A Demon's Wrath: Part II (Peachville High Demons) (12 page)

Harper had taught me that.

There is always hope.

I made my way back to the steps of the front porch
and sat down on the top step. I picked up the discarded memory stone
and held it tight in my fist. I was almost finished, but the the rest
of my journey to Peachville was the most difficult part.

As much as I wanted to put off the memories of
what came next, I was running out of time. I had to talk to Harper
tonight. I had to finish this and give it to Harper before tomorrow
came.

Because I had seen the future.

And tomorrow would be too late.

The Shadow World – Fifty-One Years Ago

When the memory had faded and our minds had
returned to the field of black rock, Lea held me close and let me
weep. I moved between rage and sorrow, tearing at my clothes one
minute and sobbing the next.

It took me a long time to calm myself, but Lea
waited patiently, never leaving my side.

Finally, she touched my arm.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,”
she said. “But I know you needed to see so that you could
understand.”

I nodded, my throat raw from screaming, my eyelids
heavy and tired.

“I can’t even imagine what kind of
torture he has been through,” I said. “He didn’t
deserve that.”

“No,” she said softly. “No one
deserves that.”

I clenched my jaw and my lips trembled. “Priestess
Winter and the witches she commands deserve that and worse,” I
said. “They can’t be allowed to continue this madness. We
have to stop them.”

The words were passionate, but I had no energy
left to shout them. I felt weak, trapped between a strong desire for
vengeance and an ignorance of how to achieve it.

I remembered then what Lea had said to me just
before she showed me the memory. She said to forgive her for taking
this long to show it to me.

“How long have you known about this memory?”
I asked. “When did you come by it?”

Her eyes fluttered closed and she looked away,
toward the cliffs where the suns had begun to rise.

“Almost twenty years ago,” she said.
“The day Andros showed us the troll caves.”

I nodded, my heart in so much pain I was numb to
it. “The day I found you sitting by these cliffs alone,”
I said.

“Yes.”

“Why did you wait?”

“Because I was afraid it would break you,”
she said. She opened her eyes and stared straight into me. “I
was afraid that if you saw this memory, every hope I had of a future
with you would die forever and that you would be lost to pain and
rage.”

Tears gathered in her eyes, then cascaded down her
face like a waterfall of sorrow.

“Only, the problem is, I think I lost you a
long time ago. I was just too blind to see it,” she said. Her
chest hitched with each breath. She reached a hand out toward my arm,
but then drew it back. “The light of love in your heart stone
was the brightest, most brilliant light of my life. I have always
loved you, Denaer, but I never dreamed you could love me back. You
have no idea how hard it has been for me the past fifty years. To
know your love only for an instant before you reclaimed it.”

She brought her fist to her chest and clutched at
her shirt, then lowered her head, resting it on her fist as she
cried.

“I thought that maybe if I was patient and
waited by your side, you would come to realize that I was more
important to you than your brother,” she said. “And I
know that’s horrible because how could I mean as much to you as
he does?” She lifted her eyes to mine again and they sparkled
with the drops of a thousand tears. “God, how I have wanted you
to love me the way I love you. I have waited for the bright love I
saw in that heart stone to shine through your eyes when you looked at
me. I would give anything to know, just for one more moment, that you
loved me. But whatever they did to you—and to Aerden—stole
that from me. From both of us. I’ve been a fool to believe we
could go back to the way things might have been. I was afraid the
memory of this ritual would break you, but I know now that you were
already broken. You’ve been broken since the moment they ripped
him from this world. All that is left for me is to let you go.”

I reached for her hand and brought it to my lips
in a soft kiss.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

I was so incredibly sorry. I never intended to
cause her this pain. All I had ever wanted was to do the right thing
by everyone. By my country, my parents, my brother. I wanted to make
everyone else happy. But in the end, following your heart is the only
way to happiness, even if it means disappointing those around you.

It was a lesson I would have to learn many times
before I really came to understand it.

Lea lifted her hand to my cheek and wiped away my
tears. She straightened her shoulders and when she looked at me
again, I saw that something inside her hand changed tonight. She
seemed resolved. As if her moment of weakness had given birth to a
new kind of strength.

“Come with me,” she said, her voice
still raw but strong. “I’ll take you to the portal.”

I called an emergency meeting of the council as
soon as we returned to the Underground.

“What’s happened?” Ourelia
asked.

Andros, Ourelia, Azira, Jericho, Lea and I all
took our places around a large wooden table in the library. We’d
been meeting here to discuss plans for training and organizing for
years, but in my mind, this was the single most important meeting
we’d ever had. I needed them to be with me on this.

And if they weren’t, I would go alone.

“I have found the portal where my brother
was taken,” I said.

Azira gasped, then clamped a hand over her mouth.

Andros swallowed, his eyes darting toward Ourelia
for a moment. They looked more worried than excited, and I knew
before they even said a word that they did not want to help me fight.

I pressed my lips together tightly to keep from
saying something I might regret.

“The portal is near the Black Cliffs,”
Lea said. “Not too far from the king’s city, among the
fields of black stone.”

Azira’s mouth was slightly open. She shook
her head in wonder. “All this time and it was right there?”
she asked. “How did we miss it? We must have searched that area
a thousand times.”

“It’s very difficult to see the black
roses among the rocks,” I said. “The entire clearing
blends in so well, you have to be almost standing directly on top of
it to notice it. Lea’s the one who found it.”

I didn’t mention how long ago she had found
the portal because thinking about her keeping this a secret for so
long made me feel ill and unsettled. I understood why she did it, but
that didn’t make it any easier to accept.

“I discovered the memory of the portal some
time ago,” she said. “I had an item of Aerden’s I
had kept with me and I spent some of my memory training traveling to
different locations throughout the kingdom and concentrating on his
memory.”

I turned. She hadn’t mentioned this to me
when we were alone. “What item?”

She brought a silver key from her pocket and
placed it on the table. She ran her finger across the top of it.
“Aerden gave me this key a few days before he disappeared,”
she said. She didn’t look up at me. This was another secret she
had kept from me. “He wouldn’t even tell me what it went
to. He only said it was important for me to keep it. That it would
keep me safe. I didn’t think much of it until after he was
gone, but I’ve carried it with me ever since.”

I leaned over and picked up the key, turning it
over in my hand. It was a small key with a long, slender stem. The
top of the key was adorned with a set of intricate knots, a small
clear stone set in the center. Was it enchanted?

I handed it back to her, wondering why she had
kept it a secret all this time.

What other secrets had she been keeping?

“It took me a long time, but one day, there
it was. The memory of him being taken,” she said. “It was
very weak at first. I could barely make out the events of the day and
I couldn’t hear anything they were saying. But over time, the
closer I moved to the portal itself, the stronger the memory became.”

“That must have been very difficult for you
to see,” Azira said, concern etched on her face.

“It was necessary,” I said. “The
ritual the Order performed when Aerden was taken was different from
the other rituals we’ve seen.”

I reached for a tattered book I had found among
the hunter’s belongings inside the cave. I flipped through the
pages until I found what I’d been looking for, then opened it
completely and slid it across the table toward Andros.

“This passage describes the prima. We
already knew she was the one who led the rituals at each portal. In
this book it says that prima means first. The first demon pulled
through the portal, somehow bound to the first witch,” I said.
“It doesn’t explain how they are bound, but it seems to
be some type of slavery where the witch is using the demon’s
essence to fuel her own magic. The prima is created at the same time
the portal itself is created. This matches up with what we saw with
Aerden. When the ritual began, there were no roses and there was no
portal. At first, there was the witch—Priestess Winter—who
we already know is connected to all of the blue portals. She
performed the ritual which then opened this particular portal for the
first time.”

Andros and Ourelia poured over the book I’d
passed to them.

Finally Andros looked up from the page. “And
you believe Aerden was one of these firsts?” he asked. “That
he is a prima?”

“Yes,” I said. “Either that or
he is somehow tied to the prima. We won’t know the exact
hierarchy until we are able to get over there and see it for
ourselves.”

“Wait a moment,” Andros said,
standing. “We can’t send anyone over there. It would be
suicide without an army to back them up.”

“Maybe not.” I lifted my palm, wanting
him to just hear me out. I had been working on a plan for years and
even though I knew Andros was against fighting the Order until we had
more information about their weaknesses, I felt there was a way
around it. “What if we were able to go through for only a few
minutes? What if we could guarantee a small amount of time on the
other side without anyone being in real danger? We could get a look
at the other side. We could see what the witches are doing and
whether they are keeping the demons there in the portal room. If
Aerden’s there—”

“How would we ever be able to guarantee
anyone’s safety while they were over there? Not to mention
those of us here on the other side. If the witches saw us, what would
keep the hunter and the witches inside the portal from coming after
us? This is madness,” Ourelia said.

“In the memory of Aerden’s
disappearance, I saw a demon rush forward. A demon wearing a red
dragon on his armband just like yours,” I said, motioning
toward the band on Andros’ arm. It was his family’s
insignia and one that had become a symbol of The Resistance. “You
said you knew that demon.”

“Mirabi.”

“Yes. He must have seen the ritual taking
place and rushed forward to try to help,” I said. “I
don’t know why he chose to act. Maybe it was because this
ritual was different from the others. Maybe he recognized Aerden.
We’ll never know for sure. But when he interrupted the ritual,
he used his sword to cut down some of the black roses. Immediately,
the blue light of the portal disappeared, as if the magic of the
portal couldn’t work without the roses.”

Andros studied me. “What are you proposing?”

I went through my plan and everyone listened
quietly. When I was finished, I felt certain they would agree to help
me. This was my chance to save my brother. Or if not save him, at
least to get enough information about the witches holding him captive
that we could come up with a better, stronger plan for rescuing him
later.

“Aerden’s alive over there,” I
said. “I just want a few moments to get a better look at the
other side.”

Ourelia shook her head. “I don’t think
we’re ready for something like this,” she said. “If
we attack them or show any kind of aggressive behavior, they are
going to send hunters after us. Or other human witches. We don’t
understand their magic enough to defeat them.”

“Bullshit,” I said, my anger ruling
me. “We’ve done nothing but talk and learn and try to
understand for decades now. When is it going to be time to fight
back? How will we learn to fight them if we don’t actually
fight? It’s the best way to learn. Andros, you know that.
You’re the one who taught me that. We have to fight in order to
learn how to fight better.”

Andros nodded. “Yes, I know I said that, but
we’ve got so much at stake right now,” he said. “We’ve
built this entire Underground to keep people safe. If we start a
battle now, before we’re really ready, we risk putting them all
in danger.”

“The only reason these demons need a safe
place to live is because the Order of Shadows has made their
homelands unsafe,” I said. “Hiding a thousand demons in
caves is no different from the king himself hiding away inside his
gated city.”

Andros lowered his head to his hands. He knew I
was right. They couldn’t hide here forever. Yes, it would be
hard to lose anyone, but wars meant loss.

They also meant fighting for freedom.

“We have to do something. We can’t
just sit here in the safety of these caves for the rest of our days,”
I said. “It won’t make any real difference because out
there, the Order will still be stealing demons from their homes and
turning them into slaves.”

“I agree with you,” Ourelia said.
“There will come a time when we have to stand and fight, but
it’s not that time yet. I know you want to save your brother,
but what chance will you really have of saving him? We don’t
know the first thing about what goes on in the human world.”