Demon High

• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
•  Chapter 13
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Chapter 17
  
• Chapter 18
  
• Chapter 19
  
• Chapter 20
  
• Chapter 21
  
• Chapter 22
  
• Chapter 23
  

Special thanks to Kristi Cook for reading this book not once, but twice, and providing invaluable input and advice. You are a jewel. Thanks also to Jennifer Stevenson for leading me through the perils of the comma.  

The envelope had arrived open. I wouldn’t have read the page inside otherwise, wouldn’t have thought to, honestly.

And I wouldn’t have known I was about to lose my home. The only home I’d ever known.

Letter still in hand, I went where I always went when I needed to think, the hall closet. It was a big for a closet but cram-packed with old comforters, wool coats and the scent of my grandmother’s perfume. The space had got me through a lot of bad, scary and lonely times.

As I pulled open the door, the hinges creaked. As I tugged the heavy door closed the knob rattled and came loose in my hand. A line in the letter came back to me…
“due to disrepair and continued devaluation of the property.”

This was what the bank executive whose name was scribbled across the bottom of the letter had been talking about. This and the peeling paint, rotting windows and cracked sidewalk. The tree branch that had crashed through our front porch during a summer storm probably hadn’t helped either.

I settled myself on the floor and stared at Nana’s green wool coat—the one with the real fur collar. The collar had bald spots. What I’d once thought of as luxurious was just old and worn out.

I hadn’t noticed before.

I glanced around the closet’s interior, taking in cracked plastered walls and the worn oak floors. Even the old heat vent was rusty.

The front door flew open, smacked into the other side of the wall beside me.

“Lucinda?”

Nana back from the store.

Still holding the letter, I waited for her to hobble away before burrowing deeper into the closet. I shoved aside a stack of embroidered pillow cases that hid the floor board I had loosened when I was eight. Under it was a cloth-covered box, my storage place for things I didn’t want my grandmother to find.

Memories of my mother, mainly. Pictures, some of her books.

Old report cards were stashed there too. The ones with notes about how I didn’t talk, seemed withdrawn, and one letter suggesting that my grandmother come in for a meeting.

I stared at the stack of papers and odd objects, my secret life of not having a life tucked away under once-crisp cotton linens.

My fingers brushed over the leather top of one of Mum’s books. A shiver shot through me.

I tried not to touch my mother’s things. I just kept them stored away where Nana wouldn’t find them and throw them out.

Today, though, I paused. There were no words on the book’s cover, but I knew what was inside.

“Lucinda?” Nana stomped away from the door, heading toward the kitchen.

My fingers wiggled. The letter fell from my hand and floated into the box. It landed on the book.

I hadn’t touched the book since I’d put it in this box. I didn’t touch anything once it was in the box. The box made things go away. At least that’s what mother had told me when she’d given it to me. She’d had me write down my nightmares and place them inside.

And she’d been right. Those nightmares had gone away, but then she had too.

“Lucinda!”

Nana was getting angry. There was a thump, her cane hitting the floor. If I didn’t appear soon, she’d get suspicious.

I slid the lid onto the box and shoved it back under the floorboard. Then I reached for a striped stocking cap. Before pulling it onto my head, I glanced back at the floorboard and book hidden beneath it.

I hesitated.

The door flew open. “What are you doing in there?”

I held up the hat. “I was cold.”

Nana leaned to the right, putting her weight onto her cane. Her gaze darted behind me, over the contents of the stuffed closet. Apparently not seeing anything suspicious, she looked back at me and the hat. She wrinkled her nose. “Not that cold.”

I glanced at the cap. It was gold and green with a tassel on the tip. I jerked it down over my ears.

Shaking her head, Nana tromped toward the kitchen. “Dinner’s soup, from a can. Tomato or chicken noodle. Your choice.”

She pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen then one foot in the kitchen, the other in the dining room, she paused.

 “Nana?” I asked.

She tilted her head, waiting.

“The Baxters moved. Do you know why?”

Her cane rose an inch, then slowly settled back onto the floor. “Spent too much on cruises and big screen TVs. Bank foreclosed.”

“Really?” I’d already known that, but I’d hoped bringing it up would get Nana to come clean about our own situation.

“Really. Now what do you want for dinner?”

“But we own this house, right?” She’d always said we did. It was one of the reasons the letter had been such a shock.

She stood straighter, her gaze shooting across the room and locking onto me like a spotlight on an escaping convict. “I’m not making payments to anybody on anything. You know that.”

Buy what you can afford and nothing more
. It was the mantra I’d been raised with.

Nana didn’t borrow money. The letter had to be a mistake.

But still as I followed her into the kitchen, I couldn’t let it go, couldn’t put the letter or what it would mean to my grandmother and me, if it was true, out of my mind. But I couldn’t bring it up either, couldn’t ask her if we were at risk of losing our home.

This house had been in our family for generations. It was where I’d grown up; it was my entire history.

But it was more than that. It was where my mother had disappeared, where she would reappear…if she could.

Fiddling with a stray strand of yarn that dangled from the side of the hat, I pulled open the silverware drawer and picked out two spoons.

“Do we have savings?” I asked, hoping I was being casual.

Nana, busy sliding a can of tomato soup under the can opener’s blade, stilled. “We have the house. That’s enough.”

“But what if…?”

She plopped the open can onto the counter and turned. The lid slipped into the can and soup slopped onto her hand. “What’s going on, Lucinda? Why are you asking me this?”

I couldn’t tell her about the letter. She would have known I’d been snooping. “Someone called, from the bank.”

“The bank…” She shook her head and reached for a towel. “It’s nothing.”

I swallowed. “They said we owed taxes and that the house was getting run down. They said they could take it from us if we didn’t take care of things.”

She waved the towel in the air, but not before I caught the flash of worry in her eyes. “Nonsense. They can’t do that.” She turned back to the can and poked her finger into the soup to retrieve the lid.

Her hands were shaking. “Forget about the bank and get bowls. Get yourself a TV tray too. You can eat in front of the TV.”

We never ate in front of the TV.

“Where are you eating?” I asked.

Busy dumping the soup into a saucepan, she looked up. “I’ll eat later. There’s something I need to do. Something I forgot at the store.”

After turning the burner to medium, she hobbled from the room. A few minutes later she had on her coat and was headed out the front door. She didn’t say anything as she left and I didn’t either.

Nana and I had a long history of pretending bad things didn’t happen.

Unfortunately, pretending never made them go away. Not really.

The next day, Nana didn’t bring up the bank and neither did I. She’d come back the day before looking drawn and worried. She’d spent the rest of the day in the attic rummaging through boxes.

This morning I’d found the phone book lying open. An ad for an auctioneer popped off the page at me and there was a stack of boxes by the front door.

When I stopped to stare at it, she made a shooing motion with her hands. “Spring cleaning. There’ll be men coming this afternoon. Don’t get in their way.”

I didn’t mention spring was long over.

She walked past, her cane making a solid determined sound as it struck the wood floor. At the piano she stopped. She laid a hand on the lid.

Nana didn’t play. I didn’t either, but my mother had and so had Nana’s.

My grandmother stroked the old wood like she was smoothing a child’s hair. “Your great grandmother taught your mother to play on this piano. You know that?”

I hadn’t, but it made sense.

“Don’t guess we have much use for it now though.” Her voice cracked. She picked up her hand.

“I can learn.” I’d never wanted to play. I had actually fought the suggestion more than once.

She turned, her fingers folding into her palm and her cane landing on the floor with a thump. “Not who you are, Lucinda. Not who you are.” Then she hobbled into the kitchen.

Not who I was
.

I wasn’t sure Nana knew who I was as well as she thought, or maybe I wanted to believe there were parts of me she hadn’t seen. That there was more to come from me.

And maybe it was time I stepped out of my box and found that something more.

o0o

I waited until the men had left and Nana too. She’d gone to the store. We’d run out of peanut butter. Nana couldn’t last a day without a PB and J. She’d taken the bus, instead of our unreliable car, which meant I had at least an hour and a half until she got back.

I went to the closet first.

The book was still there and my hand still tingled when I touched the leather, but the feeling passed. In fact after only a few moments, my fingers seemed to curve around the spine naturally, like they’d been meant to hold the book, and the tingle switched to warmth.

Comforting, like when you hold a cup of hot cocoa after being out in the cold. I didn’t want to set the book down. I tucked it under my arm; the warmth spread to my body.

It wasn’t a good thing. I had enough sense to know that. A book about demons…any good feelings it brought couldn’t truly be good.

But instead of setting the volume down, I hugged it tighter.