Demonglass (4 page)

I promised that I would, but as I hung up, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of exhaustion. I didn’t really want to deal with parental drama on top of everything else I was trying to process.

I was in England. With my dad. At some ridiculously huge house that was also serving as Council Headquarters, and home to two other demons. And on top of all that, I still couldn’t shake that weird feeling, almost like a premonition, that had been with me ever since leaving Hecate Hall.

Then, of course, there was the fact that my sort-of-ex-crush might be lurking around the same country, all monster-killing.

Yeah, I was definitely gonna need a nap before dealing with any of that.

I flopped on my new bed. It may never have belonged to a duke, but it had apparently been stuffed with baby angel feathers. Kicking off my shoes, I settled into the cool sheets. Everything smelled faintly of sunshine and green grass. I figured I could nap for an hour or so before I went and talked to Dad. And maybe I could ask Lara if she had a map, or better yet, a GPS for this place. I closed my eyes, and fell asleep still wondering why the name Thorne sounded so familiar to me.

T
he next thing I knew, someone was shaking me, and a shout was echoing in my ears. I had a feeling it had come from me. Disoriented, I sat up, my heart thrumming in my chest.

“Sophie?” Jenna was sitting next to me on the bed, her eyes wide.

“What happened?” I asked, my voice husky. The room was darker than it had been when I’d laid down, and for just a second, I thought I was back at Hex Hall.

“You must have been having a nightmare. You were yelling. Screaming, actually.”

Well, that was embarrassing. And also weird. I never had nightmares, not even after all that had happened last semester. I searched my brain for any image or memory from the dream, but it was like my head was stuffed with cotton. All I could remember was that I had been running, that I’d been scared of…something. Weirdly, my throat was aching too, like I’d been crying. Other than that, all I was left with was that same feeling of dread I’d felt on the ferry, and a strange odor in my nostrils.

Smoke.

I took a deep breath, but even the sunshine smell of my sheets couldn’t block the acrid stench.

I tried to smile. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just a stupid dream.”

Jenna looked less than convinced as she wrapped her arms around her knees. “What was it about?”

“I don’t really know,” I told her. “I was running, I think, and there was a fire somewhere nearby.”

Jenna twirled her pink streak. “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

“It wasn’t, but the feeling that came with it…” I shuddered, remembering that awful sense of loss. “It’s like I was scared, obviously, but I was also sad. More than sad. Devastated.” Sighing, I leaned back against the headboard. “I felt something similar when we left Hecate. Like, I had this super-strong sense that we’d never go back there. Not all three of us, at least.”

One of my favorite things about Jenna is that she’s pretty much unshockable. Maybe that comes with being a vampire, or maybe she was that way before she changed.

Either way, she didn’t freak out about my maybe being psychic all of a sudden. She just chewed her thumbnail with a thoughtful expression before saying, “Is that a demon power? Seeing or sensing the future?”

“How the heck would I know? Alice was the only demon I’ve ever been around. The only thing she seemed to do that regular witches don’t is suck people’s blood, and that’s not particularly impressive. No offense.”

“None taken. Well, maybe you could ask your dad. Isn’t that the point of this vacay? Learning what it means to be a demon?”

I made a noncommittal sound, and Jenna wisely dropped the subject. “Okay, so you had a dream about fire and possibly a psychic sense that we’re all going to die in England.”

“I feel so much better now; thanks, Jenna.”

She ignored me. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes dreams are just dreams.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “You’re probably right.”

“And if those are the only weird things that have happened to you lately, then why…” She trailed off at the expression on my face. “Those aren’t the only weird things that have happened.”

At that moment, all I wanted to do was slide back down and pull the covers over my head. Instead, I told Jenna about seeing Elodie.

And apparently, that was the one thing that could surprise Jenna. “She looked at you? Like, right at you?”

When I nodded, Jenna blew out a long breath, ruffling her bangs. “What did Mrs. Casnoff say?”

I fidgeted. “I, uh, haven’t exactly told her yet.”

“What? Soph, you have to tell her. That could mean something, and after Alice…Look, I get that living in the regular world for so long gave you major trust issues, but you don’t need to keep any more secrets from Mrs. Casnoff. Or me.”

There was that familiar stab of guilt again. Jenna and I had never really talked about it, but we both knew that if I had just told someone about seeing Alice, then Jenna might never have been accused of the attacks on Chaston and Anna. And, of course, Elodie might still be alive.

“I’ll send her a letter tomorrow. Oh! Or, duh, I can call her. Lara gave me a cell phone.”

Jenna perked up. “Really? What kind? Can we download music and—” She broke off and shook herself. “No. Do not try to distract me with shiny, sexy technology, Sophie Mercer. Promise,” she said, squeezing my arm.

I held up my hand and did what I thought was the Girl Scout salute. Or it could have been that
Star Trek
thing. “I solemnly swear to tell Mrs. Casnoff that Elodie’s ghost looked at me. And if I do not tell her, I swear to buy Jenna a pony. A
vampire
pony.”

Jenna tried not to crack a smile, but no one can resist a vampire pony.

I felt about a million times better as we both started to laugh. Jenna was right. There were people I could trust now, people who deserved to know what was going on with me. My heart suddenly seemed lighter, and I decided that, Demon Central or not, Thorne Abbey was as good a place as any to turn over a new leaf, and clean the slate, and all those other clichés about starting over.

I was done with secrets.

“I hate that you had a bad dream, but I’m glad you’re awake,” Jenna said when we were done giggling. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe about how your dad brought us to Council Headquarters?” Her expression softened as she added, “I could tell something freaked you out.”

“Was it that obvious?”

“No, but as a vampire, I’m able to detect subtle shifts in emotional energy.”

I just stared at her until she rolled her eyes and said, “Okay, you got really pale and looked like you were gonna hurl. I thought you might faint there for a second.” Then her face brightened and she sat up straighter. “Oh my God, you so should have fainted, and then Cal could have caught you, and, like, carried you up the stairs.” She punctuated that last bit with a little squeal and clutched my arm.

“I liked you so much more when you were sulky and angsty, Jenna.”

She just kept grinning and wriggling around the bed like a four-year-old until I laughed. Shoving off my covers, I begrudgingly said, “Okay, I admit that the image of Cal carrying me up that fancy staircase is…nice.”

Jenna gave a happy sigh. “It is, isn’t it? And I don’t even like dudes.”

I snorted at that as I leaned down to fish under the bed for my sneakers. I knew I should probably tell Jenna about the betrothal, but I wasn’t really ready to talk about it with anyone else until I worked out how I felt.

“It wasn’t just the Council thing,” I called up to Jenna. “Did you see those kids at the back of the welcoming committee?”

“Yeah, the black-haired girl, and the guy who looks like Archer.”

I sat up too fast, hitting my head on the bed frame. “What?” I said, rubbing my scalp.

“That guy. He looked a lot like Archer. In fact, I thought that might be part of the reason you looked all vomitish.”

Sitting back on my haunches, I tried to remember the guy without the haze of “Oh, dear God, that’s another demon” clouding my vision. “Yeah,” I said finally. “I guess he did look like him. Similar hair. Tall. Kind of smirky.” My stomach twisted a little, and I wished Jenna hadn’t brought up Archer. “Anyway,” I said, sliding my shoes back on, “that’s not what freaked me out. He’s a demon. Both of them are.”

Jenna’s mouth dropped open. “No way. But thought you and your dad were the only ones in the whole world.”

“So did I. Hence my puking face.”

“What do you think they’re doing here?”

“No idea.”

We were quiet for a minute before Jenna said, “Well, they’re probably lame demons anyway. I’m sure you and your dad are much better at demoning.”

I grinned at her. “Jenna, how are you so awesome?”

She smiled back. “Yet another one of my special vampire powers.” She pushed herself off the bed. “Now come on. I did a little exploring while you took that epic nap. You were out for like three hours. Anyway, I was scared to go too far by myself.”

“You scared? You know you could probably take out anything that goes bump in the night?”

Jenna shrugged. “Yeah, but being a vampire doesn’t protect you from getting lost. I really didn’t feel like wandering around this spooky house for all eternity.”

“Thorne Abbey isn’t spooky,” I said. “
Hecate
is spooky. This place is just…different.”

“It’s huge,” Jenna said, her eyes wide. “Didn’t you hear what Lara said? Thirty-one kitchens. Just
kitchens
, Soph.”

My mouth watered at the thought of food. “I wonder which one is making dinner tonight.”

Jenna and I stepped out into the hallway. There were several lamps affixed to the walls, but it was still gloomy. “It’s weird to think of one family living in this house,” I said.

“This wasn’t even the Thorne family’s primary residence,” Jenna said, like she was quoting from a guidebook. “They had a mansion in London, a castle in the north of Scotland, and a hunting lodge in Yorkshire. Unfortunately, they lost most of their wealth after World War II, and in 1951, they were forced to sell all of their properties except for the Abbey. It still belongs to the Thorne family.”

“Dude. How do you know all of this?”

Jenna looked a little sheepish. “I told you. You were napping for a long time and I got bored,” she said. “There’s this insane library downstairs, and they have a whole bunch of books about the history of the house. Some really fascinating stuff happened here. Like those big statues in the foyer? They were commissioned by Philip Thorne in 1783 after his wife committed suicide by throwing herself down the stairs.”

“Gruesome,” I replied, but something was bothering me. It was that name, Thorne. I knew I’d heard it somewhere before, but where? And why did I feel like it was so important?

As we walked downstairs, Jenna rattled off more history about the house. “Oh! One thing I read was really neat. In the late 1930s, Thorne Abbey was a school for girls.”

A faint alarm bell began ringing in the back of my head.

“Really?”

“Yeah. During the Blitz, they had to evacuate a bunch of kids from London, including whole schools. The Thornes figured girls make the least mess, so they opened the Abbey to nine ‘ladies’ colleges.”

And just like that, it all clicked. I knew exactly where I’d heard the name before.

M
y stomach rolled. “Oh my God.”

“It’s not that interesting,” Jenna said, but I shook my head.

“No, not that. Did the book have any pictures of those girls?”

“Yeah. I think I saw a few.”

I could hear the blood rushing in my ears as I said, “Okay, I need to see that book. Now.”

Jenna looped her arm through mine as we walked down one of the many hallways branching off the main foyer. “I left it sitting on the window seat in the library,” she said. “I bet it’s still there.”

We passed countless closed doors and turned down three different halls before reaching the library. Like the rest of the house, it was gorgeous. And gigantic.

I actually froze in the doorway for a second. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen so many books in my life. Shelf after shelf stretched out before me, and twin spiral staircases curled up to the second level, where there were even more books. Low couches were scattered throughout the room, and Tiffany lamps cast soft pools of light on the hardwood floor. Large windows at the other end of the room looked out over the river and let in the last few rays of the setting sun.

The window seat was empty.

“Crap,” Jenna sighed. “I swear I left it there like twenty minutes ago.”

“Do you remember where you found the book?” I asked. “Maybe someone came in and reshelved it.”

Jenna bit her lip. “Yeah, I think so. It was upstairs by this really weird cabinet.”

I followed her as she headed to the second floor. “Weird how?”

“You’ll see. Okay, I was near the back, by the painting of some dude on a horse….”

I could see where Jenna would have trouble remembering which shelf was which. Downstairs, the books had lined the walls, leaving the floor open. Up here, there were roughly thirty bookcases vying for space, some of them so close together I had to turn sideways just to pass between them.

“Aha!” I heard Jenna exalt from somewhere to my left.

I found her standing on tiptoes, scanning a shelf that was indeed next to a painting of a dude on a horse. I thought he looked awfully irritated for a guy in such a spiffy ermine cape.

Jenna was wearing an equally annoyed expression. “It’s not here,” she said. “Maybe we should look downstairs again.”

I bit back disappointment. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to see the book so badly. I already knew where I’d heard Thorne before, and why it was so important.

Thorne was the last name of the woman whose spell had made Alice a demon. Who had, inadvertently I guess, made
me
a demon. There was no doubt in my mind that Alice had been one of those girls sent here during the Blitz, and that Thorne Abbey was where everything had started.

Still, I wanted to see a picture of Alice here. Before she’d been changed.

“Yeah,” I told Jenna. “We can look again later. It’s not that big a deal.”

Jenna wasn’t an idiot. She’d known me long enough to know when I was lying. But she let it go and said, “Oh, check this out.”

Shoved in the corner, just under Pissy Guy on a Horse, was a small black bookcase that only came up to my chest. It was covered in dust, and I saw immediately why Jenna had said it was weird. There was only one book on the shelf, but it was under a thick glass cube. Scratched into the glass were symbols I’d never seen before.

“Try to open it,” Jenna said.

There wasn’t any handle that I could see, so I curled my fingers around the edge of the glass, trying to see if it could be pried open.

I immediately jerked my hand back. “Whoa.”

“I know, right? That thing is covered in some serious mojo.”

Serious mojo
was an understatement. My fingers were burning. The sensation was similar to what I’d felt when I’d touched Archer’s chest and felt the mark of The Eye sear into my palm. “Whatever that book is, someone really didn’t want anyone to look at it.”

“No, they didn’t.”

Jenna and I both jumped and whirled around.

My dad stood behind us, a small smile on his lips. His hands were clasped behind his back. “That book is the Thorne family’s grimoire. A spell book.”

“I know what a grimoire is,” I said irritably, but he continued like I hadn’t spoken.

“It contains some of the darkest magic ever known to Prodigium. The Council locked it up years ago.”

“They were witches, then? The Thornes?”

Dad ran a hand over the top of the cabinet. I flinched for him, but he didn’t even seem to feel the shock of magic. “They were,” he replied. “Dark witches, of course. Very powerful and very adept at concealing their true identity from humans.”

“They’re the ones who made Alice a demon, right?”

Jenna made a little surprised noise next to me, but Dad just studied me for a moment before saying, “Yes. And aren’t you clever for putting that together so quickly?”

He sounded genuinely pleased, and a little surge of happiness went through me. Still, I said, “Jenna actually helped me figure it out. She read something about a bunch of girls being sent here during the Blitz, and I remembered Mrs. Casnoff saying that the lady who, uh, changed Alice was named Thorne. That’s why we were in here, actually. I was going to see if I could find Alice’s picture in one of the books Jenna was reading.”

“If you want a picture of your great-grandmother during her time at Thorne, I have one. Why didn’t you just come ask me in the first place?”

A sarcastic comment sprang to mind, but I immediately bit it back. He was right. Asking him would’ve been the logical thing to do instead of playing cloak-and-dagger in the library.

Thank God for Jenna, who looked up at my dad and said, “Mr. Atherton, Sophie’s spent the last sixteen years of her life having people lie to her about one thing or another. At Hecate, she got pretty good at finding things out on her own. Hard habit to break.”

Jenna may have been a tiny blonde with a nearly pathological love for pink, but she was still a vampire, and that meant she could be pretty intimidating when she wanted to be. Right now, I kind of wanted to pick her up and hug her.

Dad looked back and forth between us. “Mrs. Casnoff said the two of you were a formidable team. I see now what she meant. Well, if there’s nothing else you ladies need in the library, Sophie, would you care to accompany me on a walk about the grounds?”

I wondered if there were ever times when Dad didn’t sound like he’d just escaped from a Jane Austen novel. It was weird to think of my superpractical mom falling for a guy like him. She’d never struck me as the type to go for a smooth talker. Of course,
I
never thought I’d fall for a pretty boy who was secretly a Prodigium-killer, so what the heck did I know?

“It’s getting dark,” I said to Dad.

“Oh, I think we still have plenty of light left. And the view of the house at this time of day is quite spectacular.”

In the few weeks since I’d met Dad, I’d learned to read his eyes and not his tone of voice. And right now, his eyes said I was going on a walk with him whether I wanted to or not.

“Okay,” I said. “Why not?”

“Excellent! You’ll be fine on your own for a little while, won’t you?” he asked Jenna.

She glanced at me. “Sure, Mr. Atherton,” she said. “I’ll, uh, just go see what Cal is doing.”

“Wonderful idea,” Dad replied. He held his elbow out to me. “Shall we?”