Reign Fall

  “I know, it’s ridiculous. Especially since he admits he’s never felt it before in his life.” She snorted softly. “Yeah, like you’re a demon. Right.” I needed to throw up. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Melinda shook her head and fished into her pocket to pull out the piece of paper. “He even gave me this. It’s some sort of spell that can help reveal a demon’s true form. Apparently they have human forms they can hide behind. I mean, how crazy is that?” Totally crazy. Yup. One hundred percent.

  “Um, let me see that...” I held out my shaky hand toward her, hoping that she’d give the paper to me. Like, immediately. It sounded beyond dangerous if it really worked.

  But instead of letting me see it, she started to read it aloud. It was only a sentence long. I had no idea what she even said, I think it was in Latin. All I heard was a bunch of gobbledygook and then...

  Pop.

  “Ow.” I gasped for breath after the short burst of pain.

  Melinda stared at me with wide eyes. Her hands started to tremble and she dropped the paper.

  It fluttered gently to the floor.

  Oh no.

  I glanced to my left to see the full length mirror by the front door in her foyer. It reflected back an image of me from head to foot.

  I was now in full Darkling form. Wings and all.

  Chapter 12

  She scrambled back from me. “What? Wh—what is going on?” I held up my hands in front of me, immediately realizing my error since they only showed my sharp talons off to their best advantage. I tucked them behind my back. “Melinda, don’t freak out.”

  Way too late for that.

  “Oh my God,” she gasped, gesturing at me frantically. “He was right! Patrick was right!

  You’re a...you’re a demon!”

  It was really hard to argue with that when I was in this form. My mind reeled and I could barely concentrate enough to form words. Panic swirled inside of me. Luckily, in Darkling form, I was able to control it to a certain extent. If I’d still been in my human form, I probably would have passed out cold on the ceramic floor tiles.

  She just stared at me, unspeaking, unblinking. I had no idea what was going through her mind. Actually, scratch that, I had an idea. She was probably screaming on the inside. Her best friend was the exact thing she’d been taught to fear, taught to fight against. And she’d just told that best friend all of her deepest, darkest secrets only last night.

  She turned and ran away from me, tearing through the house toward the kitchen. I followed her, forcing myself to relax as much as possible. I concentrated on my dragon’s tear bracelet and tried to channel my energy into changing back to a form that wasn’t quite as intimidating.

  The pain was just as bad as usual and it stopped me in my tracks for a few seconds, but I forced myself to push on. My shirt had torn from where the wings had ripped through. It couldn’t be helped.

  Melinda pressed up against the glass of the sliding door. Just outside was where she’d had the discussion with Patrick only a few minutes ago. All the information she’d tried to deny, all of this time. And— bam—the truth was presented right in front of her.

  “Why?” she asked, her voice strained to the point of breaking. “Why would you do this to me? Did you pick me on purpose? Are you trying to destroy me? My family? Are you trying to discover who’s in the secret society of slayers so you can kill them all and take over the world?

  My parents will be home soon. When they find out—”

  Oh God, this was a complete disaster. What was I supposed to do now?

  “The spell...” She eyed the floor, as if wondering where she’d dropped it.

  She zipped past me and snatched it off the floor back in the foyer. As she read it again, I braced myself...

  But nothing happened this time. I didn’t change uncontrollably.

  So she said it again.

  And again, nothing happened.

  Relief flooded through me and I said a silent thank you to the powers that be that Patrick’s spell only seemed to work once. At least this might give me a chance to fix this. Or, at least, try to put a tiny Band-Aid on a massive, bleeding wound.

  A plan formed in my mind. Not a good plan, but I didn’t have a whole lot of options here.

  “I think you must have been seeing things before, Melinda,” I said as calmly as I could. I forced myself to look concerned, as if I’d just witnessed her have an unexpected meltdown for no good reason. “Talking to Patrick upset you. He put crazy thoughts in your head. I don’t know why you think I’m a demon, but I’m not. I mean, look at me. I’m totally normal. Whatever you might have seen or heard just now wasn’t real.”

  “I know what I saw. I know it! You had horns, wings. You looked like a demon!”

  “No way.” I shook my head. “Patrick’s messing with you so you’ll agree to train with him again—so he can control you. He’s such a jerk. He wants to separate us, so you don’t trust me.

  So you’ll only trust him. That spell,” I gestured at it, “maybe it put something in your head that wasn’t really there. It made you see things.”

  There was just a tiny flicker in her eyes that made me think that my plan had a chance to work. Yeah, great plan. Try to convince my best friend that she was going crazy or had been bespelled. Guilt cut through me, but it couldn’t be helped. I had no other choice. Convince my friend that she was delusional, or wait for her parents to come home so they could alert the slayer society and serve me up on sharp silver skewer.

  I never knew I had such a strong survival mode. It had just clicked into high gear.

  Melinda stared at the spell again. Then she read it again out loud, slowly.

  I held my breath.

  Thankfully, nothing happened. Not even a twitch.

  Tears streamed down her face. “I don’t understand any of this.” My heart clenched for her and I wanted to comfort her, to explain everything to her from A to Z, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t that easy. I had to protect myself. Protect my mother. Protect my father. If Melinda decided that what she’d seen was the truth, then we were all in deep, deep trouble. Chris’s vision about a dark winged creature coming to get me would be the least of my problems then.

  “Patrick is a complete jerk,” I said as calmly as I could. “You’re right to stay away from him.

  I mean, look what he tried to do! He tried to make you believe your best friend is a demon. He tried to take away any support you have other than him. He’s sick.” Melinda rubbed her face, rubbed at the tears. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

  “Do I look like a demon to you?”

  She scanned me from head to toe. I didn’t turn to show off the ripped back of my shirt. “N-no.”

  “Whatever you saw, it was that spell he gave you. It did something to your brain, like a hallucinogenic drug. Thank God it didn’t last very long. Now it’s over and everything’s okay again.”

  She stood there, silently, trembling for another thirty seconds. I waited, holding my breath, and tried to look calm and concerned for her well-being.

  I was concerned, but I wouldn’t exactly say I was calm.

  “Nikki,” she managed. “I’m s-sorry. You’re right. He must have done something. Why would he do that? I could have hurt you!”

  I tried not to collapse with relief that my impromptu plan was working. “It’s okay now. It’s all Patrick’s fault And, if you ask me, I don’t think you should tell your parents anything about this.

  They’d probably just overreact.” I really didn’t like lying to her and making her believe something that wasn’t true, but I had no choice. That realization gave me the strength to keep going.

  Melinda pressed back against the wall. “I think I need to lie down and recover from whatever that spell did to me. You should go home.”

  I glanced at the clock to see it was after four o’clock. “You’re sure you don’t need me to stay with you and make sure you’re okay?”

  She nodded, he
r eyes red from crying. “I’ll be okay now that I know what happened. I can’t believe he’d go to such extremes to get me to believe him. I thought he was a jerk, but on some level, I thought he cared about what happened to me. Messing with my mind and trying to get me to turn against my best friend isn’t okay.”

  “I totally agree.”

  “I never want to see him again. Ever!”

  “That’s probably a good idea.”

  After a moment, she let out a little laugh. It sounded vaguely hysterical. “I’m glad Larissa wasn’t here to witness that. She thinks Chris is crazy. I can’t imagine what she would have thought of me.”

  “You’re not crazy,” I told her. “You just need a nap. When you wake up everything will be much better.”

  She just nodded. Then she tore up the piece of paper the spell was on and threw it in the garbage in the kitchen.

  Still barely breathing, I gathered my overnight bag and coat, said a sincere good-bye to her, and escaped from Melinda’s house of potential doom.

  Finally, I was able to exhale.

  That had been way, way, way too close.

  o0o

  By the time I got home, I needed a nap too. However, my heart was going a million miles a minute, so relaxation was out of the question.

  “Did you have a nice time at Melinda’s?” my mother called to me from her office. I heard her fingers clickety-clacking on the keyboard.

  “Stellar,” I said, still feeling sick to my core from what happened. “So much fun, I could die.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “How are you?”

  “Fantastic. The words are flowing! I love this story.” Right. The story about the demon hero stuck in a castle somewhere far away from his true love.

  Life was getting even more complicated than usual, and I didn’t like it at all. I needed a serious time-out to gather my thoughts and try to let all the drama settle down. I went to my bedroom and sat down heavily on the side of my bed. Then I slumped backward and stared at the ceiling, trying to find the answers to the universe up in the stucco patterns. But, just like my life, nothing really made much sense.

  After a few minutes, I decided that I needed to do something very mundane, something very human, in order to feel normal again. I began to gather my clothes together for a load of laundry, emptying my pockets as I went. In the pair of jeans I wore the day before yesterday, I found the black rock that the strange boy from the Shadowlands castle had given me. I looked at it sitting in the palm of my hand.

  Something about the rock did look vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

  “What is it?” I’d asked him.

  “Just a little piece of me. Use it well, Princess.” A piece of him? So weird. I gripped it tighter, as if trying to sense something from it. It warmed in my hand and suddenly the room around me began to dim.

  I dropped the rock and it hit the floor. The dimness surrounding me disappeared and the room brightened again.

  Had that only been my imagination? I glanced warily around at my familiar bedroom, my gaze touching the teal-colored walls, my vanity, my closet, my pile of clothes near the window where I’d just missed getting them into my hamper.

  The rock now lay on my blue and pink area rug. I bent over and snatched it up so I could study it closer.

  It was just a rock. Smooth on top, jagged underneath as if it had been chipped away from a larger boulder.

  “What are you?” I whispered.

  “Use it well, Princess,” the boy had told me.

  “Use it?” I mumbled. How was I supposed to use it?

  Finally, my curiosity got the better of me. I took a deep breath and gripped the stone. When it warmed in my hand and my bedroom began to dim again, I didn’t drop it this time. I held on tight.

  It was as if the lights in my bedroom had turned off and it was night, even though it was only late afternoon and the sun hadn’t quite set yet. I still saw the shapes of my furniture, but they grew indistinct. Then the room began to spin, slowly at first, but it increased in speed. I wasn’t spinning, since I didn’t feel dizzy. But the room spun all around me.

  And suddenly, I wasn’t in my bedroom anymore.

  I was in my father’s castle. I loosened my hold on the rock and the scene before me started to spin slowly, in the opposite direction this time. I gripped the stone tighter and the spinning stopped.

  The rock controlled what I saw and where I was. If I let go of it, I would go directly back to my room.

  “Wow,” I said under my breath. “This is so cool.”

  How did it work? And was I actually here for real, or was this just an illusion?

  I held my other hand in front of my face. Looked real enough to me.

  I wasn’t sure where in the castle I was, so I decided to explore. It was quiet and cool and dry here. A few minutes went by before I saw anyone. A old servant in human form with gray hair walked past me, in a hurry to get somewhere. She carried a metal tray with a jug and a goblet on it.

  “Hello?” I ventured.

  She didn’t acknowledge my presence. I hurried my pace to catch up with her.

  “Hi,” I said again, louder. But her expression remained placid, focused on her task.

  “Can you see me?” Since she didn’t answer, I assumed that she couldn’t.

  She took the tray to my father’s main meeting room, the one with the fireplace in which I usually saw him. He stood to the far right, staring down into a gazer—a large, shallow basin of water. In the dark worlds, it was the preferred method of communication. Kind of like a really bizarre and magical version of Skype.

  “Queen Sephina, I appreciate your patience in this matter, but there’s nothing I can do about it right now.”

  “Nothing you can do?” a thin, reedy voice chimed up from the gazer. “Or nothing you’re willing to do?”

  Queen Sephina. Queen of the Underworld. Mother of Prince Kieran. Ex-wife of the King of Hell.

  I didn’t have too many nice things to say about her. In my brief experience with the queen, she was absolutely horrible. One of those fakely nice people who could stab you in your back the moment you turned around.

  It was just too bad she was the head of the demon council responsible for all the laws that governed the dark worlds. And trust me, there were a lot of laws. Most of which were completely stupid. And most of which had a penalty of death.

  Quite honestly, I hated her demon guts.

  “The boy is trouble, Desmond. We can keep a better eye on him with round-the-clock guards.

  I know you’re understaffed there. You have no idea what he might be capable of.”

  “I take full responsibility for him as I have since he was first orphaned. And no, he won’t be going anywhere right now. It was a pleasure speaking with you today, Your Majesty. Farewell.”

  “Desmond—”

  But he’d waved his hand over the gazer and stepped back from it with a tense and angry expression. I assumed that was the equivalent of hanging up on her.

  The servant who’d brought the tray had placed it on the table and already left. I was the only one rude enough to eavesdrop on my father’s private conversation.

  The queen really believed that Michael was dangerous.

  I’d show her dangerous if I ever came face to face with her again.

  Yeah, real brave, I thought. It was easy to think that way when I was in the middle of my father’s castle. It might be another thing altogether if I was in the Underworld standing before the council.

  I watched as my father moved to the table and poured himself a glass of whatever the jug contained. Looked like iced tea to me. Then he sat on a large chair and began to go through a stack of paperwork.

  I suddenly realized I was observing my father at work. The papers in front of him were written in some sort of language I couldn’t decipher. This, I assumed, was what he did all day long. He took meetings via gazer. And he dealt with stacks of paperwork, which, if I had to guess,
were requests for gateway access between worlds. My father ran a very bizarre travel agency. I wondered if he was responsible for all travel—not just to the light worlds. That would make sense, actually. And it would take up a ton of time, too. There were likely a lot of demons bored with their current surroundings.

  While it seemed mundane, having the ability to open up gateways was incredibly powerful and potentially dangerous, depending on who wanted to stroll through them.

  My bracelet could open gateways. There had only been three dragons in recorded history who’d been slain for the powerfully magical tear they shed upon their death. My father had slain the one responsible for the dragon’s tear he’d given to me. I had to admit, it bothered me. I’d never asked him if that dragon had deserved it or not. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the truth.

  After a few minutes, with the black rock still clutched in my right fist, I left my father’s

  “office,” and began to wander the halls in search of Michael. It felt very strange being here with nobody able to see me. I didn’t want to invade his privacy, but I couldn’t help but be curious about what he did during his days.

  After ten minutes, I found him in the courtyard.

  A smile came to my face immediately. Of course he’d be out here. He’d already told me that he took care of the garden. It would be time consuming. It was a big area with lots of well-kept flowers and plants.

  Michael stood in the direct center of the courtyard. I watched him—more like admired him—

  from a distance. There was something about him that made my heart skip a beat whenever I saw him. The black rock bit into my hand as I squeezed it tighter.

  His dark blue hoodie was off and laying next to him on the green grass. His face was lifted to the magically-enhanced bright blue sky, his eyes closed. His T-shirt fit snugly to his chest.

  It took me a moment before I sensed there was something wrong.

  What was he doing? Meditating?

  His lips moved as if he was talking to himself, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.