A STORM IS BREWING
To keep up with attempting to appear normal, I took on an after-school job shortly after our production of Beauty and the Beast was staged. With my rehearsal time freed up, I needed something to fill my days that wasn’t sifting through old demonology volumes in the library. I needed something so my friends (yes, friends! I made friends doing the play, after all) wouldn’t wonder what I did with my spare time. They’d freak out if they knew it was full of training, research, patrol and hunting.
Freak out.
And that’s what I did when I got an interview and then a job at a pet shop.
A pet shop! Talk about major squee. Birds and bunnies, puppies and kittens, hamsters and mice and fish.
It wasn’t all glamorous, though. Someone had to clean birdcages and puppy poo as well as play with the kittens and bunnies. And someone had to explain to customers the difference between tropical fish and freshwater fish, and how the two can’t be mixed. And someone had to explain how to use an enema. And someone had to explain that frozen feeder mice won’t come back to life if you unfreeze them. And someone had to take crap from walk-in customers who demanded we stop selling kittens and puppies because of the unwanted number of those animals in shelters.
But all in all, I enjoyed it. I got to be around cute baby animals and sometimes I was allowed to take them out of their cages and walk around the store to help socialise them, talking to customers. Not sure what they thought about the strange-looking but gentle goth girl approaching them with a tiny baby bunny, but they were generally polite. Probably weirded out by my black lipstick.
There was a little old lady, I estimated to be around seventy or eighty years old, who would come in every single day, and walk around the store with the birds on her shoulders. I was behind the counter the first time this happened, but my manager was close by, re-pricing some dog collars. The old lady went straight up to a cage of cockatiels, opened it slowly with a practiced hand, and took one of the birds out. I looked to my manager, who was watching her with a knowing smile.
“Don’t worry about Mrs Linderman,” she told me. “She comes in every day to take the birds for a walk. She pretends she owns them. She’s completely harmless, and the birds love her. She doesn’t disturb the other customers, so the boss says it’s okay.”
“Okay…” I said. Mrs Linderman finished her stroll around the store, then came up the cash register and introduced herself to me.
“Oh, a pretty one!” she said. “You’ll do well here. The birds like pretty girls.”
“Um, thank you,” I said, not really knowing how to handle her.
“You be sure to take care of my birds,” she instructed me. “I’ll be back tomorrow to see them again.”
“I will, ma’am,” I said weakly.
“What’s your name, new girl?”
“Christina,” I answered, using my full name, “But everyone calls me Tina.”
“You have very pretty eyes,” she said vaguely, and then wandered out the door.
The next day when she came in she offered me a red frog lolly, so I decided she was making an effort and even though she was a bit vague, she was genuinely sweet.
It was around this time that a new boy enrolled at my school. It was just coming past the mid-year exams, the middle of winter, and there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about this boy except that he was new. His name was Noah and he dressed from head to toe in black. Black jeans, black turtleneck sweater under a long black leather duster. He had pale skin, black hair, and dark brown eyes framed by amazingly long lashes.
As the new kid, and with his subtle arrogance and clothing, he was kind of an outcast. I felt a kinship. Sure, I’d made a couple of friends during the show, but they weren’t “OMG, call me!” friends. It was more a case of they’d stop and talk to me if they saw me. I was still isolated from the majority of my peers.
It was only a matter of time before the two kinda friendless, all-black-clad adolescents got paired together in class. I guess our peers either didn’t want us around them, or were attempting some very subtle matchmaking.
It was art class, and we were painting. I’m not very good at painting. I don’t have the patience to mix colours or see all the subtlety in beautiful masterpieces. I chose instead to work in shades of grey, and painted a piece inspired by Edgar Alan Poe’s ‘The Raven’. Next to me, Noah had utilised all his colours in a painting of a father and son fishing on a serene and still lake.
I was jealous.
“You like?” he said suddenly, and turned his head. I got my first close-up of that perfectly pale skin, that fine nose and brows, that strong and straight jaw with a hint of a teenage shadow beard. His voice was as smooth and as warm as melted chocolate. My heart skipped a beat.
“Yes,” I stammered, thrown off a little. “I like the colours.”
“Let’s see yours,” he said, half turning in his chair, and in doing so bringing his body closer to mine. I tried to ignore the sudden heat between us that his opening body language had created.
“Nice,” he said approvingly. “I like you colour palette.”
He was kidding, of course.
He leaned a little closer and whispered conspiratorially, “I don’t think the other kids want to play with us.”
“No,” I whispered back, enjoying this little game. “They’ve kind of pushed us together.”
“Maybe they can see something we can’t.”
I pulled back to look at him. “I don’t get what you mean.”
“Maybe they want us to be friends.” And then, shocking me intensely, he rested his paint-speckled hand over mine. “Or maybe more than friends.”
I was dumbfounded. But in the end, I gave him my phone number. No harm done.
Back at the store, Mrs Linderman came in to walk her birds. She always came over to talk to me when I was on shift. She wanted to know about my family, so I told her about my father’s family migrating here with the First Fleet, and my mother’s family migrating from Germany during the war. I told her I had a brother called Teddy, and how much I wanted a puppy of my own, a Dalmatian. She told me about her husband, who passed away a long time ago, and how handsome he had been. I indulged her, for she seemed very lonely. After my shift, I’d go home, do my homework, then receive a call from Noah and talk for hours.
“So, let’s make it official, huh?” he said to me one day.
“Huh?” I echoed him.
“I’m taking you on a date, Chrissy.” I hated it when he called me that. “Then we’ll officially be going out.”
I had stopped walking due to my heart suddenly thundering in my veins. He stopped and came back to me.
“A date?” I squeaked. It wasn’t exactly like I’d never gone on a date before. I’d gone out with Micah for the better part of six months last year. But it was different. I’d chased after Micah because a German water demon wanted to lure him to his death, so I’d thrown myself at him. Slutty? Maybe. Did I save his life? Yes. I’d liked Micah a lot, but he’d never given me butterflies in my stomach. I was too busy being the seducer and the protector, staying one step ahead of both him and his hunter. Now I was the one being asked out, by a guy who was totally cute and totally easy to talk to.
My palms were sweaty and I wiped them on my jeans.
“Don’t you want to go out with me, Chris?” he asked, concern lacing his dark eyes.
“Well, yes!” The answer exploded out of me with such eagerness my face burned red and I wished I could grab hold of those two little words and drag them back for a more dignified answer.
Noah smiled and took my hand. “This is why I like you, Chrissy. You always say exactly what you’re thinking. There’s no ulterior motive with you.”
If only he knew…
It had been kind of quiet on the demon front lately. My parents had time to make some home renovations and decorations on our house – finally. We’d moved down south last year when I had been tracking the nix. I’d had to enrol in Grade 10 halfway throu
gh the school year. My parents had been so busy for so long that they were fidgeting and itching to get active with their sudden free time.
Then Mrs Linderman came into the pet store to walk her birds, as usual. Only this time, a little boy – no more than five or six years old – accompanied her. He had floppy black hair and soft brown eyes and a kind of a really cute grin. Whilst I found myself liking him almost immediately, the hair on the back of my neck stood up as I recognised the familiar tingle of the presence of magic. The little boy followed Mrs Linderman quietly around the store as she opened each and every cage and stroked the birds. She didn’t take them for a walk, she just made sure to speak to every bird. It was almost like she was saying goodbye. Then she stopped to chat to me on her way out.
“You make sure you take care of my birds, won’t you, Tina?” she said in her no-nonsense voice. Maybe she had been a schoolteacher before retirement.
“Of course, Mrs Linderman. I’ll take good care of them, and when they go to new homes, their owners will take good care of them, too.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” she replied, her voice a little unsteady, her hand brushing the top of the little boy’s head.
During my lunchtime break, as I walked down to my favourite bakery to buy a salami and salad panini, I saw the two of them sitting quietly beside the water fountain that makes the centre of the city. Mrs Linderman was eating an ice cream with her eyes closed, her face tilted to catch the rays of the sun. The little boy was sitting next to her, kicking his feet under the bench. His legs were too short to touch the ground.
When she failed to show up to walk her birds the next morning, I was a tad worried. The manager said Mrs Linderman hadn’t missed a day in months, and to not worry about it because she was old, and sometimes old people found it hard to get out of bed.
But because the little boy had set off my demon senses, and had followed her around all day, I needed more reassurance.
After my shift, I raced home and tore into the library. My younger brother Teddy heard me crash through the door and came to see what all the fuss was about. I told him about my heebie-jeebies when I saw Mrs Linderman and her grandson yesterday.
“Demonic children? It’s been done before,” he said, sliding into a chair next to me. “Let me cross reference elderly victims with the usual MO of a demon child. Here.” He threw a textbook at me. I thumbed through the pages, scanning. Teddy was the more academic of the two of us. He really enjoyed all the research parts of the job, and he was a bit wary around the lightning. He’d probably end up with a spot on the Council of Elders in London, at his rate, or at least in one of the major international offices. Me? I’ll be a demon hunter my whole life. It’s a great way to travel if you don’t have the smarts to be a Head Office Honcho.
“Here we go,” he said some time later, and marked the entry on the page with his finger. It was of the leech demon, a creature that takes on the role of an assistant or carer and slowly drains the life out of their victim. Little more than magical parasites. Their victims usually end up in comas in hospital, mentally and physically unstable.
“I don’t know,” I said to Teddy. “The little boy didn’t look like he was sucking the life out of her. I mean, he almost seemed completely normal, except for the tingle I got. He seemed to just be accompanying her.”
“Could he have simply been her grandson?” he asked, idly flicking through his shiny new copy of An Insider’s Guide To Hauntings. “You know, nothing magical about it?”
“I felt the tingle,” I explained patiently. “Something about that day was magical. It might not have necessarily been the boy, though. Maybe Mrs Linderman cast a spell… or something.”
I was running out of ideas. Anyway, her absence might not even be magic-related. So I decided to try to stop worrying and overreacting, and went to bed.
After school the next day I went in to work, as usual. I passed the front desk and noticed the newspaper the manager always reads open on the obituaries page.
I felt the pit of my stomach drop as the name Eve Linderman jumped out at me.
Her funeral was on Wednesday.
After work I called Noah, and told him about the sweet old lady who always came into the shop. He consoled me as best he could, and then he drove over to my house to take me into him arms and hold me close. It seemed to me a bit out of his way to travel to my house just to give me a cuddle, but that’s Noah. Sweet, sweet boy.
The shock of his lips touching mine sent electrified thrills coursing through my body and awoke a desire I’d never felt before. I was surprised at myself and my response to him. He pressed me closer and I tightened my arms around him. The kiss could have lasted forever. He tasted faintly of apples.
Eventually though, we prised apart and made a date for the cinema the next night. Horror film. An excuse for me to act girly and need his arm around me. An excuse to get all close and personal.
When I walked him to his car, the only thing that stopped us making out for half an hour was the cold night air.
Wednesday I skipped class to go to Mrs Linderman’s funeral. Some of the other employees from the pet shop were there. It was a lovely service. It told of how Mrs Linderman had lived for quite a while after the death of her husband, about her charity work, the children she helped to raise in foster care after retiring from being a schoolteacher. They played some classical plinky-plunky harp music. At the wake, I approached one of Mrs Linderman’s relatives – her great-niece, I think, and introduced myself.
“I work at the pet shop she used to visit every day.”
“Oh yes,” the niece replied. “Aunt Eve loved all animals. Thank you for indulging her.”
I looked around. “On her last day, her grandson came with her to see the birds. I don’t see him here now. Is he in school?”
“Oh no,” she answered. “Auntie Eve didn’t have any children. Uncle Ralph died in the war.”
There was no point in going back to school for the rest of the day – I’d already missed enough lessons. When I got home, the place was empty. I was starving, so I headed to the kitchen to make myself some overdue lunch.
Teddy wasn’t home, but he had left his new textbook open on the kitchen bench. As I passed by, my eye was drawn to the illustration of three figures – a big black dog, a young woman, and child – and the text underneath. Then I saw the note attached just above the entry.
Tina, it said. Thought this might be what you were after. Ted.
I dumped my bag and settled on to a stool, and pulled the book closer.
“The Reaper,” the entry read. “A ghostly apparition that escorts the dead on to the next world. Have been known to accompany their dying patients for up to two weeks before death, helping them to prepare for the afterlife. Documented appearances include forms such as a black dog, a lady dressed in a white gown, and a young black-haired boy.”