A Darker Past (The Darker Agency #2)(26)
Lukas opened his mouth, but Mom yanked back on him one more time. “We don’t know what that is,” she said softly, looking to Cassidy for confirmation. The witch nodded. “But if you tell me more, maybe I can get it for you. First, though, you have to release my daughter, because if you hurt her, you’ll—”
Lukas charged.
The grip around my neck loosened then disappeared, and I dropped to the ground coughing and sputtering for air. The demon laughed and dissolved into a puff of purple smoke. A moment later, he resolidified behind a crazed-looking Lukas. Mom dove forward, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Lukas and the demon were only inches apart.
“You would do well to remember your manners, boy,” it snarled and lashed out. The action was almost too fast for me to follow. Lukas flew forward into Kendra’s dresser and crashed to the floor. The impact created an echo that rattled through the room and made my blood run cold. Dad said he was becoming a demon, and that meant he’d be a lot tougher than the average Monster Masher, but I didn’t know how far along the demon path he’d come yet.
I stood and tried to make a move, but the demon growled and whirled around, latching back on to my throat. I froze.
It watched me for a moment and then, to my surprise, released its hold. “I have business here, so I will give you two days. Hand over the prison in four days’ time. I’ll kill you either way, but I promise to make it quick.” And with a puff of purple, its form dissolved, the smoke filtering out the crack in the sill from where it’d come in.
…
“She was totally lying,” I said as Mom pulled the Mustang away from the curb. The moment Lukas picked himself up from the floor, Cassidy all but threw us out of the house. She insisted she needed time to recover from what had almost happened to her daughter. What crap. I knew Kendra’s mom loved her, but coddled? Not a day in her life.
“By telling us she didn’t know anything about the prison?” Mom made a face. “Noticed that, did you?”
“The question is why?” Lukas leaned forward and poked his head between the seats. He was sporting a blooming bluish-purple bruise on the left side of his face, and had a split through his bottom lip, but otherwise seemed okay. Mom, who was normally a stickler for seat belts, didn’t say a word about his less-than-stellar car seat etiquette. “That demon obviously dislikes the Belfairs as much as the Darkers. What motivation could Cassidy possibly have to keep secrets from us when we’re only trying to help?”
I reached around and patted his head. I didn’t miss the way he cringed a little. “One day you’ll learn that it’s not all black and white.”
Mom nodded and tapped the brake as we came to the light at the center of town. Even in the cold months, the square was bustling. “Cassidy Belfair has her own motivations. Whether or not she has this prison the demon wants, she’s got an agenda of her own. When you were upstairs with Kendra, she was asking a lot of questions about the mirror.”
My interest was piqued. “Questions? Cause that’s not too suspicious…”
Mom chuckled and hooked a right onto our road. “We have some digging to do.”
Fantastic. Digging wasn’t exactly how I’d envisioned spending my Saturday.
She pulled into the driveway and killed the engine. “I’m going to check with Paulson. Maybe one of his ghosts has helpful information. In the meantime, I want you and Lukas to go through the basement. See if you can find out anything about that mirror.”
…
A few months ago, I’d stumbled upon a key to a secret storage locker my grandfather had been hiding. Lukas and I went there in hopes of finding some way to break his tether from Wrath, but all we found was a boatload of crap. Mostly dangerous crap. Old charms, ritual stones, instructions for summoning demons, it was all in there, along with boxes of journals from Darkers of days past. Mom didn’t feel the love of off-site storage, so we’d brought everything back and stuffed it in the basement where we could keep an eye on things.
“Here,” Lukas said. We’d brought several of the boxes up to the office and were camped out with a couple of hot chocolates. So far we’d found zip. He waved an old book in the air and beckoned me over. “There’s a paragraph in one of Charles’s journals about something called a vanity demon. This thing came out of a mirror. Maybe that’s it?”
“Vanity demon?” I hopped off the couch and went around to stand behind his chair. Skimming the page, I shook my head. “No way. That says they kill by slowly stealing away your youth. The thing that killed the coven witch didn’t do that. Her neck was broken, but other than that, she was untouched.”
He closed the book and leaned back, and I settled on the edge of the desk. We were getting nowhere, and I couldn’t focus. Even the chocolate wasn’t helping. I kept thinking about what Dad said about Lukas becoming a demon. The fact that he hadn’t come clean bothered me. Leaving it alone was probably the smart thing to do, and that’s what I’d planned, but I should have known that would never stick. “I need to ask you a question.”
“Okay…”
“How come you didn’t tell me about the demon thing?”
He took a deep breath and was quiet for a moment, letting his head dip low. When he lifted his chin and his eyes met mine, there was a spark of darkness there. More than annoyance, but slightly less than anger. “Damien told you.”