WEATHER THE STORM
The sun was shining, but there was no way I was getting out of bed.
It was the second day in a row, and I simply wasn’t ready to face the world. Not after what I’d done.
I’d killed my boyfriend. He was a vampire, and he was trying to turn me into one as well, but I killed him all the same.
I loved him.
I killed him.
The two words were interchangeable.
I hadn’t eaten all day yesterday. I wanted to preserve the taste of him on my lips. I wanted to remember every moment together. Every touch, every glance, every shy or passionate kiss. I wanted to remember what his bare skin felt like, before it got cold – or when it had shrivelled up before me into nothingness, after I had staked him in the heart.
My mother rapped on my door and told me to get up. I rolled over and pulled the covers over my head.
“I’m sick,” I called, muffled by the blankets.
“You are not sick,” she said in her no-nonsense voice. “Storms don’t get sick, Tina. Get up for school. You’re already late.”
“I’m not going to school.”
“You need to go to school. If you don’t, someone will get suspicious.”
“Noah didn’t go to school on Friday. I did.” My voice broke. Noah had been turned on Thursday night, the night I lost my virginity to him. Had it really been only a few short days?
“That’s why you need to keep going to school, sweetheart. When they investigate him missing, you need to pretend you haven’t seen him since Saturday.”
“You know his dad’s not around?” I rolled over in bed and looked at my mum. “Sheila’s all on her own now. I’m the one who took her son away from her.”
She stood staring at me with her arms crossed over her chest, her indigo eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened: signs she was trying to find the right thing to say. “Get up. I’ll make you breakfast and drive you to school.”
The clouds rolled over the sun while I ate breakfast. Waffles with maple syrup. I was pretty sure Mum was trying to just trying to make me eat something, and it smelled pretty irresistible. Or get me into a good enough mood so that I wouldn’t fry anyone at school with my lightning. Dad breezed through the kitchen, grabbed a waffle, kissed Mum on the forehead, and raced out the door. Taking advantage of the clouds. We never used our lightning attack when it was sunny – how could that phenomenon be explained to the general non-demon hunting populace?
I ate five waffles drowned in syrup, brushed my teeth and combed my hair, quickly applied some concealer under my eyes and eyeliner around them, black lipstick, and let Mum bustle me into her car. It started to rain. The drops splattered onto the window and I leaned my forehead against it. The glass was cold, and matched my insides; cold, hard.
I was only half an hour late. The teacher shook her head and told me off, but I made no excuse. Simply shrugged and accepted the reprimand. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t show up today.
Art class was my favourite, though I wasn’t very good. It let me be creative and put in as much effort as I wanted. Really, effort does not equal art. And today, I had no effort. That was followed by sociology class, where I sat hunched, hoping the teacher wouldn’t notice me; and then science in the afternoon, which I spent reluctantly pouring an acid into a glass vial, testing with litmus paper, and adding an alkali.. My beaker was clear, but the people around me had blue liquid in their beakers. I didn’t care, but my teacher was pleased at my precision.
After school I went home to bed, and later that afternoon, the police came knocking at our door.
Sheila had filed a missing person’s report, and I was the last person to see her son.
Teddy had his turn at lifting me out of melancholy. He thought I’d have fun helping him research. Dad was chasing a suspected water demon that could turn its body into pure liquid and escape down drains. Apparently it had eluded my father twice already. Teddy’s idea of fun was pouring over the old leather-bound tomes in our underground library. The musty smell of hundreds of old books got to me. I’d much rather be doing stuff than reading.
I went for a run along the beach. It was the same beach that I had encountered the German nix, the water demon that had been after my previous boyfriend, Micah. She wanted him because of his music. I had managed to keep her at bay for half a year, but she finally got impatient and tried to attack in broad daylight. I had vanquished her with my lightning in front of Micah, and then left him.
At least it hadn’t been him that I had killed.
The beach was deserted in the cool evening air, and I ran all through the sunset until it was quite dark, the only light coming from the pools of the streetlights up on the boardwalk.
I was just about the head home when I saw something strange washed up on the beach. An enormous hunk of seaweed. Curious, I jogged closer. I’d never seen a clump of seaweed all stuck together so large. Call me a geek if you must, but it was strange, and I wanted to see if there was anything else tangled in the mess. An oyster shell, maybe, with a lovely pearl in it. A black pearl. Or maybe a turtle or a penguin that was trapped and needed help.
But as I got closer, I realised it wasn’t a lump of seaweed.
It was a body.
It was the second time the police had been to my house that day, and they were still full of questions. Had I seen anything suspicious as I was running on the beach? What had prompted me to approach the body? Had I moved it at all?
The only thing that stopped them from arresting me right away was the fact that the body had obviously been waterlogged for some time. But now I was involved in two missing persons cases – one of them identified but with no body, one of them with a body but no identity.
My mother still made me go to school the next day.
At least I was on time. No waffles today – I begrudged that, though I felt I deserved more comfort for discovering a body. Instead, she cooked me bacon and eggs, and it was that wonderful aroma that woke me up.
“No hash browns?” I joked as I gobbled up the breakfast. It sure beat cereal any day.
“Not today, sweetheart.”
“Are you still giving me a lift in?”
“If Teddy can make the bus, so can you,” she said with an exasperated smile.
Well, Teddy is a goody two shoes, I thought savagely to myself. I finished my breakfast, primped in the bathroom, dumped my books into my bag and sprinted for the bus. At least I was in better shape than my academic brother.
Maths. Ergh. I hate calculus. Give me algebra any day.
The teacher didn’t wait for everyone to arrive, but when I left, I noticed some empty chairs. The students who normally sat in them – Jim Preston and Kelly Hartley – were in my English class, where we were studying some incredibly boring book no one cared about or even bothered finishing. But Jim and Kelly were both absent from English, as well. In fact, I remembered Kelly had been away during my art class yesterday.
Huh. Must be some kind of bug going around. More than once I had wished that the Storm family hadn’t bred this insanely tough immune system and that I could succumb to human illnesses – even just a common cold. But being a family of demon hunters, we needed to protect ourselves from demonic illnesses as well. So, one super strong immune system meant no tricking my parents that I was sick enough to skip school. Ever.
Mum made me stay in that evening. She said I’d had enough excitement with dead bodies and missing people to last a year. So I phoned a girl called Molly, whom I’d forged a friendship with when I had volunteered to be in the school show. Molly was a fellow dancer, and I had met her when her best friend and our female lead, Sarah, was the victim of another girl’s jealous wishes, granted courtesy of a djinni. I had undone the wishes, unknown to everyone. Molly was a very fresh-faced, bright, happy girl, with curly red hair and freckles. I thought if I could be friends with anyone, it would be pretty, popular, kind Molly.
Her mother answered and told me she wasn’t in.
The next
day, Molly was absent from school.
I glanced around at my classmates and tried to guess who would be next to come down with the dreaded flu bug. Would it be Sarah, the lead of our school musical, and Molly’s closest friend? Or Michael, Molly’s kind-of-almost boyfriend? Or would it be the kid sitting in the back of the class, gouging his name into the desk with a pen? I tried to remember his name, but I couldn’t even remember seeing him before. He was very short, with unwashed, unkempt black hair, pale blue eyes, and glasses. He dressed in all black, like me. Surely I knew his name?
The bell rang and I pushed the thought away, gathering my books.
On Thursday morning an emergency assembly was called. The headmaster made a grave announcement: that James Preston’s body had been discovered on a local beach a few nights before, and Kelly Hartley before that in a storm drain.
A chill shot up my spine and I sat bolt upright. Jim and Kelly, the two students I had assumed were sick, were now confirmed dead. It was Jim’s body I’d found on the beach. His body had been so water-engorged that I couldn’t recognise him.
When I got home I went straight to Teddy’s library. I poured over the texts he had exhumed to study Dad’s water demon. I wanted to know why the demon was picking off my classmates one by one.
Mum and Dad both went out hunting that night, trying to track down the water demon.
I was curled up on the sofa with a book when the news headlines came on: Molly’s body had been recovered near the water treatment plant.
My book snapped shut. Molly. My Molly, my friend. My only friend.
I racked my brains trying to remember who else had not shown up for school that day. It was hard to track anyone because we’d all been called in to the assembly.
Later that night, the parents called an emergency family meeting. They explained that they had been all over the town, but didn’t once feel the tingle on the back of their neck that meant something magical was nearby. Except for the demon who ran the Chinese supermarket. They thought that the water demon must have a human contact, someone who was keeping it hidden. They had used their Council contacts to receive cause of death notifications for my classmates. They had all been beaten and then strangled, and dumped.
It didn’t make sense to me. Water demons drowned people. Why would they strangle them when they were a demon?
We all went to bed that night thoroughly frustrated. I couldn’t sleep. All I could see was Molly’s face, pale and drawn and frightened. It merged with Noah’s dark features, and became accusing.
You could have saved me, Noah said in Molly’s voice.
Were they right?
Friday morning, and I noticed two things.
First: that Molly’s best friend, Sarah from the school play, was missing.
Two: that the kid at the back of the class, the one with the unwashed black hair and pale blue eyes, was also missing.
I was also beginning to doubt that the killer was in fact a water demon. Or even a demon at all. It just seemed so strange to me, that a demon would beat up a victim and then throttle them to death. Demons keep out of sight for the most part, preferring to take their victims without alerting anyone to their presence: like the nix had with Micah. Like the vampire had with Noah.
The news reports said that the bodies being found weren’t dead for very long – two or three days, tops. Most likely whoever was doing it was snatching them in the night, beating them all day and killing them the next evening before dumping them. It was Jim’s body that I found bloated on the beach, lost at sea for two days until the high tide brought him in. Kelly had been next.
I decided to do my own detective work. After school I stomped around the city, looking for Sarah and the black-haired kid, checking with Sarah’s mother on her whereabouts, checking her haunts: the coffee shop, the bookstore, the cinema. I ran through the police report that my parents had gotten hold of over and over again in my head, checking for discrepancies and similarities.
All of the bodies were beaten. All of the bodies were strangled. All of the bodies had abrasions around their wrists, indicating they’d been bound. Some of them had fibres in their throats, indicating they’d been gagged.
If they had needed to be gagged, they’d been kept somewhere in the city where it was necessary to stop their noise.
The Thursday victim hadn’t been found yet (assuming there was one). And I had my sights set on finding Sarah. I made a mental map in my head of the beach, the treatment plant and the storm drain. What was central within this circle, some kind of private building where you could keep someone locked up for a whole day with no interruptions?
The docks.
Hundreds and hundreds of shipping crates, ripe for the picking.
If Sarah was at the docks, it would take me forever to find her. I needed outside help. I needed something that could help me track her.
I needed a demon.
Tengu ran the Chinese supermarket. I swung by an Asian take away and picked up a rice cake as an offering. I wanted to make a good impression if I was to ask for his help. Tengu looked like a totally normal late-teens or early-twenties second-generation Chinese guy: beautiful golden skin, slanted dark eyes, his hair cut short to his head. I normally avoided the supermarket because of the tingle: I could never tell if it was because of him or another demon in the area.
I didn’t even have to introduce myself. As soon as I entered, his eyes swept over my hair and eye colour, and his back straightened. I walked up to the till and plonked the rice cake in front of him.
“I need your help.”
“What can I do for a Storm?” he asked, his accent Australian.
“I need to find a missing girl before she is murdered. It’s urgent.”
“Do you have any leads?”
“I think she’s in a shipping crate at the docks.”
Tengu yelled something to the back of the store in Chinese, scooped up the rice cake and munched on it as I led the way to the docks.
The salty, fishy smell greeted us as we walked past the open gates. There were no people. No security at all in this area. Nothing valuable left behind. Things were looking up.
“Do you mind if I shift in front of you?” Tengu asked. It was the first thing he had said since he had finished the rice cake. I looked at him in surprise.
“Of course not. What do you shift into?”
“I’m a wolf shifter, mostly, though I can do almost anything,” he said. “I thought your Council would have informed you.”
I shook my head. It was starting to rain. “No one ever told me what kind of demon you are.”
He actually smiled at me. “No one told me the Storms bred beauty.”
Momentarily speechless, I stared at him as his skin began to ripple. He shuddered and closed his eyes, breathing deep as dark brown fur spread over his body, up and down his arms and legs and across his torso. His head elongated and his ears travelled higher. He fell forward onto his hands as the bones in his knees reversed with a crack. In no time at all, a large brown wolf was standing before me, gazing up at me.
Did he have control of the beast? I daren’t move. His teeth were sharp and his shoulders strong, and his massive jaws and thick neck looked ready to tear my arm from my body.
He stepped forward and swiped his soft pink tongue across my hand, and then trotted off into the shipping containers.
I breathed again and trailed after him, following him and his lupine nose. Every so often he would check over his shoulder to make sure I was still following, and wag his tail briefly like a dog.
I was at the edge of the dock when I just so happened to glance over and into the dark water. The rain pelted down, making the water’s surface dance in response. There were no big ships docked at the moment, no cruise ships or transport ships or even exploration ships.
There was no reason why there should be a dark mass floating face-down in the docks, bright red hair fanning out in the water.
My heart skipped a beat and for a moment I t
hought the rain had started pelting me horizontally as my eyes misted over.
“Tengu!” I called, my voice weak and cracking. He appeared at my side at once. I pointed to the body. He peered over the edge of the wharf and shook his head in a very human gesture. There was nothing we could do about her. There was no way to get her out.
I had to leave her, and it broke my already shattered heart.
Tengu scampered off again and I followed, dodging in and out of the containers, listening intently for any sign of humans. I wiped at my face and sighed as my eyeliner same off on the back of my hand. The Goth look didn’t do so well in a torrential downpour. At least my mascara was waterproof.
I rounded a corner and saw Tengu sitting in front of a large blue container. His tongue was lolling out in a very pleased expression. I slowly joined him.
“Is this it? Is there someone in there?” I whispered.
He nodded.
“Thank you, Tengu. Thanks for your help. You can go now.”
I grabbed the massive handle and yanked on the door. It was heavy reinforced plastic and looked old and faded, but it slid open silently. The hinges had been oiled. The dim light fell on two figures in the box, both looking at me in surprise.
One was Sarah, hanging from the roof by her wrists, gagged, her face bloody, her feet dragging on the ground.
The other was the wannabe-punk kid from my English class, with black hair and pale blue eyes. He pushed his glasses back up on face and squinted at me.
“The Goth chick?” he said incredulously, like he couldn’t really believe I would be standing before him.
Behind me, Tengu growled. I felt reassured knowing he was still there. My hair dripped with rain and I pushed it out of my face, racking my brain for the kid’s name. It still eluded me. But by now I was pissed off. How dare the murdering demon be just a regular human! It was bad enough the Storms were demon hunters, but tracking down serial killers? That’s not our job. And why the hell was he going after his classmates? Why had he gone after sweet, happy Molly?
If I had known, maybe I could have stopped him.
“Get away from her,” I snarled. Sarah whimpered and the kid held up a knife. Its length shone wickedly in the dim evening light.
“Back off, Goth,” he instructed me, “If you care about this bitch at all.”
“Do not threaten me,” I spat back at him, feeling adrenaline pump through my system at the chance of delivering justice in the shape of a lightning bolt. Tengu beside me snarled and lifted his lip to reveal his white teeth.
“I will gut her before you,” he warned.
“Instead of strangling her like you did the other kids? What the hell is your problem anyway? Jealous of all the popular kids at school?”
“Shut up!” he screamed. “They all need to die, just like this bitch and you need to die!”
“I wasn’t ever on your list,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “Just the people who completely ignored me. Made me feel this big.” He pinched air between his finger and thumb. “Kids who are too busy worrying about the latest fashion or which guy they’re going out with to notice anyone else’s problems.”
I felt my temper explode as his presumption. “Everyone has baggage. Everyone has their own problems. No one person is perfect all the time. Not even Sarah. Not even me. Not one of those kids you murdered has this perfect life you seem to think they have. You think you’re invisible? So does everyone else.” His name came to me in a flash. “Duncan, you’re not the only one who thinks the whole world is against them.”
His face screwed up. “You have no idea what it’s like to be me!”
“No, I don’t,” I snarled. “But at least I know your name. What’s mine?”
Sarah cried out, her muffled scream the only warning I got. Duncan threw the knife at me. I swayed and dropped to my hands, and the knife went flying by above my head. It probably would have hit me if I didn’t have a Storm’s enhanced senses. Acting purely on instinct, I threw one hand up and one hand out, and summoned the lightning within. It crackled around me for a mere instant before shooting straight into Duncan. His entire body jerked in mid-air for about two seconds, and then with a blinding flash, he was gone. The lightning dissipated up into the clouds.
Sarah was staring at me in horror, her eyes wide, nothing left where Duncan had been standing – not even a little pile or ash or a darkened smudge. Tengu shifted back into his human form. What the hell, the human had already seen me vanquish someone right before her retina-burned eyes, what was one more little demon going to do?
He eased her out of the restraints and cleaned the blood off her face while I stood there staring at my hands like a moron.
How was this any better than what I’d done to Noah?
I blinked slowly, the rain now pelting at my head. Noah had been a demon at the time that I’d killed him, sure: but a demon who hadn’t actually hurt a human. And now, here, by my own power, I had snuffed the life out of a human – a human who had possibly done worse acts than a lot of demons out there. A human whose own petty selfishness had led him to murder his classmates in fits of jealous rage.
How do I define the ones I should hunt and destroy for the protection of the human race, and those demons, like Tengu, who would never harm a human and are happy to live out their lives among society?
The difference between Noah and Duncan swirled through my head, but they never became one and the same. One boy had been the species I was sworn to destroy; the other I was sworn to protect. One boy never hurt anyone in his life; the other went on a murderous rampage for a week before I stopped him.
How do I find the definition between good and evil anymore?
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Thank you for purchasing this ebook.
Lissa Bilyk graduated from the University of Tasmania with a Bachelor of Arts degree with Honours in English Literature and Film. She currently lives in the Australia with her husband and three wonderful witch cats.
The Edge of Darkness (adult sci-fi standalone)
Storm Force series (Young Adult paranormal series):
Tina Storm: Demon Hunter
Demon’s Blood
Demon’s Path (coming soon)
The Archive of Lost Dreams (paranormal short story collection)
Lies for a Living series (New Adult contemporary romance):
Book 1: Backstage Heat
Book 2: Centre Stage
Book 3: Leading Lady
Box Set #1-3: Name In Lights
Connect online:
Blog https://www.lissawrites.wordpress.com
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Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lissawrites
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