Saving Them Page 2

  “Okay,” I reply, simply taking it off and putting it in the laundry basket. Underneath, I’m wearing a black and purple tank top with stripes on it.

  “I love that color!” he cheers, smiling mischievously.

  “Black?” I laugh. “Not surprising.”

  He shakes his head. “The other one.”

  “Purple?”

  “Purple. Yes, I know what it’s called. I’ve just been going mad here. It’s so different compared to where I’m from.” He gets off the bed and closes the distance between us, putting his hands on my hips. I give him a soft smile but look away. “What is it?”

  “I’m just tired, and my teeth hurt,” I lie. I climb onto the bed and crawl under the top sheet, the one too small for him to fit under. Regret. Regret and guilt are exemplified through my bones right now, through my breathing. It feels like all I am is regret and guilt. I no longer feel human at all. I’m now closer to what Draven is; I know this for sure.

  “What did they do to you, my sweet?”

  I want to cringe at the word, but I don’t.

  “Can you go over the plan with me again?” I ask quietly.

  “We will save my family,” he says.

  “But how? What do I have to do?”

  He sighs, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Have I done something wrong, Bella?”

  I feel a tear coming out of the corner of my eye. I try not to sniffle. The sadness is magnified now.

  “How do I even know you’re real?”

  “Because I’m right here.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. The human brain can create hallucinations. It can create sounds and noises and feelings. This could all be a fucking hallucination. How humiliating. How freaky. I’m a freak!”

  I say all of these things out loud, though I have spoken them in my head since the first time I met Draven. And it’s true that Draven, since that day, has been nothing but kind to me. But this just gets weirder and weirder, and I think I’ve gone past the point of no return.

  If I’d been honest about the hallucinations the first time around, would I be enjoying normal high-school girl things right now? Or would I still be here, on my bed, in an ever-flowing river of sadness and anger and fear, speaking to a demonic creature that may or may not even be real?

  “You want to be crazy,” he tells me. Getting off the bed, he goes to the corner and into my sock drawer. I don’t even stop him. He moves my socks around until he finds the bottle.

  “These aren’t for your teeth; I’m willing to stake everything on it. I’m going to ask your brother.”

  He goes toward the door.

  “Why would I want to be crazy?” I ask. He stops in his tracks and looks over his shoulder.

  “Being crazy would be easier than believing in demons. It would be easier than accepting that you are the Chosen One, that many may die at your hands, and it’ll be for a justice you refuse to understand.”

  He moves through the door stealthily, turning into a shadow as he crawls toward my brother’s room. Ace is high, that I know for sure—it smells like a skunk in my bedroom because the window is open, and he likes to blow smoke out the window. What he doesn’t know is that the wind usually blows it at me. I shake my head, getting up to light a candle, and lie back down.

  My phone buzzes. It’s Daven.

  Can we talk?

  I shake my head as though he can see me, and then I put my phone inside my bedside table drawer. I can hear it buzz a few more times, but I don’t want to look. I don’t care to look. Any chance of reconciliation that Daven and I had ended when he and Stephanie started dating. And you know what?

  I open up my bedside table drawer again and grab both a pen and a sheet of paper. I write down, for Dr. Schultz, more thoughts. I don’t want to forget all of this next week.

  Why would Daven date Stephanie unless he was in on the prank? I write. Maybe I’m not paranoid. Maybe I’m just gaslighting myself.

  I’m proud of myself for using the word “gaslighting,” a word I’d found during my research. Bipolar Disorder hadn’t come up a single time, but psychosis had. If I were in psychosis, wouldn’t Ace be, too? He could see Draven. Most people could.

  What worries me is that psychosis doesn’t have to mean things just popping up out of the air as hallucinations. It could mean seeing something, something that was really real, and your mind twisting the image. It could distort it to have a brand-new meaning, to make their words sound different, to make your understanding of them different.

  Kind of like when you dream, and you’re at school with no shoes on, but so is everyone else, and your youth pastor is there. And your dog that died when you were seven is teaching the class, and it all just makes sense because your dream brain makes you think this is reality. What if that’s what I’m doing with Draven? What if he’s just some man who found me on the street, who’s been stalking me, and now lives in my room?

  Draven returns with the pill bottle.

  “A mood stabilizer?” he asks. “To make your moods more… consistent?”

  I nod. He hasn’t gone into the muck of why I want to use them—because I’m crazy, and I’m scared.

  “Yes,” I mutter quietly, pulling the blanket up to my chin.

  He sits on the bed, frowning. “Oh, Bella. I’m sorry. Demons tend to have this effect on people. No wonder you seem so sad.”

  “What effect?”

  “Every negative emotion you’ve ever had in your life is going to be heightened around me. I thought that since you’re the Chosen One, it would be different. But I was wrong. It sounds like it happens even worse for you. I’ll turn it off.”

  “Turn it off?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can just do that?”

  “Sure,” he says. “For you, I will. Just a matter of thinking about it.”

  I smile a little, hopeful that he’s right, and my moods might stabilize on their own. But why then, has this happened to me my entire life, even before Draven? I push this thought out. Draven will solve this problem. Maybe it never existed before him. If I can be happy again, calm, I’ll stop worrying about the past.

  “I’m sorry for being so distant,” I whisper to him. And I mean it.

  I was all over Draven the day before. I was all over Draven the day before that. And I’ve been all over Draven since we slept together. Today’s swing in the other direction must have been prompted by his demonic traits, not by me. And he’s not doing all this on purpose.

  He crawls under the tiny blanket with me and gives me a kiss on top of my forehead, repeating the same sentiment that he’s repeated to me a hundred times since we met.

  “I’ve been waiting over five millennia to meet a girl like you, Bella Nova.”

  Chapter 3

  DAVEN PORTER’S POV

  My heart stops when I see Bella at school. Not in the way it usually does—usually when I see her, I feel my hands get a little clammy, and I can feel my forehead start to sweat. She’s made me feel like a babbling idiot, not the calm and collected person I used to be around women.

  Stephanie, though she does have beauty in her own way, doesn’t make me nervous at all. Bella, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in her own way, makes me buckle at the knees.

  But today, when I see her, it’s not her beauty or my regret or my promise (the promise I haven’t promised her yet for the fear that it will compromise this mission: I PROMISE I will not let Stephanie get away with this) that shakes me. It’s the boy she’s holding hands with.

  There’s something off about him. Not just that he’s holding hands with my beloved. I’ll admit that I am jealous of him, and that may be skewing my perception. But it feels as though he walks around with this aura of superiority, maturity, and understanding of the world that guys my age just don’t really have.

  He’s here, at the high school, and he’s wearing jeans and a hoodie. His face looks smooth, wrinkle-free. And his skin is actually flawless! He doesn’t look a day older than seventee
n—though he does have a unique way about him—but he does just seem older.

  They both walk past me, Bella flipping her hair and smiling while the guy gives me a look that sends my stomach to my feet. I feel almost dizzy after seeing him. It’s as if he’s looking at me to say he’s going to rip me from limb to limb.

  But no, I’m crazy to think that; it was just a look! In fact, as soon as he walks past me, I take my hand off of Stephanie’s shoulder—which I’ve been longing to do since I put it on her—and run to the restroom. I puke, and I puke violently. I didn’t eat much this morning. And I wouldn’t ever buy Stephanie a bagel or get her a coffee like I had for Bella.

  But it feels like when I start, I cannot stop.

  “You alright man?”

  “I feel like I’m about to throw up my intestines,” I say between pukes, and I mean it jokingly, but it probably sounds serious with the way I’m gagging.

  “Want me to get the nurse, man?”

  I can only half make out the voice, but I see a pair of canvas sneakers. They’re signed by Walker Walking, a local indie band that Michael and I went to see last summer. He had them sign his shoes because his band tee was already filled up with signatures.

  “Michael?” I ask.

  “It’s me,” he replies. “I saw you running in here.”

  Michael and I haven’t exactly been on speaking terms since the homecoming dance. He, for reasons I can’t relate to, has a huge crush on Stephanie. He has since we were in the fourth grade. Even though she has a rotten heart and is cruel and unkind, he likes her. I guess everyone deserves love at the end of the day.

  But if me dating her ruins her for him, I’d be happy with that, too. Michael deserves better.

  “I must have food poisoning or something,” I mutter to him, saliva dripping out as I speak.

  “Nah.” Michael lets out a breath. “You just saw Bella with that weirdo. You’re sick with jealousy. I know the feeling.”

  I feel a pang of guilt in my chest. I know the feeling. I had been so caught up in my anger and wanting to help Bella that I honestly hadn’t thought of Michael for a second. It was only after I had already concocted my plan and gotten one foot into it that I even remembered Michael.

  I open up the stall.

  “Hey,” I say to him.

  “You look as pale as a fucking ghost,” he says curtly, his curly hair bouncing as he shakes his head, “and I can’t say I feel bad about it. You kinda deserve it, man.”

  “I’m the world’s biggest asshole, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah.”

  And I’m smiling, but he doesn’t laugh. He means it.

  I sigh. “What if I told you I don’t have feelings for Stephanie?”

  Michael raises an eyebrow. “I’d say that dating her right in front of me—and Bella—is a pretty weird way of showing it.”

  I go over to the sink and splash some cold water on my face. When I look up at the mirror, I see that I really am as pale as a sheet of paper. How much should I tell Michael?

  “Did you see what Stephanie did at the dance? To Bella?”

  “What?” he asks, leaning against the pillar that separates the stalls. “What Stephanie did to Bella? What dance?”

  I give my face a gentle slap and reach for the water bottle in my backpack. I finish the whole thing in one gulp, and I’m starting to feel a little better. The water bottle is actually a gift from Bella, before she was even my girlfriend. It’s yellow, with a little sun printed on it.

  “She humiliated her, man. She had this box, this weird ass box that sprayed her with all this gross stuff and—it was so mean, Michael. Stephanie is awful. I don’t understand why you like her at all.”

  Michael seems to be considering this, but then speaks quickly in defense. “It’s really hard for me to listen to you and take you seriously when you’re literally dating her, Daven.”

  “I just want her to admit what she did to Bella. I want the full confession. If I can figure out how she did it, place her there, and get her to—I don’t know, record her saying she did it, or even texts saying she did it—they will probably expel her. The school has a zero-tolerance bullying policy.”

  Michael raises his eyebrows. “You want her expelled?”

  “Shh!” I hiss at him, looking toward the door. “I haven’t even told Bella I’m doing this. She’d probably tell me not to or say she can fight her own battles—”

  “So… maybe you shouldn’t, and maybe she can fight her own battles.”

  “Do you think what Stephanie did was right?”

  Michael is quiet. He shakes his head no. “She can be… intense.”

  “And you can still date her when she goes to the school across town.” I splash my face with water again. “But Bella’s life will be so much easier if Stephanie isn’t here. And not just Bella. All the girls in our grade would celebrate. They’d play Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead on the announcements—”

  “Watch it,” Michael smiles, “I like Stephanie.”

  I turn to him. “But you shouldn’t. You deserve better.”

  Michael looks down at his feet, frowning. “Maybe I do.”

  “Can I count on you?”

  He looks up again. “Count on me for what?”

  “Can I count on you to keep this a secret between us?”

  He shakes his head. “Daven, I don’t think you’re thinking straight. Can you imagine what this might look like to Bella? She’s already dating that weirdo. I think you doing this will make her go insane.”

  “It’ll be worth it in the end,” I reply, going toward the door. “I know it. Can I count on you?”

  Michael takes in a deep breath, then shakes his head yes. I leave the restroom and go back toward my locker, where Stephanie is still leaning and twisting her hair. It’ll all be worth it in the end.

  I know it.

  Chapter 4

  DRAVEN ASMODEUS’ POV

  Bella is shaken from seeing Stephanie and Daven together, which angers me more than I had originally thought. I want to crawl under his skin, take his soul right from his body, and watch as his eyes melt out of his head, but I know I’d lose Bella if I did that. Instead, I give him a punch to the gut from the inside out. I can hear him puking as Bella and I walk away.

  Now, with no interest in her classes when my family is at stake, like the good girl she is, we’re sitting on a park bench near her school. Her spirits are much higher than they were the night before, when she came home with the pills.

  We didn’t have anything like that in my day. Sometimes you’d eat the powder from crushed up herbs, and those would help you with some basic things, such as breaking a fever or throwing up poison. But the only remedies we had for the brain were the ones that opened a layer to the other dimension, where you could look at it through a magnifying glass. And even then, those were better consumed whole than in powder form. Those were my favorites.

  “I want to help you,” she says to me.

  I can see fear in her eyes. As a demon, this is something I crave. But not with Bella. I don’t want her to feel a negative emotion in her entire life, especially if it’s one I have caused.

  Bella is like a mirror. The chosen ones often are. It can lead them through a life of great sadness and anger. Like the entire world is out to get them, and it only gets worse the more resentful and hopeless they feel. Many of the chosen ones don’t survive.

  But sometimes the Chosen One is met with manifestations of happiness and luck. These ones don’t last long, either. Because their riches always lead to something that will eventually break them. Maybe drugs, maybe worse. And once the descent happens, it happens quickly.

  From what I can tell, Bella’s family has done well for themselves because they request little and expect less. I have suspicions about the mother, however, about the pots of herbs she simmers as she cooks, and the salt she pours at her door.

  But as far as I can tell, Bella has never heard a word from her mother about their involvement in the Underwo
rld. About their chosen status. That makes her the perfect victim—but I am weak. I pray that her and I can work together. That I don’t have to turn her in order to get what I want.

  So, I begin with a sob story. Maybe it’s manipulation. But I’m a demon. There’s much worse I can do.

  “Your family reminds me of mine. You’d do anything to save them if they were in trouble, wouldn’t you?”

  She doesn’t need to think about it. She nods. “Of course, I would.”

  “Because they’d do anything to save you, right? Even if you’d done something wrong?”

  I can see a flashback swim across her eyes.

  Yes, I know about Brick. I can feel her shame. I can see the scene written across her skin because it constantly eats at her. I’ll use this to my advantage, without ever letting her know that I know.

  She looks down at her hands, which are wrapped in mine as we sit at a picnic table near her school. “They would.”

  I nod. “Well. I did something wrong. When I was young. I was your age, probably. Maybe younger.”

  I was the exact same age, actually, that she was when she killed Brick.

  “What’d you do?” she asks, eyes wide and innocent.

  “I opened a door. It doesn’t sound bad, but we had many warnings in our village. Humans in your generation call them folktales, but they were as real to us as the weather. We knew of demons who would rise to the surface, like weevils in rice, every thousand years. And it was time. So, we had new laws to follow,” I tell her. “All doors remain open. All bodies of water are to be ignored. Don’t look inside trees with holes.”

  “Those sound silly.” She smiles. I love the way she lightens things with her smile.

  “Yes, I thought so, too. They were hard rules to follow because they didn’t make much logical sense. So, I ignored the most important one, don’t go swimming in the river at night. The demons just needed a little of my life source to rise. And then… I let them take my father. The demons. I thought that would be enough for them. But then they came back for the rest of us and half the village.”