Bitter Demons

37. Wrath

I gripped the file and settled back down on the floor. My hands trembled as I opened the worn folder. Dust billowed out and floated across the room. I stifled a sneeze.

The first part of the file was information on Jackson's school records. He'd apparently had more than seven different names since he first enrolled at Peachville High in 1965. I flipped past the list of names and the various pieces of information about subjects he'd studied. I wondered how it was that no one ever remembered him. Then, I saw the notes on the various memory spells cast around him so that when he graduated one year with one name and reentered school the next year as a freshman, he was completely forgotten by everyone and could start fresh.

God, that must have been so boring for him. I had a hard time imagining two more years at boring Peachville High, much less nearly fifty years. Why did he keep coming back to school? Why didn't he just travel or leave town? The more I learned about Jackson, the more questions I had.

I moved past the school files and started getting into something a bit more interesting. My breath came in short, shallow bursts as I turned page after page, knowing I was close to finding something important about his past.

I stopped at a drawing of a shadow demon inside the ritual room. It was a charcoal drawing that was slightly smudged, but it looked like a scene from Dante. The room was in chaos. The shadow demon poured out of the portal on the floor and witches in full-length robes scattered. Several witches lay dead on the floor, blood pouring from their heads and bodies. Was this Jackson?

I struggled to remember Isaac's words that night. He'd said something about Jackson coming through the portal and killing, but I hadn't wanted to believe it could be true.

I turned the page.

A handwritten journal entry had been photocopied and added to the folder.

July 7, 1962

It has taken me hours to steady my hands to be able to write this account of today's initiation ceremony. A young girl by the name of Maureen was scheduled to be initiated into the Order. She was a sweet girl. Full of promise and quite beautiful. She was the daughter of my good friend Kathryn, who has been a loyal member of Peachville's Order since she turned eighteen, more than twenty years ago.

The ceremony began as usual. I called forth the spirit of our contact in the shadow world, Yanora. She told us that she had indeed found a suitable demon for Maureen and that a spell had been affixed to him to bring him over. She gave no warning of this particular demon's power, but as soon as I began the joining ritual, I could feel that something was different. This demon's power was unbelievable. Almost overwhelming.

When he poured through the portal, we forced him into Maureen's body, as the ritual commands. At first, we believed the ritual was a success. We waited for Maureen to wake and accept us as sisters, but her body began to tremble uncontrollably. Right away, the ritual room grew cold as ice, and a feeling of desperation fell over me.

The demon ripped free of Maureen's body and she fell, lifeless, to the floor. Several of the members rushed forward to try to save her, but the demon lashed out with such ferocious anger, it filled the room with hatred and fear. Chaos erupted. Several loyal members of the Order were lost to us today. Maureen and her mother. Gladys, one of my mother's friends from the old days. Penelope, a sweet young girl of only twenty-eight who had just been brought on as a member of our council. Jocelyn and her sister, Jacie, were also killed at the hands of this beast.

I cannot find the words to express the full horror of today's events. Seeing the blood run along the floor of the ritual room was the most disturbing and heart-breaking experience of my entire reign as Prima.

Once I gathered my wits and recognized what was happening, I knew we had to get the situation under control as quickly as possible or we might lose the whole of our membership to the demon's anger. I joined hands with the surviving witches and somehow my training kicked in and I was able to remember the ritual to contain a demon. A stone statue in the corner of the room was perfect for containment.

As we started to chant, I felt a strange power coursing through me. Not a foreign power, exactly, but more powerful and more pure than anything I'd ever felt before. Once we joined together, we were able to subdue the demon quickly. We transformed him into a human male. We split his power from his body and stored it in the stone statue. With his power taken, he collapsed onto the floor of the cold ritual room.

I do not yet know what we are going to do with him. It is rare for a demon to overpower a girl of eighteen, so I know we have a very dangerous and powerful demon on our hands. We will call him Wrath. I will write tomorrow when the demon has awakened and I have the opportunity to question him. For now, he is held on the third floor in shackles and chains.

My hands were shaking so hard by the time I got to the bottom of the journal entry I could hardly turn to the next page. Another entry, in the same handwriting as the first, detailed the Prima's questioning of the demon. They called him Wrath because of his anger and thirst for blood. After days of questioning, they finally got him to talk. He told them that his brother, Aerden, had disappeared a long time ago.

It took him years to figure out where his brother had gone and who had taken him there. He discovered the Order's servant in the shadow world and followed her, tracking her until he understood how she stole demons from his world and moved them to another one. He'd made sure he was the next one chosen for this particular gate, and when he had the chance, he came through, determined to kill anyone who stood in the way of him being reunited with his twin brother, Aerden.

Tears ran down my cheeks at the story that unfolded through the journal. Jackson came through the portal in demon form, looking for his brother. He'd killed six women before he was trapped in human form, his powers stripped from him.

The thought of Jackson killing all those people was hard to process. My hands wouldn't stop shaking and my entire body was tense. The image of him as some dark shadow coming through with nothing but rage and hatred made me feel sick to my stomach.

But how could I blame him for what he'd done? If someone took my twin brother away and forced him into eternal slavery, I'd be angry too.

Only, why had they kept him alive all this time? Why not just bind him to human form and then kill him? Why was he forced to stay here in Peachville for all these years? It didn't make sense. If the witches hated him so much and he was despised for what he'd done, why was he still alive at all?

I searched through the rest of his file, but couldn't find an answer. The final page in the folder was a single note indicating that the stone statue that held Jackson's demon power was still here in town.

In front of Peachville High School.