The Demon Within

☆5- Shadows of Doubt☆

"Eliza! It's time to get up! You have school today!"

Eliza groans as she pushes the hand that's patting her ass away before she settles back down to sleep.

She doesn't want to hear Crystal's annoying ass voice at this hour of the morning. "Hey, Crystal?" Jasmine barges into the room unannounced, a force of habit from their first year, "Eliza's not coming to school today, so get ready."

"What. . .? H-How? Why?"

Eliza can not help the smirk that crawls on her face as Crystal actually sounds defeated when she finds out. "She's sick," Jasmine says, "so we can't really bother her too much."

"Sick?" She hears Crystal repeat with surprise, and she can see the raised eyebrow expression that the girl is giving without even glancing at her, "by all my years of knowing her, she never gets 'sick', unless it was really bad."

"Well, it's really bad now, so she's sick."

Footsteps then thud out of the room, and then Eliza feels a warm mass leaning against her body. "If you think," the pink haired nightmare seethes in her ears, that warm tone she has used initially long gone, sending spittle that splatters on the shell of her ear, "that I'm going to be easily fooled by you suddenly falling 'ill', you've got another thing coming."

Eliza has to suppress the urge to punch the lights out of her as she abruptly sits up and glares at the girl. "Well," she snarls with narrowed eyes, voice thick with sleep, "I guess that makes two of us then." Her lips part, Eliza knows that she has struck a nerve and happily flops onto her side to go back to sleep.

A knock on the door follows, then. "Crystal, hurry up!"

"You're very lucky," the girl seethes, before another set of footsteps thud away from the bed, before the door closes shut. Eliza knows that she has to wait until she can have the room to herself. She pretends as though she is in a deep sleep with each opening and closing of the door until she hears the final one and waits a couple of minutes extra before leaving the bed.

She walks into the room's private bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror, seeing the darkened bags that hang under her eyes, her hair appearing as though she had used a blow drier on full blast and her eyes are almost bloodshot, with a faint circle of red outlining the irises. She gasps and tries to calm down her inner demon by caressing the necklace that normally hangs around her neck while counting down from ten to calm herself down.

Not now...

Please, not now...

She shuts her eyes tightly and focuses on her breathing until she finally calms down from what can be a possible panic attack. "I need someone to talk to," she snaps her eyes open and stares into her reflection.

She mumbles a spell under her breath, one she hasn't forgotten even though the rest of the spells were lost in her past life. The lights on the ceiling begin to dim without her touching the switch, and a red fog starts to swirl inside the surface of the mirror, slowly blocking out her reflection until she can't see anything.

She doesn't know whether or not he'll answer, but she has to try for the sake of her mental health.

She exhales through her teeth and whispers the following words under her breath, <<Show me Vincent De La Rosa.>>

The mirror doesn't do anything for a while, the red mist just swirls around in a constant cycle while her anxiety nips away at her, her fingers anxiously tap against the porcelain of the countertop, creating a loud tick every time her nails touch the surface.