Stranger

ch25

I am a stress eater.

Big freaking revelation about me people. I eat whenever I am stressed, paranoid, anxious, etc. I have battled this addiction for my whole life and I always felt bad about it, but right now I am ignoring all the judgments I would usually make to myself. Right now, I really needed something sweet and my conscience was on board with me on this. 

So, we both mutually decided on muffins. 

The day had been a long one, the minutes dragging painfully slow. Ever since the talk with Devon yesterday, I had been on autopilot, not really here, but also here.

Finding out that ones uncle is a demon was not something I expected to come across. Devon being one was shocking, but this, this has been... I don't even know which word would describe it best. 

I had spent the entire time locked in my room. I had planned on doing some homework after I got back from the carnival, the one I didn't finish on Friday night, but that had been out of the question. My brain was nowhere near homework mood. 

It was thinking, analyzing, going through words, remembering and trying to find out clues, generating questions, then thinking again. It was a never ending process that I would back up by pacing or just lying down, there was no in between.

Roger was a demon. A manipulating demon. What this really meant I had no idea and I wanted to know, but at the time I had learned this, I couldn't think of a single thing, my brain too fried by the information. 

I needed to find out what he was, how his power worked, what could he do with them, how dangerous was he to me, could he hurt me in any way, are my parents in danger now that I know and everything else there was connected to this subject, but again, just by thinking of this, my headache is making its return.

I wanted to call Ethan and talk, but I couldn't. I wanted to call Trish, but I also couldn't. My parents were out of the question for sure, so I was left with no one. I also didn't want risking exposing any one of them to this information. 

I didn't know if my parents knew, if they have been keeping this away from me, is this the reason they sided with him, maybe they were afraid, I don't know anything and it's frustrating. 

The territory of this problem was dark to me. I had no clue how to continue on, how to deal with it and how to come to terms with it. It wasn't that I didn't believe Devon about Roger, because I did, but I just couldn't understand how it was possible.

Roger was normal, as normal as me and my parents were or at least I thought so. He never behaved differently, he never acted strangely, except for that one dreadful night, but as long as I can remember, he had always been like every other human. 

Was that all an act? Could that be part of the whole manipulation power thing? Did he somehow made us see him as normal when he wasn't? Is that how my grandparents adopted him? Did they know who they were bringing into the family? Had they been aware of the demon world? 

Questions, all I had was questions that I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. My brain was physically hurting from all of this, but I couldn't end it. I tried to think of anything else, to connect some dots, but to no avail. 

I thought I knew who Roger was, I thought I knew him as a person, but now I realize that he is just a stranger, a black shadow that just presented itself in a certain way, hiding the true form from others. The reality was that I didn't know my uncle, I didn't know what he was capable of and I didn't know how far could he push things. I simply didn't know him. 

All the memories with him, all those times he'd come visit and be the best brother to my father had been crushed yesterday, empty frames left in their place, empty holes in my mind that a stranger had filled, an unknown stranger that had been there for all my life, an unknown.