Reign Check

on.

Dance lessons, huh? Color me mega-unconvinced.

Concern swelled inside me at the thought that my friend was hiding something horrible. I’d been so busy with my own life that I hadn’t even noticed she was acting strangely, but now that I thought about it, yeah, she had been. Distracted and worried. And I vaguely recalled her having some fading bruises on her arms and jaw that she’d explained away like they were nothing. And what had I heard her say to Patrick?

I thought you wanted me to fight you.

That didn’t sound like the kind of conversation you’d have with your dance instructor.

I glanced up at the railing on the second floor. The shower was still going. I knew I should go into the kitchen and mind my own business, but I just couldn’t.

Instead, I wandered through the house looking for clues, through the kitchen and down the hall where a framed family photo of Melinda and her parents hung on the wall. The door leading to the basement stairs was ajar. When I’d been here a few weeks ago, before Melinda had her dance lessons every day after school, it had been locked. I pushed it open and slowly descended the stairs.

It looked like a gym down there. Mats on the floor. A treadmill. Weight-lifting equipment. Not completely unexpected.

But there was other stuff, too, that I noticed at a glance. Things that began to totally freak me out.

For instance, there was a sword lying on the ground as if it had been dropped. Swords weren’t a typical floor accessory, so to say it stood out to me would be putting it mildly.

A battered and ripped punching bag hung from the ceiling. The hilt of a knife protruded from it. Also a majorly unusual sight, in my humble opinion, for a home gym.

To my right there was a table on which a selection of sharp knives were displayed. One had a curved blade with what looked like rubies set into the hilt.

Next to the knives was a short stack of books. They looked old, with plain leather covers and yellowed pages. I reached out to open one and noticed my hand was shaking. The book fell open to a page with an illustration of a very familiar-looking horned monster with large batlike wings. My stomach lurched.

I closed the book and quickly went back up the stairs, trying to rationalize what I’d just seen. I think it was safe to say Melinda hadn’t really been taking dance lessons, after all.

“This is in your blood, Melinda,” Patrick had told her. “You’re only making this more difficult on yourself. You won’t be ready.”

“Ready?” she’d replied. “For what? I haven’t seen anything that makes me believe all the crazy things you’ve told me are even remotely true.”

I understood now what she was trying to say. She didn’t believe in demons. All she’d seen was a bunch of illustrations in some old books. It was true what they say — seeing was believing. I knew if I hadn’t seen everything I had with my own two eyes, then I’d never have believed it in a million years.

But it was true. Demons existed, and some of them were really evil.

The realization that was slowly dawning on me was good for one thing. Suddenly, my prophecies and my troubles with Michael and Rhys were the last things on my mind.

Melinda could never know I knew about this. And she could absolutely, positively never find out I was half demon.

My best friend was in training to become a demon slayer.

12

“I just want to have fun tonight and forget everything else,” Melinda proclaimed as she came downstairs after freshening up from her secret (she thought) demon-slayer training session. She looked gorgeous, wearing a form-fitting short red dress I’d never seen before.

“Yeah, me too,” I said, now feeling strange about being in her presence. But she didn’t act any differently than she had before. She was the same Melinda as ever. She scurried around the house, putting last-minute touches on her decorations and ordering her party-planning assistant (aka, me) here and there as we prepared for everyone to arrive.

I watched her suspiciously. She seemed so normal. Was it possible I was overreacting to everything I’d seen downstairs? Was I worried over nothing?

“Hey, Melinda,” I imagined myself saying to her. “Is it true you’re a demon slayer? And that Patrick guy is training you, even though you don’t seem too happy about it?”

“Yes, it’s true,” she’d reply. “For a demon princess, and therefore my mortal enemy, you’re very perceptive.”

“I’m actually only half demon,” I’d try to explain.

“Doesn’t matter,” she’d say.

And then she’d kill me dead.

Was that why Patrick had given me the stink eye? Had he sensed I was a little bit demonic? And were Melinda’s parents demon slayers, too? Was it the family business? They’d never looked at me strangely before, though, so maybe not.

Come to think of it, I didn’t even know what Melinda’s parents did for a living. I knew money wasn’t an issue for them. Melinda had ordered a ton of food for the party, and a couple knocks on the front door announced caterers delivering platters of sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres.

Invited guests began to arrive at seven o’clock. By eight, there were forty or fifty kids in the house. Music blared from a variety of speakers, and the place was so loud I could barely hear myself think.

It was probably a good thing.

Melinda acted as if nothing had changed between us in the last couple of hours — and for her, nothing really had. After a while I could almost pretend that I hadn’t overheard what I had; that I hadn’t gone down to the basement and learned her big secret. But, unfortunately, pretending wasn’t going to make this go away.

Maybe just for tonight.

I avoided Larissa, who, wearing a short, tight green dress, had glared at me so evilly upon her arrival that I thought I might get a scar on my forehead, or at the very least a welt. Her issues were her problem, not mine. I had my own issues to deal with, thank you very much.

I turned to go back to the kitchen and found Chris Sanders standing directly in front of me, his arms crossed over his chest.

“I really need to have that talk with you, Nikki,” he said. “I’ve put it off long enough.”

Oh, great. I grimaced. “Now?”

“Yeah.”

The gingerbread cookie I’d downed a few minutes before began dancing unpleasantly in my gut. I don’t even want to say what the follow-up jellybeans were now doing at the prospect of chatting with Chris.

“Hey, Chris.” Larissa approached us and snaked an arm around his waist. She held a glass in her right hand and took a sip. “Great to see you. You’re looking mighty fine tonight. I’ll have to find some mistletoe later, if ya know what I mean.” She hiccupped.

What was in that glass? Melinda had threatened everyone upon entering the house that this was to be an alcohol-free party, otherwise her parents wouldn’t let her have another one ever again. To me, though, Larissa seemed a bit tipsy.

In Larissa’s defense, however, Chris was looking mighty fine. He had this effortless attractiveness about him that I couldn’t help but notice from the first day I’d started at Erin Heights. This calm confidence only helped to ramp up his natural good looks a few levels.

I’d wondered back then if he had any flaws. I now knew they included a major sense of entitlement. If Chris wanted something — no matter what it was — he felt like he should have it. And if he didn’t, he felt he should be able to take it, as evidenced by our situation in the back of the limo at Winter Formal.

Admittedly, I hadn’t heard any rumors he’d tried anything like that before. If people hated Chris, it was because they were jealous of him, not because he was a bad guy who did bad things. Maybe the incident with me had been a onetime thing — at least, I hoped so. Or maybe nobody had ever said no to Chris before, like I had. Based on the drooling gaze Larissa had trained on him at the moment, it was possible.