I slumped where I sat on the edge of the raised bed. “Do you think we could make it here without him?” I asked.
Nanna placed her dirt-caked hand over mine. “He wouldn’t go even if you forced him.” Neither would she. I had brought it up once that I was the one who was demon catnip. They didn’t have to suffer because of me. That suggestion went down like a lead balloon. There was no way they would leave me here to rot. But every day I knew they worried that I was just this sloth who walked around like my soul have been sucked from me.
For my sake, they were giving up their freedom. For their sake, I was being a sad sack. Nanna petted my hand.
I gripped her fingers and thought of those long seven years. Not for a second did she stop fighting even though she was completely human. She’s been possessed by a demon who could have crushed her will at any time and she had fought. I didn’t have a right to do anything less.
“It’s time,” I said.
Nanna exhaled. “Yep.”
I stuck my own trowel in the dirt and went back into the house to get Morning Star.
40
The Great Hall was surprisingly well-kept. Everything about Ravenhall had a sinister aura to it. By rights, I should have fit well in this place. But for some reason, it gave me the creeps.
“You’ve been at Bloodline for too long,” Eugenia commented when I jumped at movement along the ground. Whatever it was darted into the bushes. “That place is so sterile.”
“Yeah, I guess. If you call clean and great-smelling sterile.”
She gave me a sharp-toothed smile. Giselle sniffed at both of us. The Great Hall belonged to the whole town. There was no booking timetable or anything as mundane as that. Somehow it always seemed to have a room or a facility that was free. I suspected it was like the illusion training room at Bloodline.
We walked into one such stark white room. It wasn’t anything flashy like in Seraphina. Even with the seal, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. The ceiling was high. The floor was a polished stone with flecks in an irregular pattern on it. I didn’t know what we were doing here, but it certainly wasn’t to bake a cake.
I gripped Morning Star’s hilt where it sat on my back. I’d taken to keeping the sword with me and sleeping with it beside my bed. Not that I would know what to do with it if something were to happen. I guess that was precisely Giselle’s point.
“By rights,” she said, “you’ve been methodically trained to use that stick. But for some reason, you’ve resisted all of that training so far.”
“I think the reason is that I’m five foot nothing and sixty kilos at best,” I muttered.
The look she gave me could have boiled me alive. She took it as a personal insult that I wasn’t a better Sisterhood candidate. I think she would have preferred it if I was a fire-breathing spawn of Satan. At least then she could say I’d kicked her ass one time because I was a badass.
“How am I supposed to defend myself at this point?” I said.
“Let’s see, shall we?” Eugenia said.
She grabbed Morning Star’s hilt, unsheathed it, and they promptly left the room. I heard the lock click. “What the?” Not this again. I tried for the door. Yep, locked.
“Hey!” I called out. “This isn’t funny!”
The laughter that I heard coming from behind me certainly held no mirth. Every cell in my body froze. I closed my eyes, but no matter how hard I shut them, the sound of his slimy chuckle wouldn’t go away. “Seriously,” I called out. “Quit it.”
The door wouldn’t open. There was nothing to do but turn around. He looked exactly as he had when I was twelve and the Human Services woman had dumped me on his doorstep.
Denis was above-average height and blessed with male pattern baldness. Like many men, he tried to compensate for that by growing a wiry beard. It just made his head look lopsided. In his youth, he might have been built, but as age weathered him, the muscle had turned into fat. It gave him the appearance of softness where he had none. I remember sitting there on the couch while he laughed with the social worker. I just stared at the soccer trophy on the mantle thinking that I would use it as a weapon if he made a move.
To the outside world, he and his wife Marsha were the perfect, loving couple. They lived in a neat little redbrick place with five bedrooms and a big backyard where they kept a sensible border collie. Marsha was a nurse and Denis worked in some backwater government department.
I couldn’t eat for a week after being settled with them. Somehow, I knew something bad was going to happen. For two weeks, nothing did. I would sit outside on even the coldest days and play with the dog. The backyard was the farthest place I could be from them. To settle my nerves, I started weeding the garden.
Marsha found me out there one day. I’d nursed a dying geranium back to life. “You like gardening?” she said. The interest in her voice had my alarm bells flaring. Two days later, we drove into the garage of the clubhouse.
For the next six months, I spent my afternoons tending to the marijuana plants growing under lights in a nondescript warehouse that I was driven to blindfolded. My ability with plants was probably the only reason why the adults put up with me. Every time they did something to piss me off, I would think of ways to get them back. Short of alerting the
