Betrayal (14 page)

‘No. I’d just keep thinking about the first one,’ Jess said. ‘But we need to get to Manhattan soon. There’s not much time left to shop.’

‘It’s a good thing I busted down the Order’s force field, then,’ Eve said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to go to Manhattan with you – or anywhere else, for that matter.’

Jess clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘You know, I never even thought about that! How dare they try to keep my prom adviser trapped here?’

Eve smiled. ‘Well, their barrier wasn’t strong enough to keep me trapped! We’ll go to the city, and we’ll find you an even more perfect perfect dress,’ she promised. ‘And I won’t call dibbies even once.’

Jess shook her finger at Eve with a mock scowl. ‘You better not, missy.’

Eve kept the smile on her face, but it wasn’t too easy. She still thought she’d been completely within her dibbies rights when she’d called them the last time.

Jess’s teasing smile faded and she wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Here comes Simon.’ He was cutting across the front lawn of the school, head down, his usual big leather book under his arm.

‘Do you want to talk to him with me?’ Eve asked. ‘You don’t have to. I’m fine doing it by myself. Although I bet Luke would want to come with me, just cause—’

‘Cause he’s a boy,’ Jess finished for her. ‘That’s a good idea. Wait and do it with Luke.’

‘Uh-oh. Someone’s going to beat me to it,’ Eve said, gasping as Seth’s Escalade lurched up onto the sidewalk and came to a stop. The head of every person in the quad turned towards the sound of the squealing brakes.

A second later, Seth and Dave jumped out of the SUV. They were on Simon before he even had time to turn round.

‘Seth, no!’ Jess shouted. Seth already had Simon pinned to the ground, his fist poised to slam into the other boy’s face.

Eve and Jess rushed over to the melee. A small circle of spectators had already formed around them. Eve wasn’t sure how they were supposed to break up a fight involving two big guys – without the zap – but they had to try. Or was there a teacher around? She scanned the area. Nope. Never around when you needed them. But maybe someone would report the fight to the office.

‘I’m sorry I sent the letter,’ Simon cried. ‘I was going to tell Jess that. I waited at her house, but she wouldn’t talk to me.’

‘That’s why you were at my house?’ Jess exclaimed.

‘You slashed up her prom dress, you little freak. You’re giving Jess the money for it, and you’re never going to so much as look at her again!’ Seth yelled. He started to deliver the punch, but Jess grabbed his arm in both hands.

‘No!’ she told him. ‘We don’t know he did anything. Not for sure.’

‘Who else would have gone into your room and slashed up your dress?’ Seth demanded. ‘He did it because he was pissed off that you turned him down.’

‘No I didn’t! I don’t even know what you’re talking about. What dress? What do you think I did?’ Simon blurted out, his words tripping over each other because he was speaking so fast. He sounded sincere to Eve. But she agreed with Seth. Simon was the only person who had a reason to destroy Jess’s prom dress.

‘Leave him alone, Seth,’ Jess begged.

‘Smash his head in!’ Dave called at the same time.

‘I won’t go to the prom with you if you touch him. Are you listening?’ Jess shouted. ‘Are you hearing me?’

‘Yeah.’ Seth opened his fist, getting a few ‘boo’s from the crowd, and Jess let go of his arm. ‘I know what you did,’ he told Simon. ‘Stay out of my way. And stay away from Jess,’ he ordered. Then he jerked his chin at Dave and they both started towards the Escalade.

Seth looked over his shoulder. ‘Come on, Jess.’ Jess shook her head, not moving from her spot next to Eve. ‘Whatever,’ he muttered as he got in the SUV.

Simon scrambled to his feet, his face pale. Eve picked up his book, squinting down at the dusty leather binding. ‘What is this, anyway?’ she asked, running her fingers over the symbols on the front. They looked strange, but they couldn’t be demon runes. If they were, she knew she’d be able to read them.

‘It’s a textbook for Russian,’ Simon muttered, taking it from her. ‘My dad’s making me take an accelerated course this summer, and I’m trying to get a head start.’ He turned to Jess, but he kept his eyes on the ground instead of her face. ‘I am sorry about the letter. I was a jerk. I’m sorry. That’s why I was at your house. I just wanted to tell you that.’

He began to walk away, then suddenly turned back. This time he looked Jess right in the eye. ‘I really don’t know what he was talking about. With the dress, I mean.’

Eve chewed on her lip and watched him as he walked back towards the school. It really did sound like he was telling the truth.

‘I kind of believe him,’ Jess said.

‘I kind of believe him too,’ Eve admitted. ‘But if he’s telling the truth, then who slashed up your prom dress?’

‘Type in … warm Jell-O demon,’ Eve suggested to Luke.

‘Rotten-fish-smelling, shoe-destroying, warm Jell-O demon,’ Jess amended.

Luke tapped his fingers impatiently on the keyboard of Eve’s laptop while the girls lounged on Eve’s bed. He was trying to research the demon Eve and Jess had fought the other day, so he could update his database. But the girls were not being helpful. ‘Can you focus a little?’ he asked, trying not to sound irritated.

Eve flopped back on her bed. ‘Come on, Luke, we just got out of school. And it was a crazy day with Seth almost pounding Simon into the ground. We need a break.’ She nodded her head towards Jess. Luke got that Jess had had a hard day, but they still needed to research the latest demon.

‘Yeah, that was scary. I thought I might have to break out my kung fu on Seth to get him to back off,’ Jess said. ‘I keep thinking about Simon’s face when he said he didn’t know what Seth was talking about. If he was lying, he should join the drama club immediately.’

‘Which means we have no idea who destroyed your dress,’ Luke said.

‘I can’t think about that. Not right now. My head will implode.’ Jess flopped back next to Eve. ‘Right now, me need fun.’

‘Fuuuun,’ Eve groaned, like she was Frankenstein’s monster.

‘Fuuuun,’ Jess groaned back with a monster voice.

Luke gave a regular groan. They were making him insane. He was trying to discuss a demon here. A demon! ‘That thing was in our town,’ Luke reminded them from his seat at Eve’s desk. ‘What if it had stumbled across someone else? Someone with no power or kung-fu training.’ He leaned forward, looking back and forth between Eve and Jess. ‘I need you both to get serious. What else do we know about the demon?’

Eve raised her hand, waving it like an over-eager student. ‘I know something!’

She made him ask. ‘What?’ Luke said.

‘The demon? It’s dead!’ she answered.

‘And that’s all we really need to know,’ Jess chimed in.

‘No, it’s not,’ Luke snapped. ‘What if it turns out that the demon can reconstruct itself? Maybe the puddle of goo returned to demon form as soon as it hit the sewer. Or maybe this kind of demon travels in packs. For all we know, a demon could have been in Jess’s house, slashing up her prom dress. Somebody had to have done it, and it doesn’t seem like Simon is such a likely choice any more.’

‘Especially not now that we found out the spell book is actually a Russian textbook,’ Eve commented. ‘Hey, remember that day on the phone when he said such weird-sounding words? He must have been speaking Russian!’

‘You’re right,’ Jess said. ‘Wow. It doesn’t seem so creepy when I think of it that way.’

‘No. Still strange, though,’ Eve said. ‘But more regular-strange. I mean, Simon-strange.’ She looked over at Jess. ‘Do you remember anything about how it sounded? Maybe we could look up the words somehow.’

Jess frowned. ‘Not really. Maybe
atayka
? He talked so fast it was hard to make it out.’ She pressed her fingers to her temples. ‘Head beginning to implode.’

‘Right. We weren’t going to talk about Simon. Maybe we shouldn’t talk about anything head-imploding at least for tonight.’ Eve looked directly at Luke as she spoke. He got it. He knew she wanted him to drop the demon investigation.

He understood Jess needed to de-stress. But keeping the town safe was more important. They should both know that. ‘There’s still someone – or
something
– bad on the loose. We need to be ready,’ he reminded them.

‘If there’s another demon, or if the first demon did pull its goopy self back together, we’ll kill it again as soon as we see it,’ Eve told him.

‘Yeah, it only took a couple of minutes.’ Jess frowned. ‘Although it did ruin my beautiful pink sandals, and they were the cutest little shoes in North America.’

‘No way,’ Eve said. ‘The cutest little shoes in North America are my black satin high tops with the blue laces. Your sandals might have been the prettiest little shoes on the east coast, though,’ she added.

Luke shut his eyes for a long moment, trying to get a grip on his temper. They were being so silly, as silly as kindergarten kids who hadn’t had a nap. When he opened his eyes, he turned round and looked at Eve. ‘You’re the Deepdene Witch. You’re responsible for the safety of everyone in the town. How can you be treating this so casually?’

Eve sat up, pushing her wildly curling hair away from her face. ‘I’m not! I can’t believe you even said that,’ she snapped. ‘It’s just … it’s been a nasty couple of days, with the Eve-killing barrier and the demon and Jess’s dress. I thought we could all use a little while to chill. But if something bad happens, I’ll be there. You know that.’

It was true. Eve always stepped up when there was an attack on the town. But she’d never acted so laid-back about her duty as the Deepdene Witch before. She was behaving as if it wasn’t that big a deal that the lives of everyone who lived here depended on her.

Is it because her human side is being taken over by the demon side?
That was a thought Luke didn’t want to have, but he couldn’t push it away. Maybe Alanna had been right. Was Eve changing? Was she going to turn into a threat to Deepdene herself?

‘Why are you staring at me like that?’ Eve asked him.

‘I didn’t realize I was staring,’ he said, blood rushing to his face.

‘That’s probably because you’re
always
staring at Eve,’ Jess told him, with a wink.

Luke felt the back of his neck get hot, then his face. Did he walk around school in some kind of Eve daze that everyone could see?

‘Look at him blush,’ Jess cried.

Eve scooted to the end of the bed, then reached out and touched his face. ‘I think it’s sweet.’

‘Blushing is not sweet, not in a guy.’ Luke felt his face get hotter.

‘Yeah, it is,’ Eve told him. ‘And so is staring, at least when it’s you staring at me.’

‘It’s because you’re so beautiful,’ Luke said. It wasn’t really a lie. She really was beautiful, and most of the time that was why he was staring at her.

She couldn’t look like that and have something evil inside her. It was exactly what she had said – it had been a difficult few days and she and Jess wanted to blow off some steam. That didn’t mean that she’d stopped caring about protecting people.

He felt his irritation draining away as turned back to the computer. Let them goof around. He’d keep working. He decided to do a search for demons that turned to liquid when they were killed. Assuming that the demon actually had been killed, which it probably had.

‘Is this that book on the Deepdene Witch you were telling me about?’ Luke heard Jess ask.

‘Yeah, I found it on a secondhand-book website. A teeny, tiny publishing company did it way back in the eighteen-nineties,’ Eve answered. ‘You have to see my favourite illustration. It’s a picture of the Deepdene Witch blasting a demon so hard that it got trapped inside a human body.’

Luke turned round. ‘Let me see it too.’

‘I thought you were working,’ Eve teased him. She flipped through the small book, then held up a page for him and Jess to see.

Eve’s great-great-great-grandmother had had the same long, curly hair that Eve did, at least as she was shown in the pen-and-ink drawing. That hair was whipped up around her face as she threw out lightning bolts from her fingers. Her expression reminded him of Eve’s when she used her power – rapturous. Rapturous and fierce at the same time.

He turned his attention to the other girl in the drawing, the girl the Deepdene Witch was shooting the lightning at. She was writhing in pain, her face buried in her hands. Luke had to remind himself that the girl had been a demon, that the Witch wasn’t torturing an innocent human.

‘You think you could do that, Evie?’ Jess asked. ‘Zap a demon into a human body?’

‘Maybe,’ Eve said, closing the book and putting it back on her nightstand. ‘Probably, since my great-great-great-grandmother could. But why would I want to? Wouldn’t it always be better to just kill the demon?’

She said it in such a matter-of-fact way. Had killing really gotten so easy for Eve? Was it more than easy – was it exciting to her now? A thrill? Did part of her like it? The demon part?

‘You’re staring again,’ Eve snapped. ‘And don’t say it’s because I’m beautiful. Because the way you’re staring is not how you stare at something beautiful.’