Chapter 2
As she tore up the road towards her house Tom’s words played on a loop in her head.
Everyone believed that Lucas had ditched her and that’s why she was acting the way she was. As if she’d ever act this way over a boy breaking up with her. Tom had no idea. None of them did. And she knew that it was partly her fault – she hadn’t told them the truth. How could she? What would she say? Oh, by the way I’m actually a demon Hunter. Yeah, just like Buffy. But no, I can’t prove it because we killed all the demons and saved the world, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
And Tom expected her to go and see the school guidance counsellor! She laughed under her breath as she swung into her driveway. And tell them what exactly? That she had issues because her boyfriend had been stabbed to death right in front of her? That she dreamt every waking moment, and every sleeping moment too, of finding the man who’d done it and of killing him?
Should she tell them about Cyrus, a Hunter just like her, who had sacrificed himself – taking her place – to end the war no one had even known was raging all around them? Should she go all out even, and admit that she had nightmares about Thirsters? And about demons with razor-backed tails and ones with acid-coated skin? Should she admit that, when she finally managed to get to sleep at night, it was only after taking pills pilfered from her mother’s bathroom cabinet and that when she slept it was with one hand under her pillow, her fingers locked tight around the hilt of a knife? Should she tell them she was too scared to look in the mirror these days because she didn’t recognise the girl staring back at her?
Maybe when she was done telling the school counsellor all about it, and if she wasn’t already locked up in a padded cell, she could write an essay for her English teacher on the subject of fate. She had so much personal experience to flavour it with. She could tell him all about how she’d been told she was the fabled White Light, whose destiny was to end the war between humans and unhumans. And how, like an idiot, she’d believed it all, and it had turned out to be a lie.
There was no such thing as fate. There was only life. And death. And, in between, only heartache and hurt.
She pulled up in front of the house and killed the engine. Her mother was home. She could hear her upstairs, talking on the phone. Evie’s senses had sharpened to needle points in the last eight weeks. She didn’t know at what point they’d stop improving – when she could hear the termites burrowing through the wooden stairs in the basement perhaps? She’d learnt to drown background noises out until they became a fuzzy white noise in her head, similar to the sound of the river rushing at the bottom of the orchard behind the house.
She skirted around the house to the back veranda. The leaves had almost all fallen. The trees were standing knobbly branched and embarrassed almost as far as the eye could see. She looked away deliberately before her eyes could fix on the tree she’d climbed with Lucas but it was too late. Her feet had already paused, tripping on some tree roots buried beneath a pile of leaves and her memory had already gone ahead and hit the replay button, even though remembering that day felt like someone was prising her rib cage open with rusty forceps and poking her heart with a blunt scalpel.
She could see Lucas standing balanced in the fork of the tree, reaching down with one hand and pulling her up as if she weighed less than nothing. She shuddered a little in the cool air as she remembered how he’d her caught around the waist when she’d lost her balance. How he’d smiled and the sunlight had brushed his face, making shadows dance across his lips.
A howl brought her out of her daydream. She spun around. Lobo was standing on the top step of the veranda, nose to the air. He started whining as she walked towards him. He’d stopped leaving the safety of the veranda since he’d been attacked by a Mixen demon. Her mum was going crazy at him for doing his business on the bottom step.
‘Hey boy,’ Evie said, dropping to her knees and burying her face in the husky dog’s fur. He licked the side of her face in greeting.
‘There are no monsters anymore, you hear?’ she whispered. ‘They’re all gone. They can’t come back.’ She closed her eyes. ‘They can’t come back,’ she repeated, feeling the serrated edge of her own words ripping into her flesh.
‘Evie! Is that you?’
‘Uh-oh,’ Evie whispered, getting slowly to her feet. ‘Better get behind me, boy.’ She shouldered her bag and reached with a sinking feeling for the screen door.
Her mother beat her to it.
‘I’ve just got off the phone with your principal,’ she announced, yanking open the door. Evie was sure her mother had lost a few pounds and gained several new worry lines around her mouth in the last two months and the knowledge that she was responsible weighed heavily on her.
‘Well?’ her mother demanded when Evie said nothing. ‘Are you going to explain to me why you just walked out of your English class? You can’t keep cutting school, Evie, storming out whenever you feel like it!’
Evie sighed loudly and felt Lobo inch himself forward and rub himself against her leg. She reached a hand down absently and stroked him. ‘Mum, do we have to do this now?’ The truth was she really didn’t have the energy, not after the conversation she’d just had with Tom.
‘Now?’ her mother yelled. Evie looked up in shock. Her mother never yelled. Not even after Evie had turned up at the crack of dawn, after having gone missing with Lucas and walked like an ashen-faced zombie to her room. Not even after she’d stayed there for four days, curled on the bed, facing the wall, refusing to eat or talk or admit where she’d been.
‘Yes, we are doing this now,’ her mother went on, ‘because there never seems to be a good time. I thought if I waited then maybe things would eventually get better. But it’s been two months and you still haven’t said a word about what happened to you. And what am I supposed to think, Evie? Answer me that? You disappear for days with that boy …’
‘Lucas,’ Evie said through a clenched jaw. ‘His name is Lucas.’
‘You disappear with him without so much as a goodbye or a note, and the next thing I know I get a call that you’re in New Mexico – that he’s abandoned you.’
‘He didn’t abandon me,’ Evie growled.
‘Well, what else am I supposed to think?’ Evie’s mother sighed, her tone softening. ‘We’ve not seen hide nor hair of him since. And then when I find you’re not even at the gas station where you said you’d be – well …’ She shook her head, words apparently deserting her. ‘Can you even imagine how worried I was? And you didn’t even think to call me and tell me where you were?’
Evie glared at the ground, feeling her eyes tearing up. She knew that her mother had a right to be mad at her, but there was so much anger inside her own body that she couldn’t see past it enough to do anything about her mother’s. Everything was so impossible, so tangled up. She wished she could just fall into her mother’s arms and cry, and tell her everything and have her soothe it all away, but even if she could open up about what had happened, there were no words that could soothe it away anyway.
‘Evie,’ her mother said more gently, using the same pleading tone that Tom had tried in the car. ‘Please, talk to me.’
Her face was contorted with worry. And Evie knew she was responsible, just as she was responsible for the pain and suffering of dozens of other people – of Cyrus’s mother Margaret, and the rogue Hunters Vero and Ash. And, of course, Lucas’s sister, Flic. If Evie had died instead of Cyrus, instead of Risper, instead of Lucas, she wondered how much less suffering there would be in the world? No one except her mother would miss her. She felt a pang that twisted itself into the unbreakable knot of emotions inside her. Steeling herself against the pain and her mother’s indignation, Evie rushed past her, heading for the stairs, her chin tucked in tight to her chest.
‘Evie!’ her mother called after her as she trudged up them, ‘you can’t keep on behaving like this.’
Evie slunk into her bedroom and closed the door, trying to block out both her mum’s shouts and the screaming voice of guilt in her head. She crossed to her desk, which she’d swept clean of everything. All her old magazines, term papers, essay notes and books were stashed in a cardboard box inside her closet, already coated in dust. She’d taken down all the photographs that had been stuck on the walls, as well as the list of colleges she’d intended to apply to, and in their place she’d tacked up a sheet of paper with a single word on it:
VICTOR
She stared at it for several minutes, then pulled open a drawer and took out a piece of paper. On it were fragments of text, drawn from memory, as complete as she could make it.
From two who remain a White Light will be born
A purebred Hunter fated to be the White Light
Standing alone in the final fight
To sever the realms by passing through the light
Memories will rise, shadows will fade.
Facing an army from the realms
The sun, the giver of life and the light
Together will stand and fight
And one will sacrifice himself
Closing the Gateway by walking back through
Crossing into the dark, memories will fade and shadows fall
Evie dropped the sheet of paper back onto the desk. She didn’t know why she kept looking at it. The thing was done. The prophecy had come true. She had never been the White Light. It had been Cyrus all along. Anger ripped through her every time she thought about it. The Sybll were worse than the witches in Macbeth. At least the witches got the right person. They hadn’t gone telling Macduff he was going to be king.
She walked over to the bed and flopped down on it, curling onto her side, her hands sliding beneath the pillow and pulling out a crumpled T-shirt. She balled it up and held it against her face, breathing in deeply and closing her eyes as the scent of Lucas overwhelmed her. It was fading but she could still smell him – a trace of citrus and of late summer days, hazy with smoke and horses.
Her mother was right about one thing, Evie thought to herself as she lay there clutching the T-shirt to her lips – she couldn’t keep on behaving like this. She needed to do something before she went mad, before all the anger inside her erupted in a lethal, all-consuming torrent.
Her eyes flew open and settled on the piece of paper above her desk.
Victor. Once she had found Victor – and killed him – then she’d feel better.