“Killing a demon,” he answered simply. Too simply. If that was all that had happened, there would have been more celebration in the village.
“I thought it was really hard for humans to kill demons,” I said. “So that’s good, right? I mean, one less demon . . .”
“Aye, but there’s also one less girl.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, alarmed.
“The party was chasing the demons that killed Bertie, but a girl got in the way. I told you this was a dangerous business.”
“What do you mean, a girl ‘got in the way’?” I asked.
“One of the demons grabbed some girl who was out hiking and started flying away with her. The girl wasn’t about to let the demon have her, so she jumped.”
“What?” I said, arching my back and causing Gavin to readjust his grip on me. “She jumped and she fell and she died?” I could hear the panic in my own voice.
“Sometimes it happens, Maren,” he said, holding me tighter. “But I promise, it will never happen to you. Never to you.”
I closed my eyes and tried not to picture a girl my age falling to her death, jumping on purpose to escape the claws of a demon. I wondered if I could ever be that brave.
My body jerked and my eyes shot open, like when you dream you’ve fallen and the impact wakes you up. My heart was racing.
I was lying on my own bed.
What happened? How was I back in my bedroom? Where was Gavin? I had been flying with him just a second ago, talking to him about demons and the girl . . .
The entire thing must have been a dream. An elaborate, detailed, heartbreaking dream from the troubled mind of a teenager living a nightmare.
I did a quick mental check: I was in my new attic bedroom in Scotland, my own mother was still dead, and I was having crazy hallucinations about gorgeous angels saving me. Yep, I was officially in hell.
Then I saw a garland of fresh flowers with ribbons sitting on the seat of the armchair. The same garland I had been wearing in Gavin’s village.
So maybe this was just purgatory.
CHAPTER 13
What’s wrong, Maren?” Jo asked.
We were sitting in the science lab at school, getting ready for our first field trip. I had hoped for a trip to a theater or an old castle, but instead we were getting a muddy hike through the moors. I wanted to tell her about my strange trip to the angel village the day before, but I still wasn’t convinced it had really happened.
“Nothing, I’m just not sleeping well,” I assured her.
“Oh,” she said, bending down to fasten the clips on her Wellington boots. “That makes sense. You do look tired.”
“I agree, Jo,” Elsie said, shimmying onto a stool next to us. “Maren does look knackered. Like your boots.”
“What’s wrong with my boots?” Jo asked, struggling to close the rusty buckle on her cracked, dull brown boots. Most of the girls were wearing shiny, knee-high, slip-on Wellies with bright, designer colors and patterns. I felt guilty about my new black-and-beige plaid-covered ones, but I didn’t have older brothers to hand me down stuff like Jo, and I wasn’t going to tape garbage bags over my tennis shoes like my grandfather had suggested.
“Everything,” Elsie answered.
“What’s wrong with your boyfriend?” I asked Elsie, smiling innocently but knowing I’d hit a nerve, because as much as she wanted him to be, Anders wasn’t anyone’s boyfriend.
“What?” she practically spat at me.
Stuart joined in, as I noticed he always did to defend Jo. “Yeah, where’s Anders? Is he sick or something?”
“Anders and I are not exclusive, not that it’s any of your business,” Elsie fumed. “And he’s at a funeral with Graham. They had a death in the family this weekend.”
“Oh, it’s not that girl from Culloden Academy, is it?” Jo asked.
“What girl?” I said.
“Some girl died hiking yesterday,” Stuart answered. “They found her body at the bottom of the cliffs. She must have fallen.”
A wave of nausea rolled over me as I remembered Gavin telling me about the girl who jumped to her death to escape a demon. That decided it—my trip to his village must have been a dream, because that’s how my nightmares worked: I dreamed that someone died, and they did. My gran must have put the flower crown in my room, and I saw it before I fell asleep, and it ended up in my dream too. A part of me was relieved, but a bigger part was disappointed.
“No,” Elsie answered. “It was their uncle or something who died.”
Mr. Drackle, our Rural Studies teacher, poked his head into the room and shouted, “All right, people, let’s queue up. The motor coach is leaving!”
After a thirty-minute ride, we disembarked in a lush, green, but very soggy valley. Mr. Drackle had given us brown paper bags and checklists of things we had to do or find. A lot of people groaned, and I heard a few comments about how scavenger hunts were lame, but I thought it sounded like fun—more fun than sitting in a classroom with a textbook, anyway.
We had to find thistle, blaeberry, bedstraw, and butterwort (thankfully, we had pictures of them, or I’d fail hopelessly), a piece of granite, and a sandstone pebble. We needed to identify one animal print, and do a pencil rubbing of at least three different textured surfaces. Extra credit would be given for sketches of anything bearing historical importance.
I was behind in every one of my classes and desperate for extra credit, so Jo and I started out for a small stone building first. Elsie, Stuart, and a couple of other boys seemed to have the same idea.
Once we arrived at the roofless structure, everyone started climbing it, shifting rocks and causing damage to the already crumbling walls. Jo did a cartwheel off a corner.
“What is everyone doing?” I asked her when she landed.
She shrugged. “Just faffin’ about.”
“But won’t you get in trouble? Aren’t these, like, national treasures?”
“They’re just old crofts,” Jo replied. “They’re everywhere. No one cares much about tiny stone huts.”
I was amazed. In America, you couldn’t even breathe near a historical anything, and our stuff was only a couple hundred years old at the most.
We followed a faintly worn path through the valley, which rose and fell along hills studded with prickly plants and purple thistle. I looked up at the bright, cloudless sky and almost ran right into Stuart. He’d stopped to make a pencil rubbing on a flat stone that was, almost impossibly, taller than him. As the lead danced across the paper, it traced a shape I recognized.