The Gift of the Demons Read online

  The Gift of the Demons

  by: Mette Ivie Harrison

  Copyright 2012 by Mette Ivie Harrison

  Smashwords Edition

  Chapter 1

  My best friend Georgia and I were talking after school when we heard someone shrieking.

  “Bad hair day?” said Georgia with a smirk. She had sleek red hair hair that always seemed to be perfect, with the creamy white skin to match. In fact, in most ways, Georgia was ultra-white. She made fun of herself on occasion precisely because of this, which might have been one of the reasons that we were friends.

  I got tired of everyone pretending not to see that I was the only black girl in possibly the whitest public high school in America. This was their version of “tolerance” and “equality.” If they didn’t talk about my skin color and didn’t stare at it, but just looked away, then they were treating me fairly, right?

  Well, except for the fact that I’d never been asked out on a date in my life, except the one time in ninth grade when I realized shortly into the date that I was part of a “diversity project” that one of the English teachers had offered for extra credit. What a great date that was. I really wanted to thank the teacher for her shining example, let me tell you.

  The shriek grew louder and Georgia’s smirk faded.

  “Sounds pretty real,” I said.

  “A couple breaking up?” suggested Georgia, her sense of humor still not flagging. Sometimes I wondered if it ever would. It could be the Zombie apocalypse and Georgia would still be cracking jokes about bad makeup and fake movie dialog.

  “I’m going,” I said, and started off running.

  “Uh,” said Georgia. “Right behind you, Fallin.” I could hear her voice in the distance, but didn’t pay much attention to it. Georgia was a great person to have at your back if your nemesis was someone with a big mouth and a bad attitude. She wasn’t so great at running, jumping, or throwing a punch.

  I think there are probably a lot of people who see me as the proof that the stereotype about black people being more physical than white people. The reality is that when you get really frustrated all the time from the idiots around you and you’re trying not to get suspended—again—you find it soothing to be able to spend some time with a punching bag or pressing weights on a bench. Or throwing a shot put as far as it can go. I do other track and field events, but the stuff that requires real muscle is my specialty.

  The sound of the shrieking was coming from the D wing of the school. That was also the section of the school where I spent a lot of my time, mornings and afternoons. In the spring and summer, I was outside on the track. But during the rest of the year, I was pumping weights twice a day, hanging out with the football team. I got special permission from the coach to do it, after he realized it was a great motivation for the team to work harder and longer than I did. Sounds both sexist and racist, doesn’t it? Yeah, well, it works for me. I like the competition, too.

  I headed toward the lower floor. The shrieking had changed now, into a kind of varying murmur punctuated with shrieking. Or maybe it had always been like that and I hadn’t heard the murmuring before because I wasn’t close enough. I was also pretty sure that it wasn’t a woman’s shrieking, though it was pitched high enough. I didn’t recognize the voice yet, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to recognize the face. I had a bad feeling about this.

  I knew all the guys on the football team really well. I don’t know if I would call them friends exactly. They waved to me in the halls and treated me like one of the guys when I was in the gym. Other than that, I’m not sure I really existed in their cosmology. They weren’t rude and they didn’t treat me like I was dirt. They just didn’t see me as a girl and they didn’t really want to admit that we worked out together on a regular basis. I think it was because I was a girl, and not because I was black. A buff girl who sometimes pressed more than they did.

  I got to the gym and I tried to open the door, but it was locked. I started pounding on it. But if someone in there was being attacked, they might not be able to get to the door. I tried to look around for other ways to get inside. There was a long bank of windows along the outside wall of the gym. If I broke through one of them, I could slip in. I’d get cut by the glass probably, not to mention having to sit through another really uncomfortable session with the principal and my parents, as they tried to explain again why it wasn’t my fault, and that really I’d done the right thing.

  But whoever was in there needed help.

  I could hear a second voice now. The voice sounded calm and soothing, which for some reason rubbed me entirely the wrong way. If two guys were having a fair fight, they would both be shouting at each other, and in regular voices, not those high pitched terrified screams. This was not a fair fight, and whoever was the one in control was the scary one. I had no idea if there was a gun in there or not.

  Maybe it was a drug deal gone bad. People like my parents liked to pretend that drugs weren’t as issue in an affluent neighborhood like this one. Ha! Drugs were made for neighborhoods like this one. Kids with a lot of money and a lot of pressure. They were always looking for ways to get away, for a cheap fix to help them study longer and better, or just to do as much as the competition. There were other ways to get a clear mind, namely exercise, good sleep and good study habits. But for some reason, they didn’t tend to look at those. Too boring and no promise of more than anyone else could do.

  “Fallin, be careful!” Georgia said, as she reached the gym. “I’m going to get someone with a key.” She turned back and I headed outside.

  As soon as I found the first window outside, I peered in it. I wanted an idea of who was where, so that when I burst in, I was the one surprising, not being surprised. But what I saw through the window was not what I expected. I knew the guy who was shrieking, all right.

  It was Carter, the tight end. He was a good kid, not at all the type I’d expect would get into the wrong crowd. But on the other hand, his parents were hard-core Mormon types. A Mormon mission for two years and a college scholarships were requirements to even be in the family. He had four older brothers who’d all followed lock-step. Football was the only thing his parents didn’t care about. He did that all for himself.

  Carter was usually dressed nicely, button-down shirts and khakis or dark blue jeans that were ironed to a crease. He had light brown hair the color of caramel and with a cowlick right over his left eye that did what it wanted to no matter how much gel he put on it. He also had a huge nose that seemed out of place on his otherwise average face.

  But through the window I could see he was wearing only a towel, as if he had come out of the shower room. Carter was normally super-concerned about modesty. He wouldn’t even come out of the locker room without his hair combed or without his collar down. And the towel around his waist right now had been knotted, but looked like it might fall off at any moment. He was drenched in sweat and was on his knees in front of the other figure in the room.

  I didn’t recognize the woman. She looked middle-aged, and matronly. She had a soft stomach and rounded shoulders. Harmless with a capital H. The worst thing I would have expected her to do was hand me a Book of Mormon and lecture me on the need to store wheat in cans to prepare for the next tornado (Hint: tornados very, very rarely strike Utah, but one did touch down about ten years ago and the Mormons haven’t stopped talking about how prepared they were with their cans of wheat since—much good cans of wheat do after all the power goes out and the reservoirs start flooding).

  But she was doing something to Carter because anytime she got close to him, he shrieked, scrambled away, and started begging. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he had his head down, got on his knees, and seemed to be pra
ying, his hands clasped and his eyes bright and intense.

  Then I saw the woman touch him and Carter’s arm went limp. It was the strangest thing I have ever seen. It was like the bone had been turned into goo. Carter stared at the arm and shrieked again, louder and higher than ever. He scrambled backward and tried to get away from her, but the arm was of no use and it must have been painful because his face had gone whiter than white, a kind of greenish gray.

  I didn’t have a hammer or anything to cut through the window with quickly. I could have looked around for a thick branch, but with the way Carter looked, I wasn’t going to wait around. Unlike in movies, where people just lift their legs and slam into a window, I had better training. I weighed more than most guys who weren’t on the football team, which caused problems when Georgia tried to take me shopping. Nothing ever fit me in the regular sizes through the shoulders and around my thighs. But the big girl clothing stores didn’t even want me to come in, and their clothes didn’t fit any better.

  I ran back, then turned on a dime, and ran forward again. I imagined that I was going to do the high jump, only this time instead of trying to get over a bar, I was trying to smash through the window and sail into the room while landing on my feet and avoiding as much of the flying glass as possible. I was also trying to end up between Carter and Ms. H. or whoever she was.

  It didn’t go quite as well as I’d planned. For one thing the glass was reinforced so there were two layers. I broke through both layers, but not with nearly the force that I’d hoped. That meant I ended up landing on my ass about two feet from the window, with glass showering all around me, and cutting into my legs, palms, and backside.

  It hurt. A lot.

  But I’m used to pain. Pain has never stopped me from getting what I want. I learned that pretty early on in life. Little kids calling you names they don’t understand is a great way to learn how to grin and bear it. You just refuse to let your pain sensors have power over your reactions. You don’t smile and grimace when you feel like it. You do it when it works for you, when it gets you the reaction from other people that you need.

  If you really have to go home and cry about it afterward, you do that with the door closed, the water in the tub on full blast, and preferably some music in the background, too, so Mom and Dad don’t find out what’s going on and start to wonder what they were doing when they decided to adopt a kid from Jamaica so she would have a chance at a better life. It’s not that I wish I was back in Jamaica exactly, but if I’d lived there all my life, I think I would have felt like I belonged, and maybe I wouldn’t have noticed about all the rest of the things that I missed out on because no one else in Jamaica had them. Or maybe not.

  I could feel the punctured skin and the blood starting to drip down my legs and arms. It was warm and it wasn’t actually painful yet. I was still running on adrenaline and I never feel pain at first. Even if I’m going to be in agony for days afterwards, I can get through a race or an event without feeling the pain. I am just focusing too hard on the goal.

  Here, I was focusing on Carter. “Carter, get away from her,” I yelled, since I hadn’t ended up landing between them.

  But he didn’t move. I couldn’t figure out why.

  “This is none of your concern,” said Ms. H.

  “The hell it isn’t,” I said. I stood up, let the glass fall off me where it would, though there were still several large piece embedded into my left side and butt. I’d deal with that later.

  “Carter and I have a bargain, don’t we? It is merely Carter’s time to fulfill his part of the bargain,” she said.

  “Carter, tell her where to get off. I don’t know what this bargain is, but you don’t have to sit here and have your arm—“ I didn’t know how to describe it, so I sort of trailed off.

  “Get out of here, Fallin,” said Carter. He wouldn’t look me in the eyes. He was huddled on the ground like a dog.

  I had no idea what hold this woman had over him, but it had to be something weird. Had she threatened to tell his parents something terrible he’d done?

  “I’m not leaving here without you, Carter,” I said.

  “You want to make a bargain of your own?” asked Ms. H. “Perhaps I can let him go if you give me something in return.”

  Like I was going to be that stupid. “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Then he is mine,” said the woman. I half-expected to hear a crack of thunder and her cackling afterward. She was acting like someone in a movie with magical power, but I didn’t see a wand on her.

  I got in between the two of them.

  “Fallin, please,” whispered Carter. “I deserve this. I do.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “She—gave me what I wanted. Now she is taking what I offered her.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Carter winced.

  The woman wasn’t as shy about telling me. “He wanted a year of being famous. In high school. And so he has been. And now he will pay with his strength. He will live the rest of his life in a wheelchair.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. And then I thought about Carter’s arm. Weird.

  “Quadrapalegic,” said the woman in a low, seductive tone.

  I could feel goosebumps up and down my arms and then my legs. The pain was starting. I didn’t have long before it started to really get bad. I could keep pretending until I was dead, at least I was pretty sure I could. But I was going to be immobile at some point. There is only so much you can do to deal with pain.

  “And you could save him,” said the woman. “With just a simple bargain. You could offer me anything you like. Just so long as it’s something that matters to you. You could offer me your strength. Is that too much to ask to save a life?”

  “Don’t!” shrieked Carter, as if the thought alone made his pain worse. “Fallin, don’t listen to her. It’s never simple. It’s never what you think it’s going to be.”

  “Come now,” she said, turning to Carter. “That’s hardly fair. We spoke the terms of our bargain out loud from the first. You knew what would happen. I didn’t fool you. How dare you accuse me of that?”

  “You didn’t lie to me, but that’s not the same as not fooling me,” said Carter. “You made it sound like you would collect in a long time.”

  “And so I did. A year is a long time for a boy of your age.”

  “And you didn’t tell me how bad it would be. You said I would be in a wheelchair, but not that I would never be able to move anything but my eyes and my mouth. I might as well be dead. You didn’t tell me that, either.”

  “Might as well be dead? How selfish is that? Your parents will want you to be alive, and your other siblings. And what of other people who are in wheelchairs, in similar situations? Are their lives worthless? They learn to find something of value in what they have left.”

  “But they didn’t choose to be in a wheelchair,” said Carter bitterly.

  “That is true,” said Ms. H. She chuckled. “You did. Foolish boy, thinking of the present, imagining the future would never come to collect, but now it has.”

  “I don’t know who you are or what power you have over Carter.” It had to be something psychosomatic, but that didn’t mean it was real. Obviously, she had done something to Carter to make him believe that touching his arm would render it useless. I had to stop her.

  “You could get to know me better,” she said. “A simple bargain and you will know as much as Carter here knows.”

  I heard some scrabbling at the door. Georgia, and whoever she had brought with her. I didn’t know who it was, but anyone would be good, especially an adult. I had the feeling that an adult might be able to convince Carter that this woman had no power over him, even if I couldn’t.

  “Carter, just listen.”

  “No, Fallin. She’s right. I owe her this. I deserve it,” said Carter. He crawled toward her.

  “Carter, stop!” I shouted. I looked toward the door and saw Georgia, her eyes wide
with surprise. She had her arms out in front of her, but just then there was a sound like a deflating balloon. A very large balloon.

  I turned away from Georgia and whoever was behind her to see Ms. H. with a knife to her chest. She was gasping, but I didn’t see any blood. In fact, she seemed to be made of air now. She was deflating and it was almost like the Wizard of Oz where the witch was melting. The woman shrank inside herself. “It’s not fair,” she let out in a whispering scream that was too much like Carter’s for my taste. Then she was a heap of skin on the floor, and even that disappeared.

  I had read lots of books about magic, but this was the first time I’d ever seen it in real life. I didn’t want to believe it. It broke all the rules of my universe. I knew there were religious people like the Mormons who believed all kinds of crazy stuff. I had to have real scientific proof before I believed in God. My parents weren’t much for believing, either. They didn’t go to church, though now and again my mother would say a prayer, more out of habit than anything else, I think.

  This wasn’t an angel or the voice in the burning bush. It wasn’t a miracle of turning water into wine. But it wasn’t sliced cheese, either. This was real, unscientific stuff. This was a creature who had had a hold over Carter. And now the creature was dead and gone and Carter’s arm, when I looked at it, seemed completely healed.

  “Does that mean--? Is the bargain broken?” asked Carter.

  I had no idea. I wasn’t the fainting type, but if I had been, this would have been the time to faint. Instead I looked at Georgia, who had moved toward the spot where the body had been. She picked up the knife, untouched, apparently, and stared at it. Then she offered it to me.

  “Who threw it?” I asked.

  “The janitor,” said Georgia with a shrug. “But I don’t know where he went.”

  “Well, we can’t just leave it here. Who knows who might pick it up and do something stupid with it. Let’s not overestimate the intelligence of the football team.” I took the knife.

  “Give it to me,” said Carter. “I’ll keep it just in case she comes after me again. Or someone like her.”