Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - Demon in My View

Ignoring Caryn's attempts at conversation, Jessica pulled out a pencil and started to draw.

"Well, then … I guess I'll leave you alone," Caryn said, voice muted. She moved to another table. Jessica continued drawing, ignoring Caryn and the teacher, who was droning on about locker assignments.

Mrs. Katherine asked Caryn to help distribute the locks, and when Caryn had finished, she lingered a moment at Jessica's table. Jessica wondered grimly at the girl's persistence.

"I've never been able to figure these out," Caryn muttered as she fiddled with her lock. She spun the combination a dozen times without success. "Maybe it's broken…You want to give it a try? "

Jessica plucked the lock from Caryn's hands and had it open in a second. "Hope you don't need to use the locker too much this year."

"How do these things work?" Caryn laughed at herself cheerfully.

"Figure it out yourself," Jessica answered as she shut the lock and tossed it back to Caryn.

"What did I do to you?" Caryn asked, finally deflated, and Jessica wouldn't have been surprised to see her eyes start to tear. "Why do you have to be so nasty to me?"

"It's who I am," Jessica snapped, closing her notebook and putting it away. "Learn to live with it."

She turned her back to Caryn as Mrs. Katherine led the class to their lockers. The girl didn't try to talk to Jessica again for the rest of the day. No one else did either; besides the arrival of Caryn, nothing had changed.

"HOW WAS YOUR FIRST DAY of school?" Caryn's mother asked as soon as the girl entered the kitchen.

Caryn's mother, Hasana Rashida, was a slightly plump, attractive woman with hair of a rich brown, cropped in a serious yet flattering style. She was obviously tired from her day at the bookstore, of which she was the new manager, so Caryn decided not to bother her with details of the icy putdowns she had received that morning.

"It wasn't awful," she answered instead as she fished a spoon from the silverware drawer and went to serve herself some ice cream.

The thought of Jessica made her uneasy. There was something in Jessica's aura that she hadn't been able to identify—something darker than normal. At first, it had almost kept Caryn from approaching. After only one day, she could see that it also kept other students away.

Of course, that was logical. Caryn wouldn't have been in this town if Jessica had been a normal high-school student.

Caryn had tried despite her unease to get to know Jessica, more because the girl had seemed so alone than because Caryn had been asked to do so.

Prompted by these thoughts, she asked, "Where's Dominique?"

Hasana sighed. "She left to deal with some trouble involving her daughters, but she should be back soon."

Dominique Vida was one of the few people who could give Caryn the chills just by entering the room. She was the leader of the oldest living line of witches, and her power was impressive. She was the one who had tracked down Jessica's address and maneuvered Caryn and Hasana into this town, finding a house for them and employment for Hasana in less than two weeks.

Either despite this power or because of it, the woman was emotionally cold as ice in almost any situation. She needed to be: Dominique Vida was a vampire hunter. She could not allow emotion to cause hesitation in a fight.

If anyone else had asked Caryn to move into this town, where she could barely breathe for the aura of vampires, she would have refused. But Dominique was the leader of all four lines of witches, including the Smoke line — Caryn s own.

Dominique could order Caryn to go into the vampires' lairs alone, and Caryn would do so or risk losing her title as a witch. As antisocial as Jessica seemed to be, at least watching the writer didn't seem dangerous.

Following the same train of thought as her daughter, Hasana asked, "Did you meet Jessica? "

"Yes. She hated me on sight," Caryn answered gloomily. "And considering how she's treated, I'm not surprised."

Caryn had been shocked at the way Jessica's classmates seemed to view her—as if she was a poisonous spider. One of them, an athletic senior who'd been flirting with Caryn only a few minutes before, had called Jessica a witch. Hurt by his words, Caryn had needed to swallow an argument; Jessica was further from being a witch than the boy who had made the accusation.

Caryn glanced down at her bowl, her appetite gone. Her ice cream was melting.

Anne confronted Jessica as soon as she walked in the front door. "You're late."

"Sorry," Jessica answered sardonically. "They love me so much, they asked me to stay a bit longer."

"Jessica … on the first day of school?" Anne's voice was heavy with disappointment.

"Learn the art of sarcasm," Jessica suggested. "I needed to walk off some energy, so I swung by the woods on my way home."

"Thank god." Anne smiled and started to fill out the forms that the school had mailed home. An awkward moment went by in silence.

"Anything interesting happen at school?" Anne asked eventually, though Jessica could tell that her mind was not on the question.

"Nope," Jessica answered absently as she searched through her bag for a letter one of her teachers had given out for parents. She handed it to Anne.

After scanning the letter, Anne asked, "How are your teachers?"

"Fine."

"That's nice."

As usual, their conversation was more of a mandatory social gesture than a method of communication. Anne and Jessica had learned long before that they had nothing in common and had little chance of ever engaging in a truly two-sided talk about anything. Occasionally one actually paid attention to what the other was saying, but such circumstances usually led to arguments.

Another moment of silence ensued.

"I'm going to my room," Jessica announced finally. Leaving her backpack on the couch, she went upstairs and into the dimly lit cavern she had created for herself.

The windows were covered by heavy black curtains, and the shades were down. A small beam of light squeezed underneath the curtains, but that was all.

The bed, which was little more than a mattress on wheels, had been pushed into a corner. The sheets and comforter were black, as were all but one of the pillows. The exception was deep violet and made of fake suede. Anne had bought the pillow for Jessica several years ago, when she had still been attempting to influence the girl's tastes. Besides the pillow and Jessica's magenta Lava lamp, there was little else in the room that wasn't black.

A laptop computer and printer stood out brightly against their dark surroundings. They sat atop a black wooden desk, which they shared with a strewn assortment of floppy disks. The computer was one of the few things Jessica cherished. Here, in the shadowed niche she had created for herself, she churned out the novels that had been her escape from the world since she moved to Ramsa.

The twenty-nine manuscripts that she had written in the past five years, the brown envelopes that held her contracts for two of them, and a few copies of the published book Tiger, Tiger were the only other non-black objects in the room.

It had been only two years earlier that she had first begun the search for a publisher; she could hardly believe how quickly things had gone since. Her first book, Tiger, Tiger, had been released about a week before, under the pen name Ash Night. The second one, Dark Flame, was presently sitting on her editor's desk awaiting the woman's comments.

Jessica flopped down onto her bed and looked up at the ceiling. Sometimes ideas for her books would strike as she lay like this, staring into oblivion, but usually they came from her dreams.