Angie Fox - ADS 03 - A Tale of Two Demon Slayers

Pirate cocked his head. “Want me to see what it is?”

“No,” I said. “You stay here and think of what to do with Flappy.”

Pirate’s ears drooped.

Yeah, well I wasn’t the one disobeying orders and keeping dragons in the house.

I dressed quickly while Pirate tucked Flappy into my bed. Lucky for him and his pet—who was now curled up in my blankets—I had bigger things to worry about.

Buckling my switch stars, I headed out. My boots echoed down the ceramic-tile hallway. I wished they’d quiet down so I could hear the voices again. Lo and behold, my feet began to move silently.

I about tripped. Hello, new demon slayer power.

My feet moved as gracefully as a cat’s, and as soundlessly. Not that I had ever been awkward, but stealthy was a completely different story.

I couldn’t help grinning. As abilities went, it was a good one. I tried to make noise again and I did—my heels echoing down the stone stairway. I hit the silencer again and presto!

This was really nifty.

I allowed myself a brief little jig at the bottom of the stairs before I focused on what had brought me downstairs in the first place. By now I could tell it was Diana and Dyonne in the kitchen. Then Talos’s voice popped up. And Amara’s. Heavens. It was the griffin club. No wonder I hadn’t been invited. Well if there was something important going on, I had a right to know.

“I’m telling you, I don’t know how it happened,” Diana wailed.

“You’ve compromised us all,” Talos snapped. “To think I could have ever considered marrying you.”

“Zip it, lover boy,” Dyonne said.

I rounded the corner into a large Mediterranean-style kitchen. “What’s going on?”

“Lizzie.” Diana looked relieved to see me. Dyonne looked like she wanted to slap Talos. And Dimitri stood fuming in the middle of it all.

“We’ve made an unwelcome discovery,” Dimitri said, crossing the room to drop a kiss onto the top of my head. His touch was brief and distracted. “Both of my sisters’ Skye stones have been taken and crushed.”

A rock dropped in my gut.

“Crushed?”

He nodded. “By someone who knew how to do it. They were placed on an ancient altar and smashed.”

The same way they had been in my dream.

I was going to have a hard time explaining the next part. “Was this a wooden altar, with moon symbols carved over the surface?”

Every pair of eyes in the room locked onto me. I felt their shock and more than that, the growing sense of betrayal.

“How did you know?” Diana all but whispered.

I swallowed. Hard. “I dreamed about it.”

Dyonne’s eyes widened. “Who did it? In your dream. Did you see who destroyed us?”

“No.” I tried to remember, but I couldn’t. “And what do you mean destroy you? Your magic comes from inside.”

Dyonne grunted. “We could barely use our magic with the stones as conductors. Now it’s impossible.”

“Is there any way you can fix the stones or make new ones?” The ruins were still there, along with their power. I knew Skye griffins weren’t supposed to lose their magical tools, but it had to have happened sometime in the past two thousand years or so. They had to have some kind of a backup plan.

For the first time, Dyonne seemed defeated. Her eyes lowered.

“What if you held another ceremony?” I protested. “You have to at least try.”

“We have no other griffins with power that can conduct our clan ritual,” Dimitri said. “My mother helped create those stones. The magic is infused generation to generation. Yes, the power of the stone belongs to the person who calls it, but it is family magic.”

“And without the family…” I said, trailing off, not wanting to follow the thought to its awful conclusion.

“We are the last in our line,” Dimitri finished.

I had no idea what to say to him, to any of them. This spelled the death of their family and their clan. Everything Dimitri had worked for was destroyed. He’d fought so hard to save his sisters. He’d wanted more than anything to come here and protect his family, to preserve this place and this heritage for future generations.

In one night, with one act of evil, it was gone.

While the rest of the group stood in silent mourning and shock, my heart hammered in my chest.

Please let it be my connection to the evil one.

Oh great. Was I really wishing for an unholy bond? Frankly, it would have been better than the alternative.

What if I was the one who had destroyed the stones?

I couldn’t discount anything. Not when this family was at stake.

I’d watched it happen in my nightmare. It couldn’t have been just a coincidence. Not twice. There’d been no reason why I should have known where the stone had been hidden in the garden—but I had, right down to the pomegranate tree it had been buried under.

And now I could see the ancient altar in my mind, as clearly as I saw my own cut and bruised hands.

“I think I know who did it,” I said, breaking the silence in the room.

Saying the next part was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. How do you tell the man you love, the family you’ve come to care about so deeply, that you may have destroyed them?

I took a deep breath and blew it out. “It could have been me.”

My statement sucked the air out of the room for a moment before it came rushing back in.

Dimitri spoke first. “That is the most insane thing I’ve ever heard.”

“You wouldn’t,” Diana gasped.

Talos took two steps for me, his features unreadable.

“Remember how I found the stone in the garden?” I asked, looking at Dimitri. He had to be my rock right now. I couldn’t quite face the others. “I knew it was there because I dreamed of hiding it. I saw where it was,” I said, trying to make them understand. “I was right.”

Yes, it was disturbing and awful and unnatural, but it didn’t stop it from being true.

Tears surged at the back of my eyes. “Last night, I dreamed of crushing the Skye stones. I don’t know why. You have to understand I’d never want to hurt you.”

Heavens, Dimitri looked at me with such love and trust. I had to retreat from him. How could he even see me that way after he knew the kind of thoughts I’d had?

Diana cried softly, her fingers tangled in her lap.

Dyonne studied me. I stood, waiting. She was going to look at this logically. It was her nature. With a sad twist of her lips, she gave me her verdict. “Lizzie, a dream doesn’t mean you did it.”

She didn’t understand. “I didn’t consciously set out to hurt you. I’d never do that. But I do think I’m compromised.”

“I think she’s right,” Talos said from the corner, his arms crossed over his chest. “Lizzie is the only one with any specific knowledge of what happened last night. The rest of us just found the pieces.”

“Who discovered it?” I asked.

“Me,” Dyonne said. “We’d both dreamed last night that our power had fled. I thought it was only a nightmare, until the stones were gone.”

“You should have kept them more secure,” Talos grumbled. “Once stolen is a mistake. Twice is pure lunacy.”

Dimitri made a move for Talos until Dyonne caught him by the arm. “I’ll fight my own battles, if you please.” She turned to Talos. “We had to keep the stones near us. The doors were locked, as were the windows. Perhaps we should have slept in the family safe or risked a green slime ward every time we got up to pee, but frankly, we were more secure than anyone else in this house.” She glanced at Dimitri.

“My wards were designed to keep out any malicious entities,” Dimitri said.

“Exactly.” I cringed. “They weren’t designed to keep me out.”