Demons | Nico di Angelo

Chapter 1: My Miserable Life Gets More Miserable

I was pretty sure that my to-do list didn't include getting attacked by my crazy counselor and being chased around the school by a monster. At least, not today. In fact, I was one hundred percent that it was never on any of my to-do lists - past, present or future to-do lists.

I was having a horrible day before I crashed into the boy with the black sword (that wasn't really the horrible part. He wasn't bad looking.). Of I course, there was also the part where I had blasted a hole in the roof of my counselor's office and collapsed his whole office, and that he had been shooting spikes at me.

It was rather hard to process and explain what happened, but my sequence of thought kind of went like this, hurry up Dr. Payne just finish speaking, what the hell, what the hell, what the hell, and finally, what the hell.

The last thing that I had done and that was still clear on my mind was talking to my counselor, Dr. Payne, who monitored my learning because of my ADHD and dyslexia. I went to his office every week, though the meetings mostly consisted of him eating beef jerky and drinking tea and glaring at me under his bushy eyebrows.

Then, today, he had called me some names (though one that I actually remembered was the term, demigod), turned into half lion, tried to kill me, then was blasted by lightning.

Now, I was sprinting down the hallways for my life.

The lights of my school were all out, so I stumbled around blindly in the dark, hoping that I was actually heading in the direction of the front doors. I could smell the smoke on my now-charred shirt, and it probably smelled awful, but that was the least of my worries. As I half ran half tripped around in the hall, I noted that it was oddly silent. I was pretty sure Dr. Payne had been howling threats after me when I fled from his office, so I daren't give myself the hope that my crazy counselor was actually dead.

I turned a corner (more like I smashed into a wall then turned) and crashed into a human body.

The other person let out a startled yelp, one hand grabbing my right shoulder and thrusting me away from him, while his other hand seemed to go to his hip.

Before I could do so much as to react, there was the screech of metal against metal and then there was something cold pressed against my neck.

I let out a shriek of surprise and tried to move, but the metal pressed against my neck was sharp, and I realized a little too slowly that it was a sword or a blade of some sort. My scream died in my throat.

There was two seconds of silence when the other person spoke. "Who are you?"

It was a boy, I could tell by the voice. In the dark, I could make out the fuzzy outline of him - he was rather tall, at least, taller than I was. He sounded young, maybe about my age, fifteen or sixteen. I was too busy trying to figure out why a random kid had a sword pressed against my neck than to answer his question.

"Who are you?" the boy asked again. There was pressure applied to my neck, not enough to cut me, but enough to hurt.

"C-Clara," I stammered, still trying to find out why today was so bad. First Natasha, then Dr. Payne, then some random teenager tries to threaten me. Was he part of some kind of gang? Then there was the problem of Dr. Payne, who was somewhere in the school trying to kill me. "Look, I have money, and I can give you my whole wallet and stuff, but as much as I don't want to, I kind of need to run. You might find it hard to believe but like my counselor just like-"