The Demon Inheritance

THREE

For the third night in a row, I stayed up late into the hours. I huddled under my blanket with a small object, the shadows stretching in darkness, moving pools across the pale whiteness of my walls. My phone was on, set to never go to sleep so the light would continue without me constantly touching the screen. I sat with my back to my pillow, my hands hovering over the object, which was half of a graphite pencil that my father had broken. With enough focus and will and desire, I learned, I could easily levitate the object, and only if I did so on purpose.

The ability was new to me, but I could already tell that this was something that had to do with wind, because there was a sort of breeze drifting from my hand whenever I lifted something. It wasn't that I could control the wind, rather that I was the wind. It was me moving the pencil, not the air. It was as if the breeze was a natural limb of mine, instead of a power of any sort.

Although, the only way I could describe it was as a power.

With a pursed sucking noise, the pencil half wobbled upwards, nearing my hand. I experimented, lifting it up and down without any other movement of my hand, the control I had over it depending on instinctive will alone. I turned it over it the light, glancing over the shards at one end and the smooth lead at the other. I dropped the pencil, still using the air, and lifted it again. Curiously, it was extremely easy to do it, and I accidentally did it when I was daydreaming sometimes, or just sleeping. I wasn't sure it it was a mental thing, or just something else altogether. I didn't know if it was a gift or a curse. And if it was a gift, I don't remember unwrapping it!

Was Oliver a part of this new ability? In my dreams, he did tell me that I "have wind." The conversation I had with his dream self about the brilliant tornadoes that came when he "found me" was still vivid in my mind, less unblurred by the fog of sleep-induced hallucination as it normally was.

A knock on the door interupted my thoughts. Sounds like Mom. I turned off my phone and threw it to the side of my bed where it wouldn't be found and, ultimately, confiscated. Then, I threw the pencil in the floor, but softened its landing with my air so that it wouldn't make a sound, same as I did with my phone. "I'm up, Mom."

My mother opened my bedroom door, gradually revealing her smiling face. Her eyes were lit with a gentle seriousness, mixed with the spark of kindness and intelligence. "I'd like to have a word with you, Emma. You up for a chat tonight?" Her fingers flexed on the side of the doorway.

I nodded, suddenly worried. My mother and I talked sometimes, but if it was so important that I had to be talked to at night, something was probably wrong. Inside of my mind, I was looking over all the bad things I could have done to trigger a serious conversation, and my worrying increased when I came up with nothing. My mother came over and sat on the edge of my bed, dipping the mattress slightly. "Is something wrong?"

She dodged my question. "I sometimes forget to check up on you... I leave you to yourself too much... I want to know how school's going. Any crushes? Anything new happening?"

I shook my head immediately at the first question, disgusted at the thought of a so-called crush. Things like that, in my opinion, were completely irrational feelings of either respect and trust or sexual attraction to a person you normally hardly know, which never ended well for anyone. Then, wanting no elaboration for that, I said, "Oliver is kind of getting attached to our group. I mean, me and Mary. Mr. Bluethorne is as harsh as ever. Uhm, we have a essay coming up over Little Women. Why?" I pressed my back up against the pillow a bit more, a little desperate to get back to practicing my new power. "Has something gone wrong at school or something?"

"Anything weird happened lately?"

Weird would have been the perfect word to describe my air, but I didn't feel like sharing the little trick I could do with her. That would cause us both to go down a long pathway of discovery and weirdness and control that I absolutely did not want to go down. Sure, I was curious about the breeze, but I would find that out on my own. "No, ma'am." And at this point, I'd given up asking what was wrong anymore.