The Demon Inheritance

SEVEN

Monday came without break. The weekend, unlike usual, stretched out to what felt like an eternity. Every waking minute felt like an hour, and my sleep was filled with the cries of help from my missing best friend. When I wasn't worrying about Mary, I researched infants, secluding myself from my mother, my father, and all of the friends - what I had come to call Delta Waters, Fango Mills, and Delta Raking - trying to help me with the loss. I let Fango Mills have a special ringtone for when he texted in case he found something, but his text tone never came up. Even staring at my computer screen worrying about baby wellcare for my little brother-or-sister to be, I couldn't shrug off the fact that Mary was missing. There was a void in every action I took, as if some force had stolen a chunk of my soul itself.

My mother was unknowing about my friend's disappearance. No one had told her what had happened to Mary, and I hoped it would stay that way. And the media wasn't all over this, rather than who a celebrity was sleeping with. And so, when Monday came, she made me go to school, feeling diseased throughout my entire body - mentally and physically. It was if the fire in my heart had gone cold. It was distant, like ice so cold it could numb and burn me all at once. It was the greatest grief. There was a kind of black hole inside of me that destroyed anything from the outside, and held nothing inside of it.

Yet, the fire did flick in every now and then.

It was like with each Mary-less passing second, my hope was withering more and more like a dying blossom under the sun.

I woke up and instinctively reached for my phone. 17 messages. I scanned over then, in case Fango had texted me during my sleep. There wasn't a single thing from him. However, Oliver had desperately been trying to get a hold of me through Fango's device. Twelve of the messages messages were from him.

"This is Oliver on Fango's phone. You okay?"

"Emma, please answer."

"How you holding up?"

"Em, answer me."

"You're scaring me."

"If you need someone, I'm here."

"Emma Whitestone."

"Please say something."

"Don't blame yourself."

"I need to hear from you."

I ignored his messages, glancing out my window. It was so close to the time to go back to school. Time to go back to Hell. I was already in the innermost circle of it.

It was still being a cold February winter. I pulled on a black, hooded jacket over a gray Metallica t-shirt with dark skinny jeans and black tennis shoes. Dark clothes gave the impression of being reclusive, after all. No one would want to socialize with me if I looked like a Satan worshipper.

I glanced out the curtainless window to see the newborn frost lying in a sheet over the fallen, fire-inked leaves below. The fuschia dawn light glistened over it so that an army of a thousand tiny sparkling diamonds winked at me from yards over. There was a sense of ghostly aloneness in the fact that Mary's static-filtered breath wasn't echoing pointlessly in the space of my four white walls, as happened every other weekday morning. Even with the beauty of the outside world glinting in my eyes, it was pointless.

I felt grief. Mary was gone.

I felt furious. Mary was gone.

I collected my backpack and books, deciding to skip breakfast as I sat down at my computer. For half an hour, I scrolled through articles about infant diets and sleep and education. I couldn't set my mind on infants, however. All the while, I thought, Someone's against me. Some supernatural force hates me. When I vowed to protect Mary, it took her. When she went missing, a little part of me went missing, too. I choked back a helpless cry that was slipping from me, knowing it would be a strangle on my tone rather than be an actual cry. After all, I no longer had the strength to cry myself out. The worst part of it all is that I was helpless. There was nothing I could do. I felt as small and helpless as the newborn baby inside my computer screen giving me a mangled glare.