The Shelf (Dead-End Ave) Read online

  ‘Well, the security deposit’s gone now…’ she thought to herself. Hysterical laughter bubbled suddenly in her throat, and she might have let it out, if she didn’t hear the familiar sounds of beasts approaching ahead. They still sounded far enough away to be around a corner, and Bri thanked her stars.

  But the slobbering sounds were getting louder and scarier, and swiveling her head around, she tried in vain to spy a hiding space. If she didn’t find something ASAP, she would be dogmeat.

  Literally.

  Just her luck, this hallway that she was currently picking her way through had lots of dust and splinter piles, but nothing actually of size that she could hide behind.

  Suddenly, someone grabbed her from behind, hand covering her eyes and mouth. She felt herself being dragged backward and Bri tried her best to clamp down on the fingers pressed tight against her teeth. But it was in vain, and her teeth gnashed uselessly together.

  When her attacker finally released her, Bri whipped her head around to see where she was. From what she could barely see, she was in a closet. A warm hand touched her waist gently and she gasped.

  Breath tickled her ear as someone pulled close. “Bri,” a voice whispered. “Quiet.”

  ‘Korey!’ But all she murmured to him was, “You be quiet!”

  “Come over here, away from the door,” he said softly, sending a shiver of delight down her spine, though she had no clue why. Nevertheless, she cautiously felt her way over to the corner, following the dim outline of his figure moving against the blackness.

  He grabbed her arm and tugged her closer toward him, and tilted her shoulders slightly. Bri was confused and about to ask what he thought he was doing, when a thin beam of light appeared between them. She was about to accuse him of having magic too, when she realized that Korey held a small flashlight.

  “Always prepared,” she sighed.

  In the eerie beam of the flashlight, his head shake looked ominous. “Always prepared?” came his tense whisper. “Did you miss the fact that I’m trapped in a closet, hiding from creatures that shouldn’t even exist?”

  Eyes narrowed at his blatant sarcasm, she scowled. “Ohh, that’s right. How could I forget who I was talking to. Mr. Korey Parsons, the guy who is too good to tell the truth to mere, regular folks like me.”

  “Yo, stop!” He grabbed her wrist, but she just shook his hand off. “I told you that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Just like that, she was angry, irrationally mad. Turning, she made a bolt for the door, almost tripping in the darkness.

  “Where are you going?” came his whisper before his hands, sliding along her waist and helping her catch her balance.

  “Out. You know what? I just realized that I rather take my chances with the things in the hall, rather than stay here with your deception. ‘Anything to get you to stop touching me.’

  Then his body was blocking the door, and the last thing Bri saw was his determined face before he snapped off the flashlight. “I’m not letting you go out there. Are you crazy?”

  Bri glared right up to where she expected his face would be. “Well, I don’t trust you anymore. So either you let me out of that door, or I scream at the top of my lungs. I have the strange feeling that someone will find us then. Hopefully, it’s a friend that comes first, before one of those things.” She paused, taking a deep breath as if readying a scream. “So, what’ll it be?”

  Even in the dark, she could tell that he hadn’t budged, but then Korey sucked his teeth. Hard.

  “Then I guess I’ll have to tell you the truth. NOT that I want to, let’s get that straight, but from the day I saw you sitting on that wall, I knew you were crazy. From that day, I knew you were going to be a lot of trouble.”

  “Just get on with it,” she snapped impatiently.

  “There is a secret section to the RDAS. I first found out about it when I was twelve. I-,”

  “Stop.” Bri held up one hand. “Uh uh. I don’t want to hear all of that. Tell me what you lied to me about.”

  A long sigh heaved from Korey’s chest as he just stared at her. Then his gaze dropped to the floor and remained there for several minutes, while Bri waited. She was not letting him off the hook that easy. His gaze finally rose again, and this time, it was an angry glare that raked over her.

  All she did was cross her arms. “The truth? Any day now.”

  Heaving another heavy sigh, he rubbed his head. “You’re a real pain, you know that?”

  Bri just gave him a shrug.

  “Fine. What I lied to you about…..well, I lied about not knowing that curses exist. I know all about them. Ever since I was born.” He gave a bitter bark of laughter. “The day my oldest sister turned twenty-one, her son Davial, was born. Cool, huh? Her son was born on her birthday. The very next day, she was killed by a mysterious attacker that left her strangled outside a supermarket. I was only thirteen at the time, but I knew what had really happened. We all knew, because it’s what happens in our family.”

  “We live, and then,” he paused and Bri thought he was about to say ‘we die,’ but instead Korey finished with, “….and then Rikgso kills us.”

  “I never actually came out and told you that I didn’t believe in curses, you just assumed that I didn’t because I didn’t say anything. Well, curses are very real. Especially for the descendants of the Holders, the original members of The Legion. The demon made sure of that. And our families are supposed to die out, vanish completely from the world. As soon as one of our family members has an heir, the demon kills them, then it waits for that child to grow up and have offspring.” He shrugged. “Or if you choose not to have any kids, you can live up until the demon gets tired of waiting for you.”

  Shivering at his cold words, Bri interrupted. Something wasn’t adding up to her. “Then why are both of your parents still alive? They have kids, you and your sisters. Oh-,” she broke off, remembering why she had run out on him in the first place. Parsons, he was descended from the original traitor in the group. Of course, his father was still alive. “Never mind.”

  Light flashed in her face, startling her before she realized that Korey had snapped back on the flashlight. He was giving her a strange look. “Yeah, I know. I lied about that too. My mother-,”

  Bri quickly thrust one hand out. “Korey, it’s okay. You don’t have to say it, it’s not your fault.” She really didn’t want to hear him admit his guilt of being in the traitorous family. Not when she was finally starting to think of him as a good guy again.

  “What’s the matter with you?” An irritated look crossed Korey’s face. “Do you want to hear my story or not? You begged for it.”

  “No, it’s fine. I already know.”

  “Know what?”

  “You’re a Parsons. Descended from the traitor of the group, Xavius.”

  His mouth opened, and then snapped shut as his brows rose. Slowly shaking his head, Korey muttered, “I knew you were crazy. Why in the…world…would you let me try to help you, if you thought I was the bad guy?”

  Taking a moment to stop and run that thought through her brain, she frowned. He made a good point. “Uh…I didn’t have a choice?”

  His angry glare let her know exactly how much he wasn’t buying that.

  “Well, I just don’t know, ok! Tell your story.”

  Korey pointedly moved away from her. “Anyway, Xavius was NOT the traitor, no one supposedly knows who it was, though I’m beginning to have an idea. But regardless, my biological mother isn’t alive. The demon killed her after my last sister was born. The woman that I call my mother is my father’s second wife.

  Both my mother and father are Descendants. Emmaline Hamm was my mother’s ancestor. They made some sort of deal with the demon that he would only take one of them, so that the other could be allowed to raise the children. After all, they produced four heirs in a short time for the demon to enjoy,” he commented sourly. “Rikgso agreed to take one and spare the other.”

  “But why
your mother?” Bri asked, shocked that even a demon from hell could be so cold as to want to kill the parents of a large family such as Korey’s.

  “That’s who the demon picked.” Silence fell between them, as Bri reflected that the demon was cold, very cold indeed. She had no clue what Korey was thinking.

  “My father re-married and I was raised with my step-mother. She took us in as hers, and we love her as our mother. But things changed after my sister Quannie died. Dad became really crazy and paranoid. Everything around the corner was out to get us, out to kill us. Every six months, we would move so that whatever was chasing us couldn’t catch up. It was the moving, I think, that started the rift between my parents. But, it was on one of those moves that I met Aeryal Swan. My father wanted to meet with hers to talk curse business. He was thinking that it was time for them to strike back after seven generations of misery. But Aeryal’s father isn’t a Descendent and he didn’t believe in the curse, even though he’d watched Aeryal’s mother wither away years before. So he moved his family away from us, saying that my dad was crazy.”

  Korey met Bri’s eyes. “That’s when I gave Aeryal half of the pendant. It was my mom’s artifact, the one that the Hamm family had been passing down through their line. Artifacts aren’t supposed to leave the family, but Aeryal was the first person that I had ever met like me, a kid who was cursed. And yeah, I did love her, and we did kiss.”

  “But you,” Bri struggled to find the right words, words that wouldn’t increase the pain in Korey’s eyes, “..never spoke to her again. She told me so, and she was really hurt about it.”

  He nodded gravely. “Because two days after Aeryal moved away, I almost died. To tell you the truth, I think I actually did die and my dad found a way to bring me back. All I remember is just being in the worst pain of my life.”

  An involuntary gasp slipped from Bri’s lips. “What happened?”

  “I got really sick with meningitis and the doctors said that I wouldn’t make it. We went from hospital to hospital and it was the same thing. The doctors had already begun to prepare my parents for the death. My dad, though, it was like as if he just couldn’t accept it. So, one night, and my step-mother was still living with us then, he took me from the last hospital and drove me several hours to the RDAS. Against doctors’ orders. That was the final straw for my step-mother, and she left my dad, taking my little sisters with her.

  I didn’t know what was happening at the time, and it didn’t matter because I was too sick to take it in. Every part of me hurt and I was fading in and out. I remember my father lifting me out of the car, and then I passed out. The next time I woke up, I was strapped to some sort of operating table, watching a tube siphoning my blood out of my body, and another tube bringing a strange liquid in. And-,”

  “And?” Bri pressed.

  His expression was still grave. “And I lived. But I didn’t remember about Aeryal, until she messaged me through the pendant. So I convinced Dad that we needed to move here, back to Jacobsville. But she was already dead.”

  Bri didn’t miss the bitterness in his tone.

  “So as the curse goes, they said that it would be seven generations of death, before we could have a chance. Seven generations of family members being murdered, and then in the eighth generation, there would be a small window of hope for us to fight back. A very small window.”

  Bri narrowed her eyes. “What’s supposed to happen in the eighth generation, and when is it?”

  He met her gaze dead-on. “Me, Aeryal…now you, we are the eighth generation, and no one knows. No one really knows what’s supposed to happen.”

  “So,” her voice had dropped to a whisper, “if you’re the eighth generation, that means that the seven have already passed. You don’t have to die. Aeryal didn’t have to die, did she?”

  Korey shrugged. She could see the bare movement in the near-dark. “Only if we can stop Rikgso from his slaughter. After this generation passes, the murder of seven generations will start all over again.”

  “Do you know any of the others from the cursed families?”

  He shook his head. “Only Aeryal.”

  Bri slumped against the wall. “Maybe one of the others might know how to defeat the demon.”

  Korey was already nodding. “Already thought about that. That’s part of the reason why I’m back in Jacobsville. I need to find the others. Since we’re all descendants of the Holders, we all have an artifact that passed down through family. We need to get all of the artifacts together.”

  “The pendant? That was yours, you said.”

  With a faint nod, Korey pulled something out of his backpack. “It was one. Since I’m descended from two Holders, I have another.” The object he held out to her was similar to a long candlestick, an engraved metal one. As he placed it in her hands, Bri noted how the engravings seemed to grow hot beneath her touch.

  Korey was watching her closely. “Do you feel that?”

  She didn’t have to ask what he meant. “Yes.”

  “It’s the Demon’s staff, one of the items used to summon him. It can open his prison, or lock it.”

  She wasn’t surprised that it actually came from the demon himself. Under the engravings, the metal was cold and clammy, otherworldly. Though it was deceptively clunky, Bri had already noted that it was almost razor-sharp. Deadly.

  “The book,” Bri remembered suddenly, gingerly handing the staff back, “..the book I was reading before I ran out on you in the RDAS, it had a list of the Holder names. If we could get a hold of that book again, it could help us.”

  “It could.” He slid the staff back into his backpack. “So that’s my story.”

  “Okay,” was all she said as he looked up. “Lead the way.” She was still angry, but at least, he had finally given her the truth, or at least, however much of it she was going to get.

  First, he stared at her, as if uncertain about whether she was serious or not, but as she continued to gesture towards the door, he stood. “All right. The first thing we need to do is find a way out of this wreck of a building. With the explosion, it’s pretty tough to figure out where any of the exits are.”

  One hand stretched to hers, and Bri took it, without a word. Korey hauled her to her feet and turned to put his hand on the doorknob. “Ready?” he said softly over his shoulder.

  “Don’t have a choice,” she retorted, “so, I guess so.”

  The hallway was empty as they exited the closet, filled with debris, empty of demons. Bri preferred it that way. They crept along the halls, following Korey’s mumbled suggestion of keeping close to the walls ‘in case’. Of what, Bri didn’t know, but she took his advice anyway.

  After what seemed like an eternity of slow progress, Bri noticed that they hadn’t found any other students. ‘Where is everyone?’ she wondered. ‘Deanna? Rob?’

  Korey seemed to be thinking much along the same lines. “Where are the rest of the seniors?” he asked, voice low.

  Waiting until he glanced back at her, Bri just shrugged. It wasn’t as if she had any answers on this crazy mixed-up night. “Tell me more about The Legion. Where did they imprison Rikgso?”

  “In wooden dungeon, protected by several spells.”

  Bri shook her head. To think that anyone would believe that something like that would work. Witchcraft was complete bunk. No wonder the demon had escaped. He would be stupid not to.

  “Where was the dungeon?”

  This time, Korey spoke while throwing a glance over his shoulder. “Below the Swan house. Before you ask, no, the dungeon doesn’t still exist. They broke it down years later and re-used the lumber.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Why would they do that? Wouldn’t the demon just escape? And who would want wood that was used in something so evil? I sure wouldn’t touch it.”

  She could see the edge of his smile even without his turning. “Rumor has it that it was turned into a bookshelf that all the artifacts fit into. If you return all the artifacts to their position, some one ch
osen person can send the demon back to hell. But no one knows where the bookshelf is, and at this point, no one even knows where all the artifacts are. All the families spread out, trying to escape their fate. Didn’t work though.”

  Bri was still stuck on his words about a ‘bookshelf’. “There’s a really old bookshelf in Aeryal’s bedroom. Like, the wood is really worn and beaten. It’s where she kept that pendant that you gave her. I remember because the pendant even fits into a groove on the top shelf. The first time I went back to her house since she died, I took the pendant from the shelf. Right after that, Rikgso appeared to me. Do you think that could be the shelf?”

  “Could be.” He didn’t say anything else, and Bri grew irritated. It wasn’t like as she had said something wrong, for goodness’s sake! Here she was, sharing the info that she had, and Korey was choosing to shut down and not say anything else.