A Demon's Wrath: Part I (Peachville High Demons) by Sarra Cannon Page B

too late to worry about things like
that. Aerden was gone and even those we should have trusted most knew
more than they were willing to admit. I was determined to reveal
their secrets and find the truth about what happened to my brother.
    And someday, whoever took him would pay for what
they had done.
    I would never rest until that day came.

This Won’t Bring Him Back
    No matter how many times I questioned my parents,
they insisted they knew nothing about what happened to Aerden or who
would have wanted to hurt him.
    They claimed the king had dispatched a group of
guards to investigate the murder, but that so far, no one had found
any evidence of who might have taken him.
    Months passed with no answers, and every time I
asked about the guards’ progress, I was given a vague answer
with no concrete details.
    Lea and I spent hours going through maps of the
Northern Kingdom, searching for any mention of black roses. Even in
the older maps, we couldn’t find anything promising.
    The search for Aerden’s killer ruled my days
and nightmares of his death ruled my nights.
    Always, he was kneeling across the thorns, crying
out for me.
    Some nights, I could feel the silver shackles
cutting into my wrists. They were real to me and when I woke my
wrists would be sore and red, as if my nightmares were taking over my
life. The only way I could shake them was to draw exactly what I saw.
    I’d never been interested in art or drawing,
but I found that it helped me to get my memories and my visions on
paper.
    Sometimes, I stayed up several days in a row
working to perfect a single image. I couldn’t rest until every
single detail was exactly the way I’d seen it in my mind. What
if something that seemed insignificant turned out to be the key to it
all? So I learned to pay attention to my visions in a new way. I
learned to see the entire picture, piece by piece, and hold it there
in my mind until I could get it on paper.
    Years went by like this.
    When we’d been through all of the maps, I
started going from village to village with my drawings in hand,
asking for any information on black roses, a silver dagger with blue
stones, a woman in blue velvet robes with intricately woven patterns
of silver. A red dragon. No one would talk to me.
    After ten years, I was beginning to lose hope.
    “Someone has to know something,” I
said to Lea one day on our way home from the village of Baurmon.
“Aerden had only been gone a day. Hours, really. He could only
have gone so far away in that short of time. Someone within that
radius around the city has to know where there is a field of black
roses. They are too rare to miss.”
    “I don’t know.” She sighed.
“We’ve been over this a thousand times. What if we never
find the answers?”
    I snapped my head toward her. “Don’t
say that. It’s only been ten years. We have an eternity to find
answers.”
    She closed her eyes and swallowed. “We
cannot spend the rest of our days tirelessly searching for answers,”
she said. She placed her hand on my arm. “This won’t
bring him back.”
    I yanked my arm from her touch, my jaw tense. “It
isn’t about bringing him back,” I said.
    “Then what is it about?”
    “Do you really have to ask me that?” I
pushed up the sleeves of my long coat. “You don’t know me
at all.”
    Lea lifted her chin. “I know this is all you
think about,” she said. “You’re obsessed to the
point of losing yourself, Denaer.”
    I turned away from her, but she stepped behind me,
gripping my arm.
    “We’ve been engaged for ten years and
not once have we talked about our future,” she said. “You
don’t kiss me or hold me or dream of having a child with me.
You don’t even talk about what it will be like someday to rule
this kingdom. All you do is talk about a brother who is gone and
never coming back.”
    I shifted into black smoke, pulling away from her
grasp and reforming several steps away. “He was my twin. He was
a piece of me,” I said.