Read Online A Demon's Wrath: Part II (Peachville High Demons) by Sarra Cannon - Free Book Online Page B

“What is it?”
    “I don’t know.” I made my way
through the cool misty fog. The wall I’d brought down had been
several feet thick, but once I got through the worst of the debris,
the corridor opened up into a small room about a quarter of the size
of the portal room we’d been standing in.
    It was a den of some sort. Rags lay in a pile on
the floor at my feet like a nest.
    But it wasn’t an animal or beast who lived
here.
    Along the far wall of the space was a bookcase of
dusty tomes.
    As I stepped forward, something cracked beneath my
feet. I looked down and gasped at a scattered collection of human
bones.
    These rags were not a bed. They were the clothes
this creature had been wearing when it died.
    “What is it?” Lea asked, finally
reaching this side of the fallen wall.
    I crouched down. This was exactly the kind of
break I’d been waiting for.
    I picked up a bone and lifted it into the air.
    “It’s a dead hunter.”

A Hidden Power
    Andros pushed forward
into the small room. “A dead hunter?” His voice was soft,
almost reverent.
    He studied the bones
and the rags.
    “This means
they can be killed,” he said. “What if the hunter’s
death is what closed the portal?”
    He crossed toward the
piles of books and trinkets along the far wall. His hand trembled as
he picked up the tattered tome at the top of the stack. He blew a
puff of air across the spine and dust flew out from it, hovering in
the air for a long moment before fluttering down to join the
long-settled decades of dust on the ground.
    He crouched low and
opened the book, his eyes glued to the pages. His lips parted as he
read, his hand slowly rising to his mouth.
    “What is
it?” Lea asked.
    Tension gathered in the
room as we waited for him to answer. We’d never found a
hunter’s den before. We’d never even seen or heard of a
dead hunter or known if they were immortal. The true impact of this
find hadn’t even sunk in yet, but we all understood the
importance these books and belongings might have if they contained
any kind of information or clues about the Order of Shadows.
    The look in Andros’s
eyes when he turned said it all. Heat spread across my skin and I
fell back against the broken wall of the cave.
    “I’ve
never seen anything like this before,” Andros said. He turned
the page and scanned the contents, his breath coming faster. “There
are spells in here. I can’t understand all of it, but some
things are familiar. And there are diagrams. Maps.”
    “Maps?”
I asked, my heart squeezing. “What kind of maps?”
    “I’m
not sure,” he said. “I think they might be maps of the
human world.”
    “What about
the other books there?” I asked.
    Andros set the first
book down and Lea and I joined him near the wall to look through the
other items. Ourelia and Jericho searched the rest of the small room.
    “Look at
this,” Lea said. She sat down in the dust and reached out for a
faintly-glowing stone half-covered in dirt and grime.
    The moment her fingers
touched the stone, her eyes went wide and all the breath was pushed
from her chest. She looked at me, terror darkening her eyes as they
clouded from green to black. She reached for me, clutching my wrist.
    In an instant, the
ground fell out from underneath us. The world spun in circles and I
had to fight to stay upright. I was blinded for a moment, unable to
tell where we were or what had happened.
    But then, we landed in
a new time and place. When my sight returned to me, we were standing
in the hallway of a strange building.
    I had no idea how we’d
gotten there, but something was definitely off about the whole thing.
    Two human women stood
in front of us talking, but neither of them seemed to have even
noticed our presence. The color of this place was off, too, as if we
were in a faded version of reality, the edges of every surface
slightly blurred and muted.
    As if we were caught in
a dream.
    “What’s
happening?” I whispered, backing away from the