And here's another chapter!
Ligia Elena- Thanks for your review and don't feel bad. It was my intention that it would take some time to figure things out, otherwise I would have simply said in the first chapter- hi, my name is Chris and I'm for an alternate universe.
Well, I could! But of course I would never do that. I like to torture people too much… bad me.
Danna5- HYere's the next chapter. You didn't even have to wait for long! Who would have believed? And thank you so much for the compliment. When I write a chapter I feel like I'm in it so I'm glad that I managed to pass this feeling.
And of course, thanks for Shadowhiper whom I wish I had in all my English tests….
Chapter 8
The night is full of shadows just waiting for the first ray of sunshine to come, so they can hide. But you have never feared the shadows. The darkness is obvious; it needs to be there. It is comforting.
In the dawn, however, light leaks into the darkness and pretence comes to the world; presenting it as safe.
But safety is an illusion. Dawn is illusion.
Darkness is the only thing that real.
You throw the blanket off you and flop onto your back trying to find a more comfortable position. Looking around the room, you see that nothing is right: the shadow figures dancing on the walls are wrong, the organization of the things in the room is wrong, the smell, sense, and taste of the air is wrong. Everything is wrong.
Finally giving up on your ridiculous crusade to sleep you get up. You begin traveling through the house, determined to explore every bit of it. You needed to do it anyway, you reason, going downstairs. After all, you must know every corner, every shadow every leaf is making has to come as natural to you. You have to know the place they put their medicine, and the cabinet where they lock away their knives. Where their potion stash is and most importantly, you need to know how to fool the Book of Shadows into letting you touch it. The knowledge you memorized will not last you forever. At the first sign that you do not know something about a demon, and there is no doubt that such time will come, you will be made to touch the book. Then you will be rejected. You will be discovered. You will fail.
You'll die.
You see the old photo of the other you and your eyes cannot help but linger. He looked so much like you. It is strange to even comprehend that somewhere out there, there was someone who stole your face and his spirit was filled with light.
You place your finger over the other you as if you will be able to touch his flesh and feel that he was real. Your finger starts to shake and you can suddenly hear voices. Shouts.
You are 10 and he shouts at you. "Dammit, Chris, what are you saying?"
You want to explain that you saw who took Wyatt but can't. Trying desperately to make a sound that is logical, you begin to stutter, "Ce. .e.. e.."
You fight every vocal cord in your throat but it is not enough. It's too hard.
"We're busy now, Chris. We're looking for your brother," Mom tells you in a babyish voice, completely ignoring the fact that you are already 10 and know quite well what is going on around you. You try to tell her, to explain but the words are treacherous just like the hearts of the demons that took your brother and the family's rare calmness. They all fail now, paling from what the demon has done.
So you tug Aunt Phoebe's coat, trying to make her understand. Hoping that maybe through her powers she can read you and tell them what is on your mind. You do not know if she understands or not, and you never had the time to find out.
Leo barges in.
Sure, you saw him mad before but nothing compared to the total breakdown that he is experiencing. It is as if someone took your father and replaced him with a pseudo, one that you do not like one bit.
It is only when you are older that you are told that he behaved like this before, too. The circumstances remained vague.
"Dad…"
But he doesn't listen to what you have to say. Your voice making his blood boil .
He shouts, tosses and destroys. All the china in the house becomes nothing more than bare shreds, so tiny.
He looks at you and his eyes burning with hate. Hate towards you, maybe. Perhaps hate towards the world, or himself.
Then it is too hard for him to manage. And he leaves.
"Dammit, Chris, what were you thinking?" Mom whispers, her voice defeated. She descends to the couch effortlessly like the princess in all the fairytales you saw and closes her eyes with fatigue.
Wanting to make her feel better, you take the broom and begin to sweep the endless room, slowly, carefully, so there will be no glass left. Maybe if you collect all the pieces, Mom will be able to mend them back. Maybe then, everything will be ok.
Aunt Paige comes to you and tells you that it's ok, you don't have to do it. You do not listen, just continue to sweep with so much consideration that you do not hear anything around you. You are completely oblivious to the world, all that matters is the gleaming spots on the floor, the bringers of your doom, as you will call them from now on. They are all that matters.
That is why you do not sense that Mom wakes up, Dad returns and the world continues to swing with you left behind, sweeping. And no matter how much you want to gather all of the pieces, you always see another tiny one you missed. There are so many and only at the fall of dawn are you sure you have collected them all.
You bring them to Mom. She takes all the pieces from you while questions stretch across her face.
"All the pieces are here, now we can mend them back," you whisper, your voice quivering.
"Thank you, honey," she says tiredly. She turns around and tosses everything into the garbage.
Maybe she did not believe that you could mend everything, no matter how much you wanted to. Then she hugs you so tightly that you cannot breathe and you let out only a small squall of pain. Something is stabbing your hand.
You were wrong. You did not collect all the pieces, there was one still in your hand. That is probably why Mom was not able to fix it; you did not do a good job.
So you are left with the shred in your hand where it stays until the day you will die many years after and as a constant reminder to why you continue to block yourself from premonitions.
You are not sure what you have just seen and how you saw it but one thing is clear: the child was you. Only, it never happened to you. The china that that Chris broke was used in your and Bianca's marriage.
What's happening? Should you worry that you are losing your mind?
"Chris, is that you?" Mother is coming down the stairs, her eyes shady from either tears, lack of sleep, or both. You cannot think of the woman in your premonition anymore but only the one who cares so much and loves you beyond anything that you will ever be able to feel. Your mother was not like that, so this feeling is new. And you drink in her presence and inhale the familiar scent of childhood. That is silly really but your mom used that jasmine perfume as well. The scent hits you, dazzles your wits, leaving you raw and aching, bleeding from the inside. Because when you came here and conspired against them you did not take into consideration the fact that she will look so much like Mom. Now her death is replaying in your mind again and again and again and the bridge of guilt, the one you were always so careful to leave closed, is now broken.
"What's wrong, baby?"
"Nothing, everything is fine." You gather yourself together and force yourself to see Bianca's face crying in your mind's eye. You do not care anymore that everything is a lie because vengeance- vengeance is real. It is strong. Revenge is stronger than love. And rumors claim that love conquers all.
"Ok. I love you. Goodnight." Her eyes are studying you for a short moment then leave. She walks away, her motherly instincts wrong once again. She did not detect the self- loathing or the anger. Even if she did sense all of those, she failed to see that you wanted her to confront you. You wanted to be freed, to end the lie. You needed her to go away and say what she really feels about you, that she hates you. You needed to tell her that you hate her too and to believe that. There is no other way because you need to hate her. You want her to go away. You want her not to talk to you and even if she does, she needs to stop walking on eggshells every time she sees you. You are not fragile. She will not hurt you.
In fact, it is she who needs to be afraid that you will hurt her. Not to be afraid, to be sure that you will. Because you have done it already. You have killed her.
You want her to go away because you are afraid that if you hug her you will kill her gripping too hard.
While realizing that you are standing in the kitchen and staring into thin air, an urgent need attacks you to go upstairs and find a solution to the most pressing matter at hand: the Book.
Scheming in the distance on the stairs is easy but when you open the door to the attic and face the Book that you know you should be able to touch, you feel like a stranger. All the feelings that you hid so very well from yourself are coming back. But this time the sense of necessity cannot stop them at bay. This is the night. The shadows need to be unleashed.
No.
You will not break down, not when you are so close. Later. When it stops hurting so much to know you once had family who loved you. When it will not matter if they realize you are not him. Until then the truth cannot be known because it is good for your cause. Later, you can mourn.
Inhaling, you come closer to the book. First things first, you touch it.
As you expected, the Book senses your difference and leaps out of its resting place to the floor. Its thud echoes so loudly that you stay paralyzed for a moment, trying to hear if any of the girls are coming.
Thank goodness, they all sleep like bears in winter. Even if they are awake maybe they think that it is normal for you to explore the Book at night. Hell knows that the rumors flying around in the underworld intoned that you were a neurotic geek.
Time for plan A. which is the only plan you've got, so you really hope it works- spells. It's all about magic, right?
Figures and speeches float in your head as you try to rhyme several sentences that will actually have a connection. When you were little you thought that what mattered was the rhyming so when you tried to come up with a spell that would bring your cat back you thought for a really disturbing reason that cat and hat would do the trick.
It is probably needless to say that you ended up having a tail with the shape of a hat.
And it was green.
Clearing your head from memories, you begin chanting:
Spirits of evil, demons of joy
Come and help me with this ploy
The rhyming sucks but the heart is needy
Let me do what my heart is greedy.
You try touching the book, really convincing yourself this time that it will work. Why wouldn't it?
Apparently, the spirits, demons and higher forces thought your spell sucked at least as much as you did and rejected your plea. Really, it is not your fault that you are terrible at rhyming. It is kinda hard being a poetic tyrant.
You take another piece of paper, thinking it is a really good thing that they leave the paper and pens the same place as your family always did and try to come up with a better spell. You take all the traces of amusement that the nice memory brought and bury it away. Your survival is on the line here. You have to concentrate.
Come here evil and lend me a hand…
No, it could be interpreted really badly.
Hmm…
Shreds…seeds!
Seeds of pure evil
Rise and behold
Protect all the secrets
But the truths unfold
The mind is weary yet the body is ready so much
To lock the book of its ancestors
With a touch
Yes, that has to be one of your better ones. At least better then the last one.
Full of confidence you touch the damn book…
And fail.
Come on!
Come on, let me off the hook
And damn it let me touch this book!
Ok, so you did not actually think that this one would work since it has the subtlety of an elephant but Phoebe always said that the direct approach worked better. Of course, she was talking about girls and the time was before you were a tyrant so woman did not actually stand in line to be with you even if it was only to kill you. . . but that story is for another time.
You try touching that cursed book anyway. What have you got to lose?
You stare with amazement when your hand does not get its familiar voltage treatment when you touch the Book. Finally, your plan is one step closer to being completed.
"Chris?"
Shit.
With all of your concentration channeled to opening the creative part of your brain, there was obviously not enough space for practicality or hearing anything that was less than 8 decibels loud. You did not think and did not realize that with the amount of noise you were making you were bound to wake one of them, which is bad. Very bad.
Ok, what is worse is. Paige is not buying this whole I'm-innocent-love-me vibes that you are trying to project. Damn, you stumbled to the wrong sister. And she is reading those awful spells.
"'Let me touch this book…'Chris, what's going on?" She is hesitant but you do not wait for a sudden apprehension to come. You really like your head where it is, thank you very much.
So you try going away in the only way you can think of- you black orb out.
Idiot!
Now she knows for sure that you are evil. If you are lucky, she only thinks that you are possessed. However, if she has the kind of brain that you actually know she has, she is on to you. The plan is ruined. Everything is ruined!
You go back to your room and do the only thing you can think of.
You hide under the bed.