Disclaimer: I do not own Demonata or any of the canon-characters which show up in this fanfiction; they are all property of Darren Shan. I wish I did own half of the amazing shit he has created over the years, but shamefully, I do not. All I own is the characters, concepts and places I've made up along the way.
A/N: Hey guys! Sorry it's been such a long time again! I've been in Alton in the South of England for a while, visiting my crazy best friend (Izzy) and watching lots of Attack on Titan which I am now in love with, and Annie is my favourite character, but Levi has a special epic place in my heart. After my break finishes (I have two weeks off), I have another week of exams to do, and I'm not looking forwards to it, but I've made a plan to update this fanfic at least once a month. As for my Jeepers Creepers one, I'm going to try and have the next chapter up by the end of my break, but sadly I can't promise anything because I have a Within Temptation concert tonight and then I'm studying more next week, but I'll try and be more reliable. This chapter finally introduces Violet, Esther's long-suffering best friend, and is in her point of view as she approaches her friends' new home. This is just so you get to know her a little better, and the next chapter might also be in a different POV, but it'll probably be someone like Tia or one of my OCs, instead of a canon character. If I do try anything, it'll probably be Bill-E, but I might attempt some Lorcan for you loyal people. So sorry about my stupid, unreliable nature, but school sadly must come first at the moment.
I have to give a massive thanks to everyone who's faved, followed and reviewed this fic-you are the people who keep me going! And I must thank TheMortition most of all for being such a wonderful friend, supporter and general co-conspiritor in the madness I call my imagination. Stay creative, wonderful and beautiful guys!
The slow, scraping, almost headache inducing sound of the train pulling out of the station brought me partially back to my senses. Staring awkwardly down at my lap, coated in a familiarised navy pleats, the edges of a paler cardigan pushing over the waist band, stares back up at me. Long, unladdered white tights encase my thick, stocky legs in a sheath of pale fabric and a simple pair of black, ankle-boots covering my feet. A white dress shirt sits ironed underneath the cardigan and I try to shrink back into it.
My parents named me Violet Alice Whittle, and I don't hate the name, I think it's fairly pretty. The only problem is, I'm not pretty. Strands of strawberry blonde hair hang gently in front of my square-jawed face, perfectly brushed the night before by myself so I didn't look too hideous for this train journey. I often travel via train, because it saves us the cost of petrol, and gives me a break from my family. The family home is now incredibly crowded because my brother and senior by three years, Henry, has finally decided to return home from college where he's studying 'The History of Art' or something along those lines. Basically, something incredibly prestigious and excellent which makes him look twice as amazing as normal. Doesn't help that he's totally gorgeous as well as intelligent. His only flaw is his incredible arrogance, but mum and dad often overlook that because he's such an over-achiever.
Okay. I'm an over-achiever too, but I'm not as beautiful as any of my brothers; Ed, Chris and Henry all got both looks and brains, I was only granted the brains part. If you asked me who was most beautiful, I'd say Ed. Ed isn't as attractive as Chris and Henry, but he's a nice person, and that makes him more attractive to most of the female demographic. Chris and Henry have never been able to hold down a steady relationship because they're both too in love with themselves to begin paying a woman as much attention as they pay their studying and beauty treatments. As Esther once said to me, 'never date a guy who wears more makeup than you', only in a thick Newcastle accent and in a higher pitched voice than me.
Esther is one of my four friends, and my best one, as well as the only female. The other three consist of Michael and Josh Fane; mum's best friends sons, Josh is fifteen like me and Esther, while Michael's seventeen but has no other choice to hang around with us unless he's at sixth form or hanging out with his friend's Darren and Georgia who both own cars respectively. We didn't buy our house, we simply inherited it from mum's mum, who moved to England after her parents divorced when she was sixteen. My mum, Carietta, and her sisters, my aunts, Rose and Marisol stayed in Arizona with my granddad, Bill. So, we're not too rich compared to most of the kids who live around us. I say around because no kids actually live near us. Bar Michael and Josh, who live next-door-but-one.
My only other friend is Josh's best friend, Alec Noel, who practically lives at the Fane house every weekend when he decides to pop round. Alec only ever really hung around me because he had a crush on Esther, and I think he still does because he asks me lots of questions about her. It does sort of put me on a downer; I know it's wrong to be jealous of your friends, but I know Alec only uses me as a bridge to find out what Esther likes and where she is. At least the Fane brothers genuinely talk to me about how my life's going and don't spend all day bombarding me with questions on Esther Blake, my best friend who can only visit during the holiday's now she's moved to Ireland. It doesn't help that I've had a crush on Michael Fane since the beginning of time!
He's stayed on at school to do sixth form, but still lets me and Josh hang around with him and his older, cooler friends; who surprisingly don't find either of us a burden. Josh is always up for a laugh and I'm mature for my age, so we balance each other out and make each other tolerable to the seventeen year olds. I only turned fifteen last week, but it's put me in a better mood. I like to tease Esther about it because I'm the older one of the two of us, and even if I'm going to see her under slightly less than normal circumstances, it's okay. My parents' only let me visit after I explained she'd hurt her wrist and I wanted to go and give her a card and a present at the weekend. I didn't tell them exactly how she'd got it, but they didn't press.
I'm still getting my head round the whole vampire-creatures, resurrected teenage Irish warrior, her being a necromancer theory, but things are beginning to make a lot more sense. Whenever she was round, the dead flowers in our garden always seemed to seem more alive and I could never think of a reason till now. It doesn't surprise me really, that she was the one out the two of us to get the cool powers, whilst I got to play sidekick. I guess I'm bitter, but wouldn't you be? If you're best friend suddenly got amazing power and you were stuck as your boring old self.
If you didn't, I don't know whether to immensely respect you or hate you with fiery passion. I'll try to stick to the former for now, but things might change. I guess we all want to be Wonder Woman with the amazing powers and the long legs, slim figure and glossy hair…Okay! Okay! I'm going off track now, but it's what all insecure fat girls like me wish to be but know we'll never accomplish. A standard procedure. Besides, if I was powerful I'd at least have something that would make Michael notice me.
Michael Fane is 5'11" of pure beauty; at least, to a low-self esteemed, pathetic, overweight social reject like myself. I've never been good with weight, especially other people's, so I'm not going to take a guess at how much he weighs, so I'll just describe his figure to you. He's slender, wiry, and lacks a lot of muscle tone, but I've never been one for buff, bulging muscle guys anyway, so it isn't anywhere near a problem to someone like myself. His skin tone is a fair tone, pale and milky, almost ivory, and even paler than Esther's if you look at them standing side by side, a hard feet. It's positively ghostly compared to my average peachy-pink, but I guess not all of us can be ghost girls, huh?
Like me, he possesses a square jaw, but it suits him, probably because he's a boy and it evens out his long, sleek nose with his face. He's got high, prominent cheekbones and small, slightly pointed ears which stick out either side of his head, half-coated with a mess of untamed, untidy blonde hair which fell around his jaw and was partly curled. Eyes green as freshly cut grass peppering the countryside which shone out of his pale face. A true vision of beauty and perfection to me and his female friends alike. Josh liked to make fun of Michael for having longer hair than most boys of his age, but I didn't mind it, in fact, I loved it. But he didn't view me as anything more than a friend, maybe even a little sister type of girl, which made it even more awkward.
Michael didn't have a girlfriend, much to my relief, but his friend Georgia, or Georgie as she was nicknamed, was completely stunning. Not inhumanely so, as the vampoari Esther's stuck with sound like, but definitely an eyecatcher. Figure like a swimsuit or lingerie model or something equally as gorgeous; dancer or ice-skater maybe? Fair-skinned like him, not his ivory, but still notably so. Golden eyes so honeycomb they looked borderline golden and long hair the colour of bitter, dark chocolate. I was surprised that Michael hadn't asked Georgia, in all her perfection and sophisticatedness with her red Lamborghini and designer outfits, not to mention wit and intellect, out. But maybe he'd finally take interest in a plane, dumpy, church-dressing girl like me. Hardy hah! Fat chance for the fat girl.
I don't dress like Carrie White from the Stephen King novel for fun, y'know. I dress like it because it's comfortable and safe, something that doesn't make me look too hideous; unlike Esther, drainpipe jeans make my legs look twice as bloated, strappy tops emphasise my broad shoulders, and I can't walk in heels to save my life. Most people are surprised to know I even own a swimming costume, but I do; sure it's plain, a navy blue with black stripes down the sides where my waist is, but I do own it and do where it in the spring and summer when we all go out for a family beach trip.
Over the past two years, we've had an extra member joining us on our trips out to the seaside and go swimming in the English sea. Matilda Sauer is my brother Edward's gorgeous, soft-spoken German girlfriend he met whilst doing his language A-Levels aged eighteen. Ed's now twenty-one, a full six years older than me, and Matilda's been living with him in York for two years now. They live facing a bridge called the Millennium Bridge in a small house overlooking and allotment plot.
When I first met Matilda, or Tilda as she's more commonly called, she could speak perfect English which almost surprised me. Till I remembered German students are taught English from a young age as well as their mother tongue, meaning she'd pretty much mastered our language as well as her own. Brownie point for her. I could tell why Ed had chosen her to be his girlfriend; polite, intelligent, melodic voice, beautiful, and even a little shy and awkward, not someone who'd try and run the family home when she arrived. My brother Chris has a habit of choosing over-domineering women who try and act like our house is their house all of a sudden and monumentally piss off my mother. Chris is travelling around Europe for his music degree or whatever he's up to now; and that surely means he's going to try and outdo Ed on the 'beautiful, European girlfriend' stake. Sure, she's going to be gorgeous, but she's also going to be rude, self-centred, bossy and extra domineering. Chris just attracts those types. Maybe it's because he can be rude, self-centred, bossy domineering and especially shallow. He's gorgeous and knows it all too well.
Like I've said, Ed is kind, maybe a little shallow and indecisive on what he wants to be now he's passed his A-Levels and could qualify as a teacher or something, but his kindness and all-round good attitude and nature means he attracts good natured, pleasant women like Matilda. About 97% of Ed's girlfriends have been good people, only 3% were bad choices. With Chris it's 97% who are bad choices, and the 3% of good ones never last because she always gets sick of him. I'd personally love Matilda and Ed to get married, but he's just too shy and indecisive to pop the question. Indecisiveness seems to run in my family, me included; I'm incredibly fickle over a lot of seemingly simplistic things. Clothes being the main one; because I am fat, dumpy and not at all attractive by any means, it takes a very good pair of jeans to drag people's eyes off my stomach, or my breasts, naturally they're larger than someone thin like Esther or my mum because of my stance.
"Oh god! Violet, is that you? I didn't expect to see you on a Friday night train!" An all too familiar voice calls, pulling me out of my blissful thought process, but I guess everything's become even more blissful once I look upwards. It's Michael! I smile like an idiot up at him, a pleasant grin breaking across my usually miserable face.
"Yeah…" My voice doesn't match the smile. It comes out painfully quiet and shy, a mousy whisper ghosting its way across the air, breezing around the carriage. "Esther's hurt her wrist so I want to go and pop by to make sure she's okay. And, I thought it'd be nice to go and see Ireland finally; seeing as we're going to be traveling there to see her some times."
"That sounds so cool," he laughs and smiles down at me. "Your parents are so lenient! I was sixteen before I was allowed to travel on a past six o'clock train. Josh is still sulking about it, but mum won't budge!" He laughs to himself and grins down at me. "Sorry to hear about Esther, she enjoying Ireland?"
"I think so…" Is all I can reply because there's no way I can tell Michael the truth about Esther. "She's made a couple of friends there. Apparently a guy who's the nephew of her mum's old friend approached her and now she hangs out with him at school. Kinda surprising seeing as she's always been really shy. I mean…You've never seen her when she's surrounded by people she doesn't know. She won't say two words."
That seems to amuse him again because he laughs that chiming, sparkling laugh which always makes me smile no-matter what the situation is. "Josh wanted me to pass on a message from him…Only I've forgotten it, so I guess I'll have to try and remember it in the ten minutes I'm left on this train." My heart sinks as I realise he's just travelling into one of the busier towns to visit someone but I try not to let it show. "And I have some news of my own!" He grins handsomely again as he sits down in the seat next to me. I simply nod as a gesture to tell him to continue. "Well, I've done it!"
"Done what?" I ask. I hate feeling confused and in the dark, it's my personal biggest hate which I put on my insecurities due to my weight; I hate being left out of the know. Not knowing what my friends have been saying or doing without me. It's my own personal issue.
"Got a girlfriend." I try to smile at him, I succeed, but it doesn't take away any of the sour, hate which is now building up in my chest, directly inside my heart. With a friend like Georgia, I never thought Michael was interested in dating because he hadn't asked her out, but I've now just been proven horrifically wrong. He was simply waiting for the 'right girl' as some people like to put it. Someone he knew he'd be perfected with, which explains why he never dated anyone during the whole duration of secondary school.
Swallowing back pretty much most of my embittered feelings, I manage to push the dreaded words out. "Who is she?" My voice luckily sounds even and composed, and Michael's clearly wrapped up in his own feelings of complete and total happiness to realise.
"I have a picture," he pulls his IPhone number whatever out of his pocket and flips it open, flicking through a series of pictures on it before he gets to the one I've been dreading the most. But then…Then all my resentment, anger and bitterness towards the girl run away the second I see her picture. She's in a wheelchair. She's disabled. Michael can see past the fact she can't walk and loves her anyway; that makes me love him even more hopelessly for accepting her for who she is. I can tell it's a permanent unable use of legs because she doesn't have any casts and her leg isn't being held up by anything, like you do if you break your leg. I only know this from the time Chris broke his leg when he was fifteen and had to be in a wheelchair. And it even looked a lot different to Michaels' girlfriend's one.
But of course, she is lovely looking, striking even for a seventeen year old girl. I can't guess a height because you'd have to see her lying down to get a proper guess at it, but I can tell she's not too tall for a girl of her age. Maybe about 5'5"? Her face is soft and heart-shaped, the shape we all wish to have, with dimples around her smile. Her features pretty much consist of all delicate, soft, gentle corners and curves. Her figure is slender but she's rounded, not overweight like me. She's naturally curvy, with a larger chest area than most of his other female friends, but a little smaller than my own. Her face is outlined with billowing, waves of chestnut honey brown curls which match her caramel coloured eyes. I can't hate her, despite the fact I want to.
"What's her name?" Obvious, boring, kinda shit question but it at least doesn't make my jealousy of her apparent and the less jealous I can make myself appear, the better.
"Laura," he says quickly and I'm kinda surprised. I thought she'd have a much prettier name to match her pretty appearance; not that Laura's not a pretty name. I just figured she'd be something like Amethyst or Emerald. "Laura Quinn. She has a younger sister I haven't met called Elissa, but she nicknamed herself Ellie at a young age." The name Ellie Quinn sounds familiar to me, but I can't quite place it, so I simply decide to be quiet and listen to what he has to say. Besides, it's polite isn't it? To not interrupt people while their speaking. "And, before you ask the next obvious question, I met her at school. She and her sister have just moved here with their uncle; their mum died a couple of months ago, a terminal cancer, so they've come to live her and we just…"
"Hit it off?" I offer him the words he cannot find.
"Yeah!" He grins merrily down at me. "You could say that! She was in a car accident when she was six which ended with her being paralyzed from the knees down; her mum looked after her most of her life because Ellie was too little to cope. She's really sweet, Violet, I know you'd like her." Swallowing back all my embitterment I manage to smile at him and looked gently out of the window as the train grinds to a halt. All the scenery just stops rushing past the window in a blurred, speedy fashion till the familiar platform of York greets us. "Well…I'm staying at her house tonight, so this is my stop." Michael smiles at me. "See you around some time Violet!"
"Bye…" I mumble. I wish he didn't have to go and see Laura, his beautiful, paraplegic girlfriend, but it's only fair. I can tell he loves her just by the shine to his eyes and pinkness to his cheeks whenever he mentions her name or begins to talk about her. I wish he didn't have to go, but he must.
The second train journey seems to last forever. When the train finally reached Edinburgh, I had to take the short trip from Platform 3 to Platform 5 to catch the train to Carcery Vale. Esther told me she was shocked the place even has a platform for trains, but luckily they do. I'm being picked up by some of the vampoari creatures which slightly unnerves me, but I plan not to let it show when I meet them. Frightening things only get more frightening if you openly show your fear of them.
But the train journey played out exactly as how I had expected it to. Uneventful and fairly boring by all average human standards. Not even a simple fight or argument happened but I tried to ignore that factor and concentrate on my happiness of seeing my best friend. Esther, being my only female friend, is obviously my closest one and only confident when it comes to manners such as boys, clothes, makeup or hairstyling. I did once make a painful attempt talking to Josh about dating but he went all mumbly and fidgety like he does when he's bored so I decided never to attempt that experience with him again. When Josh isn't enjoying something he can have a very childish, insensitive way of letting you know. Simply not even attempting to give a single fuck about anything you are telling him, and naturally, it's very affective.
I've never been able to decipher what Josh's' opinion of my best friend is; he talks to her, but isn't as friendly or confident as his brother but on the other hand, isn't completely obsessed with her like Alec (please, he's fooling no-one in this situation). He's never had a girlfriend either or really showed that much interest in girls in a generalization and, on more than one occasion, I'd wonder if it was girls in general he wasn't attracted to. Then again, Josh never seemed attracted to anyone, so I've recently been questioning if he's possibly just asexual and has no interest in sex or other people whatsoever. I personally have no problem with that and I don't think Mr and Dr Fane would mind that either, so all is well if he is.
I picked my phone out of my bag, a simplistic pink touchscreen; sure it had internet and such, but it was nowhere near the level of an IPhone or something. Technology and I aren't the best of friends; the only thing which seems to like me in the house is the toaster, even the microwave burns my food. I had one new message from Esther and I flipped open my phone to read it.
Hey, Vi, it's just me over here in Carcery Vale! The car's on its way to pick you up and I think Decha's driving, so you're in luck-he isn't too imposing and is actually quite the gentlemen. One request from me? Don't try talking to Lorcan, boy back from the dead, he can't speak a word of English. Marcella's promised to teach him but I don't know when, so I'll have to translate for you both, kay? Lots of love, Esther. xxxx
I chuckled slightly to myself and leaned back into my seat, staring into the twinkling lights of the city which pleasantly shone right back at me. Esther clearly liked this Lorcan boy, even though she wouldn't admit it, knowing her impeccable stubbornness. Soemthing seemed different in her voice every time she mentioned his name and the way she so willingly took to looking after him seemed odd. Sure, Esther had spent most of her recent life caring for Evie, her little sister, but some boy? Weird.