The Hunt (15 page)

No matter when exactly it started, Luke had definitely ended up with some feelings, some more than just friendly feelings, for Eve. He wondered what she’d say if he asked her out.

‘Are you coming in? Or are you going to stare some more?’ Eve teased him.

Luke shook his head. ‘I was just letting my dad see that I’m being allowed in.’ He turned and waved, and his dad slowly drove off.

‘He’s never letting you outside until they catch the animal, right?’ Eve asked.

‘Yeah. I didn’t know he could be more worried than he already was, but he managed it,’ Luke said as he stepped into the house.

‘Same with my parents,’ Eve said. ‘Like it’s not bad enough that we have demons to deal with, now we have to save the social life of Deepdene too.’

‘And convince our parents that this fictional animal is gone,’ Luke added.

Eve smiled. ‘Jess is already here. We’re up in my room. Come on.’ She led the way up the stairs.

‘Luke! Yay! You’re here!’ Jess cried when he sat down in the chair in front of Eve’s desk. Luke grinned. Sometimes Jess was like a puppy. It had only been about four hours since she saw him last, but she’d given him a first-day-back-at-school greeting.

‘I’m here! Hi!’ he exclaimed. ‘Wassup, girlfriend?’

‘Evie has a present for you!’ Jess exclaimed.

‘Jess …’ Eve playfully shook her finger at her friend. ‘What part of “secret” was confusing to you?’

Luke raised his eyebrows. ‘A present?’

Eve pulled a large box out from under her bed and handed it to him. He gave it a shake. No rattle. More of a soft shhhh.

‘He’s like a little boy at Christmas,’ Jess joked.

What could Eve have decided to give him? Only one way to find out. He opened the box. A layer of crisply folded tissue paper blocked his view. He did not even want to think about how much she’d spent. He had to remind himself that money wasn’t the same for Eve and Jess and their families as it was for him and his dad.

Luke peeled the tissue away and gave a snort of laughter. A blazer. Eve had gotten him a replacement for the jacket she’d torched.

‘It’s from 7 for All Mankind. Contemporary fit.
Mid-weight cotton Oxford. Very nice. Very you, I think,’ Jess told him. ‘And that grey-blue colour – I think Eve made the perfect choice.’

‘I hope you like it,’ Eve said. ‘I convinced my mom that we could squeeze in a ten-minute shopping stop on Main Street on the way home from the library.’

He slipped it on. ‘It’s great. Might look a little better if it had a scorch mark on the sleeve or something. Can you work on that?’ he asked her.

‘Just stay close, and I’m sure it’ll happen,’ she answered.

‘I have a present for you too. Kind of.’ Luke opened his backpack and pulled out a big stack of large envelopes stuffed with papers. ‘These are records from the church, which, as one of the first buildings in Deepdene, has been around for hundreds of years. There’s tons of stuff about births, deaths and marriages.’ He passed out the envelopes. ‘The good news is, the info that we need to find Medway’s descendant is probably somewhere in here. The bad news is, it’s not organized very well at all.’

‘It’s better than nothing,’ Eve said, opening one of her envelopes.

Luke opened the top one in his pile. The smell of old paper rose out of it. He gently removed what
turned out to be a stack of birth certificates. ‘If you find anything, shout,’ he said. ‘We can piece together a Medway family tree.’

They began to work in silence. ‘I have a Mattie Dee Medway marrying Bertram DeGroff in 1782,’ Eve volunteered.

‘Mattie Dee and Bertram. Love those names,’ Jess commented.

Luke jotted down a note for the tree. ‘OK, so there could be a DeGroff somewhere who is a descendant of our Mr Medway.’

‘
Lord
Medway,’ Eve corrected him. ‘That’s what it said on the deed for the land.’

‘There are no DeGroffs in town that I can think of,’ Jess said. ‘We can check the phone book.’

‘I can get it online. OK if I use your computer?’ Luke asked Eve.

‘Sure,’ she said.

‘Just don’t read Evie’s email while you’re on there,’ Jess teased. ‘It’s full of love notes.’

Eve threw a pillow at Jess, and they both laughed. Luke didn’t answer. Was Jess serious? Eve
was
really popular, and Luke had noticed the way guys vied for her attention. How many of them were trying to go out with her?

You know what?
Luke told himself.
Think about that once you’ve found the person who can close the portal
. He turned to Eve’s computer and quickly checked for DeGroffs in Deepdene. ‘No DeGroffs,’ he announced.

‘We don’t know for sure that the person we’re looking for actually lives in Deepdene. I keep forgetting that,’ Eve said. ‘There are a ton of other towns nearby.’

‘All the attacks have been in Deepdene,’ Jess said. ‘And the portal is here. And Mal went to Deepdene High. It seems like there’s serious demon loyalty to this village.’

‘It was named Demondene back in the day for a reason. I guess demons like to vacation in the Hamptons too,’ Luke said. ‘Let’s keep working on the assumption that we’re looking for someone in Deepdene for now. We can go wider if we have to, but we know for sure somebody was in town last month to open the portal.’ They all returned to sorting through the papers.

‘There are Coles on our tree, right?’ Jess asked a couple of hours later.

Luke consulted the rough family tree – one with lots of missing branches – he’d pulled together. ‘Yeah. One of Lord Medway’s granddaughters, Ruth Alice
Medway, married a guy called Fred Cole,’ he answered. ‘You got something?’

‘I have a Lisa Cole who married Alex Groshart in 1962,’ Jess said.

‘Groshart?’ Eve exclaimed. ‘There are definitely Grosharts here!’

‘I know!’ Jess waved the marriage certificate in her hand. ‘Helena Groshart.’

‘And Helena’s mom’s name was Lisa. I remember from her obituary,’ Eve said.

‘Yay us! All right!’ Jess cheered.

‘Whoop!’ Eve added, flopping back onto her bed, where she and Jess had been sitting while they worked.

Jess flopped back too. ‘We found the descendant. Poor girl. I completely understand how Helena forgot to close the portal. Her mom died a few weeks ago, and then look what happened to Kyle …’

Eve wiggled one finger at Luke without sitting up. ‘Get over here! We all deserve a rest.’

Luke got up, moved some papers and found a spot to lie down on the bed. ‘So we have to talk to Helena.’ It was a little difficult to keep his mind on the demon situation. He was on Eve’s bed, breathing in the spicy, flowery scent of the perfume she always wore. He
couldn’t help imagining her in the bed, with all her amazing curls tousled by sleep. She probably … He got his brain back under his control. ‘Should we call her now?’

‘No. This is definitely a face-to-face kind of conversation,’ Eve said. She looked at the clock. ‘It’s almost nine. Let’s wait until tomorrow. My mom will have too many questions if I ask her to drive me over there now. And there’s no way she’ll let me walk, even if all three of us were going together.’

‘We’ve done enough for today,’ Jess proclaimed. ‘I declare it chill time. Let’s order some pizza, watch some movies, eat some Cherry Garcia ice cream. You have Cherry Garcia, right?’

‘Of course,’ Eve answered. ‘You should sleep over.’

‘Slumber party!’ Jess gave a fist pump. ‘I’m so there!’ Sometimes it was very easy to remember that Jess was a cheerleader. Luke liked that about her.

Eve sat up and looked over at him. ‘You too, Luke. We can set up sleeping bags in the living room.’

Heat washed through Luke’s body. This was … something. Eve wouldn’t invite him to stay over unless she kind of liked him, would she? Well, obviously she liked him. She’d gone out and gotten him a present.

The demon fighting had brought the three of them really close really fast. But this was different. This wasn’t demon-related. It was social. Eve wanted to hang with him. So maybe if he asked her out, she’d say yes.

‘Do you really want me here, at a girly slumber party?’ he joked.

‘Of course we want you,’ Eve replied, and Luke got that heat rush again. ‘You’re an honorary girl.’

An honorary girl? The heat drained from his body.

Face reality
, he told himself.
I might want to be more than friends with Eve, but she doesn’t think of me as anything more than a pal. Practically a gal pal, for godssake
.

He shoved himself up from the bed. ‘No, thanks. I’ve got nothing to say about nail polish or shoes. I wouldn’t be any fun.’

He saw a flash of hurt cross Eve’s face. He
had
been a little harsh. But so what? He took his cell out. ‘I’ll call my dad to pick me up.’

Eve stuck her iPhone in her pocket as she and Jess started down the steps of her front porch late the next morning. Their parents had agreed the two of them could walk over to Helena’s as long as they stayed
together and got themselves home well before dark. All the attacks had been at night, so most people were willing to ease up on the rules ever so slightly during the day.

‘What did Luke say? Is he going to meet up with us so we can all talk to Helena together?’ Jess asked.

‘No.’ Eve shoved her hair behind her ears.

‘Why not?’ Jess asked.

‘Why not?’ Eve repeated. ‘Because he has something more important to do. He has a date with Briony.’

‘He said that was more important?’ Jess exclaimed.

‘He didn’t have to say it. He made his choice,’ Eve said testily. She’d thought something was starting up with Luke. Wrong. The holding hands, the hugging – that had only happened because they had been in some extreme situations together. It had been about support and comfort, not anything more.

Just as well
, she thought.
Luke’s a player. That’s not going to change. Even if he was interested in me, it would only have been for a week or two
.

She let out a sigh. ‘So how do we do this?’ she asked as they walked. ‘We can’t just say, “Hi, Helena, we’ve noticed there are some demons around. Did you maybe forget to close the portal?” ’

‘I guess not,’ Jess agreed. ‘She might have no idea
about the portal. There might be another descendant who opened it.’

‘I hate that we have to talk to her about it at all,’ Eve admitted. ‘She’s gone through so much, losing her mom and Kyle less than a month apart.’

‘It’s strange to see Helena so quiet and sombre,’ Jess said. ‘She was the captain of the cheerleading squad for a reason. She was just up, up, up all the time, with all this pep and energy.’

‘I can’t believe the school didn’t give her a break and at least let her stay on the squad,’ Eve commented.

‘The policy is, you have a D in a class, you’re off. And Helena’s algebra grade …’ Jess shook her head. ‘But she was scraping by with a C before her mom died. I think the principal, and Ms Taylor, and our coach should have worked out some kind of exception. At least given her a little time to pull the grade up before they kicked her off the team.’

‘Lame. So many bad things have happened to her, and they went ahead and took away something that made her happy,’ Eve said.

‘So happy,’ Jess agreed. ‘When the coach announced that she’d chosen Helena as head cheerleader, it was like Helena was half-firefly. She glowed. Really. Happiness was shining out of her.’

She stopped walking, and Eve realized they’d already reached Helena’s house. This was one of those times she wished Deepdene was a little bigger. She could have used more time to figure out the best way to approach this talk.

‘Ready?’ Jess asked.

‘I guess.’ Eve and Jess followed the path that ran through the garden to the front door. Eve hesitated a second, then knocked. No turning back now.

Helena opened the door almost immediately. ‘I’m so glad you two called and said you wanted to come by.’

She looked much better than she had the last time Eve had seen her. Of course, that had been at Kyle’s funeral. Helena hadn’t been to school since, and there were still rumours about her being suicidal. But Helena’s cheeks were pink, her hair was shiny and she had a smile on her face – a real smile, not a duty smile. ‘Come on in,’ she urged.

‘How’re you doing?’ Jess asked. ‘You seem a little better.’

‘I am,’ Helena agreed. ‘I’m going back to school tomorrow. I’m ready. I miss people! That’s why I’m so glad you girlies came to visit.’ Helena sounded a lot like her old cheerleader self, even if she wasn’t a cheerleader any more.

‘Come on in. I went overboard on the snacks. We can feast.’ Helena ushered Eve and Jess into the living room.

‘You weren’t kidding,’ Jess said, taking in the bowls of popcorn, M&Ms, pistachios, veggies and dip.

‘Where’s your dad?’ Eve asked.

‘Oh, he’s out of town,’ Helena said cheerfully. ‘He travels for work a lot.’

Eve took a seat on the couch and nibbled on a stick of celery.
I’ve got to do it
, Eve thought.
I’ve got to ask her about the portal. But how – really, how – do I start a conversation like that?

‘Helena, would you think I was crazy if …’ Eve paused, then rushed on. ‘Would you think I was crazy if I wanted to talk to you about Lord Medway, and demons and … and portals to hell?’ Jess choked on an M&M, and Eve shot her an apologetic look. It definitely hadn’t been an elegant approach, but at least it was out there.

Eve braced herself, ready for Helena to laugh or to say that yes, she would definitely think Eve was crazy.

Helena’s green eyes widened. ‘You know about that too?’ she exclaimed. ‘My mom told me it was a secret. But if you know about it, then it obviously isn’t.’

Hmm. I guess honesty is always the best way to go
,
Eve thought. She hadn’t expected Helena to be quite so quick to talk about this.

‘We do know,’ Jess said. ‘But we don’t know a lot.’

‘We know that there’s this portal that has to be opened every hundred years by a descendant of Lord Medway,’ Eve began.

‘Uh-huh. I guess it’s OK for me to talk about it, if it isn’t a secret after all. When my mom first told me our family had this sacred duty to allow demons through the portal, I was all – “not me”,’ Helena said, grabbing a handful of chips. ‘But it turned out to be no big deal. I shut the portal because I knew my mom would want me to. We had this whole talk about it a couple of years ago. She wanted me to know what to do with the portal, if she couldn’t.’