I am a demon. Suddenly, it all makes sense.
I’m going to be sick.
“Penelope, sit down here,” Gran says. I feel her hands on my shoulders guiding me to a chair. I know she’s talking, but I only hear my own heart beating. Open your eyes. The truth was right there all this time. I didn’t see it. I didn’t want to see it.
My eyes focus in on Gran. “Why wouldn’t you tell me this?”
Her lips quiver. “I-It’s a long story, Penelope.”
“I’m a demon! A demon.” I repeat it until it fits more into my own head. It sounds wrong to say about myself, but it feels oddly natural. The piece I’d been missing. I look right at her. “I think I can handle a long story,” I say.
Gran touches my hair, my arm, and then nods. She stands and wrings her hands together. “We don’t know everything, Penelope. You have to understand that it was a long time ago.”
She pauses and I cross my arms. I know it looks like I’m mad, which I am, but I’m really trying not to puke. Gran sits beside me on some old dusty beanbag chair. Normally, I’d make a joke, but my brain doesn’t want anything to sway her. Demon.
“One day Emmaline’s parents opened the door—months and months after she left—and there were two babies there on the doorstep. Two girls, that journal, and that letter with their names on it. Emmaline’s youngest brother, Matthew, and his wife raised them.”
Gran twists her wedding ring around her finger. “They had to be very careful—not knowing if they were demonic or not. There was no sign that they were any different, but when they were old enough, the girls were told about their mother.”
I shift in the seat, confused. “So Beatrice and Clara weren’t demons?”
“No, but demon blood flowed through them.” Gran pauses, then gets up off the chair and returns to the spot in the floor. I watch her back while she digs around for something and comes back with a long piece of parchment. She spreads it across the floor. It’s a family tree, more detailed than the one in the Umbra I had read. With more names.
“If you look at the family tree, you’ll see that both girls only had one child—and that was purposeful.” I move closer to the paper and Gran runs her finger down the line. One child each. “Since they weren’t certain how the demonic gene got passed along, they weren’t sure what could happen. To not have children would have been safest prevention, but it would have caused many questions. Children continued the magical line and they were expected, needed even. So they believed they could have fewer children and lower the possibility of having a demonic child.
I shake my head. “But the longer that goes on the more likely it would become.”
“Exactly, but they didn’t know the genetics back then,” Gran says. She rearranges the way she’s sitting, and I sit beside her, the whole of our family spread out next to us. “Beatrice made sure her child knew about her biological parents, and I believe that’s why there are so few of us—one a generation until my sister and me.”
I look to the family tree, my eyes following along as she speaks. But then I stop and point to Clara. Clara, who had one child, who also only had one child, but that child had four. Gran nods at my unspoken question.
“Clara’s family didn’t adhere to the same belief in the power of a smaller family versus a larger one. By the time Seraphina and I were born, I had twenty-four cousins—and that’s not including the rest of the family.”
Clara’s family doubled and tripled up until the time Gran was born. My family is huge. Gran starts to say something else, but I put up a hand. “Wait. Why have I only met like nine of them?”
Gran looks away from me. She rolls up the parchment a little ways, then stops suddenly.
“Because those are the only ones who survived.”
I open my mouth to speak and close it again, confused. Gran turns back to face me, takes my hand in hers. “Things were different back then. The Nons were fighting a war against another country, and so were the witches—against demons. They were powerful then, tapping into something we didn’t have. I had a cousin named Suree, and she was so smart,” Gran says, removing her hand from mine. She twirls the ring she always wears around her finger.
“I was only six at the time, but she was my favorite person.” She holds up the ring. “This was hers. I would follow her around everywhere. We were at the park one day, Suree was next to me on the swings, and we saw Enforcers stationed all around the playground. They were tracking demons. They had this thing back then that worked sort of like a dog whistle—only affecting those on the same frequency of demons.”
Gran’s voice cracks, and I pull her hand to mine. “What happened to her, Gran?” Even though I feel like I know the answer, I need to hear it.
“She fell over, off the swing, and started convulsing. Blood poured out of her ears, her eyes, her nose, and her mouth. She yelled, pulled at her hair, and dug her nails into her own skin. The Enforcers took her away. We never saw her again.” She has to pause to take a breath, to force back the tears. I’ve only seen Gran cry once, and that was when Mom died.
“There were others too, others who woke up one day, claimed themselves demonic and started killing witches. Alfie Spencer was one of them. He eventually killed his own wife and then he led the others away from our world.” Gran wipes away tears from her eyes. Her hand squeezes mine and then she pulls me into a hug.
“Gran.”
“I didn’t tell you about this because it’s an ungracious part of our family history,” she says in my ear, her tears touching my face. She looks at the tree, pointing to a name.
“My grandfather was in the Triad. He used his power to hide all traces of Emmaline, the demon Azsis, and the demonic carriers in our family history right after it happened. He stepped down once the job was done and everyone swore to never speak of it if our family renounced Triad claim. It was better for the common good to keep it quiet. That’s why there were no records; I thought this journal was lost.”
I nod and gulp back some of my insecurity. For the first time, I feel like it makes sense. Like I make sense. “Did Mom know?”
“She did.”
“Then why not tell me and Connie? Why keep it a secret? It’s something that affected us too.”
Gran sighs and rolls up the family tree. “No one on Beatrice’s side of the family had any abnormalities in magic—not for six generations.”
“And then I was born.”
“No, and then your parents were killed. Your essence was stolen and your magic still worked, just differently.” Gran shakes her head and tosses the paper back in the secret place, replacing the floorboard. “Maybe we were misguided, but everyone I loved died that year; I couldn’t watch that again. I couldn’t risk anyone finding out, Penelope. I couldn’t lose you like I lost others. Not after losing Genevieve.”
Gran is almost in tears again, so I rest a hand on her shoulder. “I’m still here.”
Gran smiles, but I can’t smile back. This isn’t that easy.
“What happened to the demon Azsis?” I ask. I wonder if Gran knows that he’s the one who killed Mom and Dad. That he’s the one who stole my powers.
Gran shook her head. “I’m not sure. No one has heard from him since Emmaline’s disappearance, at least none who have mentioned it.”
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything. If she did, would she have been more willing to tell us? I start to share it with her, but when she looks at me, I can see all the pain and death on her face in a way she concealed before. I don’t want to add to it. I can’t tell her. Not yet.
“Connie needs to know,” I say instead. “You have to tell her about Emmaline and the demon blood. No more secrets, Gran.” She nods slowly. “And I’m telling Carter.”