Dealing with a Desperate Demon (The Sanctuary for Supernatural Creatures #2)

Prologue

She wasn’t sure what would happen when she tried to write the story of her heart.

After all, even little things she had written before now had made some extremely weird things happen.

Magical things, of the sort that she knew rationally shouldn’t exist. But deep in her soul she understood that they did. They had.

She’d heard animals speak.

Seen moonbeams come alive and make a bed for her to lie on.

Felt her feet leave the ground in a way feet definitely were not supposed to.

And even if she hadn’t been able to believe that this magic was real and something she had somehow created out of simple words, she would have understood the reality of that.

The power of it. It was the real reason it made her father furious—he knew, somehow, that she wasn’t just a teenager, refusing to let go of childish things.

He knew she hadn’t somehow gone round the twist.

Both her parents did.

And they were scared, unsettled, uncertain whether a girl should have that sort of power. Heck, her father barely liked her doing well in school or enjoying a good book. There was no way he’d ever be able to stomach what this was. He wanted to crush it, plain and simple.

But worse: she knew he was succeeding.

She was starting to squeeze it all down.

Make it all small. Hide it, in a way that almost felt like forgetting.

Sometimes she couldn’t quite recall how she had made the television talk to her.

Or what it had said, when she did. All she really had of it now was the impression of shapes on the screen, something soothing, putting her hand on the glass and feeling so loved for a moment that it made her ache.

Like a perfectly fine tooth had been pulled from the root of her heart, and all she had now was the sore, empty space it left behind.

It was unbearable sometimes. But worse: it was getting easier to stand.

To let it all disappear into a fog, instead of holding on to something slowly getting more and more painful.

So she had to do this now.

One last big swing, before she wasn’t strong enough to do it.

Not just a line or two, a paragraph, but a whole story.

A whole bunch of words that might make magic happen.

And she knew just what story to tell, too.

One about loneliness, about longing. About wanting something more than the bitter, mundane reality of nobody actually liking you.

Always being too much for everyone, always being too big.

I want to find who I’m just right for , she thought.

And who is just right for me.

A soul that meets my soul.

Then she began. She stuffed every inch of that feeling into her words. Once upon a time , she wrote, there was a prince who wasn’t . And the second she did she felt it. That sense of magic being real. The glow that began at her fingertips and spread through her. Only this time, it was strong .

It almost felt as if it made the world shake. Like it made everything shake. She looked up at the stars through the window she was sitting at, and saw them tremble in the heavens.

But she didn’t stop.

She kept going.

She called to whoever was out there, just like she’d seen in a million fantastical things she loved.

That book, that film, that music video. All imaginary for everyone else, but not for her, not for her.

She could do this. She could almost feel that person.

Feel him, because he wanted to be a him, feel what he looked like, because he had chosen his face, his form.

God only knew what he really was.

But oh, it didn’t matter to her.

She wasn’t afraid. She was filled with a rushing, wonderful sense of building bliss, her body entirely open to it, every aspect of her suffused with magic and love and emotion.

He is come, he is come, at last my love has come to me , she thought, and when she did she realized her cheeks were wet.

Her heart was hammering fit to burst. It blasted in her ears like the gong that rang at the start of creation.

She didn’t even hear her father until he had snatched the pen out of her hand.

Scratched a line across the page where the last words of the story were supposed to go.

She couldn’t even remember what the last words were, now that she was looking up at her father’s furious face.

All she could really understand was that he had her pen, her special pen, the one she thought of as her wand .

And when he snapped it in two, every bit of magic that she’d held in her head?

It went with it.