Demon in Love (Book 3)

Prologue -Karen- I shook my head quickly. “I thought you just told me not to trust anyone, not even myself,” I said to Crane. “Then why do you want me to trust this guy I’ve never met in my whole life.” “Victor wanted you to meet this friend of his,” Crane replied immediately. “He told me before he gave the note to me.” “S.crew Victor and his note,” I yelled. Jon choked on the cupcake he was chewing on. Coughing loudly, he raised one of his eyebrows at me. I glared at him. We were discussing an important matter here, and he was nibbling on a vanilla cupcake from the shop which Crane had offered to us, but of course, Jon was the only person to take it.   I was furious. Not at my best friend for eating a stupid vanilla cupcake. He could eat the entire shop for all I cared. I was furious at Victor Devries, the mad vampire who went the other way. He had tried to kill Nate and had left a note for me. And what did the note say? He wanted me to kill him. Oh, I wanted to kill him so bad…for writing such a foolish thing. How could he just write whatever he wanted in that messy handwriting of his and disappear? “Victor has spoken to me about him a lot, Karen. And you need to be polished with your powers,” Crane shrugged. “You might be a powerful witch but having powers doesn’t make you a master in using them. The person I mentioned is extremely trained with his powers. He is the best wizard, plus he lives in your town.”  “Dumbledore lives in our town?” Jon asked with his mouth full. His references were tolerable when the time to make them was peaceful. I had a weird desire to keep screaming and never stop. It was all messed up. Apparently, Jon didn’t care about the note from Victor. He didn’t even make any remarkable comments on it. But as I knew him very well, I knew he was just trying to hide how he felt. He wanted me to think that he didn’t care because this was a temporary phase we were going through. I was afraid this was anything but temporary. “I think we should meet him,” Nate spoke for the first time. He had gone into a very silent mode after hearing me read the note. His face was dark, with no signs of serenity. I sighed, looking at him. Though he looked like he wanted to give up, he was still trying his best to not. His jaw was tightly clenched, and he looked at me for a longer moment than usual, like he wanted me to hear his thoughts. That was not possible for me. However, I could clearly see his eyes wincing. “Are you sure, Nate?” I asked finally. It took him a minute to respond. “Victor is gone and we need to find him, no matter how we do it,” He said, moving close. “I hate him, yes, I do. But we have to find him. All I can say after seeing him is; he needs our help.” This came as a surprise to me. Did he really want to help Victor rather than kill him after how he attacked him? Well, his voice was filled with concern and desperation which certainly showed he meant it. “So we aren’t going to kill him when we meet him?” Jon asked. In an instant, Nate’s face altered from gloomy to angry. To be honest, I was too tired to stop him from killing Jon. I could swear the room temperature went down to some degrees as Nate clenched his hands into fists, ready to attack. Jon raised his eyebrows and shrugged casually, “Thinking of how he attacked you last time we met, I don’t think when we see him next time he will be all ‘hey, guys what’s up? Wanna hang out and have drinks.’ What do you think?” Seriously, I didn’t know what to think. He was kind of right. Considering Victor’s response and the animalistic behavior he had shown in the woods, I couldn’t imagine him being calm and talkative to us. He was going to kill us. And I was his first target. He was going to come back for me.   “Don’t even think about hurting him,” Nate growled. “We’ve to find him and Kaitlin.” Suddenly, it struck me. Nate didn’t really care about finding Victor or anything. He only cared about having Kaitlin back. All the time when I thought he was worried about his brother, I was wrong. The pieces were getting into the right spaces of the puzzle in my head. He was concerned about what had happened to Kaitlin. Probably he wanted to catch Victor and learn where Kaitlin was. He wanted to know if she was alive or not. And if he ever found out that she wasn’t…he wouldn’t think twice before killing Victor. I had seen the rage in his eyes earlier. I was done. How could he do this? Out of all people, Nate, who was supposed to be always sweet and understanding, he was the one who was now filled with revenge. It’s funny how drastically one accident could change people. Some part of him cared for Victor in the beginning but now I could see how it had vanished into nothingness. I couldn’t blame him entirely. He loved her for a long time. I needed to focus on the matter at hand. If we were going to meet Victor soon, I had to be ready to face him. When the time came, I wasn’t going to stand there and watch the two brothers rip apart each other’s hearts. “I think we should meet our guy,” I turned towards Crane who was watching the drama silently. His frowning face showed that he had also deduced the fact regarding Kaitlin. “Where can I find him? And what is his name?” “His name is Zayasu Ukyo and he is a normal college student. Well, he is anything but normal,” Crane mumbled the last sentence. “Just tell him that you’re Victor’s friends, and I sent you there. And I’m positive; he would know you and Nathan very well. But he will run his peculiar experiments to make sure you’re real.” “Make sure we’re real?” I was confused. “Like what? Will he take our blood samples or something?” Crane chuckled. “No, he won’t try. He has his ways of knowing the truth. Be cool and just go to him. He is a good teacher in witchcraft.” “Where did he learn it from?” I asked. “He belongs to another powerful bloodline and his parents taught him whatever they could,” He replied. “He lives alone now as his parents preferred Japan to spend the rest of their lives. He stayed back to complete his studies.” “Are we really going to meet this guy?” Jon interrupted. I looked at Nate who was staring off at the wall, drowned in his own thoughts. No, I wasn’t looking at him for his approval. I was looking at how different he looked now from the first time we had met. He was still the same Nate with the same green eyes and a handsome face but his features were dark now. Those green eyes were darkly fixated on the wall, wondering about the coming future. He was making plans. Plans to get his love back and kill his brother. I was warned not to trust anyone which included Nate too. What was I going to do if we found Victor or he found us first? Was I ready to kill the guy I had kissed and genuinely liked? I couldn’t even imagine myself raising a stake to drive it through his heart. Those eyes, that face, his voice…I couldn’t let him die, let alone kill him. My head started hurting. I looked at Jon. “Yes, we are,” I said, nodding at him. “I want to know what clues Victor has left for us.”