The Demon Between Us

My mother always said that to believe in normality was a lie humanity tells to assure themselves that there is nothing else.

I should have believed her.

When I first met Zoe, she was already on the bed opposite mine, knees drawn to her chest. She looked like a frightened rabbit. Big round eyes, a small voice and hunched shoulders that looked like she was trying to disappear into herself.

"Hi. I'm Arya. Your new roommate."

She gave me a smile, but it did not reach her eyes. "Zoe."

"That's it? Just Zoe?"

"What else?"

I laughed, but she didn't.

The sound of my own laughter made me cringe and I stopped it, fast.

The room was not large. Two beds, two desks, one window that faced the concrete-coloured university parking lot. White walls, stained floor, everything the typical university dorm room should look like. It was normal. Something my old life lacked in great quantity.

"So where do you come from?" I asked as I dropped my case on my bed.

"Nowhere."

"Everybody comes from somewhere, Zoe."

She looked at me for a long second. Her eyes were brown, perfectly normal, but they held something that I really wanted not to see.

"You wouldn't believe me." And with that she pulled a textbook out. The conversation was over and I didn't push.

It was three in the morning, and I was barely awake when I heard the whisper from the other side of the room. The room was dark except for the faint glow of my cell phone charger.

My eyes fluttered open.

Zoe was lying on her side, her back facing me. At first, I thought she was having a nightmare or something. Then I realized she wasn't blinking or tossing or moving in general.

I shrugged and was about to ignore it, when the sound came again. It was so strange I thought I was imagining things.

The words that came out of her were not English.

"Arak nal shirr, Keth vun dar..." she muttered, over and over again.

My eyes snapped open. She wasn't sleep-talking.

I pushed myself up on my elbows, staring at her. "Zoe," I called.

She looked...wrong. Her shoulders didn't move. And it just wasn't Zoe.

"Zoe," I called again.

No response.

I got off the bed and walked toward her. As I crossed the room slowly, every instinct screamed at me to stop. But I didn't.

I reached out and touched her shoulder. Then slowly, she turned her head to look at me. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was moving on its own. The voice coming from her mouth sounded nothing like her. It was scratchy and deep.

Then she said my name. Well, she said the name she thought was mine. Out of the blue, in a voice that was definitely not hers. That was when I noticed she was smiling in her sleep. What she was smiling about, I didn't know. But it was definitely not a friendly smile.

"Zoe, wake up," I said, shaking her shoulder.

Her eyes snapped open.

The voice disappeared, and the smile vanished.

There was nothing wrong. She was normal. Brown. Human. She blinked at me like I was the crazy one.

"What's wrong?" she asked. Her voice was hers again, soft and tired.

"You were talking in your sleep," I said. "In some weird language."

She frowned. "I don't talk in my sleep."

"You just did."

"I've never done that before." She pulled her blanket up to her chin. "You probably imagined it. Go back to sleep, Arya."

I wanted to disagree, but she was already rolling on her side. I stood there for a while before going back to my bed. I lay back down and stared at the ceiling.

My heart was hammering in my chest. I told myself it was only a dream. People talk in their sleep all the time. It didn't mean anything.

But I knew better.

Because six months ago, before my whole coven was murdered, my own mother would talk in her sleep too. She'd whisper the same type of words. Demon words. She was a powerful witch and she spent her whole life battling things that shouldn't exist.

The night before she died, she woke me up at three in the morning and told me, "Arya, if you ever hear someone speak the old tongue in their sleep, you run. You don't look back. You just run."

That night, I didn't run. I was too exhausted and too afraid of sounding crazy. Zoe was just a normal girl. She wasn't possessed. That sort of thing only happened in the movies.

That's what I told myself.

The next morning Zoe acted like she nothing had happened. She brewed coffee for the two of us in the dorm kitchen and asked if I wanted some. She amused herself by scrolling through TikTok on her phone. She was the same uninteresting, hair-shy roommate I'd stayed with for some weeks now.

Except I couldn't take my eyes off her.

"So," I said from my position on the bed. "Did you sleep well?"

"Yeah." She took a sip from the cup she was holding. "You?"

"Not quite."

She didn't push me on this. Another person would have! But she just smiled and chirped, "That's too bad."

I studied her face. Wrong smile.

"Hey, do you believe in demons?" I asked. I wanted to test her.

Zoe's hand jerked away from her coffee mug. Just for a moment. Then she chuckled. "Demons? No. That's idiotic."

"Really?"

She studied me closely. Her irises flickered, shimmering. For a brief second, I saw fire red against her eyes. Like someone had ignited a match and got it a little too close to her pupils.

Nope. Gone.

"I'm having a class." Her voice was high, grabbing her backpack. "Later. I got to run. See you."

She left the room.

I sat there alone, my heart lodged in the center of my chest.

I went to the library to escape my mind. I settled in the back corner and unpacked my tablet. I needed to speak to someone. Anyone. But I was truly alone. My coven was dead. My entire family, my mother was dead. I remained the only witch the world had gone on a witch hunt for.

And I had my only option. To keep pretending I'm not falling apart.

I was returning back from the campus library, trying to keep it together, when I saw him.

A tall, dark-haired man was leaning against the wall, just outside the female hostel. He was dreesed in black jeans and a black leather bomber jacket, though even here in the heat as oppressive as hell he didn't budge. He had black hair and pale skin, like he hadn't seen sunlight in years… Probably because he hadn't.

I knew what he was the second I saw him. The coldness emanated from him. The way his eyes stalked me as if I were food. The way my witch instincts went crazy with warning signals. I could hardly hear myself think.

Vampire.

His stormy gray eyes landed on me.

He pushed himself off the wall and started toward me.

"You're Arya," he said. His voice was smooth and deep, like velvet over broken glass.

I stopped walking. "Who's asking?" I said, keeping my voice steady.

"My name is Dorian." He smiled, and for a moment I thought I saw fangs. But it was probably just my imagination. "You don't know me, but I know you. And I know what's in your room."

My stomach went plummeting. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Your roommate," he said. "The one who talks in her sleep. The one whose eyes turn red when she thinks no one is looking." He stepped nearer; the air around him practically crackled with cold. "She's not sick, Arya. She's not crazy. She's possessed by a demon named Raze. And if you don't help me stop him, he's going to kill everyone in this hostel."

I wanted to run. I wanted to ignore him. But my legs refused to move.

"Why should I believe you?" I asked.

Dorian raised an eyebrow. "Because I'm the only one who knows you're a witch, and haven't killed you yet."

He drew his hand from his jacket pocket and held out a folded sheet of paper. "Meet me at the old chapel tonight at midnight. Come alone. And do not tell your roommate where you are going."

He turned his back and pushed through the crowd. He melted away among the students as if he'd never been there.

I looked at the paper.

It depicted a symbol I hadn't seen since the night my mother died. A demon trap. The kind used to catch things that weren't quite human.

My hands trembled.

I folded the paper and stuck it in my pocket. Then I went back to my room to meet Zoe who was sitting on her bed like nothing was wrong.

"Hey," she said. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

I managed a nervous laugh. "Something like that."

She grinned. That same evil grin.

And in the wall behind her in what appeared to be red marker were the wo

rds: She knows, Raze. Should I kill her now?

I blinked, and the words disappeared.

I either was going nuts, or my roommate was a demon. I wasn't sure which one was worse.