How did I know it was a demon's face if I had never seen them before?
I knew they existed. In bedtime stories.
But if you had been there, if you had been there on the day my life was stolen from me, you would've agreed that my father's mother was no longer human. Not a monster of fear and fangs, it was one that terrified silently.
Grandma—the demon's face was something from a terrible nightmare.
Her face (was it even her face, anymore?) retained almost none of her former ageless grace. The kind wrinkles had been replaced with glaringly sharp lines, which ran cruelly across the unyielding planes that were her cheeks. Her sun-kissed skin had lightened to an almost-white pallor, which made me feel like if I touched it, the unnatural paleness would come off her face like chalk dust on a blackboard. Instead of being eternally stretched upwards in a grandmotherly smile or set in iron authority, her mouth was pressed in a tight line, a smug, wicked smirk playing on her lips. Her lips, which had retained their alluring fullness but were a deathly purple, as if she had not breathed for days.
Not a beast of fur and flesh, but something far worse. Grandma looked like her but at the same time, there was nothing of her in her body. The changes were so subtle that if you did not know better, if you had not looked up to her your whole life, you might have dismissed it as a trick of the light and shadows.
And while our family's eyes were traditionally the fresh, clear colour of the sea, my darling grandma's eyes were...I could not describe them. If she were here still with me, she would chide me, saying that some things should be better left to the imagination.
There was no distinction between the whites and the irises, the pupils they surrounded. There was only emptiness, a gaping darkness.
They were blacker than the deepest abyss, empty as a deserted road in the loneliest and darkest of nights, as hungry as a black hole.
They did not shine. Did not twinkle.
Some eyes were young, innocent, childish. Some were wise with wrinkle lines around them. Some told the tales of a thousand cultures. Some hid secrets, some were cunning, some were weighed down and twisted with hate. Eyes—they could tell you so much. They could tell you if someone were seeing the world for the first time, or if they had lost the will to live.
These eyes did not live. Tendrils of darkness seemed to reach out of them, probing into my mind, seeing things I had never dared to face. Without thinking, I let out a wail. They were making me see things I'd not faced for years, the guilt of something people had tried to convince me I hadn't done. A secret I had not told anyone. But it had been no use. His blood would always be on my hands, and I was an evil person who didn't deserve the world... My vision turned grey, the colour leeching from it, but I didn't move, struck by terror as if by lightning, rooted to the spot. The pain of the crime I had committed stained my sight. I shrieked, the sound more like a raven's caw than a human cry. But I was not human—I was a murderer. I still remembered the sound of his body hitting the ground, the snow rising from his still form. Her scream of denial. Glassy eyes fixed on mine.
Eyes, like the ones that x-rayed me. For a minute I forgot about the events of the past, forgot what made me stand unable to move.
And what did those unholy eyes thirst for with the vengeance of a desert that had not seen rain for a thousand years?
Magic. Not the fairy magic in the stories, but a specific type of magic.
The Gifts.
I knew it just by looking at the demon my grandma had become, the one that had taken over her body. This demon wasn't made by the gods of the hell-realm to destroy, to kill. It was made to steal, steal magic, cut away magic from the souls of the Gifted. Leave them shattered without their power. How had she become this twisted monster? Was it Grandfather? Or had she been hiding, waiting for this moment, biding her time for years? I thought of the grandma who spoke to me, laughed and worked with me. How much of that had truly been her?
Grandma floated towards us, hovering without a hitch though without a fraction of her classic elegance. My blood curdled at the sight, a cowardly creature inside of me shying away at her unbroken stare. The moisture drained from my lips and I sucked in a breath. A chill shook me from the inside, tingling the tips of my fingers with a fragile electricity.
"Mother...?" Father asked fearfully. I had never seen him look so pitifully small.
But Grandma took no heed of him, her first son. Instead, she floated towards Mama, Mama who had fire, Mama who was Gifted and I had never known...for that, I felt ashamed. Ashamed that my calm, talented mother burned inside with a fiery passion like mine, and I had never known, even if it was her greatest secret.
Grandma flashed her teeth, jagged and hole ridden. Her black eyes crinkled at the corners, but with none of their old warmth.
The High Chieftess swept towards Mama and stretched out a hand. Her pretty, nimble fingers now looked wickedly long, suitable for prying into minds and souls, made for stealing. All the wrinkles gone, not smooth but hard.
And it was stealing that she did now, when she snuck into my mother's heart and soul, and took her fire away.
People say that seeing is believing. But even when my eyes followed those terrible granite talons sprouting from Grandma's fingers, I still told myself that I would wake up any second. I would not accept this. I couldn't.
My world, my life had been scrambled into a mess so thorough I might never be able to sort it out again. I didn't know if I could live through, no, survive the trauma and the agony that I went through that day. Father was right. In this world, in this twisted existence where demons did really exist, it was all you could do to survive. Never live. Survive. Survive, pick up yourself and carry on no matter what happened.
Because no matter what happened, the sun would keep on rising, the rest of the world would keep on moving, and if you were stuck, living in the past, you would never amount to anything. Never. Unless you stopped clinging to life and started surviving.
Because I didn't know if I could pick up the pieces of my fragmented life after I stood there unable to do anything while my mama turned into a demon, a living wraith. Perhaps not even living, not for much longer.
While a black shape was released from the tips of Grandma's razor-sharp nails and dissolved into Mama's chest, where I knew a chain held her tethered to this world while her magic belonged in the realm of the gods.
An axe with a mahogany handle, made to sever that chain forever.
The part of her that lived and sang for life, her magic, had been taken from her, was she not allowed to die in all the ways that mattered? I hated that I had to stand there unable to look away while she twisted on the floor, while her skin paled and her eyes turned to onyx, while I gave her the only mercy I could—the gift of watching instead of turning away in shame.
I could almost see the heat leaving her body in waves, gobbled up by her own mother-in-law, who stood there devouring her magic, tasting it like fine wine.
An axe. That had become a scrap, a base of sin. A core of malicious, fiendish thought, a seed of darkness.
Planted in an unwilling garden.
I could see the dissipating flames that raged through the air, searching for something to burn.
Every second. Every minute that we stood there, my father's arms clutched in my clenched hands, she was suffering. And yet I couldn't move.
Every second.
The clock tower tolled somewhere far, far away. As if on cue—a funeral gong.
I could see Mama protesting, trying desperately to worm out of Grandma's iron grip, to dislodge the axe buried in her. Clawing at the walls of the never-ending pit she was falling into, digging broken nails into an unyielding wall, grappling with all her might for purchase.
I could see her skin turning to ice as the fire and human warmth left her body, leaving it like a frozen shell.
I could sense that the mother who loved me was still in there, still fighting as she got up, every trace of colour leeched from her skin. Maybe I was imagining it, but for the memory of the mother I had known, I said she was still fighting it, fighting it as she joined Grandma, sneering a smile that didn't reach her eyes, once forever uptilted in warmth, and faded into the forest without the slightest acknowledgement of Father. Father, the Chief who was to rule, to whom the role of High Chief had just been passed to, who stood there, swaying slightly like a paper marionette whose strings had been cut.
And me? I was dumbfounded. Nonplussed. Flabbergasted. All of the strongest synonyms for 'shocked' that my writing teachers had taught me in a lifelong gone couldn't amount to what I was feeling now. Did their blood relation to me make me, who was Gifted as they were, immune to them? Or were my powers still too weak for them, evil spirits who were as old as dirt, to pick up and take away, either to feed off or give as an offering to their nefarious master?
Pick up, as if a god's Gift was a basket of strawberries stolen from a bush in a rolling field and brought back home to feast on.
I could not summon tears. They were nothing, while I drifted in an ocean of shock. They were nothing, while rain fell endlessly from the dark sky.
Could I get the two women who had been in my life since birth back? There was no coming back from death. Was there coming back from this? From the taking of their Gift, from the transformation of good as a human could be to bad? Was it so black and white? Good to bad, and someone you've known since forever is gone?
Gone.
The clock tower tolled for the twelfth time.
Gone.
And yet, that is the way death works. One mortal wound, either progressive or sudden, and that person is gone. That person, that you may have hated or shared memories with, scorned or treasured.
Gone forever, until you joined them amongst the home of the devils.
Then, I knew, that this was like what Father had told me about. They disappear, vanishing into thin air. So these demons hunted the Gifted—and took them back to their sacrilegious hideout, or headquarters, or even hell, whatever, wiping the memories of everyone they loved. But I could still remember. I still remembered Mama's lovely face, her brown eyes and rosy, sharp cheeks.
I still remembered the fierceness stark in her dark eyes a moment before she was taken from me. I still remembered. And that made it so much worse.