An old song by The Partridge Family filled Joelynn's ears. She tried moving her arms but couldn’t. It felt like they were tied up and her eyes had a blindfold over them. Something was on her head too. She couldn’t see and she couldn’t move. What the hell was going on? She started to scream for help until a man came to where she was at. She was blindfolded, but she could hear him breathing.
“Joelynn, I would stop screaming if I were you.”
She felt the tip of a knife caress her cheek. She immediately stopped screaming and started whimpering.
“That’s better,” he said. “I’m sorry for the blindfold. I don’t normally make my girls wear them but you’re a special case.” The knife began to travel down her neck and across her shoulder towards her right arm. He wasn’t cutting her, just letting her feel the cold knife against her hot skin.
“I’m sorry I had to take you like this. You can blame your cousin. The more she tries to find out information about me…the more I want to punish her.” As he said the last words, he pressed the tip of the knife into the inside of Joelynn’s right arm. It was a shallow puncture, but it still made her cry out in fear.
“I would’ve gone after her directly but that’s not fun. Scaring her…that’s fun.” He began to make shallow wounds in her right arm and then her left. He wished he could leave permanent scars on her so that if Eva saw her, she would always be reminded of the power he held, but he didn’t want to kill Joelynn. Not yet.
“I texted your cousin. She’s willing to trade her life for yours. Will you let her do that Joelynn? Will you let her die for you?” Joelynn didn’t answer. Instead she continued to cry in fear, making low guttural sounds that annoyed him. “Answer me, bitch!” He struck her face with his gloved hand.
Joelynn squealed and in between sobs answered, “Yes.”
His low sinister laughed filled the room. “That’s what I thought you’d say. Don’t feel too bad. You’re only human Joelynn. We’re programmed to love ourselves more than others. Your poor cousin loves you more than herself but she’s special.” He was quiet for a moment and all she could hear was the music playing in the background. Finally he spoke again, “I’m not sure how this is going to play out Joelynn. I will make you a promise though. If you come out of this alive, I expect you to disappear from Eva’s life. If you don’t, I’ll come after you and finish what I started tonight. Do you understand?”
Joelynn could feel him adjusting something on her head. It felt like a very light crown. That’s when she realized who had her. It was the Demon King. Her scream filled the air.
Suddenly she heard Jacob next to her, “Are you okay Joelynn?”
Joelynn was sitting up in bed and Jacob was beside her. She was safe. Mrs. Torres, Jacob’s mother, came running into the room with a baseball bat, “Is everything okay? I heard screaming.” Jacob laughed at the sight of his mother and told her everything was fine. She begrudgingly left the two of them alone.
“I’m sorry Jacob. I just had a bad nightmare,” Joelynn explained.
Jacob put his arm around her to offer her some comfort. “This is all Eva’s fault,” he said in anger.
Joelynn shook her head, “No. It’s not her fault Jacob. It’s the Demon King’s fault. She can’t control what he does.”
Jacob didn’t agree with her, “She can control what kind of articles she writes.”
Joelynn sighed, “Honestly, I think I should have been prepared for something like this. It’s kinda like when you stand too close to a fire and get burned. Well Eva is the fire. She has this burning passion to do her job. She’s always been like that.”
“It’s not healthy,” Jacob muttered.
“No. No it’s not but she doesn’t know any other way to be. I used to spend summers with her and her parents when we were younger. If you think Eva is bad…you have no idea how her parents were. They were both journalists as well. It’s their fault she’s so gung-ho about chasing stories. They used to make her write articles during her summer break. If they weren’t good enough, she’d get punished. I remember them telling her that it was up to them to find out the truth and share it with the public.”
“So they’ were a family of journalists?” Jacob asked.
“Pretty much. Her parents used to travel the world writing articles for all sorts of magazines and newspapers. They were freelance writers but they were never afraid to face danger just to get an article. Eventually, it’s what killed them. They went to some remote third world country that was kidnapping women and selling them. They were never heard from again. After so much time had passed, they were presumed dead.”
“Is it possible they’re still alive?” Jacob asked.
“Highly unlikely…but sometimes I think that Eva is trying to work towards eventually finding out the truth about her parents. I could be wrong but if she’s too passionate about reporting, it’s the fault of my aunt and uncle. Besides me, she doesn’t have anyone else except her job. I can’t blame her for what happened.”
Jacob let all that information soak in and he kind of regretted his last comment to Eva, a woman who was already very lonely.
“I feel sorry for her, Jacob,” Joelynn said. “Now she has no one except maybe David. The Demon King may go after him too. And then what? She’ll have no one.”
Jacob hugged Joelynn, “Don’t think about it. For now you’re safe and that’s all that matters.”
Joelynn smiled at her friend’s words of comfort but she was still worried. The Demon King seemed obsessed with her cousin. He had let her go but she didn’t know if Eva would be so lucky.
~AT TOM’S APARTMENT~
Tom and Eva sat in his living room. Eva was holding the gun that Tom had held to her earlier. In an act of good faith he had given it to her after they stepped inside his apartment. “If I do anything to try and hurt you, I give you full permission to shoot me,” Tom said.
“I’d shoot you with or without your permission,” Eva responded.
Tom smiled and gestured for her to sit down. He placed an old briefcase in front of her on the coffee table. “Tonight I went to my father’s place. I told you he wasn’t at Open Heart. He wasn’t at home either. I broke into his house in the woods and took this.”
“Why?” Eva didn’t understand what Tom was getting at.
“I’m not the Demon King Eva, but someone wants to make the FBI think that I am. The only people that have ever held a grudge against me are my father and brother. My brother is dead but my father is still very much alive. This briefcase is where he hides all his important papers. I’m grasping at straws but I thought maybe we’d find some clues in here.”
“Do you really think your father would frame you for murder because he thinks you killed your sister?” Eva asked.
Tom smirked, “That man didn’t care about Beatrice. All he cared about were his books. When Beatrice was killed, he blamed me. He said he couldn’t write anymore because people would start to become interested in him again and someone might want to start writing about Beatrice. He said he wouldn’t be able to live it down if it were discovered that his son murdered his daughter.”
“So he’s framing you for murder because you were the reason he couldn’t write anymore?”
Tom stood up and picked up a yearbook. He began flipping through the pages and showed one picture to her. It was of Vincent McDaniels receiving an award as the most famous alumni of the school.
“My father is a narcissist. He loved all of the praise that came with his writing. He’s a smart man but people call him genius and prolific. One of his books was nominated for a Pulitzer. He loves the glory of being a talented author. He didn’t care about us growing up. He was never really around anyway. He was always on some high and then when he tried to get clean, he was checking himself in and out of treatment centers.”
“Why are there pictures blacked out of here?” Eva asked, looking at the yearbook.
“That’s my brother Christopher and Paula. I suffer from Intermittent Explosive Disorder. If I don’t take my meds regularly, I can become out of control. After they died, I kind of lost it.” Tom explained.
“Kind of?” Eva asked. He didn’t respond.
“You once asked why I wore green contacts. It’s because my dad, Beatrice, and even Christopher had the same color of eyes. I don’t like to be reminded of them, so I wear contacts. Now that I stopped wearing them, they’re all I think of when I look into the mirror and see these blue eyes. It’s the same reason I marked them out of my yearbook. I didn’t want to think of them. I wanted to erase them from my memories. It didn’t work.”
Eva couldn’t help but think how crazy Tom was sounding. She made sure she had a good grip on the gun.
“Someone has been visiting my father at Open Heart and claiming to be his son. You think this bloody handkerchief is going to help?” Tom asked.
Eva shrugged, “I’m not a hundred percent sure.”
The doorbell to Tom’s apartment rang. He got up and walked over to the door, carrying the handkerchief Eva had given him. A tall dark man was waiting for Tom. Tom passed him the bloody piece of cloth and said, “Donovan, it’s what we discussed earlier. I want the results back ASAP.” Donovan nodded and left.
As Tom returned back to Eva, he said, “Well, we’ll find out some answers soon enough.”
He began to open the briefcase. “I’m not sure what we’ll find in here but I’m hoping it’ll help us figure out where to look next.”
Tom had taken a key that he said was in his father’s nightstand and used it to open the case. Inside were tons of papers. Eva saw old and new drafts of books, legal papers, letters from other authors giving Vincent praise, and an old red folder. Eva picked up the folder and looked through it.
“Tom, your father told me that you and your friends used to go hunting with him. Is that true?” Eva asked.
Tom nodded, “Sometimes Christopher and his friend Chad came but it was mostly me and Kevin. We were practically like brothers. I was closer to him than Christopher. He used to say that my dad was like a father to him.”
"Is that so?" Eva asked curiously.
She opened the folder and pulled out one of the papers from it. It was an old birth certificate belonging to Kevin Landers. In the box where the father’s information should be filled out was a familiar name.
Vincent F. McDaniels.