Indigo

Part II

Amarantha was sitting in the kitchen counter, her books sprawled all over it. She finished typing the last of her History essay and e-mailed it to Tyrell’s dad. Just when she was getting accustomed to being “home-schooled” it had all finished. With one simple click on the send button just beside the small envelope she had finished her tasks for twelve grade and was now completely free of written reports. Of course, Headmistress Mayari would arrange a meeting with her and have all of her teachers present and do the weekly physical trainings and tests. Amarantha glanced at the entrance hall out of habit, scanning the floor for any sign of an envelope that didn’t belong to bills or propaganda. Her ancient eyes didn’t find a thing apart from that and she sighed, again, out of habit.
She stood up and piled up her books in a corner, turning her laptop off and closing the lid. She walked up the stairs, her socks producing a soft thump as she made her way up the stairs and into her bedroom. The house was silent, but she had accustomed to it. I was only ten past two and her parents wouldn’t be home from work before ten o’clock. Her fingers turned the door handle swiftly and she pushed the door open softly. Soft sun rays peered through the thin transparent glass and crawled over her pale blue walls, making it easy to distinguish the only two things that covered her walls: a stunning painting of a blue butterfly sitting gracefully over a pair of dew-moistened leaves and a board full of papers pinned to it.
Amarantha walked to the board and her eyes wandered over the results of her research for the past eight years. The board was full of notes talking about incubi and drawings depicting them on their many forms. The pictures were nerve-wrecking to say the least, Amarantha had to constantly put up with her mother’s attempt of taking them down. But they didn’t scare Amarantha that much. The fact that she had fallen for a demon in male shape that went to women when they were asleep and had sexual intercourse with them was far more frightening than that.
The first time she found out about this, which was when her feet were lead out of Akilah Academy and into her home and ran to the computer searching for the meaning of the word ‘incubus’, she had started screaming like a maniac, fat tears streaming down her cheeks non-stop. It had been weeks before she began to eat properly. Her mother and father were devastated: looking at their thin daughter decay into a pit of loneliness and sorrow. But Amarantha had always been strong and after a couple of months her hair started thickening again, and so did her limbs. Her appetite was usual and she didn’t seem that upset anymore. Her parents blamed themselves for letting their only precious daughter set foot unto that ‘freak school’ and had decided to take Amarantha out of school. She objected, her desire for education and a better future dimmed her broken heart. So her parents accepted to have her take classes from home and every week her teachers would come to train and evaluate her. It had been like this for eight years now, and Amarantha was now on the last weeks of her senior year on Akilah Academy.
As Amarantha traced the outline of an incubus she wondered where Kier was. He had graduated long ago, she was sure of that. But then again, incubus didn’t age much, at least not on human standards. She guessed he might’ve grown a couple of inches more and his powers were about to get to their fullest extent. She wondered if he had raped any woman yet to bare his children, but she shrugged the thought off. He hadn’t written or called nor did he appear on her front steps. Even though she had gathered as much information possible about his kind from books , websites and occasional inquiries to her teachers there were gigantic gaps on her understanding of them. In fact, she felt like she didn’t even know a 1% of what being an incubus implied.
Regardless of all of the changes in her life there were still two things that remained relatively the same. On one side she didn’t have friends except for a boy she used to go to school with back in forth grade and moved in beside them a couple of years back. On the other side her nightmares and the feeling of being watched still haunted her, making her extremely uneasy.
But she wasn’t the same weak Amarantha, the same arrogant eight-year old. She had grown, bore sorrow and confusion on her bones as if she had been born with them and could, quite expertly, manage her powers.