This Strange Sight [Chapter 2]

Jubilee remembers why she doesn't go outside.

It took twenty extra minutes, two detours, and a lot of exasperated looks from passersby before Jubilee finally found the pharmacy. By then, her prior determination to overcome the fear brought on by her spiritual sight had been dampened by anxiety. It was as much due to the chilling wind, incessant traffic, and swarms of people as it was to the other things she could see.

Dimly she registered the presence of angels and demons—tall figures of light and ambiguous columns of shadow—flitting across her sightline, either following humans or simply drifting about. Hellenos, for his part, had disappeared the moment she'd left the orphanage, much to her annoyance. It just figured that she couldn't see him when she wanted to the most. This seemed to happen frequently when she felt afraid. Did that mean it was her fault—a failure of her spiritual senses, perhaps? Or did Dad sometimes deliberately cloak Hellenos from her sight to test her? Whatever the reason, she resented it. What good was seeing angels only when you weren't afraid?

Crossing a busy intersection, she patted down her hair—now frizzing slightly from the sweat of her excursion, despite the wintry day—and hurried into the fluorescent-lit pharmacy. The awareness of other, vaguely visible beings around her continued to crowd in painfully on her senses. Unearthly hues and shades of darkness emanated from the humans in the store. Some were gentle and easy on the eyes, but many made her head reel to the point of feeling faint, just like the first time she had started seeing them in Chicago, three years earlier.

She commended herself on handling it better now than she had back then. In fact, the number of things she could see in the spirit had increased over the years. There'd been a season when she couldn't see any spiritual beings aside from Hellenos, yet now she noticed other angels and even small demons when she was outside the orphanage. The latter still unsettled her, but not to the point of paralysis like it once did. So, maybe she was starting to get the hang of it after all. Locating the fever reducer, she quickly paid for it at the counter and left.

Back on the street, she let out a sigh of relief. "Success," she said in English. There’d been no run-ins with demons, no awkward interactions with people, and the pharmacy cashier hadn't even looked at her funny due to her accent. Maybe that meant it had faded. Immensely cheered by the thought, she turned to make her way back to the orphanage—and immediately collided with another person. She tumbled to the ground, the pharmacy bag landing before her.

"I'm sorry," she and the other person said in Chinese at the same time. Then, wincing, Jubilee got to her knees and continued, "Please excuse me, I—" As she looked up, the words died on her lips.

The girl before her looked perfectly normal, some years younger than Jubilee's twenty-six, with roundish, wire-framed glasses sitting askew on her nose from their collision, and hair almost as long as Jubilee's but sleeker and lightened to brown. It was the demon beside the young woman that looked unlike anything Jubilee had ever seen.

At least, not since the first one she'd ever encountered, in Chicago.

The dreadful memory hit her with great force, and for a moment Jubilee couldn't breathe as a familiar stench of decay filled her nostrils. Nausea swept over her as her remembrance of a tall demon with ebony skin and white tendrils of hair filled her mind. The demon before her now looked different than the one from her memories: less feminine in appearance and taller, with the hair and skin color reversed. But it looked no less powerful or terrifying.

"It was my fault," the girl said as she straightened her glasses and got to her feet, a dark haze surrounding her. She scooped up the fallen bag and held it out for Jubilee. "I wasn't looking where I was going."

Jubilee swallowed thickly, resisting the urge to cover her nose, and reached for the bag. "Thanks." Their fingers brushed, and her queasiness doubled as a wave of icy cold washed over her, chilling her far more than the wind could. She gave the girl a nod and hurried past her, ignoring the demon.

"How odd." A deep, gravelly voice came from behind her. It spoke Mandarin but definitely did not sound human. "If I didn't know better, I'd say that human could see me."

Jubilee's heart stopped, but she forced herself to keep walking and not look back. The last thing she wanted to do was draw the demon's attention any more than she already had.

Just as she turned a corner, she heard the girl's voice murmur in reply, "That's impossible. No one else has been able to."

Jubilee's feet stuttered to a halt. She stood frozen as people flooded past, jostling her. Never, in the last three years since she'd started seeing angels and demons, had she ever witnessed another human be aware of them, other than Kailin. But Jubilee had heard of children being able to see angels before. This was different—another adult like her who could not only see demons...but actually dared to talk with them?

Jubilee's gut roiled. Loud honking sounded around her, drowning her in memories that she couldn't suppress—of a car crash, blood, and a white-haired wraith staring down at her with rage in its eyes.

She stumbled over to a brick wall to get out of the crowd's way. Clutching her stomach, she bent over and took deep breaths. Why was this happening? Why was she allowed to see something so dark and so powerful after three years of 'the dark side' being dialed down and, to her immense relief at the time, almost completely shut off? Was her past finally catching up to her?

She would've preferred getting mugged.

Straightening, she gripped the shopping bag tightly to still her shaking hands and entered back into the flow of the crowd. She didn't have time for this. She had to get back to the orphanage for her English class and give Kailin her medicine. Other people and their demons were not her problem. They would only cause her trouble, and she had barely gotten out alive last time.

But that was because someone stepped in to help.

The thought startled her, and she briefly wondered if it was her own. Her feet halted of their own accord. "Dad...?" she whispered.

For a brief moment, everything was still. Then, suddenly, a vivid memory entered her mind—of an older woman's face, filled with worry and relief, hovering over Jubilee as she opened her eyes. You're alive, the woman had whispered.

"Move, crazy!" a man behind Jubilee hollered, along with a string of other Chinese words that she didn't recognize and was glad she didn't. She obliged him, suddenly spinning around, and retraced her steps.

Maybe there was a way to free that girl from that demon.