Across Carina (32 page)

My mind was strained. It was difficult to think about anything. But I tried. I started to rearrange the letters of his name in my head.

The first combination I came up with was
R I C
, but that didn’t end up going anywhere. Then I came up with
C R U E L
, and I would have been proud of that one if only I had known what to do with the
F
and
I
. But after a minute, something else was swirling into place. . . .

L . . . U . . . C . . .

I almost fell off the stool.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “You can’t be the devil. We’re on Perunda.”

“
Yes,
” Fleuric snapped, “we’re on Perunda. And I am Lucifer.”

He clapped his hands, and the walls changed from white to black. Then each door in the hallway turned a different color. The door in the back turned red, the doors on the left turned orange and yellow, and the doors on the right turned green and blue.

Fleuric continued. “Your god has more than one world, does he not? You think I’m only allowed on one of them?”

He removed his jacket, and I noticed that his shirt was dripping onto the floor. The drops looked like blood.

“We’re going to play a game,” he said. “It’s a guessing game. I know how you love those.”

El . . . tell me you can hear me. I know I got distracted, but I don’t want to be here. I want to go home.

My head dropped. There was a sudden flash of light in my peripheral vision, but when I looked up again, it was gone.

“You have two tries to choose the right door,” Fleuric said. “If you choose the wrong door, you will never see Sal or your pathetic family again. Not that I understand why you’d want to.

“If you’d like, we can forgo this entire game, and you can stay in the house and have any power that you can dream up.”

“I’m not staying,” I said.

Fleuric smiled. “Well then, guess away. Seeing as there are only five doors, you have excellent odds. If you choose wrong then you really are stupid. Or maybe if you choose right then you really are stupid. It’s funny how one’s perspective can be so easily altered. Isn’t it grand?”

I flinched. Sal had asked me that the day we’d floated down the river. Fleuric was drilling into me, but I wasn’t going to let him in any further.

“What’s behind each door?” I asked, easing myself off the stool.

I had no choice but to play his game.

“Oh, just your fate,” Fleuric said.

He tossed his head back and laughed. His shirt, which had appeared to be dripping blood, now looked like it was
made
of blood. It was sort of melting off him, oozing onto the floor. I should have been able to see his stomach, but I couldn’t. His chest was floating over his hips, a strip of nothing between them. If he had once possessed the body of a club patron, it seemed that he was now leaving it for his true form.

“My fate?” I repeated. “There are five doors.”

“Well there’s more than one option for you,” Fleuric said. “There are many ways that you could live and die. Of course, some ways are better than others. That’s why I’m giving you two tries. I want you to have your best shot at a brilliant future.”

He sucked on his finger, his lips blotting it red.

I swallowed. “My brilliant future will be on Earth, where I am meant to be.”

El, I can’t do this without you. Please don’t forget me. I’m sorry to have forgotten you.

This time I was upright when the light flashed. The red, green, and blue doors all lit up. It had to be a sign, a clue.

Whatever it was, Fleuric did not want me giving it my attention. He cast a single flame onto the ceiling, and it began to travel the perimeter in a slow taunt.

I shook my head. I had three doors to choose from and only two tries to pick the right one. All I could think about was Sal and if he was okay, but I tried to focus on the doors and the lights despite Fleuric’s distraction.

In my mind, I called El’s name a third time. Immediately, the lights reappeared. The green and blue doors flickered, but the red door shimmered in petition. I wanted to think that it meant something, but it seemed too obvious, like a trap.

When Fleuric saw me eying the red door, he expanded the flame that was on the ceiling. Then he dragged it down the wall and confined it to the space between the red and green doors. He knew that I had called on El.

I knew that the next time I betrayed him, he would set the fire free. I needed to guess the right door on my own—without the lights.

I shuffled toward the green door. Fleuric watched me from the middle of the hallway. Half of him was gone, and the pool of blood at his feet had deepened. The hallway was orange and hot. I pointed at the green door, and Fleuric walked to it, leaving a spotted trail behind him.

He rested his hand on the doorknob. “Is this your official choice?”

“Yes,” I said.

He opened the door and ushered me into a room. . . . It was my bedroom from Earth.

As always, it was in order, not one sock tarnishing the floor. Clean cotton sheets were stretched across my mattress, and knives and perfume bottles lined my dresser. Sunlight was streaming through the window blinds between strips of a pale blue sky. Everything looked normal except for one thing: the photos on my desk were facedown.

Suddenly,
I
appeared. It was a girl—another me. She sat at the desk writing so furiously that my own hands weakened in the doorway.

When she finished writing, she folded the paper and tucked it under the arms of my teddy bear. Her eyes were a glossy green, like she’d been crying, and her lips were in a triangle—not a frown or a smile. She was neutral, acceptant.

She took the desk chair and placed it on top of the bed. Then she climbed onto the chair and stood balanced with her feet wide apart. In the ceiling was a hook that had once held my dreamcatcher. Now it was holding a rope, which was rolled and knotted into a neat ball.

The other me untied the rope and wrapped it around her neck. She tugged on it to ensure that the hook was sturdy, and then she took a deep breath. When she exhaled, she kicked the chair off the bed and swung to her death.

I screamed and ran out of the room. The door slammed behind me as I faced Fleuric in the hallway.

“So you’ve chosen to join your brother,” he said. “I can’t say that I blame you. You
were
so close. Or weren’t you, at the end? Is that why you must see him again?”

I wiped the sweat off my forehead. We were baking. As I had watched my own suicide, Fleuric had let the fire ravage the left side of the hallway. I looked at the red door again, and he pushed the fire toward it.

“I have another guess! You said two tries!” I protested.

“Then quit stalling!” he shouted. “You have
one
more guess. If it’s somehow better than what you just saw, then you can have it. But the odds are against you. One in four, Jade, one in four.”

According to the lights, my odds were one in two. I wanted to choose the red door, but I didn’t know if I should. I didn’t know who had sent the lights—El or Fleuric. At first I had thought it was El, but now I was wondering. After all, I was in Fleuric’s house. There was no telling who had the real power.

“What happens after I make my choice?” I asked. “What about Sal?”

Fleuric laughed. “You may or may not see him again. That’ll depend on your choice. But don’t worry—he’s plenty occupied at the moment.”

“If you’re just going to hurt us anyway,” I said, “why are you even giving me a choice?”

“You fool,” Fleuric spewed. “You
must
have a choice.”

He was sneering, but his words were tinged with resentment.

His shirt had bled entirely onto the floor. He was no longer skin and bones, but a lone head. He spun, and the doors opened and shut, opened and shut. They clattered loudly, trying to sever my thoughts.

“You think you can drive me crazy?” I taunted. “Go ahead—do your worst!”

Fleuric smiled. Parts of his body began to fly in from the corners of the hallway and assemble beneath his head. I was dumbstruck. It made no sense that he could reform. Amidst the fire and the fates I had missed something.

Suddenly, I was picked up and thrown into the wall. My arms and legs flung forward as my back arched into the concrete. I hit the floor, blood and dust in my hair. My cheek was sliced and every image doubled.

Remotely, Fleuric then slid me up the wall to its joint with the ceiling. He started to choke me, and I coughed and gagged. I could feel his hands around my neck, but I couldn’t see them or fight them off. He was still standing in the hallway, down and away from me. As my throat closed and my eyes bulged, I feared that I wouldn’t have to wait for the hanging I’d seen in my room.

“Bastard!” I managed to spit at him.

Fleuric didn’t like that at all. He bent my neck flat against the ceiling, forcing it into a ninety-degree angle from the rest of me. I felt something crack, and I screamed, but that only excited him further. Moving his hands in circles, he began to spin me across the ceiling. Plaster dug into my face with each rotation.

Mentally, physically—I couldn’t handle it. The floating kicked in, and I began to hallucinate. Visions of me puffed up inside clouds of smoke, and the room filled with my tangible memories. I saw everything that had ever caused me guilt, down to the pettiest of things.

I watched myself dodge my friends at school, explode on my family over dinner, sneak through Doctor Pine’s house, steal a pack of gum, tell my best friend in seventh grade that she was so annoying we couldn’t be friends anymore, lose touch with Garrett, and call nine-one-one for kicks and let Tyson take the blame when the cop said that he was “just a kid.”

The fire was rising, and so was my guilt. I even felt guilty for having
been
so guilt-ridden. I had lived in a cycle of acting out to bandage the wounds that I had made. And there I was, at it again, picking a fight with the devil.

It was clear that I couldn’t win with taunts, guesses, or my physicality. So I gave up. I surrendered. I let my arms hang until I stopped spinning and fell.

Fleuric disassembled. His spine curved harshly, cracking his ribs. Then the rest of his bones broke through the skin. His stomach melted into strips that plastered the floor, and his arms and legs softened into rubber. He was sinking, inch by inch.

“You need me!” he cried. “Otherwise you’ll choose wrong, Jade! You’ll pick the wrong door! Do you want to hang yourself? Are you ready to die?”

I didn’t respond. Time was scarce. The fire was dancing from the walls to the doorframes, racing down the doors and across the floor to where I had collapsed.

This is it, El. I trust you to show me the right door, and I will get to it before Fleuric gets to me.

Even as I sent my plea, I was sprawled on my back. With weak eyes, I watched the corner between the red and green doors, and I urged the lights to flash again.

What was left of Fleuric crawled to me. He screeched in my face, and I watched his tongue loop around itself as it split into two. He spit on me, and it burned like the fire.

I refuse to pick the wrong door, El. This one time I need you to tell me what to do.

Heat bristled on my shoes, and I lifted my head to see that I was on fire. It pushed its way through the leather, searing my toes, my ankle, my shin.

“El!” I screamed. “Tell me what to do! Tell me what to do!”

At the sound of El’s name, Fleuric raised his fists. He was about to swing them down on me when I saw the red door glow, and a blend of adrenaline and hope reeled me upright.

I ran straight through him, narrowly missing his fists. My entire left leg was on fire, but I couldn’t feel a thing. Nothing was more vital than me reaching the red door.

My path to it was less than thirty feet, but even running, it was the slowest, most jarring run of my life. The fire was spreading over me like wrapping paper, leaving blisters all over my skin.

My lungs began to fill with smoke. I tried to breathe through my nose, but then my mouth opened as the ceiling caved in. I limped around the falling plaster toward the red door, which was now ablaze.

When I reached it, I turned around to eye Fleuric once more. A mouth and a dark pair of eyes were all that remained of his body—his spirit—whatever he was. I realized that the only control he’d had over me was the control that I had given him. If I hadn’t second-guessed myself in the first place, I could have escaped the room much sooner.

But I shouldn’t think like that. I made it.

I locked eyes with Fleuric, and then I turned away from him forever. With no other options and absolutely nothing left to lose, I seized the hot doorknob and opened the red door.

I lunged into the next room, my burnt toes dragging. I tripped and landed on my face.

The door closed behind me, and my world fell quiet. I lay there, regaining my breath. I could feel my bones beginning to snap back into place, and my skin was cooling and smoothing out. My chest relaxed.

It’s over.

I looked down. My clothes were clean, with no purple stains. I looked up.

I was lying in an empty room. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all white. There was nothing else to be seen.

What? This is my future? An empty room?

Either I had misread the lights or Fleuric had tricked me all along. But I had felt so certain of the red door. . . .

As I looked around the room, I suddenly noticed something in the corner that had not been there the second before. There were five buckets of paint, with brushes scattered around.

I propped myself up and stared at them. They seemed to be taunting me with their happy colors and possibilities, while there I was, stuck in a prison. The door that I had come through had faded into the wall, and there was no way of me knowing if or when I’d be rescued.

All the hope that had built up within me left in a heavy sigh. I stood up, slowly, and walked over to the corner and picked up one of the brushes. It slid in my weak hold.