Evil Librarian (26 page)

I already know he is not someone I can trust. I try, halfheartedly, to convince myself that maybe I can. I mean, he wants me to survive and carry out my part of the bargain and all that, right? He’s not going to mess with that.

But he might. He might make some other deal, or he might just get overexcited and screw things up again. I can’t risk it. Which is really too bad, because he is the only person I know who knows anything at all about demons.

And then I stop, and stand there, frowning.

I have just been struck with a really unpleasant idea.

I take a cab back to school and even get in some actual work before rehearsal ends. Ryan does not seem to have noticed I was gone. He gives me a ride home, and on the way we talk about how great the show is going to be and pointedly avoid all other topics.

The next day at school, before homeroom, as has become usual since Annie stopped speaking to me, I sit with Diane in the hallway that everyone calls the band wing, which is next to the auditorium. Diane, as a clarinet player, has a legitimate reason to hang out in the band wing, but no one really needs a legitimate reason to be there. It’s just one of those places people go. Mostly the theater crowd and the band crowd, but occasional other random people, too.

We sit on the floor, our backs to a row of lockers. We’re just sitting, not talking, which is something I can do with Diane that I can’t do with many other people. She does a good companionable silence. We’re both kind of lost in our own thoughts, staring into space. We both notice the shoes that have stopped in front of us at about the same time.

“Excuse me,” a polite voice says. “Can you tell me where the office is? I seem to have gotten turned around.”

We look up. A middle-aged woman smiles hesitantly down at us. A new sub, I’m guessing. Diane points left.

The sub turns to follow the direction of Diane’s finger, squints, then turns back. “Um, thanks.”

She leaves.

I watch her walk to the end of the hallway and ask someone else, who also points left. The woman wanders off. Just before she disappears from view, two more unfamiliar adults walk by, a man and a woman this time, from the opposite direction.

As they pass the junction with the band wing, they turn their heads. Slowly and simultaneously.

They are looking at me.

Invisible fingers seem to crawl up my back. I shudder involuntarily.

“You okay?” Diane asks.

“Uh, yeah. Just a chill or something.” I smile reassuringly at her before looking back down the hall.

The strangers keep their eyes on me until they cross out of my line of sight.

I count three more unfamiliar faces in the next ten minutes.

Then there’s a familiar one.

“Hey,” Ryan says. This is new. I don’t usually see him in the band wing in the morning. Usually he’s off hanging out with his friends (his other friends?) in the cafeteria or the school yard or wherever they like to go.

“Hey,” I say back, squinting up at him. “What’s up?”

Diane suddenly remembers something she needs to do somewhere else. Before she goes she makes kissy faces at me behind Ryan’s back until I successfully glare her away.

Ryan slides down next to me, taking Diane’s place against the locker. For one crazy second I think maybe he’s going to say something about us, about how he doesn’t just want to be friends, about how he really wanted to kiss me in the sports closet yesterday but didn’t quite have the nerve.

“What’s up with all the subs?” he asks.

I close my eyes.
Stupid, Cyn.
He does not like you that way.

“I think they’re demons,” I say.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Not all of them, maybe. I think there was one we saw earlier who was just a regular human woman. But some of them are definitely not, you know, normal. I mean even for subs.”

“Huh,” Ryan says. “That doesn’t seem good.”

“Nope.”

Silence. Then: “Why are your eyes closed?”

“I don’t know.”
So I don’t have to see how close you are and still so incredibly far away.
I open them. He’s looking at me oddly. “What?”

“You’re a strange one sometimes, you know that?” He’s sort of half smiling as he says this, I guess to communicate the fact that he doesn’t mean it to sound entirely like an insult. But it’s clearly not entirely a compliment either.

“Um. Thanks?”

Before he can say whatever he might have said next, a pair of burly unfamiliar security guards wanders down the hall toward us. They both turn to stare at me as they go by. Their faces are long and blank; their eyes look dead and empty. Ryan and I stare up at them silently until they finally have to look away or start walking backward. And then one of them actually does start walking backward, so he can keep looking at me, until the other one notices and gives him a smack on the shoulder and makes him turn back around.

“Okay, those guys were hardly even trying to pass for human,” Ryan says. “That’s just sloppy workmanship.”

There are ten more minutes until homeroom. I want to close my eyes again. I don’t want to see how many more demons there are at school today.

I keep my eyes open anyway, though.

We sit there on the floor, watching too many students with listless expressions, watching not enough others looking concerned and suspicious. I sit, and I enjoy the fact that Ryan is sitting next to me (he is also capable of a good companionable silence, it seems), and I try not to think too much about what I have decided to do later this morning.

After Italian, during which I try to act just like someone who does not have a troubling and secret plan up her sleeve, I ditch second period and force myself to go to the library. I stand outside for several minutes before I can successfully make myself go in.

Mr. Gabriel is seated with a laptop at one of the tables, working on a PowerPoint presentation about the Dewey decimal system.

“Really?” I can’t help it; it just slips out.

He clicks Save and turns to face me, ignoring my question. “Can I help you with something, Cynthia?” he asks.

Okay. Okay, go.

“Yes,” I make myself say. Then I make myself sit down at the table across from him.

He looks at me, eyebrows raised expectantly.

Deep breath. Then: “I might be willing to make a deal, after all.”

His eyebrows climb even farther up toward his hairline.

“But not the one you offered that day at rehearsal. Something else.”

He tilts his head slightly toward the library doors, and I hear the lock slide into place.

“I’m listening,” he says.

“So, okay. I could not help but notice that you are no longer the only demon invader in the school,” I begin. “I mean, obviously Principal Kingston is another one, but I know there are more. I saw several of them this morning. And I get the sense that they might not be the last.”

Mr. Gabriel says nothing. He just watches me, waiting.

“And I heard what Principal Kingston said, about the wards or whatever, and how they got weak because you were, uh, distracted. With other things.”

“Indeed.” His eyes are getting that look like they want to start twining and flaming at me.

“So, I get that that’s maybe a little bit my fault. That you got distracted,” I go on quickly. “And while I still, you know, hate you and everything, I am not exactly excited about having all these extra demons here, sucking out souls and stuff. And so I’m wondering if there’s anything that I can do, to help you strengthen the ward-things again and stop more demons from showing up. I know that this roach thing I’ve got going on gives me some resistance . . . I thought, maybe, I could help you somehow, using it.”

Mr. Gabriel leans back in his chair, still looking at me.

I wait.

“What are you up to?” he asks finally. “I know you’re not just giving up on trying to stop me. You
can’t
stop me, but I know you won’t really accept that. I can’t figure out your angle here.”

“There is no angle. I mean, yes, you’re right, I haven’t given up on trying to save Annie,” I say. “But I haven’t yet figured out how to do that, and in the meantime, I can’t just sit here and let more people die and get their souls siphoned away until there’s nothing left. Not if there’s a chance that I could help stop it. Having you here is bad enough; having you and a whole bunch of other demons sucks even worse.”

He squints at me, then shakes his head. “I don’t get you, Cynthia. I offered you a free pass, for you and your hopeless love interest, and you turned it down.”

“Because for that deal I had to give up on Annie. And I won’t give up on Annie. This time I’m the one making the offer, and so I get to set the terms.” I pause, then add, “And my love interest is
not
hopeless. There’s been significant progress!” That’s not exactly true, of course, but Mr. Gabriel doesn’t need to know that.

“Kudos,” he says. “What are your terms, then?”

“I help you close your gates or whatever to stop more demons from coming through. In return . . . can you stop the demons who are already here from killing and draining everyone?”

He’s still squinting at me. “You realize I’m still planning to kill and drain pretty much everyone myself at the end, right?”

“I know you’re planning to try. I told you, I haven’t given up on trying to find a way to stop you. This gives me more time. And if nothing else it gives everyone a stay of execution, right?”

“Hmm.”

I can see he doesn’t think this is a good enough deal for me. I can’t let him get suspicious. “And you promise that no matter what, you won’t hurt Ryan. You won’t hurt him or kill him or suck out any of his soul or let Principal Kingston or any other demons hurt him either. Not just until the show, but forever.”

I should have thought of asking for that before, anyway. My deal with the demoness only really obligates her to
try
not to let him die. Not quite as much of a guarantee as I would like.

“Ah,” he says. “Now, that makes more sense.”

“I want to save everyone,” I say. “But if I can’t — then I at least want to save him.”

This is absolutely true. And I think Mr. Gabriel can hear it in my voice.

He stops squinting and leans forward, hands clasped on the table, all business. “The only way to reinforce my wards at this point is through a significant ritual sacrifice,” he says. “I thought about arranging some mass poisoning in the cafeteria or something, but the consequences of killing a sufficient number of people would be too much for me to easily damp out. Police would come, the school might be closed down . . . I can’t risk it. Not now.

“If you are indeed willing to help me, however, there is another possibility. I could kill the other demons who have come through instead. That would actually be a far more powerful sacrifice, and of course no one would miss them.”

Now it is my turn to be squinty. “Why haven’t you done that already, then?”

“I can’t do it myself. I need to kill them all at once for the sacrifice to work, which would require luring them to some single location, and there’s no way I could do that without raising suspicion. But you . . . there is a way that you could help me get them all in one place. It’s actually something that you are uniquely qualified to do.”

He goes on to explain that all I would need to do is “tag” them for him. Which turns out to basically just mean touching them after dipping my hands in some special substance that Mr. Gabriel will provide. That’s it. The tagging will allow Mr. Gabriel to draw them all to one place, probably without them even realizing they’re being drawn, and then he and Principal Kingston will kill them and fix the wards.

“But — Kingston —?”

“I can’t hurt Kingston until the actual battle, because of our truce. Which means he’ll have to be in on this plan. And it will work better with the two of us anyway. And that part isn’t your problem. All you need to do is tag the others. I don’t think it will be very difficult for you. They’ve all heard there’s a super-roach here, and they will be interested in you, which will let you get close. But your resistance means they won’t be able to charm or glamour you or otherwise get inside your head or turn you from your objective, even if they have minor protection spells going. And they’ll never suspect you’re working with me. If I tried to compel anyone else to do this, they’d be able to detect my influence. But you’ll be clean, acting of your own free will, and they will never know what’s coming.”

I have to admit that I am not exactly excited about helping to kill a whole bunch of demons. I don’t think I could be excited about killing anyone, demons or not, present company excluded. But if I don’t, more human people are going to die. So, easy decision. Save Ryan, save at least some of the other students and teachers in the school, and cut down on the amount of life-energy sucking that will be going on between now and the show.

Yeah, it’s not perfect, I know. But I think it’s the best I can do.

I extend my hand toward the librarian, and we shake on it.

“Deal,” I say.

“Deal.”

I am pretty much ready to start right in here, get with the tagging, let’s do this thing, etc. But of course there are preparations and Mr. Gabriel needs to confab with Principal Kingston and so I am sent off to class with instructions to come back later.