The Devil's Intern (26 page)

“You’re a genius!” I exclaim, recalling the moment I thought Elinor was running around like a headless chicken in the files, when in reality she was the only one who had actually kept her head.

“A princess among peasants,” sighs Alfarin.

“This is why you were throwing up, wasn’t it? You traveled alone?”

Elinor nods. “Osmosis of the Dead is not very nice.”

“Elinor, you are an absolute genius,” I repeat.

“A rival to better the goddess Frigga,” says Alfarin.

“Oh, behave, the pair of ye,” replies Elinor, but she is beaming with pride.

I start tearing pieces of paper from the file and handing them to Alfarin and Elinor.

“We’ll start with addresses,” I say.

A color photo slips out. It’s Medusa’s deathday picture. Her brown eyes are already swirling with white; they look like miniature pools of milky hot chocolate. Her head is leaning back slightly in the photo. My raggedy doll doesn’t look scared or confused the way I was, but she does look shocked. The wild curls are wet against her face, making them look longer, and leaves and other river debris are caught up in several ringlets. She made a mistake, she never meant to let go.

My stomach feels hot and flustered as I gaze at her. I haven’t eaten in days, or at least it feels that way. I don’t understand why Medusa makes me feel hungry all the time. When I see her I think of chocolate and strawberries.

“I have Medusa’s home address and a photo!” cries Alfarin.

“She worked weekends in a shoe store; the address is here,” says Elinor.

“And I have her stepfather’s name and place of work,” I say darkly. “He’s a mechanic—”

A howl interrupts me. The three of us turn around in a panic, but we can’t see anything that could have made that noise. It seems to be coming from above us, as if it’s being carried through the wind.

“Where do you want to start, Mitchell?” asks Alfarin. He’s shivering. “We are down one, but you are still our leader.”

“We’ll go back ten minutes before the time Medusa put into the Viciseometer and try to intercept. We can’t stop her time-traveling because of the fixed-point-in-time rule, but we can get her as soon as she arrives somewhere. Plus she’ll be suffering from Osmosis of the Dead, so she’ll be easy to get to. We’ll go to her family’s house first, but we’ll have to be careful. Elinor arrived in Hell already knowing us—but Medusa didn’t. We’ll have to make sure we intercept the right one: the dead Medusa, not the living Melissa.”

Alfarin is rubbing his temples with the flat side of his axe. He probably finds it comforting, but it makes me really nervous. One slip and he’ll take off half his face.

“Is this going to work?” he asks.

“It has to. I won’t let the Skin-Walkers take her.”

The three remaining members of Team DEVIL stand and link arms. The air feels heavy around us. Even the laughter and music seem to have stopped. I move the minute hand on the white dial back by ten minutes. I hope it will be enough.

Warm fire wraps around us as we rush through the wind. Alfarin and I are on either side of Elinor, and I swear I feel someone holding my other hand, but when we land outside Medusa’s run-down house, it’s only the sparking Viciseometer that I see when I look down.

Medusa’s house is old and wooden and sits on a small lot on a quiet street. The outside is painted white, but even from our position in a small park across the road, I can see the thick curls of peeling paint. A metal screen covers the front door. There are large windows on either side, and the upstairs floor looks cramped, with two dormer windows settled into the roof like watching eyes. There’s a white Dodge Polara parked on the street right outside the house. The hood is up and the windows are wound down, but I can’t see anyone around.

It’s ten minutes to eight in the evening. The sun is still setting and the sky is splashed with pink. The color reminds me of Medusa’s pretty dead eyes.

It’s my fault she’s here, hidden somewhere from me and her other best friends, who would do anything to protect her. I want to shout her name until my throat bleeds.

I won’t let her go again.

“Should we knock on the door?” asks Elinor.

“Absolutely not.”

“But we need to find her,” she protests.

“And we will,” I say, “but we’ve blundered from one time to another since we left, Elinor. My leaving Hell caused me to die in the first place, and now it’s something I’ll never be able to fix without screwing up a bunch of other lives and deaths in the process. I won’t mess this one up.”

“Mitchell is right,” says Alfarin, looking up and down the quiet row of shabby detached houses. “So do you think they serve buckets of chicken in this time?”

Elinor huffs. “Medusa is missing and moments away from being snatched by Skin-Walkers and all ye can think about is yer big ol’ stomach?”

“Your point, my princess?”

“I’ll stay here,” I say. “Leave your axe with me, Alfarin, and you two see if you can get us some food from somewhere.” Elinor is now scowling at me. “Elinor, don’t look at us like that. We have to eat. Our brains work better when they’re fed, and I haven’t eaten anything but a few strawberries since we got back from 1666.”

She starts walking away. I can hear her muttering under her breath about boys having one-track minds.

“How will we pay?” asks Alfarin seriously.

I shrug. “Our money is useless here because it’s future currency, and I’m not even sure they had credit cards back in the 1960s. You’ll just have to improvise.”

“How?”

“You’re in Hell for a reason, Alfarin—steal something! And hurry up. Our Medusa arrives in just over seven minutes.”

My attention turns back to Medusa’s former home. I can hear raised voices coming from inside, but the conversation is followed by the echoing laughter of a crowd. I think it may be a television turned up really loud.

The screen door suddenly flies open, but it isn’t Medusa who steps onto the wooden porch and down the front steps. It’s a man.

He isn’t as tall as me, but then again, few guys are. He has long, sun-streaked blond hair and sideburns all the way down to his chin. He looks as if he could be in his late thirties, but he dresses as if he wishes he were younger. For a few moments, I wonder if he’s Medusa’s brother, but he looks nothing like her, and as far as I know, Medusa was an only child like me—well, before M.J. 2.0, anyway.

The guy slaps his hands together and heads toward the open hood of the Dodge Polara.

And right away, with a sudden surge of hatred, I realize who he is.

This is Medusa’s stepfather.

Alfarin’s axe is lying by my feet. My first raging thought is to charge at the mechanic and slice his head off. My hands are reaching for the handle when the screen door clatters open again and another figure comes running out of the house. The guy immediately looks up, and the figure freezes in her tracks.

It’s Medusa.

Only, right away I know it isn’t
my
Medusa. It’s the living Melissa from this time. She looks the same: mad corkscrew hair, skinny little arms and legs dressed in denim shorts, and a peach-colored top that ties around the back of her neck.

But something is missing.

The living Melissa looks back at the house and runs down the path. She opens the gate and makes to sprint across the road, but the mechanic, her stepfather, slams down the hood and catches her, holding her tightly by the wrist. She doesn’t see me standing opposite, peering out from behind a bush like a child, debating whether to run across to the car and punch his teeth in.

Shadows of the living and inanimate are stretched along the road as the sun sets lower in the sky. I can hear Medusa pleading with her stepfather. I reach down and pick up Alfarin’s axe.

A woman calls from the house.

“Melissa . . .”

It’s the reason I need to stay where I am. This isn’t Medusa—
my
Medusa. That girl is Melissa Pallister, and she doesn’t know it yet, but her life will end in one week, on the twenty-fifth of June, 1967. I can’t change this because it isn’t mine to change. I need to wait for Medusa to appear; she’ll know what to do.

But I don’t let go of the axe.

I think back to that first night in New York. Medusa awoke from yet another nightmare and told us for the first time how she died.

I only regret that I didn’t take him with me
.

What does he do to her? Has it already happened? Where is Medusa? Why
this
moment in time?

The voice calls again. It quivers, as if worried. The living Melissa breaks free from her stepfather’s grasp and runs back into the house. He turns, kicks his car, and wipes his top lip with the back of his hand. Then he leans in through an open window and reappears seconds later with a bottle, which he swigs from before going back into the house, stumbling over the steps in his haste.

Alfarin and Elinor reappear; both are looking flushed and sheepish. Elinor dips in behind the bush and gesticulates to the house; she has a glass bottle of milk in one hand and a loaf of white bread in the other.

“We were watching from back there,” she says quietly.

“Not ours?” whispers Alfarin.

I shake my head. I don’t take the bread or milk from Elinor, or the cookies that Alfarin has stuffed into his pockets. It looks as though they’ve raided a 1967 fridge.

“Any sign of our M yet?”

“Who do you think that man is?” asks Alfarin thickly. Cookie crumbs spray into his blond stubble as he speaks.

“Her stepfather,” I reply.

“Why are ye holding Alfarin’s axe?”

“I was looking after it,” I mumble.

Alfarin takes it from me. “Whatever that man has done, we cannot take his life with intent, Mitchell,” he says solemnly. “If there is one thing I have learned on this journey, it is the honor of living that we take for granted. I fear now that some of my clan, those we believed had been taken by Up There, have become victims of the Skin-Walkers. Too many killed in cold blood, for enjoyment, for the thrill. I will not allow that fate to befall you, my friend.”

There’s a sudden change in the air: a quick blast of intense heat.

“What are you doing here?” gasps a voice I feared I would start to forget.

I turn around and my hand connects with burning-hot skin.
My
Medusa is standing right next to us. Instinctively, I fling my arms around her and crush her tightly. Alfarin and Elinor join in the group hug. And now I know why the living Melissa didn’t appear real to me when I first saw her, because what I have clasped against my chest is pure soul and nothing else. In the same way I recognized those angels in the cemetery, I know a devil when I see one.

“Why did you leave us—leave me?” I growl into the mass of curls that is invading my mouth and nostrils.

“How did you get here before me?” she replies in a muffled voice that’s smothered by my T-shirt. “I left you just seconds ago.”

“A lot has happened since then—we can time-travel, remember? So we went back to Hell and Elinor stole your devil resources file. Did you seriously think we wouldn’t follow you?”

“You’ve let him corrupt you, El.”

“She’s been worried sick the Skin-Walkers were going to get you. We all were.”

I can feel Medusa’s hot little body trembling under my grip. I hate her and love her at the same time.

“The Skin-Walkers were there, in the fire, as I traveled. They were snapping and screaming at me. I could see every soul the Skin-Walkers have taken, begging in the flames. They were reaching for me, touching me; they wouldn’t let me go.”

“If you kill your stepfather, the Skin-Walkers will take you,” says Alfarin gravely, releasing us all from his grasp.

Medusa gasps. “I was never going to kill him; I just wanted to frighten him.”

And now I pull away from Medusa. I can hear her voice crying in the background, and yet her mouth in front of me isn’t moving—this is weird and confusing.

“Why did you leave us?”

“Because I guessed the Skin-Walkers were after me and I wanted to get them away from you . . . and . . . and because I need to protect my mom,” replies Medusa, and for the first time, her eyes take in the house she hasn’t seen in forty years. “Mom goes to pieces after I die, and he takes everything from her—her money, her dignity, everything. He gets worse, Mitchell. Rory does horrible things, sick things, to girls even younger than me. And people blame her—for not stopping him sooner.”

“He abused ye?” whispers Elinor, asking the question neither Alfarin nor I want to ask.

Medusa nods and says softly, “He hurt me, El.”

It’s a good thing Alfarin has taken that axe back, because right now I’m prepared to risk the wrath of the Skin-Walkers. But judging by the look of boiling hatred on Alfarin’s face, so is he.

“Yer mother was not to blame for what happened, M.”

“That doesn’t stop people, though,” she replies. “People go after her, El. Some of the moms and dads of the other girls he hurt. They burn the house down.”

“But how do you know this?” I ask.

“Because I’ve seen her future, Mitchell. I looked into the Viciseometer back in Hell. You weren’t the only one who was stealing it out of the safe, you know.”