The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant (11 page)

“Ben, you’re going to have to choose Garnet.”

“I hope you mean garnet the gemstone.”

“You need to win the Big V.”

“Shh.” He puts his finger to my lips, and I pretend to bite at it. “I’m with you. Not her. Any plan that keeps me from you is no plan for me.”

“But Ben—”

“If I have to choose between death and life without you, I choose death.”

“That’s very”—I pause—“cheesy.”

Because we can’t actually stay in the library forever, we make our way outside and, holding hands, meander down the dark island, past the red line that used to mean so much, past the old Zin mansion in which Dia and Invidia now live, past Gigi’s old cottage, toward the village. Most of the villagers’ homes, which were enormous, are being demoed to make way for the college.

“Why do you think Mr. Watso’s here?” I ask Ben. “Everyone else is gone.”

“He made a deal with the devil. I assume he’s here because he has to be. Maybe if he signs the island over to them, they’ll let him go.”

“Sign it over?”

“My dad has this idea that Villicus
wanted
you and Molly to break the rules and be friends. He put you at Gigi’s so you’d be more likely to run across the only village girl. That way, he’d have some leverage—he could dangle Molly’s life in front of Mr. Watso in exchange for the island.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Mr. Watso is a shaman. He’s the spiritual owner of this island. Or so the story goes.”

“So he can just give the island to the devil if he wants to?”

“If he had to. It’d be a clear gateway in for the underworld. But I doubt he’d do that.”

“He’s got no reason to now that she’s gone.” I meet Ben’s gaze. “Do you think Mr. Watso will hate me forever because of what happened to Molly?”

“Molly’s gone because you guys were friends. She was a part of that friendship.”

“She’s dead because of that friendship.”

“Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself,” he says.

“I just can’t believe how dumb I was.”

“Hold on there.” We stop walking and he turns me to face him. His hands are on my shoulders, and he’s looking quite serious when he says, “That’s my girlfriend you’re talking smack about.”

With that word—
girlfriend
—running through my head and the warmth of his hand on mine, we return to campus and cross the quad. I watch Ben walk to the boys’ dorm. He smiles back at me when he opens the door, and we wave again, smile again, say good night, and eventually, with me suppressing dumb giggles that I sort of love, retire indoors.

Harper isn’t in my room when I curl up with thoughts of the beautiful Ben Zin, the boy who is, at last, mine. I see bright lights like fireworks behind my eyes.
Ben’s my boyfriend
. We’ll figure the Big V stuff out. He’ll find a way to win. I’ll help Teddy—maybe I can find a way to wrestle the Seven Sinning Sisters away from Mephisto and Dia—and then get Teddy to wake me up. And, after that, Ben and I will be together in California. It won’t be easy, but we can do it.

It is that gloriously satisfying thought that sends me swiftly into dreams, dreams I’m quite certain will feature a tall, lovely, mint-eyed sculptor.

Except it’s not Ben in my dreams.

It’s Dia.

At first he and I are arguing, but we swiftly find ourselves in a far more compromising position than I’ve
ever
been in. I feel the soft ring of his open mouth moving down my neck to my shoulder, leaving a glowing tattoo that looks just like Invidia’s. When he leans away from me, his mouth is open—and he’s screaming.

My eyelids burst wide to find Harper standing over my bed in the glow of a lamp. She’s screaming at me. She reels back as I stagger out of bed, holding my arms out defensively.

“What is it?” I cry, looking for an intruder. “Where? Who?”

“
Y-y-you!
”

I catch a glimpse of myself in Harper’s full-length mirror as she staggers backward.

And I do a double take.

Everything about my reflection is exaggerated: my lips and cheekbones are fuller; my eyes are huge and a strange violet color; my curves are inflated like helium balloons; my legs are sinfully long. It’s only my big, everywhere hair that looks like me.

“I’m dreaming,” I utter. “This must be a dream.”

I shift, watching the movement in the mirror to be sure I’m looking at my own reflection. As I do, I see what Harper was screaming about and what she is now, from the furthest corner of her bed, pointing at in dumbfounded silence.

“What on Earth?” I breathe as a shimmering silver tail wraps over my shoulder.

I look at it, and it wags once. Then it disintegrates into a million sparkling fragments that glow, dance, and vanish, taking my larger-than-life exterior with them.

six

INNER DEMONS

IT SMELLS LIKE WET DOG OUTSIDE THE CLOSET IN WHICH
Lou Knows and Pilot keep their janitorial supplies. I must have walked by this closet a dozen times in the last month and seen Lou bent over, filling his dingy yellow bucket with soapy water. All along, he’s known something about me. Or so Pilot suggested the other day.

Today, I’m going to find out what Lou Knows knows about my soul.

And so restarts my attempts to act on my PT to “look closer” when, in fact, all I really want to do is close my eyes and, like all the other Cania students do, act as if nothing weird is going down. But last night I saw something I’d have to be brain dead—not just in a coma—to forget. I saw something I’d be crazy not to investigate. I saw something that Harper is
so
going to blab to the whole school; even in a land of sworn enemies, Harper has a way of spreading news. So before I have to deal with girls in the bathroom whispering trash about my (I can’t believe I’m actually admitting this)
tail
, which has thankfully not reappeared since Harper screamed it away, I need to get a handle on what’s up.

So I wait for Lou.

I lean against the wall. I drum my fingers on the cool painted cinder blocks. The clock above me ticks so loudly, it echoes all the way down the hall, bouncing off the lockers. I’m next to the chem
lab, inside of which Miss Incitant—one of many new faculty members Dia brought in—is conducting a lesson I can just overhear. Her name is Latin, just like Invidia, though
incitant
isn’t one of the seven deadly sins, so Miss Incitant can’t be one of the Seven Sinning Sisters; this is a little more proof that my hunch was right: Dia’s demons go by Latin names.

“The study of chemistry dates back how far?” Miss Incitant asks her students, who are so quiet, their silence echoes. Evidently none of her students’ PTs is to be successful by throwing the teacher a bone. “Thousands of years. To where? Anyone? To the Middle East, where philosophers and scientists engaged in what we now call… anyone? In what we now call
alchemy
. And what is alchemy?” She waits, patiently pulling teeth. “It is the art of freeing parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence. To what end? Yes, Jackson—oh, you’re just stretching. Anyone else care to try? Alchemy achieves the goals you seek here: longevity, immortality, and redemption. And thus chemistry is magic.”

Magic. Immortality
.

Was what I saw last night magic? Was it the work of alchemy? Did someone put a spell on me? Does every student at some point look like I did, thanks to our proximity to demons? Or am I, like, possessed?

I slide to the floor to wait for Lou. I open my sketchbook. Time ticks by. Before I know it, I’ve filled page after page with hasty renderings of the vision I saw last night: her voluptuous body, her pillowy lips, her commanding stance and impressive height. The movement of her hand as she tugged her nightie to cover herself. Yes, I’m thinking about my own reflection as if it wasn’t mine at all. That’s because whatever I saw, it was nothing like me.

I tear out a page and absently roll it into a long tube. I stare down the hall through it, like a telescope. Still no Lou. I flip it over and write his name on it.

“Lou knows my soul,” I whisper. “Why do you know my soul?” I ask the name on the page.

I tap my pencil over
Lou Knows
and stare ahead. Lou is a demon with a non-Latin name, a demon that was here before Dia arrived. It’s probably safe to say he serves Mephisto.

“But why does Lou know something about me? Or why does he think he does?”

Lou suggested the same thing that Teddy did: that I could succeed by using my “feminine wiles.” But Teddy only said that after he’d read my soul; I’ve never even touched Lou, so he couldn’t have read my soul. How did he gain special insight into who I am?

A noise up the hall steals my attention. It’s just a heater cranking on.

I look at the page again:
Lou Knows
.

And then I see it.

I can’t believe I’ve missed it.

I jot a phrase under his name: know soul. And then, moving between his name and those two words, I strike out letters until I’ve proven my guess right.

His name is an anagram for ‘know soul.’

Wondering if that’s just lucky—just a one-time coincidence— I write down the next staff name that pops into my head: Trey Sedmoney, Harper’s Guardian, the only teacher I’ve had the displeasure of seeing in the buck (purely for artistic purposes), and a decidedly creepy dude. He was here before Dia, so he’s one of Mephisto’s. Do all demons have a special power? Is it possible that all of Mephisto’s servants, when they arrive here, get names that are anagrams of their powers? And maybe Dia’s followers have kept their underworld names because he was rushed here; I’ve already seen that Dia needs Hiltop’s help with almost everything related to this school, so he definitely wasn’t prepared to come here. It’s possible…

I stare at
Trey Sedmoney
.

Rearranging that name is a lot harder because I have no idea what Trey’s power could be, unlike in the case of Lou Knows. Trey is Harper’s Guardian, so maybe something to do with sex? But no matter what I try, those twelve letters don’t rearrange to form any sex-type phrases.

I scribble his name out. Maybe I’m wrong about this. But before I discount the whole idea, I remember that, my first day here, the secretary Kate Haem used all sorts of anagrams for my name. I thought it was just an annoying game, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was a hint. Was Kate trying to tell me something almost from the moment I stepped foot on this island? But why would she do that?

I write down
Kate Haem
.

That turns into “aka theme,” “take me ha,” and “meet kaha” until eventually I land on something that just might be right.

“Make hate,” I whisper.

Kate Haem’s power could be to make hate.

Immediately, I write down
Hiltop P. Shemese
, which rearranges easily into
Mephistopheles
. It’s not a single power, but perhaps that’s because Mephisto is higher-ranking and, thus, has multiple powers.

I list everyone I can think of. The secretary, Eve Risset; my sculpting teacher, Dr. Weinchler; the music prof, Maestro Insullis; the gym coach, Stealth Vergner; the history teacher, Star Wetpier; the poetry prof, Levi Beemaker. Then my housemoms, Elle Gufy and Shera T. Bond. And Ben’s housedad, Finn Kid.

I start with the short names. They’re easier.

“Finn Kid might be able to
find kin
,” I say as I write it down. “And Elle Gufy could be
feel ugly
. Maybe Shera is
bond hearts
? And I think…Star is…
rewrite past
. Or
trap sweet
.” No, that leaves an extra
I
and
R
. “
Rewrite past
. That’s what Star can do.”

As I’m working on Stealth Vergner’s name, Lou finally rounds the corner. He’s hunched over his yellow bucket, steering it with the mop and the lever he uses to ring the mop out. Between the gap in his teeth, he is whistling a low tune. Until he spies me. Then he stops in his tracks.

I close my sketchbook and stand.

“If you’s looking for Pilot—” he says and starts pushing his bucket again.

“I’m looking for you.”

“Some idiot throw up or something?”

“No, I don’t need you to clean anything.”

Watching me from the corner of his dark purple eye, he pushes the bucket past me, jingles with his keys until he unlocks the door, and shuffles into the cramped space of the janitor’s closet. I follow him in, almost pass out from the muggy chemical stench, and close the door behind us. Lou dumps brown water out of the bucket and sticks a hose in it to rinse the remaining grime down the drain.

There’s nowhere to sit.

“Cut to the chase,” he says over the rush of water.

“Pilot said you know something about my soul. My history. Something that makes him think I’d be successful in life”—
ridiculous
—
“on my back.” Old pipes squeal as he shuts the water off. “Were you guys just being pervs, or is there something I need to know? About my soul.”

Lou faces me. His blue coveralls are wet with mop water, and a smear of mud or oil crosses his stubbly cheek. With the set of his jaw, if he weren’t so thin, he’d almost look like a bulldog.

“Pilot told you that?”

“Tell me what you know, Lou. Please.”