The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant (32 page)

The spirits are waiting for me outside the storage room as I click the door closed. But rather than letting me go, they turn my attention to a room at the exact opposite end of the hall, down in the dimness of the south wing.

Checking for Dia, I tiptoe past the staircase and soon find my hand resting on the doorknob of this room. It could be any room. Could be empty.

So I turn the knob.

Before I flick on the light, I hear groans and breaths and sighs. Then a flick. A sterile fluorescent glow floods the large, bare space—four plain walls, with a closet at the far end, and two shaded windows.

The light confuses the four beings ambling in circles within: a girl, two boys, and some unimaginable creation that barely passes for human. The girl is chattering about the magic of moving pictures. The first boy is blank. The other thing is…unmentionable; its three arms clutch at each other, and that is the least of the horror. And the final creature is none other than Damon Smith.

I freeze. They turn their vacuous stares on me.

“Interesting, aren’t they?”

I jump at Dia’s voice behind me. He pulls me, in all my stiff shock, closer. The beings start toward us, and I back up, even with Dia’s arm holding me tight. He lifts his free hand, and the creatures stop like they’ve run into an invisible wall. Their knees keep bending,
their arms keep swinging, but they move no closer toward us. He drops his hand; they walk forward. He lifts his hand again; they stop.

“What is that? A spell?” I ask.

“There’s always plenty of magic at my house,” Dia says. Then he drops his hand one more time—this time to flick off the light, close the door, and trap the beings within again. In the safety of the hall, he eyes me up. “Were you freezing? You’ve got about a hundred sweaters on.”

“You kept Damon Smith?” I ask, unable to budge. Dia has to manually move me away from the door and back to the staircase.

“Who’s Damon Smith?”

“That boy in there. You vivified him in front of me. He had no soul. You don’t remember?”

He looks like he’s about to shrug until he catches my confounded expression. He scratches his chin instead. “Oh, sure, that kid.”

“He stood like a zombie in the middle of your office. His parents were crushed. How can you not remember?”

“Sure. The boy in there.”

“Hello? His dad’s building your college in exchange for seeing that heartbreaking display.”

“Oh, the
Smith
kid. Yeah, he was my first vivification, so I only destroyed one of his vials. Get this, though: he’s reincarnated as an impoverished girl in Brazil. Smith’s wife already moved there to keep tabs on the baby as she grows up.” He nods like it’s cool, like this is all perfectly acceptable.

“You’re keeping zombies, you know.”

“Nah, they’re not brain-eaters or anything. They’re just interesting creatures.”

I storm downstairs. Dia follows, rattling off facts about those beings as if he doesn’t realize how upsetting they are.

“The soul that’s coming through for the girl,” he says, “is one of her past ones, from the 1920s.”

“Leave me alone!”

“And that really odd-looking one? I made it myself. Just blended drops of blood. That was based on your idea.”

I glare up at him from the foyer. “I was talking about making art. Painting!”

“
That
was art,” he says, pointing upstairs. “Why are you putting on your boots?”

“I’m leaving.”

“But why? We haven’t even painted.”

“Are you serious?” I grab my coat. “Y’know, I wondered why Gia would leave the underworld, and I wondered why she would react so violently to you. But now I know.”

“You think you know.”

“It’s because, as beautiful and appealing as you are, you’re ultimately the darkest and coldest of all the demons and devils in history.”

After a pause, he says, “You think I’m beautiful and appealing?”

Growling, I turn to go.

“Gia—Anne, stop! Please stay. Don’t be angry with me.”

I look at him, at his earnest expression and his pleading eyes. “Those were real people once,” I say.

“I’m sorry.”

“I thought you loved beauty. Not monsters.”

“They’re beautiful to me. They would be beautiful to Gia. You’re tainting them with your morality.”

“Spare me the lesson in aestheticism.”

“Anne, deep down inside, you’re just like I am. You’re an artist. You blend paint to see what colors you can make. That’s all I’m doing.”

He tries to brush my hair away from my face. I smack his hand. He mouths,
“Ouch,”
but grins through it.

“See you next Saturday,” he says.

“Not if you’ve got those monstrosities up there.”

“You know how I love threats.”

When he closes the door behind me, I have to stop and catch my breath. I hope he’s not right about the way Gia would have seen his experiments, about the dark areas she easily navigated. I need to use who she was to help me, but the last thing I want is to start looking at people like test subjects.

That’s when I hear voices.

“Garnet, I said I’m sorry!”

I flatten against the wall at the sound of Ben’s voice. He and Garnet are on the road, heading toward the college. She is storm
ing ahead of him. I hide behind a column. If they saw me here… oh God. I’m wearing six of his sweaters! Can you say
stalker
? I close my eyes. Even when a melting icicle starts dripping on my head, I don’t budge.

“You know damn well that sculpture looked nothing like me,” she snaps at him. “And stop calling me Garnet. I’m Lizzy to you—I always have been.”

“Of course, Lizzy. Please hear me out. I think my sculpture does look like you.”

She whirls to face him. They’re stopped directly across from me, up on the road.
No
, I think,
move along. Go
. Dia could open the door at any moment and reveal me here.

“Look at me.” Garnet motions up and down her body. “Am I some sort of Amazon woman? Is my hair huge and crazy?”

“I swear, I was thinking of you. It’s not…her.”

“It’s not your ex-girlfriend.”

OMG, they’re talking about me. If they see me now…I shift closer to the column. I accidentally step onto a slick mound of ice. My foot slips. Biting my lip, I grab hold of the column and rebalance.

“I have no idea what I ever saw in her,” Ben says. “It wasn’t her. I swear.”

A spell made him say that
, I tell my heart.

“Here’s a tip, Ben: girls don’t want to hear about other girls. Like,
ever
. And we sure as hell don’t want our idiot boyfriends to say they’re going to make a birthday sculpture for us only to show up with some dumb-ass statue of their
ex
!”

“It wasn’t her!”

“Especially,” she insists, “when your life hangs in the balance. Got it?”

twenty

A LEGION OF THREE

MOLLY IS READING
THE MANY LIVES OF THE GIRLS OF CANIA

Christy
—the book that told me the truth about this school months ago—when I open the door to our room. To my surprise, tears are streaming down her cheeks. I’ve never seen Molly anything but cheery.

She wipes her face when she looks up at me.

“Are you okay?” I ask her.

“Are you doing a Michelin Man impersonation?”

I glance down at my sweaters. “These are Ben’s. I got them at Dia’s. Don’t ask.”

“Don’t ask what you were doing at
Dia’s
house? K. I’ll just jump to conclusions.”

I start pulling off Ben’s cardigan. “What are you doing with that book?”

“Harper brought it to me this morning. Said I have to add my page to it. Then she took your hairbrush and left.”

“She what?” I glance at my dresser-top. My brush is gone. It had strands of my hair in it.

Does this mean what I think it means?

Has Harper come around to my idea?

“I was gonna stop her,” Molly says, tossing the book aside, “but I kinduv couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Why did she take your brush?”

I decided long ago that I wouldn’t tell Molly about my plan to help Ben and my mom. She wouldn’t understand. Every time I’ve suggested, even jokingly, that I’ve got a demon-lady under my skin, she gets so upset, so adamant that I couldn’t possibly be a demon goddess, no matter what my mother asked Mephisto for. She’s left me no choice; I have to lie to her.

“Maybe she secretly digs my puffy hair,” I say with a short laugh. Molly arches an eyebrow. “Anyway, what are you gonna write on your page?”
That you were murdered by Mephisto? That I was partly responsible for your death?

“I’m not sure,” she says. “It’s such a morbid book.”

We’ve never talked about her murder. Or her life before Cania. We barely even talk about our memories together. It’s always felt like too sensitive a topic to broach. But now, with Molly wiping her tears away, it feels like the perfect—maybe the only—time to bring it up.

“Hey, Mol?” I begin. “I’ve wondered for a while… How did Mephisto do it?”

“Do it?”

“How did he…kill you?”

Her face pales. “Um, it doesn’t really matter.”

“Of course it matters.” I sit next to her and take her hand.

“The memories are blurry. A lot of my memories are. Must be a vivification glitch or something.”

I don’t mention that my memories aren’t spotty.

“Well, what about your gramps? I don’t imagine he just sat there and let Villicus, like, poison you? Was it poison? Or something worse? Something faster? It’s just so—”

“I don’t really like talking about that, okay? I’m here now, so that’s what matters.”

“I know, but—”

“Anne! Drop the interrogation.”

“Interrogation?”

Someone knocks at the door. Molly, looking relieved at the distraction, tosses my hand aside and bounds to her feet as a senior boy pokes his head into our room. She darts to his side. Her expression has totally shifted back to cheery—her mischievous brand of cheeriness.

“Anne, you know Paul? Paul, Anne.”

“The girl who chose to stay,” Paul says with a half smile and small wave.

“Paul’s a chemistry major,” Molly explains.

“I’m sure he is,” I say. It’s clear that Molly doesn’t want to continue the convo we were having. So I sigh and offer, “Well, Paul, what’s in your shopping cart? Must be something pretty sweet for you to risk coming into the girls’ dorm.”

“It is,” he says as Molly yanks her box of contraband out from under her bed. She holds up a smartphone, and he hands her a folded slip of paper in exchange for it.

I watch the exchange, fascinated as always by Molly’s take on trading. It’s the opposite of Mephisto’s. Molly has become the go-to person around here for forbidden technology. For a long time, I thought she was trading tech for favors, mostly IOUs. But it turns out she’s been asking students to commit to being nice to just one person. That’s all the payment she takes. They write the name of the person they’ll be kind to on a slip of paper, and that’s it. I once thought that Molly should be sainted, and every day she gets more and more likely to earn a halo.

“Come on,” Molly tells Paul. “I’ll show you where to stand on this island to get a signal.”

Before I can say anything more, they’re gone. I listen to them chatter on their way to the staircase, and I lower myself to her bed. The book of death is open next to me. I flip through it until I land on the page reserved for Molly Lynn Watso. It’s empty. Just her name at the top. And something tells me she’s never going to add anything to it. Her death is a topic she clearly wants to hide from, which is odd. After all, she practically ran toward it when she befriended me.

I glance up to find Pilot and Lou standing in my doorway.

“Where’s the security around this place?” I ask. “You guys can’t be here. Girls only.”

Lou nudges Pilot. “I told you!”

That’s when I glimpse the lockets around their necks. My hair is in them. I scan their faces for an explanation, but they both keep their eyes averted. Which is explanation enough.

I stand.

“Master,” Lou says, “our apologies.”

“It’s my fault,” Pilot adds. “Lou asked if he could see you. Rumor has it you appeared to Dia today. From the sound of it, you put on exactly the sort of wow-worthy show we were talking about.”

“Word travels fast.” I look at Lou’s locket. “Is that what I think it is?”

“I serve Miss Saligia,” Lou says with a deep bow. I check to make sure no one in the hall saw that. “Master, I have long awaited your return.”

“So I’ve got two followers now? And maybe Harper, too?”

Pilot and Lou exchange a look. I don’t care if I sound like a sad excuse for a would-be underworld goddess. Two followers is awesome! It might even be enough to give me what I need to turn the tables in Ben’s favor. At least, I’m gonna try.

I don’t know how to dismiss Pilot and Lou, but I need to go. So, short of a better idea, I pat them each on the head, grab my sheet of notes on teachers’ powers out of my desk, and dart by them. As I hurry down the stairs and out the door, I unfold the paper and search for the first power I need to use. The sheet shakes in my hands. I have to stop, catch my breath, slow my heart.

“Take it easy, Saligia,” I whisper. I look at the list. “I need to rewrite history,” I say as I scan the names and their powers.