The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant (42 page)

It’s so still in the room, I’m sure they can hear my heart beating. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. One thump for me, one for Saligia. The fainter one for Saligia.

“I’m sorry,” I repeat.

Harper sticks her hand out, and Plum puts a tube of lip gloss in it. Still watching me, Harper drags the gloss across her lips and hands it back to Plum, who does the same.

Without a word, she and Plum leave.

“They’ll be fine,” Molly says. She’s never sounded less convincing.

It’s three in the morning before I finally fall asleep. Tomorrow, Harper or Plum will tell Garnet that I fixed and manipulated things to get a second life for Ben. That I used her, and she didn’t even know. That Ben’s feelings for her, if they exist at all, are based on a demon’s spell. I wake a half hour later. And stay awake until dawn, when I drag my butt out of bed and hope to see Harper in the bathroom, getting ready, so I can plead with her to protect Ben.

But she’s not there.

Stiff with dread, I stumble to our morning workshop, the last of the year. Garnet is standing at the front of the room with Augusto; they both notice my pixie cut and drop their chins. My whole body clenches when I see, standing behind Augusto and waiting for their chance to talk to Garnet, Harper and Plum. What are they gonna say to Garnet? Are they going to do this now, right in front of me?

I sit at my easel. Just on the edge of the stool. Put my bag down. And stare at them intently, willing them to be kind.

Harper’s face is blank, but Plum’s eyes are narrow little slits, glaring at me.

Just make it quick
, I think and bury my face in my hands. How did this all fall apart so completely?

Augusto huffs away from Garnet, who turns to Harper and Plum. It looks like Garnet asks them what’s going on with my hair, because she speaks first, and tries to be subtle when she points, and they all turn to me.

I hear Garnet say, “Gosh, what would possess her to do that?”

Harper and Plum turn their backs to me. And then it happens: they begin talking to Garnet. I watch it like a car crash in slow motion. I watch Garnet lean in to hear better. I watch her head tilt, her eyes narrow. She glances over Plum’s shoulder at me, and then back at them. She nods. Raises her eyebrows. Puts her hands on her hips.

This is it.
Sorry, Ben. Sorry, Zin family. I tried. I really tried
.

At once, Garnet claps her hands to settle the room. As we quiet down, she settles her gaze on me.

“Harper, Plum,” Garnet says, “tell the class what you just told me.”

Are they gonna announce to everyone what I did? Why can’t anything bad at Cania just happen quickly? Why does it have to be dragged out like torture?

“We wanna let y’all know,” Harper begins, “that Anne’s portrait of Headmaster Voletto will be unveiled this weekend at the Cania College grand opening celebration, hosted by your very own Social Committee.”

“Which is led by us,” Plum tacks on.

“Well, it’s led by me, but Plum’s a fine-and-dandy vice president.”

“We’re co-chairs.”

“Anyway,” Harper says irritably, “let’s put our differences aside and cheer on one of our own, okay? This Saturday. After the Big V ceremony.”

A small, perfunctory round of clapping takes Harper and Plum to their seats.

I’m not sure what just happened.

Did that really happen?

I don’t think I breathe again until, as I’m cleaning up my workstation after class, Harper saunters by and elbows me in the side.

“I should hurt you for lying to me,” she says. “But, y’see, you actually did help me. Not the way you promised to, no. Not even close.” She flares her nostrils. “That said, I’ve gotten pretty good at collecting followers.”

“You have.”

“And I’ve got a hunch Superbia and her crew don’t like serving Dia Voletto much, do they?”

“I don’t know.”

“So they’re ripe for the plucking.”

“Hold on.” I stop to figure out how to put this. “Are you planning on seeing this through on your own?”

“I’ve learned to do what I need to in order to survive. This is no different.”

“This is playing with fire, Harper. Not just any fire. The kind that comes from Hell.”

“I can play the game. Just keep out of my way, Merchant, and I won’t make you or your boyfriend pay.”

P
ILOT IS NOT
quite as forgiving—if you can call it that—as Harper. Luckily, Pilot doesn’t know that I’ve been twisting things to help Ben,
so he doesn’t know he’s got a card to play. He only knows anger and hate and stomping around like a spoiled brat. Which I silently endure.

“Why did you give us all up?” he asks. “
Why
?”

He’s wearing Mephisto’s pin again. A punk or demon in the underworld is asking for trouble without the help and protection of a master. I wonder if my other followers went back to Dia, Mephisto, or any of the underworld leaders. I’ve been avoiding them all, especially the Seven Sinning Sisters, who keep showing up everywhere and just
looking
at me. I suppose I could take four of them back and, when Saturday comes and goes—when I prove I’m not weak after all—add the remaining three to my ranks, even though Teddy said to avoid them. I could give my followers a new token of my dominance, do the whole thing all over again, maybe even start doling out lives. But for what? To start a war I don’t want any part of? To risk Mephistopheles hurting my dad this time or going after the Zins or destroying every vial in Valedictorian Hall and on the yacht just to punish me for challenging his position?

I can’t.

I won’t.

I’m not ready for that.

“They were threatening my family,” I tell Pilot. In a way, they were.

“But now we’re back to square one! Except for my dumb promotion.”

“Your what?”

He shrugs. “I’m a demon now. Yippee. Sammie M. Firestone— that’s my new name.”

“Well, you got to keep ‘Stone,’ sort of. That’s good.”

“Even got a power,” he grumbles.

“It’s not the power to vivify, by chance?”

“That’s not even funny.”

“Hey, there’s still the chance we can win the Big V.”

“Even if we changed your PT to the skanky one, you’d never pull it off with that haircut.”

I leave him slamming doors and hitting walls. And I run, in the dusk, back to my room, where Molly has laid out options for what we can wear to the graduation party at Dia’s tonight. Everyone’s going to be there. I don’t even care that it’s at Dia’s—he can’t keep
me from enjoying myself anymore. He and Mephisto have had enough power over me.

Molly has laid out three pairs of shoes on my bed. Her name is written in all of them.

“My feet are the same size as my mom’s,” she says with a laugh. “Get over it.”

“What goes better with super-short blonde hair?” I ask and hold up a sparkly, long black camisole and a silvery dress that’s fitted like a corset. She points to the silver dress. “Own my badassness, right?”

She tosses me a pair of strappy heels. “Exactly.”

The road to Dia’s is filled with so many people, you’d hardly believe there are only 200 students at Cania. Molly swivels her arm through mine, keeping us locked together. Around us, most of the seniors are resigned to their fate, and now they’re ready for the last— in some cases the first—party of their lives. We’re going to do what it takes to give it to them.

The crowd spreads out across the Zin lawn, flows in and out of the front door, trickles through the porte cochere, and wraps around the back, where the first of many fireworks displays are well underway, brightening the sky and shedding light on the dramatically changed southern half of Wormwood Island. Gigi’s cottage is gone. It’s been replaced by a thin patch of green grass and animal-shaped shrubs that wall off Dia’s lands, creating a fence, on the other side of which is the vast, seemingly endless campus of Cania College.

Molly tugs me toward the gated entryway of the new school.

“It’s really something, isn’t it?” Molly whispers to me. She’s seen it already in her many visits to her gramps’ inlet. “Better than Cania Christy.”

“Way better,” I agree.

I press my face between the bars of the wrought-iron gate, which is flanked by red brick pillars and topped by a decorative iron symbol. It could be the entrance to Brown University. Pavestone walkways connect a series of stone buildings, some columned, all of them timeless, that lead to a cathedral-esque main hall. The lights are on in a building made just for visiting parents; in classic Cania form, not even the mothers and fathers of graduating seniors are allowed to connect with their kids until the morning.

I stare at the too-familiar campus.

“I’ve seen it all before, Mol,” I say. “I memorized these buildings on an admissions pamphlet my mom got me.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You know?”

“It’s obviously a replica of Brown.”

It is. And something tells me it’s designed like this not to torture, and not to tempt me, but as a message to me:
this
is my destiny. Mephisto won’t let me escape; he thinks I’ll always come back to him. It seems I’ll never be free until Mephisto is gone—so why did I agree to kill Dia first? As I stare at the college Dia will lead, I know he’s got darkness in his heart, but I can’t help but wonder why I narrowed my focus so quickly from Mephisto and Dia to just Dia. Now that I think about it, it seems sortuv nuts to destroy Dia alone tomorrow. When he goes, a whole slew of demons are going to be looking for new masters fast. I should be ready to swoop in and destroy Mephisto before he takes every lost demon and becomes entirely unstoppable. Why didn’t Teddy and I think of that?

“Come on,” Molly says, stunting my mounting concerns. “My first high school party awaits. If I haven’t made out with three guys by the end of the night, it will not be due to a lack of effort.”

We make our way into the mansion, where the walls are vibrating as Pilot plays DJ Who Wants to Deafen Us. I see the Model UN from Hell early on, and Harper and Plum nod my way, but nothing more.

Venturing further in, I find a corner in the kitchen, near the wide-open backdoors that lead to the crowded deck, while Molly grabs us something to drink. I catch a glimpse of my pixie cut in the window’s reflection and have to smile; from Miss Saligia to
this
. Frankly, I prefer this.

“It’s growing on me,” Dia says as he comes to stand at my side. I see him in the reflection next to me. He doesn’t look like his old self, either; his broad shoulders slump now, and there’s a wheeziness in his breath. “You haven’t been here in so long. Not since the day you freaked out about my experiments.”

He’s got a lot of nerve talking to me after what he did. Of course, I’ve had some nerve looking him in the eye for the past few weeks even as I slowly enacted my plot. I guess you can’t expect much more from a couple of underworld leaders.

“Did you destroy those morbid beings?” I ask him.

“‘Course I did.”

I glare at him.

“I’m not as bad as you think I am,” he says.

“Saligia hated you.”

“Well, hate is love in the underworld.”

“And cheating on her was…adoring her?”

“I don’t know if I should take credit for mentoring you now,” he says, “or stand humbly in the shadow of what you were able to accomplish when you weren’t under my tutelage.”

“Nice topic change.”

“I can’t stop thinking about that painting.”

“Me neither.” And I mean it. That painting consumes my every thought.

Molly swoops in and hands me a can of soda. She’s shoving chips into her mouth as she smiles at Dia, excuses us, and pulls me into the dancing crowd, where no one can keep their hands off my short hair, which is especially short at the back.

When the music starts to get lame, we venture out back, where the most tormented of seniors have gathered to slice knives across their wrists and stab each other just to see how it feels. That gets old—and creepy—fast, so Molly and I move along, like we’re exploring sideshows. A prayer vigil is underway in the porte cochere. A dozen kids hold candles and pray for the souls of the seniors we’re about to lose.

“I think we promised to enjoy tonight,” Molly says, tugging me away. “Not that…I mean… We can sit and pray here if you want to.”

“I never took you for guilty, Mol.”

Verily and Justin bolt our way and hand Molly flash drives containing their good-bye speeches, meant for family, and then dash off, holding hands, with a final call of thanks. Molly tucks the drives into her pocket and shoves me when I look at her like she couldn’t be a bigger softie.

Around the next corner, to my heart-stopping dismay
and
delight, are Ben and Garnet. Molly tries to steer me away, but I won’t let her.

“You are such a masochist.”

I hush her.

Ben has his back against the house, and Garnet is standing an inch or two from him, bringing her lips to his, then pulling back, then smiling and kissing him again—on the nose, on his eyelids, on
his forehead, and eventually on his lips—bobbing like one of those bird toys that sips from a cup of water.

When she notices us, she calls us over. I try not to look at Ben, even though I can feel his gaze moving through me like fire through dry wood. Last we spoke, I told him I hated him. If he wins tomorrow, will there be time for me to tell him the truth? Or will I have to use Mr. Watso to send notes to Ben in his new life?

“Anne, my prize student with the bold new look!” Garnet is all smiles. “And her friend—I forget your name, sweetheart.”

“It’s Molly.” She throws me a glance that says what I’m thinking: Garnet’s barely older than we are, so why is she calling Mol
sweetheart
?

“Yes!” Garnet exclaims. “Such a cute name.”

“That’s me,” Molly says. “Little cutie.”

I have to look away to keep from laughing.

“So, are you girls enjoying the party?” Garnet asks us.

“I’m thirsty, actually,” Molly says.

Ben’s face lights up. “Me, too. Let’s go grab a drink, Mol.”

“I’ll take a chardonnay,” Garnet calls after them. She drapes her arm over my shoulders. It smells like she’s already had a glass or two.

I drive a glare into Molly’s back, but she doesn’t turn to see.