The Devil's Intern (21 page)

Her mouth is on mine, and it is way better than kissing Patty Lloyd, because this means something. The heat of Medusa’s skin scorches mine, but it feels like home.

Medusa was under my nose all this time and I never realized. I take my hands off the ground and move to touch her.

Suddenly her weight is gone. I open my eyes with a start as a blast of hot wind sucks at my clothes like a vacuum cleaner.

Medusa is nowhere to be seen.

I peer around the tree and see Alfarin and Elinor running toward me. Elinor is screaming.

“Where’s Medusa?” I yell.

“She’s gone, she’s gone!” cries Elinor.

I can’t move. My legs feel like dead weights. There’s an ache in my chest as if my dead heart has been replaced with concrete. I fall
to the ground and my fingers grope at the Viciseometer, flickering feebly between two exposed tree roots.

Medusa has left us, left me, ripped away like a Band-Aid, and I have nothing but the taste of strawberries on my lips and the stain of my best friend’s tears on my cheeks.

“What did ye say to her?” screams a distraught Elinor.

“I didn’t say anything!” I yell back. The Viciseometer is in my hand once more. I clasp it to my chest.

“Did Medusa tell you she was going to use it, my friend?” asks Alfarin. His eyes are darting in all directions, even upward into the trees, as if Medusa is a bird that has tricked us all by flying away.

“She told me . . . to close my eyes . . . and then . . . and then . . .” I can’t finish. My throat has gone into spasms. I look at the date on the Viciseometer. It reads: 18 June 1967. The time: eight o’clock.

Elinor snatches it from my hand. “It’s okay!” she cries. “We have the date and the time. We’ll just follow her and bring her back.”

“We don’t know
where
Medusa traveled to, though,” says Alfarin. His deep voice reverberates like the chime of a grandfather clock.

“Then we go back in time a few minutes and stop her from having the Viciseometer in the first place,” sobs Elinor.

“But we can’t!” I cry. “Once that button is pressed, it becomes a fixed point in time, you said so yourself. We can’t stop her—and she must have known that.”

I wipe my mouth and then my tongue on the back of my hand, trying to remove the taste of strawberries. The paper packet I bought just moments ago lies discarded in the dirt. Red juice,
like diluted blood, seeps through it. I stand up and stamp it into the ground with my feet until there’s nothing left but a smeared crimson pulp.

And in that instant I know who the Skin-Walkers have been coming after all this time.

“Do ye think she has gone to stop her death without us?” Elinor’s question jolts me from my thoughts.

I snatch the Viciseometer back from her and look again at the date Medusa entered into it as I sat like a love-struck fool with my eyes wide shut.

“But this isn’t the date of her death,” I say, completely confused. Either San Francisco is spinning or I’m swaying where I stand.

“How do you know?” asks Alfarin.

“Because I looked up Medusa’s records once on the computer. I wanted to know how she died, but the details were classified.”

“But ye definitely know the date of her death?”

“She died on the twenty-fifth of June in 1967, which, if she was telling the truth, is today’s date. We’re a week forward from the date she just set in the Viciseometer.”

“So why has she gone back a week?” asks Alfarin.

I squat down and put my head between my legs.
Think, Mitchell
, I say to myself.
Think
.

Medusa has rarely talked about her life—her living life, that is. I know she wanted to be a ballerina when she was four, and then a doctor. She told me she had lived in Texas for a while when she was thirteen, but that was only because her parents had split up and her mother was staying with relatives until she got back on her feet. They moved back to San Francisco when Medusa was fourteen and her mother had remarried again . . .

The answer suddenly hits me.

“It’s her stepfather.”

“What about him?” say the other two together.

“Do you remember what she said the first night we were in New York?” I shout. “When she woke up from the nightmare. She said she wished she had taken
him
with her.”

“And
he
was her stepfather?” asks Elinor.

I nod furiously. “She told me it was her stepfather. Medusa has gone back to do something connected to him.”

“But where?” demands Alfarin. “Where has Medusa gone? Time is nothing without the destination. We have to see the place she has traveled to in the red—”

“I know, Alfarin!” I interrupt. “I know we have to see it in order to travel to it.”

“Has she ever said anything about her mother, or where she used to live?” pleads Elinor; she is clawing at my arm.

But I can’t remember. My mind is like a blanket of pale-gray fog. I try to think back to past conversations with Medusa, but I can’t even remember what her voice sounds like. I try to grasp it in my head, but it has turned to bloodred sand. It’s slipping through the cracks in time we’ve opened.

“Let’s try the bridge first,” I say, wiping away the beads of sweat that have gathered around my top lip.

“But this date in the Viciseometer isn’t the date of her death!” cries Elinor.

“I know!”
I yell. I immediately regret shouting as Elinor blanches and Alfarin’s face turns to thunder. “I’m sorry, Elinor, I’m sorry.” I hold her trembling hands in mine. “But we have to start somewhere. We will find her. I promise you, we will get Medusa back.”

Tears cascade down Elinor’s freckled cheeks. I feel more responsible for her than ever. How could I have let Medusa go?

Why did she let me go?

I do not touch the red needle. It hangs on its chain like a delicate pendulum as I imagine standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. The red face begins to glow and spark.

“Hold on to someone,” I say, but I don’t need to. Alfarin, Elinor, and I have been holding each other since Medusa left us.

Our flight through time is hot but quiet. No screaming or wailing of the dead accompanies us. Just a haze of pink in the darkness, like the seconds before a sunrise. The Skin-Walkers have gone.

We arrive on the bridge next to one of the colossal towers. Up close, it looks more orange than red. A steady stream of traffic thunders past: Buicks; Pontiacs; and my all-time favorite, the Chevrolet Camaro. Classic muscle cars.

But I only want Medusa.

“Can you see her anywhere?” I yell, pulling out of Alfarin’s and Elinor’s grip. I run to the edge and look along it and then down into the water. The futility of our presence is laid bare by the sheer scale of this bridge. It’s so long, it’s impossible to see the full length. Medusa could be here right now and we wouldn’t see her unless we used the Viciseometer to travel along every inch of it.

I look along the strait to the Pacific Ocean. Fingers of fog are already starting to grope inward as the sun sets. The fog is coming to claim the bridge, and us with it.

Elinor is running up and down, screaming Medusa’s name. I try a different tack and start yelling for Melissa Pallister.

But my raggedy doll isn’t here. This wasn’t her time.

“Should we try the other side, or the middle of the bridge?” asks Alfarin. His voice is steady and calm. His blue eyes are narrowed with intense concentration.

“I don’t think she’s here, Alfarin,” I reply as Elinor continues to scream. “We could scan every inch and we wouldn’t find her.”

“There’s something in the water!” cries Elinor, and Alfarin and I rush to where Elinor is pointing down into the murky depths. Something bobs in the froth, hundreds of feet below.

“It’s just a seal,” says Alfarin, and he wraps his arms around Elinor, who collapses sobbing into his arms.

I always considered Medusa my best friend, and myself hers. I never really gave much thought to anyone else’s relationship with her, even though the four of us are inseparable. But Elinor was like the sister Medusa never had, and Alfarin was like a brother. We
were
a family.

Medusa has been gone just minutes and already I’m referring to her in the past tense. Is this how those who are alive move on
without those who’ve died, I wonder? Is it that easy? One minute you’re there, the next you’re gone. A memory. A photo. A ghostly imprint.

Medusa is already dead. The living won’t mourn her passing again. Will the bustling kitchens in Hell notice one departure among the steam and noise?

Well, screw them all, because I will. If I have to travel along every inch of this bridge, this city, this world, I will find Medusa. I will stop her from doing whatever it is she couldn’t tell us she was planning to do. I will not let the Skin-Walkers find her. She isn’t theirs to take.

My cell phone vibrates and beeps. It’s Alfarin who hears the incoming text. I’m too busy trying to find Medusa’s voice. I pull out the cell phone—it’s glowing red.

“Do ye think that’s her?” asks Elinor.

I don’t have to look to know who it is, because I can hear his voice in my head instead of the one I really want. I just don’t understand how. We’re forty years in the past and I won’t be born for decades. My life and death are still to come.

So how does Septimus know we’re in trouble?

Another two-word text. I show the message to Alfarin and Elinor. They guessed it was from Septimus as soon as they saw me pull the glowing cell phone out of my backpack.

“Go back,” repeats Alfarin. “Lord Septimus is asking us to go back to Hell?”

“We can’t . . . leave without . . . Medusa,” says Elinor. She has finished sobbing, but her words are punctuated by hiccups.

“Try holding your breath,” suggests Alfarin rather unhelpfully. I make a WTF face at him.

Alfarin gets it. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “I forgot.”

I grip the cell phone in my hand. I came close to calling Septimus once before, and our situation has become even more hopeless. Yet I hold back once more. I don’t even scan my directory for his number.

“Why do you think Septimus said
go back
instead of
come back
?” I ask Alfarin.

“It has fewer letters?” he replies without a hint of irony.

I laugh. It’s completely inappropriate, but in normal circumstances that’s exactly why Septimus would have done it.

“Go back . . . go back,” I mutter to myself. I’m searching for clues
in the six characters. Septimus enjoys being cunning in a way that’s almost Machiavellian.

My eyes follow a fine-looking 1965 Chevy Nova. The driver stares at me glassy-eyed as he takes a drag on a long cigarette. He finishes crossing the bridge and heads toward the park we just exited, in a cloud of black exhaust.

I slap my forehead. The park. That’s it.

“Go back, Septimus wants us to go back!” I yell.

“We knew that, Mitchell,” says Elinor. The whites of her eyes are as red as her hair.

“Hold on, quickly, we’re going back to the park.”

“Do ye think Medusa has come back?”

I shake my head. “No, but I bet you anything Septimus is there.”

Elinor suddenly lets go and both hands grasp her neck.

“Ye cannot take us back, Mitchell. Septimus may have the HBI with him. We’ll be arrested and locked up and then we will never find Medusa.”

“Elinor.” I try to keep my voice as calm as possible, even though I’m tempted to just grab her in a headlock and take her by force. “Please, Elinor. I am asking you to trust me. I know Septimus. He wouldn’t betray us.”

“How can ye say that? Ye have only been dead for four years, Mitchell. You forget we are in Hell and there are different rules for us.”

“What if Lord Septimus can help us find Medusa?” asks Alfarin.

“Exactly.”

Elinor transfers her gaze to Alfarin. “Do ye think we should go back to the park?”

He nods. “I trust Mitchell.”

It doesn’t bother me that Elinor believes in Alfarin more than in me—not much, anyway. They have an impenetrable bond now. I just want to keep us together. I need to see the park in the red face of the Viciseometer. I fix my mind on the tree with the tusklike boughs because that seems as good a place as any to go back to. I slap Alfarin on the back in a show of thanks, and he reciprocates
and almost sends me tumbling to another doom over the edge of the bridge.

Elinor is muttering under her breath. I only catch every third or fourth word, but it sounds as if she’s praying.

“Now.”

A reddish-black mist swallows us whole. As before, there are no screams in the darkness. I can feel flames tickling at my flesh, but they aren’t hot. They’re light and wispy, like feathers. For the first time, I want the gnashing of teeth, because it would mean the Skin-Walkers were back and not tearing at my Medusa in another time.

The three of us land on our feet. Just above our heads is the couple from before. They’re so busy getting it on that they don’t notice us materializing out of nowhere. I doubt they would have noticed even if we’d landed on top of them.

“No Skin-Walkers again,” says Alfarin quietly, with a sideways glance at Elinor.

“Do ye think that means they already have her?”

Alfarin says nothing; he’s looking beyond me with his eyes wide open like blue-and-white china saucers.

“Lord Septimus!” he cries, and he immediately goes down on bended knee with his axe clasped between his hands.

I spin around and see my boss striding across the patchy yellow grass. Septimus appears a foot taller than I remember, long and thin and achingly cool in a black pinstriped suit and red shirt.

I start walking backward. I can feel my duplicitous tongue swelling in my mouth. I want to hug him and run from him at the same time. Has he always looked this fierce? His black skin is glistening, and the sun is reflecting off the golden hoops that hang from his ears.

I wait for the crooked white teeth to appear as characters in his enormous grin, but they stay hidden. Panic forces every swear word I know to come tumbling out of my mouth as I continue to stumble backward, away from the most important civil servant in Hell—a
former Roman general who intends to incite a million tortured, tired souls in Hell to rise up and create an army.