The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant (15 page)

I swirl, looking for Ben. It’s too dark. Too much seaweed. It tugs at me like long fingertips, pulling me in when the force of the tide wants to pull me out. I finally spot Ben. He’s way beyond my reach. His gaze meets mine. Bubbles push out of his mouth as he tries to say something. He’s pointing at our feet. And then he’s gone, vanished, back on the island.

My head hits something. It’s the iron bar that’s holding Molly’s box. The ice floor is solid above me.

I look down again. Where the glints were. But they’re not glints at all. They’ve taken shape—the strangest, eeriest shapes. They are eyes. And they are teeth. And they are swaying, in eel-like motions, up from the murk, up toward me. They are looking at me. And there are dozens of them.

Something has been living under the water. And it’s coming up for air.

Or it’s worse than that. Much worse.

The gateway to and from Hell
, I think.

Desperate now, I pull myself up to the ice that’s trapped me. I pound my fists against it. In futility. Bubbles of my breath collect under the grayness I can’t break through.

I swivel to see. Far below. Climbing up. Living beings. With legs and arms and heads and eyes. But also horns. And snouts. And tails.

Instinctively, I try to scream. Water fills my throat, touches my lungs. I can’t cough. This is how you drown; this is how I drown, if I’m not first killed by whatever’s swimming up at me.

But all at once, the world is gray. And the flash of violet eyes. Nothingness and lightness. And then I feel the earth under my feet again. Ben is standing, quivering, on the snowy bank next to me. We are soaked through, drenched in ice water. He grabs me and wraps his arms, his whole body around me, and I cling to him. We’re gasping for air. I cough, trying to form words. Our bloodshot eyes meet.

“I tried to warn you,” he says, convulsing with cold. “I saw them. From above.”

“Are those what I think they are?”

But the woods answer for Ben. The ground beneath our feet, which starts to move and take the shape of a large man’s back, is all
the answer I need. The quaking ground growls under our boots and throws me off balance. Just before I fall, we grab hands and leap off the rounding, rising lump of snow-dusted cliff. We stagger backward, stagger toward the woods. And when the thing takes full shape, facing away from us—“
What is it?
”
—
“
Some sort of man-thing
”—we spin on our heels and haul ass. We refuse to look back. We race into the woods, through them, as fast as our wobbly new legs can go, and stop short at the road. I’m fearfully certain more of what we just saw will find us here.

And it does.

The demon-women push through the frozen mud near the road. Ben pulls me back into the shadows just before their heads swivel in our direction. Together, we watch those things, dressed in diamond-printed unitards, faces painted a streaking white, dash forward and scurry up the trees like lizards, a third set of limbs helping them. Lumbering across the road far ahead, an elephantine creature dressed in formal clothes from another time drags a wrecking ball in its trunk and moves slowly into the woods on the other side.

“Either we’ve just stumbled into the circus from a nightmare,” Ben whispers, “or Molly’s alive.”

“And found.”

“And Mr. Watso had to sign over the island to keep her alive.”

“So it’s a gateway now.”

“It’s owned by the devil. And his demons are here. They’re making it their home.”

“It’s what Mephisto always wanted.”

“But,” I pause, “it’s Dia’s now. Not his.”

“Does it matter? We’re on the property of the underworld. It’s Hell on Earth. Dia’s demons or Mephisto’s—they’re here.”

The island is filling with demons—real ones in true form, not semi-palatable human avatars. The tree we’re clutching begins to morph, its bark taking the shape of the man in Munch’s
The Scream
, which is our cue to get the hell outta there. As if we needed nudging. Keeping low, we scuttle along the road, feeling anything but protected by the starless night. We move fast, stay together, back to back. We look the other way when a fern quivers. We pick up our pace when the earth rumbles.

It seems as if campus will never be in sight. But why should we think things will be better there?

There’s a moment, when we’re near Dia’s mansion, that we talk about darting inside and hiding. But the lights are on within. And huge shadows pass by nearly every window at once.

“It’s packed with his demons,” Ben says.

Enormous winged creatures—could be bats—could be vultures— sweep up to perch on the rooftop. They are dripping wet, as if they’ve risen from beneath the water.

“Mephisto’s going to flip,” Ben whispers to me. “If all the students see these demons running around, it’ll be impossible to pretend that this place is anything but evil. That won’t be good for enrollment.”

“Are you seriously thinking about
admissions
right now?”

“I’m seriously thinking that Dia is reckless. This is bad. In so many ways.”

Just as we turn from the mansion, we are faced by a tall, pencil-thin man with bright red skin. He dwarfs the trees.

We stop dead. And stare up. And up.

Fear paralyzes me. Ben yanks me closer to him. Trying to protect me.

With long eyes stacked one above the other, this enormously tall demon is watching us from the middle of the road. The stretched, ribbed horns of a gazelle rise skyward from his soaring forehead, and his legs in red striped pants are those of a painted giraffe: endless, knobbed at the knees. He is too thin to house a heart, too thin for the things that make you human. He watches us with the curious expression of a hunter observing his prey behave most strangely— the dance of death. I know this thing can’t kill us. We can’t die. We can, however, be brought to the point where we’d beg for death. With no one to hear us. Or help us.

“Back off,” Ben warns it. “Leave us alone.”

The thing’s thin upper lip curls. It’s laughing at him.

“I’m not kidding.”

I notice the others. All around us. Up in the trees, glaring down with thin eyes. Behind the forest ferns, in heaving rows. Large ones that seem made of rock, and small wiry ones that are all teeth. Some look human, dressed in top hats and tights as if they’ve raided a demonic dress-up trunk. Others are anything but: webbed feet and
scales, beaks and horns, hairless, made of smoke. I don’t have to turn around to know there are more at our backs.

My next thought catches me by surprise:
Look closer
.

I hadn’t thought I was so indoctrinated in the Cania Christy way of thinking as to use my PT when no one’s even grading me. In what precious little time they’re allowing us before they pounce or do whatever demons do to vivified kids, I take in the scene and then each of them individually, starting with the tall red man. He is standing exactly where, beneath the snow, a red line is painted across the road. Something about that lessens his power, as if he is made of paint, as if he’s nothing to fear after all. Looking even closer, I find that he’s not watching Ben anymore. He’s fixed that stacked gaze solely on me.

They’re all looking at me.

Expectantly.

Curiously.

My heartbeat quickens. As if I have two hearts, and they’re racing each other. Adrenaline surges through my veins, rippling under my skin. The rush of fear that froze my legs explodes into waves of energy, straightening my back, lifting my chin, arching my eyebrow. Ben is whispering that he’ll find a way to get us out of this, that I shouldn’t worry, when I fix an unwavering glower on the tall red thing.

“Get back to Hell,” I command it.

The red man looks like he might speak. But, instead, he folds in half, almost as if he’s bowing, and then in half again, and again, as Ben and I stare silently, until he disappears beneath the snow. The others crawl and slurk back to where they came from, one by one, sinking into the frozen earth or retreating to the ocean.

I feel Ben’s arms stiffen around me. But it’s not until we’re alone again that his body starts to shake with laughter. My heart, to my surprise, is still thumping hard.

“I don’t know where that came from,” I confess. Why wasn’t I more afraid?

“They obeyed you,” Ben says as he pulls back, holding my shoulders and laughing. He kisses me. Hard and full on the lips. I wish I could be in the moment with him—these moments are so rare—but I can’t believe what just happened. “What are you?—some kind of demon tamer? Maybe that’s why Teddy brought you back here. The underworld’s recruiting you.”

Easy for him to laugh. He doesn’t know what I saw in the mirror.

My heart slows to normal. Finally.

Slush and mud squish inside my boots as we walk back to campus. A hot shower is all we can talk about when we part ways outside his dorm. He tells me to warm up—I’ll feel better then, he says. But I can only shrug. I guess five years on this island have normalized interactions with the underworld for him.

“I’ll meet you after your mentoring session tomorrow. Okay?” he asks. “We’ll celebrate our anniversary in the cafeteria. Nothing better than food we can barely taste to celebrate, right?”

“Sounds good.” Can he sense how messed up my head is right now?

“Have sweet dreams. I’m sure there’s an explanation for what just happened.”

I’m sure there is, too. But I’m not so sure I want to hear it.

I’ve only just started up the stairs to the second floor of the girls’ dorm when I see Harper and Plum. Their arms are full of clothes on hangers, shoe boxes, and hat boxes. I tiptoe up the rest of the way, and they finally notice me when I’m at the top of the stairs; Harper’s face pales.

“Spring cleaning?” I ask, my tone flat.

“It’s
winter
,” Plum says.

“You finally learned your seasons. Congratulations.”

“I already knew the seasons.”

“All four of them?”

Harper interrupts us: “You’ve got a new roommate, Anne. I, um, had to move out. Not that I wanted to. I—I really liked living with you.”

Gulping so loud I can hear it, Harper casts her eyes down, gestures for Plum to keep moving, and hurries into Plum’s bedroom, closing the door and locking it behind them before I can even ask if they saw any of the demons Ben and I saw.

I shuffle into my room—right past my new roommate, who’s digging through her closet. And I stop.

It just occurred to me who she is.

I turn back to her. She’s standing. A big ol’ grin spreads across her pretty face.

“Surprise, roomie!” Molly exclaims.

nine

THE MENTOR

HERE SHE IS, MY BRUNETTE FRIEND WHO’S AT LEAST A
foot shorter than I am but is always, even now,
especially
now, larger than life. She tosses down the sweater she was stretching onto a hanger and throws her arms around me, ignoring my owl-like stare and the stiffness of my drenched body as she squeezes me hard.

“You’re soaking wet, but I don’t care!”

“Oh my gosh. I was totally right about you,” I stammer.

“Good to see you, too.” Her laugh fills the room as she lets me go. When I don’t crack a smile, she shakes my shoulder like she’s waking me up. “What, has rigor mortis set in? Look alive, Anne! It’s been
sooo
long. Did you forget me already?”

“I was just looking for you. Ben and I. We fell. We fell into the water. Looking for you. And then the demons were there. And then. Gone.”

She smiles coyly. “Ben?
Ooo la la
. I want to hear everything!”

She tugs me onto her clothing-covered bed, oblivious to the fact that I’m going to drench all her stuff. She starts flouncing my wet hair over my shoulders.

“Look at you. Look at us! Roommates at Cania Mother-Effing Christy. Who’da thunk it?”

“How long, Mol? How long have you been vivified?”

“Since, like, gee, how long since Villie gave me the ultimatum? About a week after that, my grandpa buried a little container of my blood in the ground, and voilà.”

“So it
was
you outside the gates that day.”

She blushes. “I gravitate toward you—what can I say?”

“Then your grandpa really was keeping vials of your blood out in the water, just beyond the power of the island.”

“
Précisément
. The night he got so mad at you—remember?—was the night he took my blood as a precaution. Just in case the worst happened. Which, of course, it did.”

“And then he vivified you without Dia or Mephisto knowing?”

“Bingo. Anything that touches this place vivifies—including moi—so The Great Mephisto didn’t even know. But enough about all that.” She rolls her eyes like her top secret vivification is so boring. “Tell me about Ben. Are you guys, like, making out on a regular basis now?”

“So, wait, back up a sec. Your grandpa waited a week to vivify you?”

She sighs. “This is not the girl talk I was looking forward to.”

“It’s just that I’m trying to keep ahead of things here, Mol, instead of, like, living in the dark. I saw them try to vivify this kid named Damon Smith, but they’d waited too long, and his soul had already moved on. He’d only been dead, like, three days.”