The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant (16 page)

“Well that sucks.”

“It’s just lucky that your soul was still available to be vivified along with your body. I mean, waiting a week to vivify you sounds risky. You’re lucky.”

“Oh, yes, I’m the luckiest girl on Earth!” she laughs and starts braiding my hair absently. “I managed to live in secret on this island for, like, five weeks. But today, I was snooping around Cania, just checking things out, and that weird chick with the bangs—Hiltop, right?—she spotted me. Turned me in.”

“She’s one of Mephisto’s avatars.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.” I watch her fiddle with my hair as if nothing’s wrong. I can’t keep it in any longer, so I whisper, “I’m so sorry, Mol.”

“Sorry?”

“You never wanted to go to Cania. You never wanted to compete for the Big V. And now you’re doing both. And your island is your tuition. And it, like everything, is all my fault.”

“Oh, no, you’re not inviting me to a Pity Party, are you?”

“I’m serious.”

She smiles. “Well maybe there’s a loophole.”

“We both know there are no loopholes with these guys. You lost your island for good.”

“Anne, stop worrying. Losing Wormwood was bound to happen. Molly’s okay with it.”

I lean away. “You did not just talk about yourself in the third person.”

She clears her throat. “Molly likes to do that sometimes.”

I’m laughing when it finally sinks in that my only friend is back in my life. Molly has replaced pain-in-the-ass Harper as my roommate. I throw my arms around her.

“You’re here!”

“You’re wet!”

We head into the shared bathroom, where Molly shoos a couple sophomores out and sits on the counter as I hop in the shower. She rattles off stories about sneaking around on the island and asks me questions about everything—she seems to care most about my relationship with Ben and my dad’s new position here—while I trade chattering teeth and de-thawing hair for a rush of hot water that, after ten minutes, leaves my skin almost as red as the pencil-thin demon’s. I wrap myself in a plush towel, push away all the dark thoughts of this evening, and step onto the heated tile floor.

“You look like a sundried tomato—ever heard of turning the cold on, too?”

“You sound like my parents.”

“Your hair is a rat’s nest. Come here!” Molly shoves me onto a vanity stool and wields a wide-toothed comb. We watch each other in the mirror as she starts working through my knots. “So, exactly how much naughty business have you gotten up to with Mr. Ben Zin?”

I can’t help blushing, even though there’s not much “naughty business” to relate. “He’s…he’s amazing. And too good for me. And…amazing.”

She smiles. “I guess that dress I loaned you really made an impact.”

“So much has changed since that night,” I say in a breath.

“
Everything
changed that night,” she echoes. Our gazes lock in the reflection, but, to my relief, her smile widens. “Anyway, get this—you’ll never guess who my Guardian is.”

“Nice topic change. This is so
awful
.”

“Go ahead. Guess.”

“If you’d just been a cow, Molly, we wouldn’t have been friends, and this whole mess—”

“
Guess, bitch!
” Molly’s forcing a mean face that doesn’t look even remotely scary. Her dark eyes twinkle against her olive skin. “Guess who my Guardian is…or I’ll start teasing this big ol’ hair of yours.” She taps the comb impatiently on my head. I smack it away, but she doesn’t give up. “I swear, it’ll pick up radio signals by the time I’m through.”

I relent. “Well, I’ve got Pilot for a Guardian, which is the worst possible punk to get stuck with.”

“
Pilot?
That pervy sex-senator’s son? The one you freakin’ dated?”

“And then killed.”

“Hold up—” Her eyebrows hit her hair. “You what?”

“It sounds worse than it was. It was this situation when Ben and I jumped off the cliff. Long story.”

“You black widow, you.”

“I’m not exactly proud of it.” I wait for her to make me feel better, but she just keeps combing. “Anyway, Ben’s a student now, too, and he’s got Garnet as his Guardian. She’s the blonde chick I kept seeing with him. They used to go out.”

“Remind me?”

I stare in disbelief at her. “The blonde girl. We broke into his house to learn about her.”

“Oh!” She shrugs. “I forgot.”

“You forgot that?” I laugh it off. “Anyway, it turns out she’s a teacher. And she’s kinda obsessed with him. And pissed he’s not into her.”

“Well, gee, mine doesn’t seem so bad now.” She puts the comb down. “Ready for it? It’s Teddy! Wasn’t he your old Guardian?— that scrawny little guy? Man, what a puke.”

Teddy?
“I thought he was off looking at places like Wormwood. Dia sent him away.”

“He was here tonight, and he tried to ‘read’ me. Creepy much? I wouldn’t have it.”

“You didn’t let him read you?”

“I told him any part of him that touches me, he ain’t gettin’ back.”

I silently curse Teddy for being here and not coming to talk to me. It’s been six weeks since he told me our so-called mission. The least he could do is check in. For a second, I think about telling Molly the truth about Teddy, but if I didn’t tell Ben, I can’t tell her. Teddy warned me not to trust anyone.

“So how did he give you your PT?” I ask her.

“I chose my own PT.”

“Of course you did.”

“I’m going to succeed in life by surprising people.”

“You’re off to a good start. What did Teddy think about that?”

“As long as I can use it in sinister ways, he’s fine with it. What a freak. Made me write it down and sign it with my blood, right in Dia’s office. And, can I just say”—she stares dramatically into space—“in another world, I would totally have Dia’s babies. Damn, that is one fine devil-dude.”

Laughing, we head back to our room. Void of Harper’s motivational posters and flush with Molly’s carved trunks, golden twinkle lights, and family photos, this rectangle of a room actually feels like it could be home. The lights are dim, and the faint moonlight beyond our windows is reflecting the falling snow outside. For the first time since I moved in, I flick on the little gas fireplace in the corner of the room; Molly smiles, and so do I.

“So Teddy must be sticking around here now. To be your Guardian.”

“I don’t want him anywhere near me, so I hope not. He said something about traveling the world. Thinks he’s a big shot. And who needs him?” She tosses me her fancy body lotion, which smells like cookies, and locks the door. “I have a surprise for you.”

“Save it until someone’s grading you for it!”

“Uh-uh. Guardians can’t see this surprise.”

From under her bed, she pulls a shoe box large enough for boots, doing her best not to get lotion all over it. A grin lights her eyes as she lifts the lid and reveals a laptop, a Kindle, a bunch of magazines, and an MP3 player. I rub the rest of the lotion into my hands so I don’t smudge the devices.

“Contraband?” I ask, trailing my fingertips over the silver laptop. “Here I thought you’d have a secret vial of, I dunno, Hiltop’s blood.”

“My gramps saved this stuff for me. Consider it a crash course for the two years of life you slept through.” She pushes the Kindle at me. “
Fifty Shades of Grey
—like it or not, a pop culture must-read.” Then the MP3 player. “Imagine Dragons. One Direction. Adele.” Then the magazines. “The Kardashians. That’s all I’m going to say.”

For the rest of the night and almost until the sun rises, Molly and I talk breathlessly. We both know I’ve gotta meet Dia Voletto tomorrow, but neither one of us wants to sleep. She has a thousand questions about my life, though she never actually asks about how I got into a coma or who brought me back here, to my relief; I don’t want her to get the wrong idea about my mom, and I don’t want to openly lie to her about Teddy. I’m struggling to keep my eyes open by the time her sentences start breaking up and her questions turn into mutterings that finally peter out.

I make sure to wrap my covers tightly around my body, and I wait until I can hear her heavy, slow breaths before I close my eyes. One day I’ll tell Molly about the creature I saw in the mirror, but not now. We need time for some friendship rebuilding first, methinks. There will be enough forces trying to pull us apart as the Big V becomes an actual consideration and we find ourselves competing against each other for it. I don’t want to lose her now, not to something as foreign and confusing to me as it would be to her.

I’m relieved to make it through the night without any screaming whatsoever. But my relief vanishes when I wake to the first in what is sure to be a dreadful series of Saturday mornings spent in “mentoring” sessions with Dia.

“Why are you dreading seeing Mr. Sex himself ?” Molly asks me. “I’d be waxing my lady parts.”

“There’s just something about him,” I say.

“You don’t like bad boy types?”

“I don’t like devils.”

Molly got up early to see her gramps, who’s going to live on the ice until spring, and brought back a thermos of coffee for us to share. I sip mine as I watch her put away her insanely gorgeous wardrobe, all of which she’s told me I can borrow. Her jeans would be flood pants on me, but the sweaters and dresses will totally work.

“What’s he mentoring you in again?” she asks. “The art and science of
luuuv
?”

I throw a balled sock at her. She bats it away and celebrates her awesome instincts.

All sense of levity vanishes twenty minutes later, when Dia opens his office door for me. I’ve just zipped through the quad and found myself looking both ways for clownish devils. Dia’s grinning as I stand before him, but there’s nothing funny about any of this. And I won’t step foot into his office until I get him to agree to sending those demons back from whence they came.

“Headmaster,” I begin, “you’ve gotta get rid of all those dudes from the underworld, stat.”

He looks confused. I can hear Tom Waits’
The Black Rider
on a record player inside. My mom would play that on her darker days.

“The demons,” I clarify.

“My staff?”

“No. The ones that, like, infiltrated Wormwood last night. In their scary circus costumes.”

“Oh, them. Done. Gone. They went away last night.”

“Permanently?”
Please say it’s not because I asked them to. Please say I’m not a demon tamer
.

“I traded the island to Mephisto last night. So my little followers had to leave.”

I struggle to process what he’s just said.

“Mephisto owns the island now?”

“Sure does.”

Why does this seem so much worse than Dia owning it? It is. It is worse. I don’t know why, but I feel it in my gut. Already I’ve developed a hunch that Dia isn’t quite as clever as Mephisto is, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was just a pawn in Mephisto’s larger world-domination strategy.

“Anyway, it’s not like they would’ve harmed you, Anne.” Dia tugs me by the sleeve into his office, closing the door behind us. Seven beautiful women are standing behind his desk. I freeze. “And, as you can see, I made out much better than Mephisto did in the exchange.”

Before I even know what I’m seeing, I say, “The Seven Sinning Sisters.”

Here they are. In the flesh. In the spectacular, mind-numbingly beautiful flesh. Mephisto traded the remaining six goddesses of sin for the island. Which means his legions are at an all-time low, and his power might be zapped with it. If there was ever a time to destroy Mephisto, it’s now—but Teddy’s nowhere to be found!

“Anne, please meet—”

“Superbia,” I say to the first woman, who’s taller than the other six and holding her chin haughtily as she looks down her long, straight nose at me. She can only be the sin of pride.

The Seven Sinning Sisters, oozing appeal, arch their well-shaped eyebrows at one another and turn their impressed gazes on me. Each of them has translucent violet eyes edged in thick black lashes. Each has hair at least as wild as mine, but theirs are streaked with jewel tones like amethyst and ruby. Each is tattooed, the mark of their master Dia, and their tattoos reveal their powers. Each is more striking than the other, possibly having to do with their submission to the beauty-obsessed Dia Voletto. Each has afflicted me in my life, and each one has the power to destroy me. But in spite of their destructive power, I’m awestruck by them, trapped in a rapturous enjoyment of the simple act of looking at living dolls. I want to touch them. I want to be them. And it takes me too long to realize what a terrible thought that is.

“Nice work, Anne,” Dia says. “Yes, she’s Superbia. Of course, you already know Invidia.”

“The sin of envy,” I say.

“Don’t hate me because I’m everything you want to be,” she offers, pinpointing exactly how I’ve felt in her presence for weeks.

“And you’re Avaritia,” I say to the blonde woman dripping in diamonds and draped in white mink. “The sin of greed.”

“I’ll be teaching Modern American Economics,” she says.

Dia introduces the rest of them. Dressed in fishnet stockings and a tight black dress is Luxuria, the sin of lust, who bats her eyelashes at me while Dia explains that she’ll teach biology. Gula, whose heavy curves are barely contained in her tight jeans and tighter blazer, personifies the sin of gluttony and will oversee the cafeteria. As Dia’s talking, Acedia abandons her sisters to make herself comfortable on the divan near the fire; there she seems ready to sleep—until Ira, frustrated with her, shoves her off the lounger and to the floor.

“And they,” Dia says with an eye roll, “are the goddesses of sloth and wrath. Acedia has informed me she won’t have anything resembling the energy to teach a course, but Ira has agreed to manage the school secretaries.”

“Am I going to be painting all of you today?” I ask.

They laugh. Deliciously. In unison. Rather than answering me directly, they begin filing around the desk and, one by one, they give Dia a kiss on the cheek on their way to the door. Acedia, too slovenly to make the epic journey to where Dia’s seated, blows him a kiss from across the room and drifts slowly to the door, which she waits for Luxuria to open for her.

“I’ll see you in class, Miss Merchant,” Superbia says to me, pausing to look me up and down. Her tattoo is a tiara, and it sparkles when the light catches it. “I’ll be your English Lit instructor in Term Two.”