With perfect timing, Chris knocked and came in, his eyes widening. “Amanda?”
“Hi, Chris.”
He gave her the standard guy once-over before he said, “I almost didn’t recognize you.” He looked at Sasha. “Are you going to the game?”
“Yes, are you?”
“No, I don’t do sports if Brett’s involved. But I forgot my chemistry book, so I was wondering if you’d get it when you’re at the school.”
She couldn’t figure out why Chris disliked his brother so much. Jax told her Brett had been a lost soul for only a few weeks, but she thought the animosity Chris felt toward him went back way longer than that. “Sure, Chris. What’s your locker number and combination?”
“I wrote them down.” He handed her a slip of paper. “Thanks.” After one more look at Amanda, he mumbled goodbye and left.
Sasha grinned at her new friend. “He gave you the guy once-over—twice.”
“He didn’t seem very enthusiastic.”
“You don’t know Chris. He’s the quiet type, and he pops in and out of here superfast. Trust me, he was impressed.” She couldn’t wait to go to the game and see everyone’s reaction to Amanda’s new look.
At ten till five, she and Boo walked Amanda over to Colorado, to the market where her dad worked. He was the butcher, übernice and friendly, and when Amanda asked if he’d bring her back for the game, he looked like the sun had just risen behind his daughter’s head. “I’d love to bring you back for the game.” He grinned at Sasha, and invited her to their home to eat supper before they returned to Telluride. She wanted to join them, but she needed to find Tim and ask him about her birth certificate. Rose had reminded her twice again before she had left school. “Thanks, Mr. Rhodes, but I’ll have to take a rain check. I’ll see you guys at the game.”
Back at the Shrivers’, she was surprised, and relieved, to find that Melanie was nowhere around. Tim was in the kitchen making a ginormous sandwich.
He looked up when she came in and smiled. “Hey, kiddo, how was school?”
“Okay. Did you have a chance to go by and sign those papers and give Miss Rose my birth certificate?”
“I didn’t, Sasha. Sorry. I’ll do it tomorrow.” He slapped a couple of slices of tomato on the towering pile of roast beef and wheat bread.
“She’s kind of leaning on me for it, Tim, and finals are next week.”
He carefully stacked leaves of green lettuce on the sandwich. “I don’t get why they need a birth certificate. It’s not like you weren’t born, right?” Taking the sandwich, he went into the family room, to his recliner, and sat down.
Sasha followed, standing next to the bookcase that held no books, only video games and DVDs. “If it’s a problem, Tim, maybe I should just tell Rose that we have to wait for Mom to contact us.”
Tim looked really upset, his face turning red, his small eyes glancing between Sasha and the stairs. “I told you I’ll take care of it, and I will.”
Why did he look so freaked out? He’d forgotten his sandwich, mopping sweat from his flabby face with his napkin, mumbling something about consequences and being tired of it all.
“What’s wrong? Is there a problem with getting the certificate from Marin County?”
“Why don’t you tell her, Tim?” Melanie asked as she came down the stairs. “Go ahead. Tell Sasha why you can’t order a birth certificate from Marin County.”
Stiffening, preparing for battle, Sasha waited.
Melanie went to the sofa and sat, crossing her legs, checking out the toe of one of her spike-heeled boots. “Go on, Tim. We’re all waiting.”
“Be quiet, Melanie.” He was still wiping his face with the napkin. “Please, Sasha, just let me get your birth certificate.”
“For God’s sake, you’re such a spineless worm!” She turned her hateful gaze to Sasha. “Marin County doesn’t have your birth certificate. No one does. Katya found you in a slum in Vladivostok when you were two years old, probably the kid of a crack whore who ditched you.”
“You’re lying.” Sasha looked at Tim, waiting for him to tell Melanie to back off.
He leaned his head back against the recliner and closed his eyes, the plate with his sandwich sliding from his lap to the floor, spilling tomatoes, lettuce, and roast beef across the carpet.
“You’re an illegal alien,” Melanie said in pretty much the same way she’d say Sasha was a crack whore. “You’re not a citizen of Russia, either. It’s as if you don’t exist. Tim didn’t know until he went to San Francisco that you’re not Mike and Katya’s natural child. You’re not even legally adopted, so you belong to nobody. If you’d gone with your mother, having no papers, they’d have taken you away from her, and because Tim’s living in some fantasy that he owes it to Mike to protect you, especially since your saintly mother—”
“Melanie, if you say one more word, I’ll put a bullet through your head.”
She stood, went to his chair, picked up the roast beef from the floor, and smeared it across his shirt; then she grasped the neck of his shirt, pulled it open, and dropped the meat inside. “This’ll save time. You won’t have to wait for it to show up as another bulge.” Turning, she went to the foyer, grabbed her purse from the hall tree, walked out, and slammed the door.
After an eternity of staring at each other, Tim said in the quiet of the room, “Before Katya was to leave for the United States, she went to Vladivostok, to the house where her grandfather used to live, to say good-bye. She never expected to be in Russia again. The house was old and abandoned, and there you were, wandering through the debris. She took you to the police, but they couldn’t find anyone who was missing a two-year-old, and when she offered to keep you, they said no and sent you to an orphanage. Things were bad for her in Russia, and she couldn’t wait the months it would take for a legal adoption, so she went to the orphanage that night and took you, then caught a plane to Paris. She contacted Mike, who met her there, married her, and they flew to San Francisco. He got you through customs with a fake birth certificate, which is probably what they used to get you into school. Katya said she lost it and would send another as soon as she could, but so far, I haven’t been able to contact her.”
Sasha sank to the floor, crouched there with her arms around her knees, Tim’s giant body a blur through the flood of tears. Mom and Dad had told the story of when she was born at least a million times—all about how Dad had flown home from halfway around the world to be there when she arrived, and how Mom had been told she could never have children, but there was Sasha, a miracle.
It was such a great romantic story. And it was all a lie.
She remembered her mother had said she’d found the painting in an old empty house in Vladivostok. Mom had failed to mention what else she’d found.
“When she received notice she was to be deported, she called and asked me to come,” Tim said, staring at the floor. “She said that she had something of Mike’s she wanted me to keep. I didn’t expect it to be his daughter, but she asked me to take you, to protect you from what could happen if she took you back to Russia.”
“Would they put me in an orphanage? I’m too old for that, aren’t I?”
“It’s very different in Russia, Sasha. Crime is a way of life, and the Mafia is everywhere, even in the government. The sex trade is huge. Since you aren’t legally her child, Katya worried you’d be taken from her and sent to work.”
Just then, Brett came down the stairs. On his way to the kitchen, he said, “So Sasha, turns out we’re not actually related at all. Pretty weird how just one phone call could get you kicked out of the country.”
Tim frowned. “There won’t be any phone calls to anyone, Brett. Do you understand?”
“Sure, Dad. We wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to Sasha, would we?”
TEN
WHEN JAX GOT HOME FROM PRACTICE, HE WENT TO HIS room to do homework, and found Phoenix playing Demon Slayer. “Didja get the memo that you have this game in your room, too?”
“Coincidentally, I also have news.” Tossing his jacket to the bed, he went to sit opposite his brother, watching the screen while Phoenix incinerated the demons. “It’s pretty sick that we have this game. Kind of latently suicidal, isn’t it?”
“We’re not demons.”
“Semantics. So what’s your news?”
“Zee’s been over at Bruno’s every day after he leaves for work, and today he found a list of the Skia who’re going to be at the meeting. It’s teachers and administrators from schools all over the country. Fifty-five of them, attending under the guise of a conference on how to stop underage drinking.”
“And in the night-owl session, Mr. Bruno will teach them how to recruit teenagers.”
“Right. We’ve got a whole crew of Luminas researching every name on the list, to get what M needs for doppelgängers.”
“He’s going to have to make it a rush order, because I’m pretty sure the meeting is next week.” He told him what Bruno said about being out. “Makes sense they’d do it during Christmas week, when most schools have a break.”
Phoenix wiped out a whole band of demons. “Right. It’s just gravy that it’s Christmas. Eryx does love irony.” He progressed to the next circle of Hell. “So how did it go today?”
Jax leaned back and told him, but wasn’t halfway done before his cell rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, surprised to see Sasha’s name on the screen. He answered and knew right away something was terribly wrong.
She was crying. Hard. “Can you come over?”
“I’ll be right there.” He shoved the phone back in his pocket, went through his bathroom to his closet, grabbed his trench coat, then came back to tell Phoenix he was leaving.
“What’s up?”
“She’s crying and asked me to come over.”
“I told you girls cry a lot.”
“I’ll be back later.” He popped out of his room and into hers, cloaked in case anyone else was there. She sat at the end of her bed, tears streaming down her cheeks. Sitting next to her, he pulled her close. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
With her face buried in his shoulder, she told him around her sobs, something about her birth certificate, and being adopted, and her mom finding her in the same abandoned house where she found the painting.
It was hard to get the whole story, but he finally did, and understood why she was so upset. She felt betrayed because she’d been lied to.
“I was two years old, Jax. Why was I there, in a falling-down house, alone? Who did that to me? Why would my real mother leave me there?”
He suspected she was left there, with the painting, by someone who wasn’t human. Maybe an angel. Maybe Lucifer, who asked God to send an Anabo to bring hope back to the Mephisto. Maybe God himself.
He supposed it didn’t matter. Listening to her cry, feeling her shake with emotion, he was torn, wondering what to say, what she could handle.
“Jax, I want to see the painting.”
He’d seen that coming, but he wasn’t ready. He wanted to show her the reproduced painting that Andres was still working on. “Maybe now’s not a good time, Sasha. Let’s wait until you’re—”
“No!” She jerked away from him and got to her feet, rounding on him. “I want to see it, right now! You said I could. You said you wouldn’t take it away from me.”
“You won’t like it, Sasha. You’ll be even more upset.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible. I want to know why I was there, who left me, and what it means. I’m not anyone’s child, not a citizen of this country. I don’t actually exist. No way can I go to school, and college is a joke. I’m going to be a homeless person, without an identity.”
He stood and reached to cup her face between his palms, pushing the tears from her cheeks with the pads of his thumbs. “I’ll get the Luminas to work up some papers tonight, and you’ll have them in the morning before school. They’ll make sure the papers are on file, wherever we tell them, so if anyone checks, you’ll be as legal, and real, as anyone else.”
“What about the painting?”
He sighed and dropped his hands. “I really wish you wouldn’t look at it yet. Don’t you have enough on your plate without that?”
She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “All you’ve done is make me even more determined to see it.”
“All right, fine, but don’t ask me questions because I don’t have any answers. Deal?”
She moved close and slid her arms beneath his trench coat, around his back. “Deal.”
Ten seconds later, they were in the document lab, where Andres was hard at work on the fake, the room infused with the scent of paint and linseed oil. He looked up when they appeared and smiled at Sasha. “Ah, the Anabo. Hello, Sasha. I’m Andres.”
She nodded at him and said, “Hi, Andres. Is that my mom’s painting?”
He pointed to the one on the left. “Yes, this one. I am reproducing it, as you see”—he pointed to the canvas on the right—“with a few changes.”
Jax watched her look at the canvas, saw her eyes widen, knew her heart was racing because he could see the tiny pulse in her temple. She must be freaking out. She was going to go off about destiny, or how this made a joke of free will, or something. He watched and waited.
She said breathlessly, “Ohmigod, this is an Andolini!” She looked toward Andres. “It is, isn’t it?”
The painter nodded sagely. “I was captivated the moment I saw it. Very rare, of course, and in excellent condition.”
“My mother told me it was flaking.”
“Not the original. Someone altered it with shoddy paint. See? Your face was painted over, and here—”
“What did you say? My face?”
“Yes, see? It’s you in the painting. And Jax.”
She leaned in and looked closely—so still, Jax was certain she was holding her breath.
Andres continued on as if he were a museum docent. “The river was redone, to hide these tiny numbers. That was the flaking paint. The original paint is pristine. This must have been kept in perfect storage for many years to be so clean and undamaged. I’m appalled someone would alter it, but I suppose your mother felt it necessary, so no one would realize this is you, and she saw this as a perfect way to hide the account number.”
“The code to the lockbox in Geneva?”
“Right, and this is why Eryx wants the painting. If he could get his hands on the contents of the box, he’d have dozens of leads to people he might blackmail into pledging.”
“Are you putting a wrong account number on the fake?”
“No, they’re the same. We sent a Lumina to Geneva yesterday to remove the contents from the lockbox so Eryx can’t get them, even if he has the account number.”
“What was in the box?”
“Just what your mother said. Private letters, taped conversations, and compromising photos of lots of people we see in the news, although some of them are retired now, or dead. If Eryx had access to it …”
“What will you do with all of it?”
“Destroy it.”
“If you’re leaving the real account number, why make a fake painting?”
Andres looked at him. “Does she know?”
“Know what?” Sasha looked even more freaked out.
“I guess that answers the question,” Andres said dryly.
“Sasha and I are going to my room.” He hauled her close and popped them upstairs.
Phoenix was still playing Demon Slayer, now in the seventh circle of Hell. “So what was she crying about?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Jerking around, Phoenix saw her and jumped to his feet.
“Phoenix,” Jax said, watching her step back from him until she bumped against his desk, “why don’t you tell Sasha why we need a fake painting to give Eryx? Tell her about the Mephisto Covenant.”
“Why don’t you tell me yourself?” S
asha asked.
“Phoenix tells it better.” He walked to the window and stared out at the mountains. “He’s also way less invested, so he can bear watching your facial expressions.”
“You didn’t really just say that.”
“Wait until you hear what he has to say.”
Dead silence.
After a while, he looked over his shoulder and saw Sasha turn on Phoenix, who was watching her with a funny look on his face. “Will you say something already? You’re freaking me out, staring at me like that.”
Phoenix stroked his goatee and said, “The Mephisto Covenant is a deal Mephistopheles made with God when we became immortal. He didn’t think we could do what Lucifer wanted us to do if we had no incentive, so he asked God to give us a loophole, some way to earn Heaven. God said if we could love selflessly, we’d be at peace, and we’d have the same chance of Heaven as any other human. M agreed, but it wasn’t until later that he realized his sons are unlovable. We tried to find girls to love, but it was hard to do when they ran away screaming.”
“Hyperbole?”
“No, they really did run away screaming. M was bummed, but he said we had another alternative. An Anabo girl wouldn’t run away. She’d give us a shot. The problem was, and still is, there aren’t enough Anabo. We found one, over a hundred years ago, and now you. In a thousand years, we’ve found exactly two.”
“The Mephisto Covenant,” she said softly. “If Jax loves me, if it’s real and selfless, he’ll be redeemed?”
“He’ll be like everyone else on earth and have the same opportunity to reach Heaven.”
“But he’s immortal. He’ll live forever.”
“Forever is relative. The end of the world will come, someday, and when it does, all of us will be in Hell, unless we’re redeemed and have lived a life worthy of Heaven.”
Silence fell again, until she said, “That’s heavy.”
“It’s heavier when you consider none of us have a clue how to love someone. We don’t know anything about females other than the obvious, and the odds of convincing a girl to stay here with us and join the fight against Eryx are even slimmer than finding an Anabo in the first place.”
THE MEPHISTO COVENANT Page 21
