Monday morning the callback list is posted on the lighting-booth door. (Mr. Henry always sneaks it up there like a thief in the night and then hides the rest of the morning in his office so he can avoid the angry and the disappointed as long as possible.) Ryan has promised to wait for me so we can go look at it together, and so as soon as I start up the front walkway toward the school he pounces on me and grabs my hand and practically drags me up the stairs and down the hall to the hallowed location. We wait impatiently for the several people in front of us to finish looking and walk away either elated or deflated, and then we step forward together and scan for Ryan’s name.
It’s there, of course, under Javert, as we knew it would be. And Jeff’s name is there, too, as we knew it would be.
“I vill destroy him,” Ryan whispers in some kind of pseudo-Dracula-sounding accent, and I put my arm around his waist.
“Duh,” I say.
He kisses my forehead and then we look at the rest of the list. That unfamiliar girl I noticed at auditions did get a callback for Éponine, and Danielle, who played Johanna in Sweeney Todd, got a callback for Cosette, which is also as we knew it would be. I like that Javert doesn’t have a romance of any kind going on, and so I don’t have to think about what girl Ryan might have to pretend to be in love with. All he has to do is seethe with vengeance and struggle with existential questions about the nature of good and evil and his place in the universe and whether or not mercy can coexist with justice.
Callbacks are set for Friday. That gives Ryan the rest of the week to get his best bass-baritone game on.
“I booked three rehearsals with my voice teacher,” he tells me as we walk back down to the band wing to wait for the bell for homeroom. “I’m not taking any chances.”
“Good. If I have to watch that Jeff guy play Javert, I will never forgive you.”
Ryan laughs, and the bright and airy sound of it is both a joy and a relief. The fear and panic of Friday afternoon seem to have vanished completely. He is back to being confident and slightly contemptuous of all challengers to his musical-theater throne, and while in general I don’t advocate contemptuousness nor find it at all an attractive quality, in this particular circumstance I will take it and be happy, thank you very much.
Several of Ryan’s friends give him various forms of shoulder punches and fist bumps when he gives them the news, and Jorge actually hugs him, because Jorge is his best friend and really gets how important this is.
Annie also hugs him, and then hugs me, and then hugs Leticia and Diane, who themselves just give Ryan we told you so looks over Annie’s curly, happy, hugging head. William arrives and also accepts his hug from Annie, and then congratulates Ryan when he learns what all the hugging is actually about.
The bell rings and Annie tells me she’ll see me later as she dashes off to get a few last pre-homeroom minutes with William. Ryan gives me an extra-long, extra-confident kiss before heading off down the hall, and my heart is full of light as I make my own way in the other direction. I don’t even have to remind myself that this year is going to be awesome, because it’s so obviously apparent. Sure, things got a little off-kilter on Friday, but the universe has now righted itself and I am certain once again that everything is going to be fine. Whatever stupid tiny part of me keeps bracing for disaster is, well, stupid, and it will see that it deserves nothing but to cower in shame and embarrassment as the rest of us go on to enjoy the wonderful and magical senior year that we deserve.
Smiling the smile of the fearlessly happy, secure in my good feelings, I push the door open to the stairway, and I start up the steps toward the third floor.
I am so securely feeling good that when the hand suddenly grabs my shoulder from behind, I’m barely even alarmed.
But then I turn.
And I see that it is Aaron.
And that he is covered in blood.
And I know that my stupid tiny fearful part was right after all, dammit, and everything is about to go horribly, horribly wrong.
“Aaron? What — ?” He shouldn’t be here. Someone else could walk into the stairway at any second.
I can’t stop staring at all the blood.
“Cyn. You’ve got to — my mistress, she’s —” He suddenly whips his head around to look back over his shoulder, and that is when I notice the flames and the smoke visible in the tiny window of demon realm that I can see behind him.
“Aaron, just . . . just slow down. What’s wrong? What happened?”
He turns back to me, and the panic on his face makes me want to throw up or run away or both. I’ve never seen him like this. Aaron is a person who willingly became a demon’s consort. Aaron is a person who loves demons, who enthusiastically went to live among them, who thrives on all the horrible things that come with the demon world and who is apparently very much enjoying his own slow metamorphosis into a more demony version of himself with random fish-themed appendages and things. I cannot even begin to think of what might be so bad that even Aaron is terrified.
But then I know, even before he says the words.
“He’s loose. He —”
I don’t wait to hear the rest. I fly up the stairs and race to Annie’s homeroom.
I don’t stop to think as I burst through the door.
“Can I help you?” the teacher begins, but I talk right over her.
“Sorry — it’s an emergency.”
Annie’s face went white as soon as I came in. I grab her hand and drag her back out into the hall with me over the teacher’s increasingly loud and unhappy objections. I don’t stop until we come to an empty classroom and I pull us both inside.
“Cyn, what?”
I grab her by the shoulders and stare into her eyes. “Are you okay? Are you — do you feel okay? Is everything . . . ?” I don’t ask what I want to ask: Is Mr. Gabriel already back inside your head? Is he making you think you’re in love with him again?
She shakes me off. “I felt fine until you came barging into my homeroom with that look on your face. What happened? Talk to me!”
“I just saw Aaron in the stairway.”
“Aaron?”
I realize I am stalling.
“Mr. Gabriel got out.”
Annie’s face goes to some new level of pale far beyond what it already was. She is nearly translucent. She backs into a chair and sits heavily down.
“Are you sure? How . . . ?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I didn’t stay for the details. As soon as he said it I came to find you, to make sure —”
“I’m fine,” Annie says. She’s not fine, obviously, but she is at least still here and not under any apparent demon mesmerization. I don’t think Mr. Gabriel could trick her in the same way he did the first time, not now that she knows what he is, but she’s not immune like I am. He could still get to her somehow.
But not if I can help it.
I grab her hand again. “Hold still. I’m going to share my protection with you.” You should have been doing this already, I scold myself silently. You should have known this would happen, you should have kept her protected from the second you knew you could do it. But I know Annie wouldn’t have allowed it. You can’t live your whole life bracing for the worst.
Except . . . clearly we should have been doing just that, because . . . because . . .
I turn off my brain and close my eyes and focus on trying to extend my special protection to Annie in the way I did at camp that time, making it so Mr. Gabriel couldn’t take over any of my friends’ bodies like he so horribly took over William’s for a few unbearable minutes. Annie lets me. She might not want to live in fear, but she’s no dummy.
“I feel it,” she says as I open my eyes again. “Can you do everyone else, too? Do you . . . have enough? I still don’t really understand how it works.”
“Join the club,” I mutter. I should have been learning more about it. I should have been figuring out how to use it more effectively. How to use it to protect everyone I care about when
danger inevitably came around again.
How to use it as a weapon.
But I didn’t. I wanted to believe that I wouldn’t need to. And now I’m caught unprepared.
Again.
“Do you know where William’s homeroom is?”
Of course she does, and we stand outside the door beckoning until he makes an excuse to his teacher and comes out to join us.
“This isn’t alarming at all,” William says to no one in particular as we whisk him frantically around the corner and out of sight of the classroom.
Annie explains while I grab his hand and repeat the sharing procedure. William looks shaken, his former good humor gone, and I don’t blame him — as Annie’s boyfriend, he knows he’s a potential target for Mr. Gabriel.
“It’ll be okay,” Annie tells him earnestly. He nods in response, but his face as he turns back toward his homeroom looks anything but reassured.
Diane is the next closest, and then Leticia. By the time we’re done with them, homeroom is just about over. I send Annie back to her room — she’d left her books behind when I abducted her — and continue on alone to find Ryan.
The bell rings just as I arrive, and I wait outside the door for him to come out. But he does not come out. After the last of the other kids file into the hall, I lean inside but the room is empty.
The tight little ball of panic I had just barely been managing to keep under control begins to grow painfully inside me.
You should have come for him first.
But I couldn’t have. Annie was obviously the one I had to check on first. She’s the one Mr. Gabriel wants more than anything. He hates the rest of us, sure, especially me, but of course Annie would be his first priority. It never occurred to me that he might —
Stop it.
Ryan could still be fine. He might have some perfectly normal reason for not being in homeroom.
I know he has math first period, so I swing by his classroom to see if he’s there. But I don’t expect to find him, and I don’t. The ball of panic in my belly has swollen into something bulging and awful and alive. I imagine it filled with bloated panic beetles, all of them ready to punch through its paper-thin panic membrane and crawl eagerly throughout my body, leaving oozing trails of panic slime in their wake.
I take a breath and try to make myself stop imagining horrible things and focus on what to do next.
He might still be fine. He really might still be fine. But I’m having trouble putting any faith in that idea.
Resolutely, I turn and head for the library.
At the end of the summer, mostly as a joke, or at least slightly as a joke, or maybe not as a joke at all but only our desperate attempt to reclaim some sense of sanity and control, we agreed to make the school library the rendezvous point if there was ever an in-school emergency of the demon-related variety. It seemed both easy to remember and perfectly safe, since the new librarian who took over after Mr. Gabriel left transferred from another school and has a legitimate personal life and work history (we checked) and is absolutely not a demon.
Entering the library still gives me the creeps, though.
I force myself to walk calmly through the doors so as not to alarm Mrs. Davenforth (Mr. Gabriel’s human successor), but I needn’t have worried; she’s apparently busy with something elsewhere. One of her library monitors is sitting at the circulation desk. He gives me a cursory glance and then goes back to reading whatever book he’s got open in front of him. I have to admit that Mr. Gabriel ran a far tighter ship when he was the librarian. But the monitor’s lack of interest in library visitors suits me just fine at the moment, and I start walking between the bookshelves, looking for Ryan.
I find him sitting in one of the reading chairs at the very back. I enjoy one nanosecond of relief that he’s here, but I know better than to relax. The panic beetles are tracing complex lines and figures somewhere in my abdomen now. I feel them readying themselves for the moment when the panic is fully unleashed. They seem to sense it will be very soon.
“Ryan?” I ask softly. He is sitting very still. He doesn’t look up when I speak. He is holding his left hand in his right, palm up, and seems very engrossed by whatever he sees there.
I walk over and kneel beside his chair. He closes his hand into a fist before I can get a look at it.
“I was hoping you’d think to come here,” he says. He’s still not looking at me.
“Ryan, what happened? Did . . . did you see Aaron?” Maybe Aaron went to find Ryan after I ran away from him in the stairway. That’s a thing that could have happened. It would explain why Ryan decided to come here. How he knew there was an emergency. But not so much the thing with his hand.
“Aaron? No. I — I saw Mr. Gabriel.”
The panic beetles rejoice. I swallow hard and try not to let them out.
“You saw him? He was here?”
“Not . . . not here, exactly.” He shakes his head. “I’m not sure. I was about to go into homeroom and then I remembered I’d left my math textbook in my locker. So I went back but when I opened it, it wasn’t my locker inside, it was . . . it was like that scene in the original Ghostbusters when Sigourney Weaver opens the fridge and instead of milk and salami in there it’s the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster prancing around. Only in this case it was Mr. Gabriel.” He pauses, then adds, “He wasn’t prancing around, though; he was just standing there. Like he’d been waiting for me.”
I want to reach over and make him open his hand, but I’m afraid to move.
“What did he do?”
“He laughed, mostly. He was kind of blurry, but I could hear him laughing. And then he stopped laughing and he reached out of the locker and did . . . something. . . .”
I swallow again. It feels like the beetles are crawling up my throat now.
“Ryan, please let me see your hand.”
Both of his hands clench tighter for a second, but then he opens his left hand and shows it to me.
There’s an angry red welt in the center of his palm. It’s about the size of a quarter, but with rough, uneven edges, and the skin there looks raw and delicate and painful. The color is dark and crimson and terrifying.
“It’s kind of pulsing,” he says. “What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. But whatever it is, it can’t be good. “I’m going to try something,” I tell him. I close my eyes and try to share my protection with him. A little late, the panic beetles whisper, but I tell them to shut up. Maybe I can cancel out whatever Mr. Gabriel did to him. I know I can do more with my power than just use it as passive resistance. I just . . . don’t really know how.
At least I’m getting better at the whole voluntary-sharing procedure by this point. It’s not hard at all to take hold of my power and push it gently outward toward Ryan. But whatever Mr. Gabriel did to his hand doesn’t seem to be affected by my ability. There’s no change; the dark-red mark remains just as scary looking as before.
It is too late. Mr. Gabriel got to him first.
I give up and open my eyes. “Oh, Ryan. I’m so sorry. I should have . . .”
I trail off, because there is no good way to finish that sentence. I had to go for Annie first. I see Ryan struggling with wanting to tell me he understands but also totally not understanding. Because right now he has some crazy pulsing demon wound in the center of his left palm, and there is no way that that is any kind of okay. And it’s my fault, because Mr. Gabriel would only come at Ryan to get to me.
Yes, I know, Ryan would already be dead if I hadn’t stopped Mr. Gabriel in the first place. But . . . it’s hard to feel like that matters now. All I know is that my boyfriend is in danger. And I should have known this would happen. I should have been prepared to stop it.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“Not . . . exactly. It feels pretty weird, though.”
We fall silent again. I want to feel shocked and appalled that we are facing demonic catastrophe once more, but somehow I can’t muster the a
ppropriate emotional energy. And I’m not shocked, of course. Not really. I’d been waiting for this ever since Aaron told us that they were going to keep Mr. Gabriel alive. I knew he wasn’t going to stay imprisoned forever. And I knew he wasn’t done with us yet.
Aaron. “Crap. We need to talk to Aaron. I just left him there — he was in pretty bad shape.”
“What else did he tell you other than that Mr. Gabriel was out?”
“Not much. Something about his mistress, but he never said all the words. He was a mess, Ryan. Covered in blood, and so scared . . . also everything behind him seemed to be on fire.”
Ryan stares down at the reading-area carpet. “This sounds pretty bad, huh?”
“Yeah.”
More silence. The bad kind, where there are things that should be being said but aren’t. I take a breath.
“I think we need to call Peter.”
Ryan takes a breath of his own. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
There is so much unhappiness in those words.
Well, he may not like it, but Peter’s our best resource at this moment. And I am not going to screw around when Mr. Gabriel has already begun moving against us.
I get out my phone.
Peter answers on the first ring. “Did you break up?”
The sound I make in response to this is part laugh and part sigh and part scream. Ryan stares at me but I can’t even begin to explain. “Not a good time for your nonsense,” I tell Peter. “Something very bad is happening. Can you come?”
“Is it Mr. Gabriel?” His voice is immediately serious. “Never mind; of course it is. He’s the only reason you’d be calling me. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“But aren’t you an hour —”
I can almost hear him rolling his eyes. “By car, sure. But you do remember I’m a demon, right?”
Before I can answer, there’s a flash of light and Peter is standing before us.
The library monitor, suddenly and inconveniently deciding to do his job, sticks his head around the bookshelves to peer at us. “Hey, no cell phones in the library, you guys.” He looks at us suspiciously, no doubt wondering how Peter got in without him noticing.
Curse of the Evil Librarian Page 3
