“And the rest?” I ask.
Mr. Gabriel gives me a condescending look. “You know I will not relinquish my claim on Annie. And I will not promise not to take my revenge upon you.”
“Will you promise not to hurt the rest of them? Peter, Leticia, Diane, William?”
He considers this. I wait. Peter and Ryan both step close to me and start whispering urgent objections.
“Don’t you dare, Cyn,” Ryan says. “Don’t you dare trade my safety for yours and Annie’s.”
“Cyn, you need to think really carefully about this,” Peter says.
They continue to say things, but I’m not listening.
Instead, I’m suddenly remembering that I already made a deal for Ryan’s safety a long time ago.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner.
“Wait a minute,” I say, holding up my hands. “Everybody shut up.”
I point angrily at Mr. Gabriel’s flickery image. “This is all bullshit. You can’t hurt Ryan. We already made a deal about that.”
“What?” Ryan and Peter say together behind me.
“You promised not to hurt him. Forever. When we made that deal in the library.” My eyes go squinty at him. “You’re already violating that deal, in fact. How is that even possible?”
Mr. Gabriel smirks at me. “I was wondering when you’d think about that. I was kind of hoping it would take just a little longer to occur to you.”
“Cyn? Will you please turn around and tell me what the hell you are talking about?” Ryan’s voice is not very friendly right now.
I turn around.
“Remember when I told you about the deal I made with Mr. Gabriel to get rid of all the extra demons in the school?”
“Yes . . .” His eyes are not very friendly right now, either.
I don’t know why this is so hard. We’re in the demon world, one of the demons just demonstrated exactly how little power we have here in a very painful and upsetting way, I’m trying to make a bargain for our lives, and somehow the most terrifying thing is confessing to Ryan that I still haven’t actually confessed everything to him yet.
“So I didn’t tell you the whole story. Part of the deal was that Mr. Gabriel wouldn’t hurt or kill you or let any other demons hurt or kill you. Ever.”
Ryan just looks at me for a minute, and it takes everything I have not to crumple under that gaze.
“How many times did we agree no more secrets, Cyn?”
“I know. I know! But that was such an old one . . . honestly, I just didn’t remember to tell you. I swear. I mean, you can see that I almost completely forgot about it, can’t you? Otherwise we wouldn’t have even needed to come here, since you can’t be in any danger from Mr. Gabriel.” But then my eyes drop to his hand, and I am reminded again that Mr. Gabriel is already hurting him.
I whirl back around. “How are you breaking the deal? Is that whole deal thing a lie?” I whirl again, this time to glare at Peter. “Is it? Do demons not actually have to honor their bargains after all?”
Peter is looking at Mr. Gabriel thoughtfully. “It’s not a lie. We do have to honor our bargains.”
I turn back to Mr. Gabriel again. “So?”
“Apparently,” he says at last, “dying, ah . . . releases you from all of that. Honestly, I wasn’t sure about it myself until I actually placed the mark on your boyfriend. I half expected it not to work.”
“But — then — how can I possibly make a deal with you now, knowing that there’s nothing that holds you to it?”
“Oh, I think any deals I make now will be solid,” he says. “Dying just released me from the old ones.”
“Oh, you think so? Oh, in that case . . .” I throw up my hands. “This is ridiculous. There’s no way I can trust you.”
Mr. Gabriel’s face darkens again and all pretense of banter suddenly disappears. He leans toward me, and even though he’s not really there, I can’t help taking a step backward. Only to be stopped by one of Mr. Crunchy’s horrible arm-leg things, which has reached out surprisingly stealthily to prevent me from backing up any farther.
“You don’t have much choice, my dear girl,” he says, his eyes somehow fixing steady and determined on mine while the rest of him remains slightly flickery. “You will do as I tell you, or I will kill Ryan where he stands. And then I will start killing more of the people you care about until you comply.”
I try to put the same fire behind my own glare as I force myself to take a step back toward him. “If you kill him,” I say softly, “I will never do what you want. So if you really want me to do this thing for you, you’d better think twice about trying to bully me into action that way.”
We are at another impasse of mutual glaring. It threatens to go on for quite some time, because I am out of ideas for how to proceed, and it seems that Mr. Gabriel is, too.
“I have a suggestion,” Peter says suddenly.
We all turn to look at him.
“Test deal,” he says.
“I’m sorry, what?” Mr. Gabriel and I say in unison.
“Test deal,” Peter repeats. “Let’s make a little deal right now, for something unimportant. Prove to us that you have to honor deals made going forward, and then we can go back to negotiating terms for the real thing.”
I glance at Mr. Gabriel, who shrugs. “I’m game if you are,” he says.
“Okay,” I agree, turning back to Peter. “Tell us what you have in mind.”
“Let’s see,” Peter says. “It has to be something small, but also something that you wouldn’t do unless you had to.”
Everybody falls silent, thinking.
After a few minutes, Mr. Gabriel asks, “Do any of you want to be taller, or better at math, or”— he looks at me with exaggerated sympathy —“more attractive?”
“No,” I say. “And those wouldn’t be anything you’d care about giving to us . . . they wouldn’t prove you had to honor the deal.”
“We could make him inflict some kind of pain on himself,” Ryan suggests.
“No,” Peter says. “He’d probably like it.”
And then a really perfect idea occurs to me. “Love poems,” I say.
Ryan and Peter turn to squint at me in confusion.
I keep my eyes on Mr. Gabriel.
“Annie told me that you used to write her love poems. Back when you had her completely brainwashed. She said they were so beautiful. That no one who could write things like that could possibly be evil.” I smile mercilessly at him. “Recite one.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Mr. Gabriel says quickly. Too quickly. “I’m not doing that.”
Peter is smiling now, too. “That seems like a perfect test to me,” he says.
“Do we even know for sure that he wrote them?” Ryan asks.
“Oh, he wrote them,” I say. If I had any doubt, which I don’t, because he is entirely too proud to entrust such a task to anyone else, his face right now would make me absolutely certain.
Mr. Gabriel looks like he wants to stab me in the heart.
“Fine,” he says, sounding as though he has to force himself to speak the word. “One poem. Of my choice.”
“One love poem that you composed for Annie, and it can’t be a haiku,” Peter says. “Done. In exchange for what?”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “I’m not the one who has to prove I’m bound to honor a deal.”
“There are two parts to any deal,” Peter says. “There must be an exchange.”
“You could recite a love poem to me,” Ryan says, grinning at me.
“I have never written you a love poem,” I tell him. “Sorry.”
“You could make one up on the spot.”
I want to smack him, but I also want to get this show on the road. And making up one stupid love poem wouldn’t be so bad. No one would expect much of it, since it would be spontaneously composed. I could make it silly. “Fine.” I turn to Mr. Gabriel. “Would you accept that?”
“No,” he says. He looks at Ry
an thoughtfully. “No. I think . . . I think Cynthia should have to kiss Peter.” He pauses, then adds, “Again.”
We all stare at him. I’d forgotten that he was, technically, in attendance when I confessed my kissing of Peter to Ryan at camp.
“No,” Ryan says firmly. “Pick something else.”
“Besides,” I say, “I already promised that would never happen again.”
“A promise is not a deal.” It is Mr. Gabriel’s turn to smile. “Those are my terms.”
“Well, they are not my terms,” I tell him, no longer feeling the least bit playful about any of this. “Pick something else.”
“No.” He points a flickery finger at Ryan, who suddenly screams and falls to his knees, clutching his hand. “Don’t forget that until we make our new deal, I can hurt him. Do you want me to hurt him some more?”
“Stop it!” I shout at him.
His smile stretches wider. “I can also hurt you. Indirectly, at least.” He gestures, and Mr. Crunchy lunges forward more quickly than I would have believed possible and slices my upper arm with the sharp edge of a crab claw.
Now it’s my turn to scream. The pain is bright and hot, and there’s a red line of blood beginning to drip down along my skin. I slap my left hand over it, trying to contain the bleeding.
That’s enough for Ryan. “Cyn, it’s okay! Just do it. Please. I . . . I know it won’t mean anything.”
Mr. Gabriel stops and looks at me questioningly. I’m blinking back tears, still trying not to bleed all over the place. God, that hurt.
Peter has been, perhaps wisely, silent this entire time. Now he says, hesitantly, “Maybe this test deal idea has gotten a little out of hand.”
“No,” I say. “No, we need to establish that he can be held to a bargain. Otherwise we can’t trust anything he agrees to.”
Mr. Gabriel’s eyes are shining merrily now. “Excellent. So that is the deal. You will kiss Peter — for, let’s say, forty-five seconds, eyes closed, like you mean it — and then I will recite one of the love poems I wrote for Annie. Agreed?”
I glare at him helplessly. “Agreed.” I feel the skin-prickling tingle that I first experienced when I made the original deal with the demoness.
“It’s okay,” Ryan says to me quietly. “Just get it over with.”
I nod and walk over to Peter, still holding my arm.
“No one asked how I feel about this arrangement,” he says, trying, I think, to lighten the mood.
I give him what I hope is a scathing look, because I am not at all ready to have my mood lightened. I half expect him to sweep me into his arms in some over-the-top fake-romantic gesture, making the most of the opportunity, but he doesn’t. He just stands there, waiting. Understanding, I think, how much I don’t want to do this.
Don’t you? a tiny electron-size voice whispers from somewhere inside me.
No, I tell it. Not like this.
But I agreed to this deal, and so I’d better just get it done. Peter is my friend. This kiss is only Mr. Gabriel’s way of getting back at me for the poem thing. And it’s just a dumb kiss, after all. Like playing spin the bottle in fifth grade in Melanie Schwimmer’s basement.
“Come on, then,” I mutter, leaning forward.
“So romantic,” Peter mutters back, rolling his eyes.
I press my lips gently against his. My plan is just to stay there, lips together, technically kissing, but there’s that immediate spark of contact and I can’t stop my lips from parting slightly in response. Peter feels it, too; I can tell. There’s that electricity between us that has been there since the start. But he holds as still as I do, not taking it any further.
“Like you mean it, I said,” Mr. Gabriel calls. “If you don’t start actively kissing him, Cynthia, you’ll have to start again.”
And so I start to kiss Peter for real.
Mr. Gabriel begins counting out the long, slow seconds. I try to seem as unenthusiastic as possible, which shouldn’t be hard, considering the circumstances. Except it is, because I like kissing Peter every single bit as much as I liked kissing him the first time. It’s hard to keep my mind on the circumstances. It’s hard to keep my mind on anything.
And now Peter is kissing me for real, too. Like he was just waiting for my permission, and now he’s more than happy to follow my lead.
I tell myself that Ryan has probably turned away, since he wouldn’t want to see this and Mr. Gabriel, thankfully, didn’t think to make Ryan’s close observation part of the actual deal. I try to focus on the counting. I try to focus on anything other than the delicious softness of Peter’s lips. But it gets more difficult with every passing second. I feel his hand come up and bury itself in my hair, and I know I should tell him to stop that, but I don’t. I move closer. I keep kissing him.
At some point I forget to keep holding my arm. I forget almost everything but the feel of Peter’s body pressed against me and his mouth and tongue and the undeniable heat that burns between us anytime we get this close. I almost don’t let him pull away when he finally does, and then I realize that Mr. Gabriel has gotten to forty-five and I didn’t even notice. I see that Peter knows this, and I flash him a look of shame-laced gratitude for stopping when our time was up.
“Done,” I say quietly, turning back toward Mr. Gabriel. I’m not ready to look at Ryan yet. “Your turn, you bastard.”
His look of gleeful satisfaction fades as we all stand facing him, waiting.
“Oh, very well,” he says finally.
He closes his eyes and begins.
By the second line, I am fully regretting my choice of task for him. The poem is horrible. Worse than I ever imagined. Also, it is very long.
Soon the three of us are sitting down, hands over our ears, waiting for it to be over. The only good thing is that it seems to have totally discharged the awkward aftermath of the kiss. But that is seriously the only good thing.
Eventually, Mr. Gabriel coughs, and we realize he has finished.
“Thank God,” Ryan says as we get back to our feet.
“I didn’t realize there were quite so many rhymes for bosom,” Peter murmurs.
“Well, most of them weren’t actual rhymes,” I point out. “He fudged a lot of them.”
“True.”
Mr. Gabriel glowers at us. “Satisfied?”
I look at him carefully. I suppose he could have faked the whole thing, but . . . somehow I don’t think so. In addition to being awful, the poem was intensely personal. He really does think he’s in love with Annie, in his own twisted, screwed-up, evil way. I don’t think he could have faked the painfulness of that recital, or the shadowy look of mortification that now haunts his features.
“Yes,” I say. “Are you guys?”
Ryan nods, and after a second, Peter does, too.
“Okay,” I say. “So now let’s make the real deal and be done with it.”
“Fine,” Mr. Gabriel says. He’s still rather pouty. “The terms I offer are these: you will retrieve the object I require to re-create my body, and in return, I promise not to harm or kill Ryan, Peter, Leticia, Diane, and all of their families.”
I’m a little disturbed that he didn’t need prompting on any of the names, but I put that aside. “And William,” I add.
There is a very long pause, and then: “And William,” he agrees.
“And Annie’s parents and siblings.”
“Fine.”
“And my family.”
“Your family except for you.”
“And you also won’t order or allow any other demon to hurt or kill any of them.”
“No demon will hurt or kill them at my command. I can’t be responsible for more than that.”
I guess that will have to do.
I look to Ryan and Peter. “Am I leaving anything out?”
Ryan is clearly still very uncomfortable with all of this, but he must realize that guarantees of safety for some of us is better than promises of death for us all. “I don’t think so,” he say
s.
Peter looks like he’s trying very hard to think of something to add, but finally he shakes his head.
“All right, then. But before I officially accept, I want you to explain what this thing is that I’m going to get for you. I’m going to need a little more than ‘retrieve the object.’ What exactly is this object, and where do I have to go to get it?”
Mr. Gabriel narrows his eyes at me thoughtfully. Then he begins speaking, and all of his banter and nonsense is gone; it’s just business now.
“My amulet, as you have noted, is very powerful. Unfortunately, it is also incomplete. There is a piece missing — a very important piece, without which I can’t use the amulet to channel my power in the appropriate way.”
“Wait,” Peter says suddenly. I shush him. I want to hear the rest, and I don’t want Mr. Gabriel to start getting all pissy about being interrupted and just end up dragging it out.
“Your task is to go to the creator of the amulet and retrieve this missing piece.”
“Wait,” Peter says again, and this time the dismay in his voice finally registers. He is staring at Mr. Gabriel. “That — that’s your amulet? The one that . . .” He trails off unhelpfully.
“What?” I ask. “The one that what?”
Peter ignores me. He keeps his unhappy eyes on Mr. Gabriel. “Is it what I think it is?”
Mr. Gabriel sighs. “I keep forgetting about you,” he says. “Yes. It’s that amulet.”
“Hey!” I say to both of them. “Share with the rest of the class, please!”
Peter shakes his head, apparently still having trouble accepting whatever he has suddenly figured out. “Remember how I told you that truly powerful amulets were rare and generally not allowed, at least as far as anything is ‘not allowed’ down here?”
“Yes . . .”
“So there’s this one amulet that’s basically the king of amulets. I mean not in a one-ring-to-rule-them-all kind of way, but just in being the most powerful amulet anyone has ever known. It was so powerful that the demon who created it was sentenced to eternal punishment for his efforts. He actually never managed to finish it before the authorities came for him; the story is that he knew they were coming and just managed to stash the nearly complete thing somewhere before they found him. And that he still has the missing piece with him that would bring the amulet into its full power.”
Curse of the Evil Librarian Page 8
