An impossibly loud roaring sound seems to burst out of the very air around us. The same horrible demon that briefly appeared in Peter’s summoning circle in the library is now squeezing itself out of the alleyway — the same alleyway that Annie was hiding in just seconds ago, the realization of which makes my blood turn to ice inside me. Aaron yelps and vanishes. The demon screams, staring at the spot where Aaron had been standing, and then lifts its head(s) to stare at those of us still present.
And then it comes shrieking right for us.
“Everyone hold hands!” Peter shouts. “And run!”
The open gateway is right there in front of us but somehow it suddenly seems an impossible distance away. I have Ryan’s hand on one side and Annie’s on the other and am desperately screaming questions at everyone, trying to make sure someone has a hold of Peter.
“I’m good!” Peter shouts. “Go! Go, go, go!”
I throw myself into the swirling black smoke, holding as tight as I can to Ryan and Annie as I do. The blackness takes us in eagerly, sucking us forward into its cool, dark embrace. Just before the world vanishes I catch a glimpse of Peter grabbing the gate with his free hand and yanking it closed behind him.
And then everything is silence and smoke and my frantic, desperate thoughts of how the hell I’m supposed to keep all of these people I love alive and safe until I can get them back out of here again.
When the smoke clears, we are standing in a vast, open field.
Well, partly open.
There is grass under our feet but also a wall at our backs that seems to be made of some kind of shiny black stone. It is perfectly smooth and featureless, and it stretches up and up until it becomes lost in a hazy blur far above. I don’t think that’s really a sky up there, but it’s not quite a ceiling, either.
The grass and the wall stretch endlessly to either side, but ahead, far off in the distance, I can see what looks like another kind of wall. The inner boundary, I am guessing. Which is where we have to go.
But first things first.
I turn to Annie, releasing my grip on her and Ryan’s hands.
“What are you doing here? Did we not have an agreement? Do you not remember our agreement?”
She is trembling, and her eyes are shiny with tears, and she has obviously not yet recovered from the near-demon experience we all briefly shared before leaping through the gateway into the hungry black smoke. I should be sympathetic. I should try to comfort her; I should try to give her a minute to pull herself together. But I’m not and I don’t. I’m glad she’s afraid. She’s probably still not afraid enough. She shouldn’t even be here.
“Well?”
“Cyn —” Ryan starts, but I shoot him a stay the hell out of this look and his mouth closes with an almost audible snap. He goes to stand quietly beside Peter.
“Cyn, don’t . . . don’t be mad,” Annie says.
“Um, too late!”
“I know I agreed to stay behind. But it wasn’t right — I should be here with you. At least for this part, after — after you were done talking to him. I want to help!”
“But you can’t help. All you can do is make this harder. Why can’t you see that?”
Her expression begins to harden, her mouth set in a firm little line. “How do you know I can’t help until you let me try?”
I wave my hands around, trying to indicate all of the horror and danger that surrounds us, although the effect is probably weakened by the soft expanse of cheerful green grass and the current lack of things trying to kill us. “Why does everyone seem to keep forgetting that this is the demon world? Do you remember what happened the last time you were here? Do you remember how helpful you were then?”
Annie flinches, and I take a breath, trying to calm down, because I don’t really want to have a big fight with her right before I go off to probably die. “Annie, I’m not trying to be mean, but — what were you thinking? I had to come or else Mr. Gabriel would kill Ryan. And Ryan had to come because of the curse. And Peter is a demon! He knows how to survive here. But you . . . you don’t have to be here and I don’t see what you can do other than scare me to death by putting yourself in unnecessary danger.” I’m getting angry again. Because I don’t have time for this. “Also, didn’t we already have this same goddamn conversation in the library? Ryan is dead if I don’t get this thing done and I still have to figure out how to do it without actually letting Mr. Gabriel win and instead of getting on with it I’m standing here explaining to you again why you need to go the hell back to school where you belong!”
Her face has been getting redder and angrier with every word I say. Now she shouts back at me, “Who are you to decide where I belong? When are you going to get it through your stupid head that you do not get to tell me what to do?”
“Argh! I’m not — that’s not what this is about! I’m not trying to tell you what to do. I’m trying to keep you from dying!”
“By telling me what to do!”
“Ladies —” Peter steps forward, trying to get between us.
“What?” I shout at him, swinging the full force of my frustration over to his direction. “Can you not let us finish this conversation, please?”
“Um . . . no. Sorry, but no. We need to keep moving.”
I sigh theatrically. “Fine. Please just send Annie back up and then —”
Annie growls “Don’t you dare” just as Peter leans forward and says, “Cyn, listen, we have to —” and I want to smack them both. Why won’t anyone just do what I tell them? Ryan drops to the ground, apparently deciding to get comfortable while waiting for us to sort this out. The grass around him seems oddly taller than it did a minute ago. Peter notices me noticing this and then stretches a hand toward Ryan, his eyes wide.
“Ryan, no! Get up!”
“What —” Ryan starts, and then he shouts in pain and leaps to his feet. Or tries to. Some of the grass has wrapped itself around his leg, and he’s yanked back down before he can get all the way up. His shouts get a little panicky as he swipes frantically at the grass, trying to rip it away. Peter yanks on Ryan’s arm, trying to pull him up.
I rush to help, too, and together we get him back to his feet. The grass is even taller now.
Peter plucks a blade of it and holds it up in front of my eyes.
“See?” he says. “See?”
The blade of grass has a mouth. A mouth filled with tiny sharp teeth. It whips forward, trying to get free of Peter’s grasp and bite me in the face.
Ryan’s jeans are torn and his leg is bleeding. All of the grass is moving now, trying to get at us. Peter drops the piece he was holding and wipes at a bloody mark on his wrist. Annie is making unhappy noises as she starts jumping around, trying to keep the eager little grass-mouths from getting a taste of her, too.
I put a hand to my forehead. “Peter, please —”
“I can’t!” he shouts at me. “I can’t send her back. Not from here. And not without going up myself. She has to stay with us for now, Cyn, I’m sorry.”
Annie looks torn between triumph and sudden, dawning doubt as she continues to dance around in the monster grass.
“Come on!” Peter says. “We have to move!”
He starts running toward that faraway second wall, and we all follow suit.
“Did you know the grass was going to try to eat us?” I demand, pulling up alongside him.
“No. But I knew this place wasn’t designed to be a nice picnic spot. Anyone who comes here is supposed to just do what they came to do and get the hell out. I figured something would start urging us along if we didn’t get moving. Which is what I tried to tell you, but —”
“Yeah, yeah.”
We keep running.
The wall is getting closer. I glance down and notice that the grass has gotten shorter again, or at least we’ve moved past the section that decided to take violent manducatory action against us. I look back up and see a very large shape moving toward us from up ahead.
The others
see it, too. In simultaneous unspoken agreement, we all come to a stop.
“Peter?” I ask. “What’s that?”
“I have no idea,” he says. “There shouldn’t be anyone else here, unless another demon was just locked up. But . . . but that happens very rarely. I mean, like hardly ever. Maybe once every several thousand years or something. It would be a pretty big coincidence for our visit to overlap with one of those events.”
We watch as it gets closer. I see Ryan spare an anxious glance down at the grass.
I really hate this place.
We start running again, trying to angle away from the thing up ahead, but it only changes course to intercept our new path. I stop again, panting, and everyone else stops, too. Then they turn to me as though I will have some solution for what is happening.
I look around, rather desperately. But there’s no place to go. The thing is clearly able to move more quickly than we are, and it’s going to catch us no matter what we try to do. There doesn’t seem to be much choice except to wait. No one wants to run back to the carnivorous-plant-life area, or into the teeth and tentacles of the demon who is probably still waiting for us outside the gate on the other side of the smoke. Plus, some of us are kind of winded from the running and could use a breather.
Pretty soon, I am able to make out some unquestionably spiderlike features on the approaching figure. My stomach clenches into a tight queasy little ball.
“Um, Cyn?” Ryan asks. “Isn’t — isn’t that —”
Annie gasps beside me, and Peter stares in open disbelief.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it is.”
The figure finally gets close enough for us to see it clearly, and I am very sad to confirm that we are correct.
It’s Mr. Gabriel’s little brother.
I hear my friends shouting in alarmed voices around me, and I think someone is pulling rather urgently on my arm, but it’s hard to focus on anything other than the approaching monster’s horrible beetle face and waving spider legs. I don’t understand. Was all of this . . . the deal, the prison, everything . . . was it all some kind of very elaborate double cross?
That doesn’t make any sense. But neither does this sudden appearance of our old familiar B-list enemy. I realize that it somehow never actually occurred to me to wonder what had happened to him after Aaron took him away over the summer. Clearly it should have.
“Cyn!” Ryan’s voice finally breaks into my temporary mental paralysis. “Shouldn’t we be running away?”
I shake my head. There’s nowhere to run to. He’s nearly upon us.
“Get behind me,” I tell Annie. It’s a sign of how terrified she is that she does so without complaint. I speak next to Peter, without turning my head. “Is there anything you can do to fight him?”
“No,” he says, but instead of fear in his voice, I hear something else. Frustration. And fury.
Of course; this thing is the monster that killed poor Hector.
We stand there, the four of us. Waiting.
The spider-demon closes the remaining distance and then stops a few feet away. I brace myself, but the anticipated attack doesn’t come.
He seems to be waiting, too.
Several long seconds pass in silence. I hear someone shifting restlessly behind me. Ryan’s hand is still clamped around my upper arm. The demon just stands there, perfectly motionless, like the most horrible statue ever.
Finally I can’t take it anymore.
“What are you doing here?” I demand. I’m attempting to bury my fear under my annoyance. It works, at least a little.
“You,” Little Brother says in his grating voice. “I have come to find you.”
“Well . . . congrats. Here I am. Now what do you want? Did . . . did Mr. Gabriel send you?” Maybe he’s here to deliver a message, I realize. Maybe he’s not here to kill us.
The demon’s insect face seems to darken and contract at the mention of Mr. Gabriel.
“No! He does not know I am here.”
Oh, crap.
Oh, crappity crap crap.
Little Brother’s gone rogue.
I back up slightly, closer to the others.
“Now . . . now think about this, uh, you,” I manage, suddenly wishing I knew what the hell his actual name was. “Don’t do anything hasty.”
“Haaasty,” he repeats, taking a step forward to follow me.
“Listen to her, you bastard,” Peter says, stepping up on my non-Ryan side. “Remember what happens when your brother gets angry.”
This line of argument had worked with him in the past, but this time it just seems to agitate him further.
“No!” he shouts. “You do not care if my brother is angry!”
Peter and I look at each other. “Well, no,” I agree. “We don’t care at all. But . . . don’t you?”
“No,” he says more quietly. “Not anymore.”
Which means . . . he won’t care if his brother made a deal with us. He won’t care if killing us ruins his brother’s plans. In fact . . . that might be exactly what he wants.
But he’s still not attacking. He’s still just standing there.
Annie leans forward and whispers to me, “Ask him again what he wants. Without mentioning you-know-who.”
I clear my throat and address the demon again. “Uh . . . so what did you say you wanted again?”
“Find you,” he says at once.
“Oh, right. Yes. But . . . why?”
“You fought us. Fought him.”
“Yes. That’s . . . that’s true. He didn’t give us any choice. We had to fight him.”
“No,” he says. “You could have served him. You chose to fight.”
I concede the point. “Okay, yes. We could have given up, you’re right. But we didn’t want to serve him. We wanted him to leave us alone.”
“Yes,” he says, and now there is something different in his inflection. “You did not want to serve. So you fought.”
He takes another step forward.
“I do not want to serve. I want to fight.”
“Oh,” I say. “Well, great. That’s great. You should do that.”
He moves his insect head slowly back and forth. Then he steps forward again. “I will fight with you.”
“Um.” I look around at the others, who are staring back at me with equally bewildered expressions. “What?”
“I will fight with you,” he repeats. “You do not fear my brother.”
“Well, I fear him; I’m not an idiot. I just try not to let that stop me.” I shake my head, trying to get back to the main thread of this conversation. “But . . . you tried to kill us. You did kill Hector, and you wanted to kill me —”
“Yes. Before. But not now.”
Ryan speaks up beside me. “Are you saying that you no longer want to kill us? That you want to help us fight your brother?”
“Yes.” It’s hard to read the bug-face features, but I’d say he looks grateful that someone is finally understanding him.
“Just . . . just hold on a second, okay?” I ask him. Then I turn around and motion everyone into a football huddle.
“I can’t even formulate a question,” I say once we’re all huddled in. “What? What the actual what?”
“Can we trust him?” Annie asks.
“No,” the rest of us say back.
“But I kind of believe him,” Ryan adds.
“Me, too,” I admit. “And honestly, he just doesn’t seem bright enough to come up with some elaborate plan of deception.”
“But, wait . . . what are we saying exactly?” Annie asks. “Are we letting him, like, join the team?”
I want to remind her that she is not, in fact, on the team herself, but now doesn’t seem the time. Instead I peek over my shoulder at where Little Brother stands, apparently patiently, waiting for us to finish our discussion. He certainly seems to have undergone some enormous change of perspective since we last saw him. Maybe he finally got tired of his big brother pushing h
im around and yelling at him and trying to steal his body.
I glance at Peter. “You’re pretty quiet. What do you think?”
“I . . . don’t know. Mostly I just want to kill him for what he did to Hector. But I also kind of believe him. But it was not very long ago that I fought this guy almost to the death. He’s really strong, Cyn. Last time I had all of that extra strength courtesy of the queen, but now, if he changes his mind about what side he’s on . . .”
That is a valid concern, obviously.
“How did he even find us?” Annie asks. “If he’s not on Mr. Gabriel’s team anymore, how did he know we’d be here?”
Peter looks at her. “That’s an excellent question.” He turns around and addresses Little Brother. “How were you able to find us here?”
“Followed.”
“Followed us . . . through the gate?”
“Yes. I knew he would make you come to him. I waited until he did. And then I followed.”
“But if he came through the gate separately,” I ask Peter, “he would have lost us, right? Ended up in some other section, or whatever? Isn’t that what Aaron was saying?”
“I know this place,” Little Brother answers, even though I clearly wasn’t talking to him. “Easy to find you again.”
“Really?” Peter seems genuinely surprised by this. “But why? It’s not safe here for anyone — not even a big tough guy like you.”
“That’s why I come. Because no one else comes. I can . . . hide.”
He looks suddenly off to the side, pincers alert.
I follow his gaze with a sinking heart, wondering what’s coming to kill us this time. It appears to be some kind of metallic tumbleweed.
Ryan, Peter, and Annie turn to look, too.
“Razor balls,” Little Brother says calmly. He nods once as if to confirm this identification. “They will slice you.”
“I guess we should be going, then,” Peter says.
“All of us?” Ryan asks pointedly.
Everyone looks at me.
I hate making these kinds of decisions under pressure. Well, also at all. But especially under pressure.
I look at the monster, trying to figure out what to do.
What do we know about him? He doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record. He was with the group of demons that chased Aaron and me the second time Ms. Královna summoned me to lend her my power. He followed me back to camp through the tunnel she’d created, and then ran off and joined his brother, believing he’d eventually get to share in the spoils of Mr. Gabriel’s success. He killed Hector when Hector stupidly tried to protect me from him. The rest of us had witnessed his unhappy awakening when Mr. Gabriel forcibly took over his body and smushed him down somewhere inside himself where he had no agency or control. And then Mr. Gabriel (wearing his brother’s body) fought Peter (who was using borrowed strength gifted by Ms. Královna and still had a very hard time coming out on top), and my ridiculous but still effective Mikado fan drove Mr. Gabriel’s defeated essence into the trap that the demon queen had waiting. And then Aaron spirited the unconscious spider-demon body away and I kind of thought I’d never have to worry about him again.
Curse of the Evil Librarian Page 10
