The sting is worse this time, sharper and deeper, but Annie seems to have been right about LB being the one causing most of the problem. We all cry out at the feel of it, but then we’re through and the pain vanishes.
Part of me has been desperately hoping that we would come through to find Peter waiting, but he’s still nowhere to be seen.
Ryan and Annie look around with wide eyes, taking in the infinity walls and the dark shadows and all the very ominous black stone stretching off in various directions. There are sounds coming from some of those directions, sounds like big things moving slowly in the dark, and I cringe again thinking of how I shouted Peter’s name before.
I take Annie’s hand and place it firmly in Ryan’s.
“Stay right here. Right here. Do not move even a centimeter. Do you understand me?”
They nod. They look terrified. But they nod and stand obediently still. Annie looks like she’s trying not to even breathe.
I should turn around and go back through the wall now. I should go and get LB, who stayed behind to fight the demon grass monstrosity.
LB, who killed Hector and tried to help Mr. Gabriel kill most of us at camp last summer.
LB, who was one hundred and ten percent on board to do terrible things to Annie once Mr. Gabriel succeeded in his plan to recapture her.
LB, who now wants to help us defeat Mr. Gabriel.
Probably. Maybe. If we can believe him.
“Cyn?” Annie asks.
I still haven’t moved. My conscience says I can’t leave LB out there. Of course I can’t. Of course not. We made a deal. Not an official demon deal, but still. I said I’d go back to get him. And we need his help. I mean, seriously, we need all the help we can get since I still don’t have the slightest idea how we’re going to stop Mr. Gabriel this time. But even if we didn’t . . . I can’t just leave LB there when I said I’d go back for him.
But what if Annie and Ryan aren’t here when I come back?
I look at them, find myself trying to burn their faces into my mind as though I’m never going to see them again, and force myself to stop. I’m going to see them again in like two seconds. They’re going to be standing right here.
“We’ll wait right here,” Annie says. “Don’t worry.”
Ryan catches my eye. He doesn’t say anything, but he pulls Annie closer to him and gives me the slightest of nods. My heart wants to climb out of my chest and snuggle up around him. He is all at once telling me that it will be okay and they will be right there when I get back but that also if they are not then he will take care of Annie until I can find them again. I love him so much for understanding and for telling me it’s okay to go but also I hate him for telling me it’s okay to go because what if they’re not here? What if they’re not? What if I come back and they’re gone?
What if they’re gone and I never find them again?
I tear my gaze away and throw myself back through the wall.
LB is ferociously attacking the grass monster, slicing off strands of toothy greenness with his long beetle-pincer things and doing some kind of spider-kickboxing move to keep the bulk of it at bay.
“LB! Come on!”
He turns and for a second some almost-recognizable emotion burns in his inhuman eyes, but I don’t have time to try to figure out what it is because we have to get right back through the wall so that Annie and Ryan will still be there. I grab his closest leg and pull. He gives one final kick-snap at the grass monster and lurches after me. I envelop him in my protection and drag us both back through.
It hurts a lot this time. LB doesn’t scream but his leg goes rigid in my grip and it’s all I can do not to scream myself. There’s no question of not pushing through it, though. Because Annie and Ryan.
So we push through and come back out of the smoke into the dark, stony prison interior.
Where Annie and Ryan should be waiting, but are not.
I yank my protection back from the spider-demon and wrap it around me like a blanket, like something that can somehow soften the horrible emptiness that rises up inside me, that might smother the regretful yet self-righteous voices that swell up to say they told me so, that I should never have left Annie and Ryan alone for even a second, not for LB, not for anyone. That I should never have let them come in the first place, but I did and now I have failed them, and that is what I get for not being strong enough to do this on my own.
I look around wildly but it’s stupid and pointless and I know it.
Annie and Ryan are gone.
“No,” I whisper. “No, no, no, no, no, no.”
The word gets louder each time I say it, but not loud enough. Nothing could ever be loud enough to reflect the way I’m feeling right now. I try, though. I have to try or I’ll explode right here in the featureless, dark demon-prison hallway. I throw my head back and scream, long and loud. As long and as loud as I can.
“You should not do that,” LB says from beside me. His gravelly voice is low and urgent. “You should not make those sounds.”
I’d almost forgotten he was there.
I stop screaming and look up at him. “You understand screaming, don’t you? You’ve probably made lots of people or demons or whoever scream over the years, right?”
“Yes,” he replies somewhat hesitantly. “But —”
“I don’t know exactly how it works with demons,” I go on, “but with humans, we scream when we are really scared or horrified or upset. I am all three of those things right now.”
“But you will make the monsters come,” LB explains.
I know I should care about that. A distant part of my brain recognizes that Monsters Coming is a bad thing, a thing I should try to avoid at all costs. But most of me is too scared and horrified and upset to think about anything but the fact that I’ve apparently lost all the people I care most about in the bowels of a demon prison that I should never have let them come to in the first place.
“My friends are gone,” I say, not expecting him to actually understand. As Peter keeps reminding me, demons don’t really understand the whole friends idea.
“Yes,” LB agrees. “Because of the moving.”
My eyes snap to his ugly bug-face, all of my heartsick exhaustion suddenly transforming into some other kind of feeling that I can’t yet quite identify.
“The . . . the what?”
“The moving. Of the prison.”
I know this place, he’d said. Oh, God. I close my eyes for a second so I can better focus on my extreme stupidity. It never occurred to us to ask him what he knows, exactly.
I open my eyes again. “Please explain about the moving.”
He seems to think for a moment, maybe searching for the human words. “The prison . . . turns. Inside the boundary.”
“Have you — have you been inside the prison before? Inside here, past the inner boundary?”
His eyes dart away and several leg joints move in what might be an evasive spidery shrug.
I try to make my voice patient and gentle. Which is hard, because I am so not feeling patient and gentle right now. “You’re not in trouble. I’m . . . I’m not going to tell. I promise. I’m just trying to find out how this works so I can find my friends again.”
“Yes. I have been inside.”
I take a deep breath. Patient and gentle. Patient and gentle. “So . . . you could have walked through that wall without my help?”
He shakes his head. “No. It’s . . . hard. I can only do it sometimes. When I am most strong. And only at certain places. Places with . . . holes. Not where we were before.”
“Would the places with holes be easier for us to get through, too? My friends and me?”
“Oh, yes. Much easier.”
My fists clench tight at my sides, my fingernails digging into my palms. But I keep my voice calm. “LB?”
“Yes?”
“When you know about things that we’re trying to do, I need you to speak up and tell me. Okay? Can you do that? It . . . it will help us g
et back sooner to fight your brother.”
“Yes.”
“For example, right now . . . do you know how we can find my friends?”
“Yes.”
I wait, trying so hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“LB?”
“Yes?”
“What did I just say? About speaking up?”
He thinks about this for a long moment. Then he straightens slightly. “You want me to tell you how to find the others.”
“Yes! Yes, exactly. And anytime you see me trying to do something and you know things that might help, I want you to tell me. Got it?”
“Yes,” he says, sounding rather pleased at having grasped a new concept.
“Okay. Great. That’s super great. So . . . about finding my friends . . . ?”
He bobs up and down excitedly on his spider legs. “I will show you. I know how the prison moves.”
“Excellent.” I make myself reach out and pat him on his disgusting bristly abdomen. “And is there anything else you think it would be helpful for me to know about the prison? About the monsters, maybe?”
“Yes,” he says at once. I suspect this is LB’s first experience with the power of positive reinforcement. Mr. Gabriel was probably all stick and no carrot. And his stick was probably more like a mace or scythe or flamethrower or something. “The monsters will try to kill you.”
“Okay,” I tell him. “That’s really helpful to know. Is there a way I can avoid being killed by them?”
This seems to be a more difficult question. He considers me doubtfully. “I don’t know,” he says at last. “You are small and weak. You have roach power but they can still kill you.”
“How about you? Can they kill you?”
“They can try,” he says fiercely. “But they will fail. I will crush them. I will fight them and kill them and rip their bones —”
“Great,” I break in. “Awesome. So, maybe if we encounter any monsters, you can try to kill them before they kill me. How would that be?”
“Yes. That would be good.”
I give him another quick pat and then wipe my hands on my jeans. “Great. Let’s get moving, then. Show me how to find my friends.”
LB sets off down the corridor, away from the smoke-wall behind us. I hurry to keep up. The cautious part of my brain keeps trying to tell me that it still might all be a trap, that the whole big-dumb-demon thing could be an elaborate deception, but I just don’t believe it. No one’s that good of an actor. And LB, in my personal experience, seems to be the type who wears his heart on his sleeve. In the past, his heart was all about joining Mr. Gabriel in carrying out his nefarious plans and getting to share in the spoils, but I believe him about no longer being in his brother’s pocket. I mean, it’s one thing to put up with verbal and physical abuse, which, in the demon world, is kind of just normal operating procedure, but I suspect it’s quite another to find out your own brother was lying to you in really significant ways and meant to steal your body away and force you down so deep inside yourself that you would be nothing more than a spectator to the rest of your own life.
That’s the kind of thing that can make you seriously want to switch sides.
The tugging inside me has returned, but I do my best to ignore it for the time being. Friends first; amulet guy second. We hurry along, and the passages begin to multiply and branch off in various directions. But LB doesn’t hesitate; he moves forward with confidence, turning left or right without even stopping to think about it.
I follow with a similar lack of hesitation, hoping with everything I have that he can get us to the others before they get hurt. Peter might have ways to protect himself — even though he’s not a fighter, he’s survived for hundreds of years in the demon world and one would have to imagine he’d learned ways to avoid being killed — but of course Annie and Ryan have no such experience or expertise. I send them silent directives to stay small and silent and out of sight until we can get to them.
Please.
LB turns another corner and I race to catch up, but before I can reach him one of his giant spider legs flicks back to push me back against the passage wall. He’s not gentle about it, and it takes me a second to regain my breath and balance. But by then I can see exactly why he did that, and I don’t mind his lack of gentleness one bit.
We have discovered one of the monsters.
It looks like an enormous gelatinous blob of some kind. I am very briefly grateful for the lack of tentacles, but then I think of everything I have ever heard about gelatinous blob monsters (a small yet consistent sample set of movies and bad TV), and I immediately suspect that it will dissolve any body parts that are unlucky enough to come in contact with it.
That . . . that might be even worse than tentacles.
There are teeth and eyes floating within the blob parts, in no discernible order or logical placement that I can recognize. It turns slowly to face(?) LB, and the eyes all widen as it takes in the spider-demon brandishing his impressive forelegs and bug-pincers. Then it seems to see me, and its eyes widen even more.
“No!” it cries in a very un-monster-like voice. “Wait!”
I know that voice.
“LB, STOP!” I shout, and I am relieved to see him pause in midstrike.
He twists his head and upper parts to look at me. “I should not kill the monster before it kills you?”
“I don’t think that’s a monster.”
We both turn back to look at the blob, and it’s already beginning to change. It shrinks into itself, the slightly translucent gel parts solidifying as it grows smaller and denser and more familiar by the second. And then a somewhat disheveled Peter is standing there before us, still wide-eyed and looking terrified.
“Cyn?” he asks. “Is that really you?”
“Peter!” I run forward to embrace him in a possibly overenergetic hug. We slam into one of the stone walls. Peter hugs me back just as tightly.
“It is one of your friends,” LB says from behind me. “Not a real monster.”
I laugh against Peter’s neck. “Yes, thank you, LB. Good catch.”
I pull away before Peter can think to get handsy, but he doesn’t seem the least bit mischievous at the moment. Only profoundly relieved.
“When you didn’t come back, I thought . . . I thought something must have happened.” He lets out a shaky breath. “I thought I’d end up trapped in here forever.” As though speaking the words brings the fear back, he puts his hands over his face and slides down to the ground.
“Hey,” I say, kneeling beside him. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m sorry that happened — it turns out the prison moves inside the boundary. We are all idiots and didn’t think to interrogate our best source of information.” I nod backward toward LB, who stands patiently in the passage behind us. “I lost Annie and Ryan, too. So please get up now so we can go and find them, okay?”
Peter takes his hands away from his face and stares at me. “Annie and Ryan are in here somewhere on their own?” The horror in his voice makes me want to start screaming again.
“Yes. So let’s go. Come on, get up.”
Peter lets me help him up, but he shakes his head regretfully. “Cyn, this place . . . if they . . .”
“Shut up, please,” I tell him, only barely managing to keep my voice to a normal speaking level. “They’re going to be fine. Don’t you dare start telling me all the ways in which they might not be fine.”
He swallows and nods. “Okay. Sure, okay. Let’s . . . let’s go find them.”
I turn around to face LB. “You did great,” I tell him, forcing myself to step forward and give him another friendly pat. “Now we just have to find the other two. You can do that, right? Take us to where they would be?”
“Yes,” LB says with a confidence that would make me want to kiss him if he weren’t disgusting and evil.
I gesture toward the passage spanning out before us, and he steps purposefully past us and forward into the dark. Peter and I follow closely b
ehind.
The walls continue to be the same black stone. I keep expecting to come across doors or something behind which the prisoner demons are locked away, but then I remember what Peter said about the prisoners just being shoved inside.
“So are the monsters the demons that were sent here?” I ask him quietly. “Or are they part of the prison?”
“Hard to say,” he says. “Since they’re roaming around pretty freely, I’m guessing they might be demons who committed lesser offenses? Who . . . changed, somehow, after so many years of being locked away? But I don’t really know. Like I said, no one that comes in ever comes back out.”
“LB does,” I say.
“What?”
“He can get in and out. That’s how he knew about the way the prison moves. It didn’t occur to him to volunteer that information, but he was pretty forthcoming once the topic came up. I’m trying to get him to tell us things that we might need to know without being asked in the future.”
Peter considers this, looking at the gigantic form of LB striding along before us. “All I can see when I look at him is Hector’s dead body.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But I think we need him. I think we’re going to keep needing him.”
Peter sighs. “I know. But don’t forget what he is. He’s not . . . he’s not like me, Cyn. He’s still evil. It’s just that his goals align with ours right now.”
“Well, be glad they do,” I tell him. “I don’t think I ever would have found you in here without him.”
“We might not have ever needed to separate without him,” Peter points out.
“But we also wouldn’t be able to fight our way past the monsters in here without him.”
“Hmm.”
We fall silent, focusing on keeping up with LB as he continues moving through the prison corridors as though he knows exactly where he’s going. We hear occasional ominous sounds coming from adjoining passages, but we don’t see anything other than endless stone and shadows.
“So how long have you secretly been a blob monster?” I ask.
He stumbles and then catches himself, shooting me a dirty look. “I’m not! That was just an illusion. I was trying to stop any of the real monsters from coming after me.”
Curse of the Evil Librarian Page 12
