by Joanna Wiebe
“What if…?” Pilot begins. He’s tapping his lip and looking at Vale Tuefurre, a cafeteria lady. I can almost hear the wheels turning in his head. At once, his gaze hops back to me. “I’ve got an idea.”
“I thought you might.”
“I can help you.”
“How?”
“I could serve you. That would immediately give you a boost of underworld cred.”
Bingo.
“But no powers,” I remind him. “You don’t have any. You’re a punk.”
“Thanks for the reminder.”
“Mephisto wouldn’t notice you’ve left him to serve me?”
“I’m a punk, like you said. I barely register. And with whatever island Teddy finds for him, he’ll have bigger things on the go for the next few months.”
“If you barely register,” I counter, “how could you help me?”
Thinking fast, he darts to the cutlery stand, where he grabs a steak knife. He runs back and, with a single swift motion, raises the knife until it’s just above my ear. A flash of him torturing me the way Dia tortured Eve and Kate makes me recoil. I fall off my chair with a cry. But he straddles me and, in one stroke, swipes at my head.
I squeeze my eyes shut, squeal, and wait for pain.
But there is no pain. Wet blood doesn’t flood my cheek or ooze into my mouth.
I open my eyes to find Pilot holding a large chunk of my hair; blonde strands glisten in his fist. I feel around my head and find a good inch-wide lock missing.
“My hair!”
“Gia’s calling card was her hair. It was her thing. Hey, maybe that’s why you’ve got such crazy-ass hair.”
“What’re you doing with my hair?”
“I’ll help you rebuild your army,” he says, tucking my lock of hair into his pocket. “I bunk with a shit-ton of demons that could serve you again, if they knew Saligia was seriously back. I’d have to tell them in secret. Can’t let Dia or Mephisto hear.”
I consider it with wide, innocent eyes, as if this entire idea isn’t something I’ve been trying to steer the conversation toward.
“If punks, demons, ’n’ shizzle are gonna serve you,” he says, “they’re gonna need a token from you. Hence the hair. I’ll get my dad to send a butt-load of lockets pronto. We’ll clip your hair in the lockets, give ’em out to newbies, and build you up.”
I didn’t know about the hair, but everything else about this meeting is going pretty perfectly. It took me a month to nail down the starting point of my plan: get Pilot to serve me, and then get him to recruit for me. Of course, I know he won’t do it without getting something in return. But I think I might be able to give him what he wants. I’m just waiting for him to get to that part of the conversation.
“You’ll help bring, um, your kind on board?”
“My kind and better. I’ll put the word out! I’ll be your mothereffing right-hand punk. Your recruiter.”
“In exchange for?”
He beams, almost looking as genuine as he did when we first met. “The ultimate, Anne-a-bam. I want to live again.”
“You want me to…give you life?”
“Let’s circumvent the Big V. We’ll build you a big army with the right recruits to give you the powers to hand out your own version of the Big V.”
“Do you know who gives out life?” I ask him. I’ve got a list filled with the powers of the demons on staff here, but none of them seem in control of vivification.
“No, but we’ll figure that out.” Then something dawns on him. “Oh, shit, you’re not doing all this just so you’ll be able to, like, put a spell on Ben so he’ll fall for you?”
“After cursing his kids?”
“I totally hate the dude, but he looks really happy with Garnet. He always looked so tortured around you.”
“I don’t want to break up Ben and Garnet,” I promise.
But inside I’m smiling. I can almost feel my heart grow inside my chest. Pilot’s so wrong about Ben. My hard-to-reach Ben, tormented by demons far different from the Cania variety. For the first time in a long while, my soul feels lightened. Ben was his deep-as-the-Atlantic self with me; with Garnet, he’s just playing the game his life depends on. Exactly as I’d hoped he would.
But I know better than anyone that hope isn’t enough.
Hoping Ben will win isn’t going to guarantee that he will. And I need a guarantee. I need to know that there’s no one else in the running. With Pilot helping me rebuild the strength of Gia, I’m going to do exactly that—even if a few demons have to get hurt in the process.
And so begins part one: Operation Save Ben.
I have a follower now. Soon, I’ll have more. With their allegiance, I’ll be able to remove obstacles from Ben’s path to the Big V. When that’s all done, I’ll be strong enough to help Teddy destroy Dia.
“Wait,” I say to Pilot. “How will you convince the others that I’m, as you say, seriously back?”
“They know you’re Gia. They just need to see something from you. Put on a bit of a show. Get them talking about you.”
“Show them I’m her.”
“Wow them. And,” he lowers his voice as a sophomore passes our table, “humans can serve Gia, too. Human witches serve demon witches all the time. Is there anyone you might be able to coerce into serving you? In exchange for, say, the same thing you’re giving me?” He taps his lip, thinking. “Someone capable of venturing to the dark side.”
“Someone to tiptoe through Hell with me? A Virgil to my Dante?”
He stares at me. “Literary references? Really?”
I stand to leave. I know exactly whom to ask—the only person who’s proven to me she’s capable of doing anything to get what she wants, and the only person here with followers of her own.
I move to shake Pilot’s hand. But, with a quick look to be sure no one’s watching, he bows instead.
And my heart thumps faster.
The heart I share with Gia, a goddess regaining her followers one by one, thumps at double time.
eighteen
GOOD INTENTIONS
HARPER IS CLAPPING CHALK BRUSHES TOGETHER IN THE empty parking lot when I sneak up behind her and give her a scare: I flick her ponytail, and she jumps. She nearly punches me as she whirls, but I duck.
“You!” she cries. “Comin’ up on me like an outhouse breeze. What’s the matter with you?”
“I’ve got a proposition for you.”
She rolls her eyes. I’m sure she’s not only heard that before but said it herself. And it never comes to any good.
“A real one,” I tell her.
“You planning to turn into a scary devil child on me again? Steal my soul this time?”
“No, but I want to talk to you about that night. Sort of.” She smacks the brushes together.
“Look, I know you don’t trust me,” I say, “but I didn’t kill Gigi. She committed suicide. And I wouldn’t have ended Pilot’s second life if it hadn’t come down to me and him that night.”
“I ain’t judging.”
“Sure you aren’t. Listen, you once said we should both sleep with one eye open. Remember?”
She drops the brushes in a bucket. Stares me straight in the eyes. And starts screaming bloody murder.
I muzzle her with my hand, but she pushes my arm away and screams for help even louder. So I grab her by the hair—it’s the best I can think of—and start tugging and shoving her toward the path leading up to the cliff-top. Her screams turn to short, choppy cries for me to let go of her. I shove her against the hill’s steep incline. She shouts as she stumbles. I can’t see any other option, so I gently—okay, a tad more than gently—butt the back of her head against the hillside. She growls at me but quiets down.
Gripping her chin, I get close enough to her face that our noses touch.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say.
“You’re going to wish you’d killed me. Let me go.”
“Harper, you saw who I am. You and I both know y
ou’re powerless to me.” With her pinned, I glance over my shoulder, but no one’s here, no one came when Harper cried. Of course they didn’t. Caring about others isn’t the Cania way. “But you’re not totally powerless.”
She’s breathing heavily. Her straight, white teeth are clenched like a growling dog’s.
“Calm down,” I say. “If you want to live again, I can help.”
“You’d better sleep with one eye open now, Murdering Merchant!”
“You’ve done worse. Admit it.” I wait for her to say something; she blinks. “The real reason you don’t like me is because I’m still alive.”
“That’s just one item on a long list.”
“I’m about to give you a chance to live, too. If you trust me.”
“I’d be a damn fool.”
“No, you’d be free.”
Slowly, I release her chin and lift myself away from her. She shakes her hair until it’s straight again and pushes my hand away when I try to help her get upright.
“Trust you?” she snaps as she dusts her uniform off. “In what world?”
Her glare doesn’t leave me, and mine doesn’t leave her. But she doesn’t scream. And she walks when I do. We watch each other closely as she follows me into the Rex Paimonde building, to our workshop. No one’s here. I close the door behind us.
“Spill it, Merchant. How can you help me? And why the hell would either one of us agree to help the other?”
I start at the beginning. My beginning as Miss Saligia, and my incarnation as Anne Merchant. She listens impatiently, more patiently, solemnly, and then with wide eyes. I tell her everything I need to, leaving out only the details that will hurt others and, as always, avoiding any mention of destroying Dia in order to ultimately destroy Mephisto. Teddy doesn’t even come up. Harper doesn’t need to know the whole truth; she just needs to know enough to trust me. And join me.
“So Hiltop’s actually Villicus, and Villicus was actually Mephistopheles, and Dia’s from Hell, too, and our teachers are the creators of sin?” she asks. “I knew some sicko-type stuff was up ’round here, but I didn’t know the place was crooked as a barrel of fish hooks.”
“No one knows, although I think some have a hunch. I was sworn to secrecy. But, well…”
“You’ve got Hell’s dust on your boots, Merchant. If anyone’s allowed to break an oath, it’s you.” She leans back. “But what’s all this got to do with me and the Big V?”
“I’m not talking about the Big V. I’m talking about a second life sooner than next May. You have followers,” I explain. “Trey Sedmoney worships you. And then you’ve got your, um, friends.”
“I know you call us the Model UN from Hell.”
“In all fairness, Pilot taught me that.”
“Alls I know is you must need my help awful ba-a-ad to come nosin’ around me. So what’s up your sleeve?”
I hand her one of my mom’s glued-together barrettes. She recognizes it. Months ago, she snapped it in two.
“Ew, there’s hair in this,” she says as she holds it far from her, between two pinching fingernails.
“That’s my hair.”
“Grody.” She hands it back to me.
I don’t take it. “I need you to serve me, Harper.”
She laughs. “You’re about two sandwiches short of a picnic, Merchant.”
“Look, Gia was powerful. Super-powerful.”
“I ain’t surprised you’re a monster underneath.”
“If I can build up the fanbase she once had,” I continue, “I can gain the power Dia and Villicus have. I can attract demons with the power to vivify, and we can give you—and your whole clan, if you want—what you’ve been looking for.”
“Life,” she says in a breath. She’s looking at the barrette.
“Life off this island. But I need you to help me get started. I need you to serve me and grow your own fanbase, which will, in turn, serve me by serving you. Get it?”
“Are you seriously asking if I get how hierarchy works? I invented it.” She turns the barrette over. And eyes me carefully in the orange glow of the setting sun through the windows. “Prove it.”
“Sorry?” I say.
“Prove. It.”
“You saw Gia with your own two eyes. What more proof do you need?”
“Wait, am I the first soul that’d be serving you?”
“No, Pilot’s on board, too. He’s also going to get a new life out of helping me.”
“Then bring him to me right now. He can tell me it’s all possible. And that’ll prove it.”
“Fine. We’ll go to the staff quarters.”
“Uh-uh.” She wags her finger in my face. “If you’ve got this power, if you’re this big shot in a dummy’s body, then bring him to me now. He can tell me in person, right here. Or, what, can’t you even communicate with your own servants telepathically?”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Why not? Because you’re lying like a sidewalk? I knew it!”
“I’m not lying. I just…don’t know.”
“You’re slippery as a pocketful of pudding. What a whopper.”
No matter how I beg and try to convince her, I can’t get Harper to listen. She shoves my barrette at me and disappears out the doorway, muttering as she goes. If I’d just been able to summon Gia somehow, I might’ve been able to call Pilot like Harper said.
I know now I’m never going to be able to do this if I can’t start proving who’s under my skin. So that night, while Molly sleeps, I lie in bed and try to recreate the scenario in which Gia last appeared to me. I’d gone to sleep thinking of Ben, hoping to see him in my dreams—but I hadn’t dreamt of him at all. It was Dia in my dreams. Dia and me. In a compromising position.
Dia, the ex-lover of the woman I once was, awakened her.
“Oh, damn,” I groan, knowing what I’ve gotta do.
SATURDAY MORNING FINDS me at Dia’s office door for a meeting I’ve avoided as long as I’ve known about my inner demon’s history with him. But he’s not here. He’s left a note taped to his door, as if he knew I was coming—that, or he tapes the same note to his door every Saturday:
Miss Merchant, I’m at my house. Come on over.
Double damn! His house. His private home. The former home of Ben and Dr. Zin. I make my way down the island to his mansion. The last time I was here, I snuck in through the back window with Molly. I’m at least as anxious now as I was then, and I’m not even breaking in.
“Do this for Ben,” I coach myself. “Do it for Mom. You can’t help either of them if you don’t wake up Saligia.”
I ring the bell. No one answers. I try again.
Then, amid the sound of melting ice trickling from the gutters into basins, I hear footsteps around the side of the house, just beyond the porte cochere. Footsteps crunching through the hard shell of snow. I look to my right just as Harper, Agniezska, Plum, and Jasmina—all of whom must have been inside Dia’s only moments ago and snuck out the back when I rang the bell—stop dead and, in unison, look at me. The girls stack up behind Harper like they’re a living version of dominos.
The girls clutch most of their clothes to their chests. You don’t need to look closer to know what they’ve been up to. The messiness of their normally stick-straight hair. Their matching lacy undergarments: garters and fishnets. It’s a no-brainer for four girls who share the same PT: to use their desirability to win.
“We’ve tuckered him out,” Plum tells me proudly. Harper pretends to inspect the snow at her boots. “So good luck.”
“Well, I don’t do sloppy seconds.”
“Seconds? More like twentieths, Murdering Merchant.”
Everyone but Harper breaks into giggles.
“She’s paintin’ a picture of him, you numbskulls, not screwin’ him,” Harper says, cutting through their laughter. She marches up to the road, stomping the snow. “Honestly, y’all get me so agger-vated.”
“Hey, Harper!” I shout. Her shoulders jerk, but she do
esn’t turn back. “Great call choosing this option instead of mine. Genius decision. Good luck with the whole Big V thing, if Plum doesn’t beat you to it.”
I ring the bell again. I’d feel kinda bad for Harper if I wasn’t jealous of the souls she’s got under her command. Lucky bitch. How long is it going to take for Pilot to get me some followers?
The door swings open. Dia is sans shirt. “Anne!”
I frown as I look him up and down. “I can come back another time.”
“Hang on.”
He darts away. Moments later, he slides back into view wearing a tuxedo shirt and grinning. He is still far too casually dressed—light pants that look like they’re about to fall off his narrow hips, most of the buttons undone on his shirt, his sleeves rolled up to reveal his tattoos, as always. I see Dia + Gia on his arm; it’s a reminder that I need to be here right now.
“Better?” he asks me.
“Is there a reason you wanted to meet at your house instead of your office today, Mr. Voletto?”
“I got tired of waiting in my office every weekend. Now come in, come in. Superbia and her crew have gone home for the weekend, so it’s just us.”
“They live with you?”
He smiles. “We all have our own bedrooms.”
I step inside, silently marveling at how different it feels compared to when Ben lived here. Comparing now and then will torture me, so I try not to. As I tug off my boots, Dia hangs my coat, takes my bag, and gestures for me to follow him.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says. He’s astute. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you wanted me to chase you.”
“Chasing me and luring me to your house are two different things.”
He laughs. “We can be more comfortable here. No nasty secretaries knocking on the door every ten seconds. Come, come. Are you thirsty? I’m chilling a pinot grigio.”
“Even if I wasn’t underage, it’s ten in the morning.”
“I can add OJ.”
