Devilish

by Maureen Johnson

  Provided it had ever happened.

  After I wiped my eyes and got over the shock of seeing them all go over the edge, I walked over and peered down. There was no screaming crowd. No splotch on the sidewalk. No sound of sirens in the distance. Nothing. Nothing but a few stragglers coming and going from Halloween parties. Somewhere between the roof and the sky and the sidewalk, Lanalee, Owen, and Allison checked out.

  I sat down on the edge of the building with my purple bottle, and I began to laugh. Pazuzu landed next to me and picked at the shiny candy wrappers for a moment. When he found nothing of interest, he turned and gave me a final look, then he too departed from the roof, taking a solid plunge downward before turning sharply and disappearing around the edge of the building.

  I picked at the candy. In the next five minutes, I ate every single remaining piece of chocolate. Then I went back down the grimy service steps and back to the ballroom floor. The great white doors were closed, and the whole floor was silent. I had left this room not a half hour before in the middle of a massive party. But the strangers had all vacated, taking the dogs. The lights had been brought up, and the floor was littered with balloons. Maybe half the other people were still there. The A3 were all together, lying in the center of the ballroom floor, looking at the ceiling. Cassie was twitching and laughing to herself in the corner with tears running down her face.

  Donna Skal was sitting at one of the tables, staring vacantly at a balloon. She looked up at me as I entered and smiled—a large, sunny Donna smile. But nothing seemed to be behind it. I sat down next to her. It wasn’t clear what was wrong with her or any of them. They may have been stunned, intoxicated, gassed … or they were just experiencing what I had already felt, the shock of knowing that a bunch of nightmarish fairy tales were real. Maybe riches or power had been dangled in front of them or visions of hell. But the bottom line was, they were checked out, all of them.

  “Donna?” I said, poking at her arm.

  She turned slowly and tried to focus on me.

  “Jane?”

  “What happened?”

  “Party,” she said. “Dance. Lots of people were talking to me.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They were so nice….”

  “Did they try to get you to sign anything?” I asked.

  “They talked about signing something….” She sighed deeply, as though all her cares in the world had settled on her like a swarm of butterflies. “I’m going to put my head down now.”

  She face-planted onto the table.

  I picked up a steak knife from the table and stabbed a red balloon that had landed there. Donna didn’t twitch. I sat down next to her and stroked her hair. The steak knife had gone right into the surface of the table. I had to wiggle it and pry it loose.

  The door swung open, and there, heaving but otherwise intact, was Allison.

  “Jane!” she said, running toward me.

  “Ally? How …”

  I burst into tears as she embraced me. We were both crying.

  “It’s a shame, isn’t it?” she said.

  “What?”

  There was something wrong. It was Allison. It looked like Allison, sounded like Allison—but it wasn’t her. I backed away.

  “Surprise,” she said, giving me a slow smile. “How do I look?”

  thirty-nine

  Allison-Lanalee examined the body, looking down her arms, feeling her face, checking down the front of the dress.

  “It needs some work,” she said. “But I think I can make something of it. I’ll go see Paul in Boston. He’s a genius with the fruit peels. Maybe a little surgery. A little TLC. It’s a fixer-upper.”

  “Where is she?” I growled.

  “Who? Allison? She’s at home, getting settled in. This is mine now. Someone will take the other body down to the river and toss it in. That girl was a swimmer. She would have wanted it that way.”

  This Allison sat down, crossed her legs, and examined me in a businesslike fashion.

  “So,” she said. “That was a shocker. I feel like I’ve been ripped off, which I hate. I didn’t think she was that smart, though I definitely thought she was that pathetic.”

  “What are you going to do with all these people?” I asked, ignoring this and looking over the dance floor. “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Oh, they’ll come around in a few. Like I said, we never use force. We do, however, know how to persuade.”

  She got up and went over to the A3 and prodded them with her foot. When they didn’t respond, she put her foot on Tracey’s face.

  “See, Jane, it’s like you’ve always known. These are the easily led, the overly ambitious, the selfish. And while I admire that last quality … I like giving things to my friends even more. Those other people here tonight were new demons who’ve never harvested a soul before. I basically held this party for them. It was a banquet! We’ll have all of these people under contract in no time.”

  In the corner, Cassie shook until she fell to the ground. To be fair, this wasn’t so far off from her normal behavior.

  “Besides,” she added, “it always annoyed me that my house, my lovely house that Fields built for me, was taken over. I want my house back.”

  She removed her foot from Tracey and stretched.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I have people coming over to talk business. You enjoy yourself, Jane. And if you ever change your mind, just give a shout. I’ll be listening.”

  She vamped her way across the room and was gone.

  All of these people would be taken. This was just the beginning. And Allison was gone.

  I sat there for some time, hugging my knees to my chest, until the door creaked open once more and my sister’s head of long, glossy hair peered around it.

  “Jane!” She ran over and embraced me. This time, I knew it was real. This was Joan, smelling overpoweringly of hair-care products and raspberry gum. I hugged her back, tight.

  “You are so hard-core!” she said. “I called Carbo and he told me that the whole staff had been kicked out. I can’t believe it! Mom and Dad are so worried, though. You have to come home. I can’t handle it anymore.”

  She looked around at the carnage.

  “These people are so drunk! Why didn’t you tell me you were going to a party?”

  “It kind of sucked,” I said. “You wouldn’t have liked it.”

  “Is this why you wouldn’t go to that school in Boston today?”

  “Kind of.”

  “That,” she said solemnly, “is the best thing I have ever heard.”

  She hugged me again, and I held on for dear life.

  “Joan,” I said, not letting go, “what do you do when demons come?”

  “What?”

  “Say you were in a TV show and demons had attacked your school. What would you do?”

  Joan leaned back and gave this all of her thought.

  “Well, that depends,” she said. “What am I? Do I have powers? Am I a witch?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well,” she said. “Aren’t you just supposed to kill them?”

  “What if you couldn’t kill them?”

  “Why can’t you kill them?”

  “Because they’ll …” I wasn’t sure, actually. Probably something bad. No matter what, killing this demon meant killing Allison, even if it was just her body. And then what? Kill all those people?

  “Just killing them isn’t an option. They’re hard to kill. And there are too many of them.”

  “Well, then, you vanquish them!”

  TV had really improved my sister’s vocabulary.

  “How?” I asked.

  “With a spell. You trick them.”

  “What if you don’t have a spell?”

  “Well, what do you have?” she asked.

  I looked around. I had nothing. I had me. I had the steak knife. I held it up.

  “You have this,” I said.

  Joan looked at it critically.

  �
��That’s not going to kill a demon,” she said. “This isn’t a very good show.”

  “No,” I said, carefully holding the knife out at arm’s length, “it’s not.”

  “But it would be a good show if you were the one fighting them,” Joan said, fluffing my spikes gently. “Are you the one fighting them?”

  “Yeah,” I said into her leg. “I fight the demons.”

  Actually, I realized, I was doing no such thing. I had tried to figure my way through this, and I had failed—or I had succeeded to the point where I was alive and safe, but my best friend was not. My best friend had gone down trying to keep me from saving her.

  I could have walked away then. I could take my chips and go home. But a very loose idea began to form in my mind. Well, sort of an outline of a possible idea. It was in what Owen had told me—Lanalee had to follow the rules too.

  And suddenly, I understood what I had to do. The outline became a rising impulse that pulled me up.

  I looked over at my sister, who was fiddling with the ends of her hair, still thinking on the problem.

  “Joan,” I said, “I want you to know two things. You’re the best sister in the world, and they don’t really have flying cars in Japan.”

  “I never believed that,” Joan said, undisturbed. “I stopped believing all that stuff when you told me that India used to be a part of England.”

  “That one is true,” I said. “It was an empire.”

  “Yeah, right. And did it strike back?”

  “Joan,” I said. “I have to go. And I could be home really, really late. But just remember that, okay? The thing about being the best sister.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked. “Can I come?”

  I reached out and hugged her hard again.

  “No,” I said. “I have to go alone. Go home, Joan. Get out of here.”

  “But you’ll come back home, right?” she said.

  I hesitated.

  “As soon as I can,” I said, trying to keep my voice firm.

  When she was gone, I took a deep breath and scrawled a message on a piece of napkin. This was my last chance to walk away.

  I went back to the roof.

  forty

  The first part was calling the hell back down on myself, and that meant I needed the bird.

  “Pazuzu!” I screamed into the night sky. “Get back here!”

  I retrieved the purple bottle and carefully rolled up the napkin scrap and threaded it into the small hole. By the time I had done this, I saw that the owl had rejoined me. He was sitting quietly on a bent antenna.

  “Listen up, bird,” I said.

  Pazuzu cocked his head.

  “I have a message for your owner,” I said. “You’re going to take it to her.”

  Pazuzu looked a little put out by my demand; he pulled his head back a bit. Still, he dutifully sideways waddled down the antenna to me, reached out with one taloned foot, and deftly took the bottle from my grasp.

  “Thanks,” I added.

  He shot into the air, the bottle dangling freely beneath him. He dove over the edge of the building.

  About a minute passed during which I did nothing but dumbly stare at the B on the Biltmore sign. It hummed.

  Suddenly, there was an incredible snap of cold—like that feeling in the dead of summer when you walk past a store and get that blast of air-conditioning—that, but about a hundred times more intense. It burned my skin. Suddenly a split appeared in the sky, a painful red cut. Pazuzu flew out of this, and the cold seemed to be sucked back into this wound as it closed itself. Pazuzu flew overhead, dropped the bottle back into my outstretched hands, then sat back on the antenna and preened himself.

  I pulled the stopper from the bottle and removed the scrap. Right under my message, I saw the following words, scrawled in the familiar ornate, looping hand:

  My house in five minutes. Don’t be late.

  “Five minutes?” I said out loud. “How am I supposed to get there in five minutes?”

  Pazuzu pulled his face out of his own feathers and cocked his head at me, as if puzzling this over himself. Then he blinked his yellow eyes and fixed them on a point just behind me.

  I turned to see Mr. Fields standing on the very edge of the rooftop, his back facing the open sky and the moon.

  “Nice to see you again, Jane!” he said, bowing low. “Come along. My car is waiting.”

  He didn’t move from the roof edge. Instead, he slipped off his glasses and replaced them with a pair of old-fashioned goggles—massive ones, like the kind people used to wear to go “motoring.”

  “The stairs are this way,” I said, pointing to the door.

  “No time.” He fussed with the goggles with one hand and waved me toward him with the other. “No need. Come along.”

  “Come along where?”

  “To Mistress!” he said brightly. “Come along now.”

  He reached out to me. This could mean only one thing.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll take the stairs.”

  “If you want to talk to Mistress, this is the only way,” he said primly, as if he was admonishing a small child. “Come now.”

  There was no going back. Only forward. I joined him on the edge.

  “Now,” he said, “I should warn you that sometimes this hurts a bit.”

  With the slightest of tugs, I felt my heels liberated from the surface.

  Maybe you’ve wondered what it’s like to fall off a tall building. Well, let me fill you in.

  The first second is really, really good. It’s surprisingly like the cartoons, where the fateful character hovers for a moment after running off the cliff. Everything is still. There’s no cold or restriction…. You’re just free. For just a second, you really feel like you’re standing on air.

  And then you realize that you are not. This is not as fun.

  The falling is pretty much what you might imagine. You fall. It happens very quickly and you have no real time to be scared because you are simply flattened by the force of falling until your face feels like a pancake.

  What I didn’t expect was the fact that you flip over and go headfirst. Then you get this feeling like every single internal organ and bone in your body just slips out of place and lodges somewhere in your neck. The blood really does rush to your head, causing a sensation a little bit like drinking fifty cups of coffee in one second might feel if that was possible. My arms were flapping uselessly at my sides, rubbery as fish fins. I knew I had to be nauseous—it would come when my body understood gravity again. Next to me, Mr. Fields was in pretty much the same position, but he was holding his arms back gracefully and putting his smiling face against the wind. He was shouting something, but I couldn’t hear him.

  There was ground coming up fast now. I was ten feet, five feet, four, knee-high distance. I could see the pattern of the concrete clearly. Then my legs bent around hard, arching my body completely. I tumbled in the air, turning the right way around. I landed heels first. The sidewalk was solid—it made my teeth chatter—but it didn’t kill me.

  Mr. Fields was standing next to me. His little silver sports car was waiting, engine running, right next to where we had landed. I looked around, expecting to see crowds of terrified Halloween revelers or at least a startled doorman. But there was no one. It was just an empty stretch of sidewalk. Not abandoned. There was just no one there at that second. I got the feeling this was not a coincidence.

  Mr. Fields ushered me to the car and settled me into the front seat. My entire body, I noticed, was now shuddering with the most painful cold. Anticipating this need, he tucked a purple cashmere lap blanket over me.

  “That happens,” he said. “That feeling of cold. It’s because you have a soul and a life force. When you do something like jump off a building, it starts to slip away. It’ll snap back into place in a moment.”

  He hurried around and got in on the driver’s side. He fumbled with the stereo for a moment, then he was blasting Beethoven and the whole car was groaning w
ith the heavy-belly sound of cellos. Then we were speeding off down the empty streets, with the other cars always just a block or two in the distance but never in our way.

  The sports car loved the challenge of the Providence ski slope hills, and the engine purred happily as it pulled us up the streets. Maybe two minutes later, we were coming to a checkered-flag stop in front of Lanalee’s, right behind a line of silver cars.

  “Houseful tonight,” Mr. Fields said pleasantly. “Well, here you are. Good luck, my dear. We’re all very happy to have you with us.”

  It was cold now. For reasons I have never quite understood, cold always makes things louder. My shoe made a definite crunch as it made contact with the pavement. Pazuzu was there already, sitting placidly on a yellow porch light, occasionally pecking at the bulb. I could hear a lot of noise coming from inside. It sounded like the party had simply moved here.

  In case you’re thinking that I’m exceptionally brave—don’t be fooled. I wasn’t happy about any of this. I definitely wasn’t looking forward to going smack into a house full of demons. But there are times in life when only one path is presented to you. The path may be rocky, on fire, populated by poisonous cottonmouth snakes … but it’s your path.

  forty-one

  The door wasn’t locked, so I just went in. The foyer was empty, but the Tremone living room was packed. The air was smoky, with a light touch of cloves. I recognized most of the people from the prom. David was stretched out on a sofa, looking elegant in a consumptive, low-red-blood-cell-count kind of way.

  Allison stepped through the crowd, which parted graciously to make way for her. Some people reached out to stroke her red hair, to touch her dress.

  “Hi, shortie,” she said. “Snack?”

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “Food first,” she said. “I have things here tonight you wouldn’t believe. Sushi that Tokyo would die for. And these smoked almonds from Seville that would make any self-respecting Spaniard eat his own arm off in envy. Try.”