Diabolical

by Cynthia Leitich Smith

  I think it over. He is a grown-up. The school’s target market appears to be older teens. I look about twenty, which may be enough of a problem. Besides, as a human, Freddy is more physically vulnerable than the Wolf. “Nah. Thanks anyway.”

  Freddy hits a link to download the admissions application.

  WITH WEATHER DELAYS and pit stops, we don’t drop off Quincie until after 5 P.M. Sunday. She gives me a quick hug in the living room of the historic B and B in Montpelier. “How long will you two be gone?”

  “It depends on Lucy,” I say. “How quickly we can convince her of what the school is really about. Whether after finding out, she’s willing to leave with us.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be?” Kieren asks. “Any sane person would run screaming.”

  Quincie’s phone ringtone goes off. It’s Pavarotti singing “Mamma.”

  “There’s a reason you-know-who is called the Prince of Lies,” I reply. “He figures out what people want most. He uses that information to tempt them.” I don’t say what we’re all thinking: that the devil has managed to lure Lucy there in the first place.

  “Howdy,” Quincie says into her phone. “Damn.” She bites her lower lip. “Are you sure? What was the number? Thanks.” Quincie raises a finger and makes a quick call. Covering the receiver, she looks up at me. “That was Yani from the hostess desk at Sanguini’s. Sabine left a message for you at work. She said it’s important.”

  Sabine, the vamp queen. Crap. The school must’ve checked our references.

  Quincie asks for Her Royal Majesty and hands over the phone.

  I gesture at the young couple to stay put and step outside Norma & Harry’s B and B. It’s getting chillier every minute. “Zachary here.”

  “Friend Zachary, I am confused. If you have fallen, why would you go to the American Scholomance and not instead come to me?”

  “Sabine . . .” She’s helped me in the past, when it was in her best interests. I’m tempted to let her think that I’m a fallen angel now. It would make my enrolling at the school more plausible. But what was I just saying about lies and temptation? “I need to talk to one of the students. A friend of Miranda’s. What can you tell me about the place?”

  “You should stay away from it.”

  “Sabine —”

  “Non!” she exclaims. “You should not have involved me. Do you know what happened to the last eternal royal who tried to deceive Lucifer?”

  I couldn’t care less. “Not exactly.”

  “Neither does anyone else! This afternoon I received an electronic letter from the school, requesting confirmation of my previous correspondence. I will not reply for twenty-four hours. Consider it a gift to celebrate the annulment of our association. I will assist you no further, Zachary. That is all.”

  She beeps off. The vamp queen fears the Big Boss, but she fears his adversary, too. Still, for a damned undead royal, it’s a pretty generous offer. Twenty-four hours.

  Back inside the B and B, it occurs to me — not for the first time — how hard it will be for Quincie to wait here alone. She’s not a sidelines kind of girl.

  Even if she weren’t worried about me and Kieren, doing nothing is contradictory to her nature. What’s more, it’s almost painful for her, being away from Sanguini’s.

  In the living room, my young assignment is seated with her beloved Wolf on the piano bench. They’re talking in hushed tones. When I come in, they stand.

  “We’ve got twenty-four hours,” I announce. “If we’re not out by then, we have to deal with Sabine ratting us out.” I glance at Quincie. “Will you be okay here?”

  “You’re asking me?” she replies, walking us to the door.

  “I’m surprised you’re not putting up more of a fight about being left behind.”

  Quincie shrugs. “Call me crazy, but I’d rather you not ‘renounce the Big Boss and march us both straight to hell.’” With that, she hugs me again like I’m going off to war. Then she gives Kieren a kiss that could melt snow.

  THROUGHOUT THE AFTERNOON, Vesper has chattered at Lucy nonstop, which is how I know Vesper took extra classes to graduate early last semester from a private girls’ school in Georgia. She doesn’t have a particularly Bostonian or southern accent. It’s more of an affected mix.

  The sheer volume of her belongings is staggering, and this is coming from me, who, as eternal royalty, used to toss away million-dollar gowns after one wearing.

  In terms of gloves alone, she’s unpacked pairs for driving, skiing, weight lifting, and kickboxing in leather, suede, and knit, in patterns and solids, in various colors, with fingers and without, in classic and opera lengths.

  “They barely fit in my drawer with the mittens and muffs!” Vesper exclaims.

  “Do you think you’ll need all that?” Lucy asks, removing one of two identical uniforms from the closet. It’s an ash-gray oxford-style shirt and matching pants. The embroidered logo is based on the devilish monster depicted above each fireplace.

  Vesper glowers at the outfit. “Did you see the shoes?”

  Zooming in on the closet, I consider the terry-cloth robe and matching slippers. They’re not heavy enough for winter in Vermont. Lucy, who unpacked herself in about three minutes, opens yet another of Vesper’s trunks, this one filled with silk bedding.

  “Don’t you love the color?” Vesper asks. “It’s Persian plum. I adore the contemporary furniture and design. Monochromatic is always chic, but it can get tiresome after a while. The color will give it punch.”

  I don’t think Vesper is a demon, just incredibly boring, superficial, and spoiled.

  According to Seth, they’re the only two students who’ve checked in thus far, because of the weather. He left when the caretakers arrived.

  The Bilovskis are a married, middle-aged couple, who’ve been given an apartment to themselves on the first floor. It has a separate bedroom and its own kitchenette but is otherwise designed and decorated like the student quarters. The couple seems rural, polite, and in no way remarkable.

  As headlights flash against Vesper’s windowed wall, I zoom out to watch a compact car slow to idle in the circular front drive. A petite girl exits. Her long, blue coat looks worn. She has chestnut-colored hair under her knit cap and carries only a backpack.

  Meanwhile, upstairs, Lucy, who worked as a hotel maid last summer, has Vesper’s bed made in record time — skirt, mattress pad, shams, and throw pillows. Lucy tosses an extra Persian plum pillow on the black leather Euro recliner.

  Vesper looks impressed. “Are you always this quiet? It’s Lucy, right? Earlier, it looked like you’d been crying or had pinkeye, but it’s better now.”

  “I got in an argument with my parents before I left home,” Lucy explains. “They didn’t want me to change schools. Or leave Texas. And my gerbil died. Actually, he was my best friend, Miranda’s, gerbil.”

  Vesper seems baffled. “You were crying over your friend’s dead gerbil?”

  The newcomer steps out of the elevator, and the two girls peek into the hallway.

  “DO ALL ANGELS know each other?” Kieren asks from my front passenger seat.

  “Nope,” I say. “We’re talking about a lot of angels. GAs alone solidly outnumber mortals. But with the earthly population soaring and tensions rising around the globe, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Big Boss created more soon. Why?”

  Kieren flicks his wrist, unleashes his claws, and retracts them.

  “Are you pretending to be Wolverine for a reason?”

  “The devil,” he replies, “has quite a reputation. What does he bring to a fight?”

  “Lucifer is battle trained. He taught Drac his tricks. He can change shape, mess with your mind, vanish at will. Or seem to. He can cater and reframe the experience of hell itself. Beyond that, who knows? He’s had a lot of time to gather strength and forces.”

  The Wolf’s scowl is formidable. “Would you recognize Lucifer if you saw him?”

  It’s a good question. “I’m a new angel. He fell lon
g, long before my time.”

  “So that would be a no?”

  Wolfish posturing aside, Kieren is nervous. I answer, “The fact that Scholomance Prep is supposedly Lucifer’s school doesn’t mean that we’ll find him there personally. Where the Big Boss sends down GAs, Lucifer sends up demons. The devil himself has been banished from earth. He has minions but no power except what we give him. That’s why he’s big on temptation. Bargains.”

  The blizzard intensifies and we briefly lose all visibility.

  Kieren is silent for a long moment. Then he says, “His minions have earthly power, though? They can hurt us?”

  I turn down the heater. “There is that.”

  The Wolf chuckles. “Your pregame pep talk needs work.”

  Minutes later, we come upon a black hearse stuck in a ditch. It has New York plates. We can’t see through the tinted windows, but the taillights are on.

  I pull over the Impaler, and Kieren and I go investigate.

  “Can we give you a hand?” the Wolf calls, turning on a flashlight.

  The driver lowers his front window. He stares blankly at us through long, unnaturally black, uneven bangs. “Do what you want.”

  The girl sitting beside him leans forward into our field of vision. “Excuse me, who are you? I have my phone right here, and 911 is programmed into my speed dial.”

  When my first assignment, Danny Bianchi, was a boy, nobody would’ve questioned someone stopping to help a motorist in distress. It sucks that people these days often doubt each other’s motives. It sucks more that they’re often smart to do so.

  “We’re students,” I reply, “on our way to a school called Scholomance Preparatory Academy. It’s up the road another five minutes or so.”

  “Us, too!” the girl exclaims. “Hang on. Can you prove that’s where you’re going? Do you have your admission letters with you?”

  There’s cautious, and there’s paranoid. Why is she so high-strung?

  Freddy received a curt, officious e-mail confirming our acceptance only moments before we left. Not that I was expecting, say, a formal, embossed parchment on such short notice. But I had no intention of letting my guard down either.

  Kieren glances back at the SUV. “We’ve got a printout of the directions from Yahoo! Maps. If you want to stay in the car, though, we can push you out.”

  The ditch isn’t deep. Even if it were, the Wolf could handle the job solo, but like most shifters, he’s careful about showing off his strength.

  I mean, like most werepeople. That’s what they prefer to be called, even though the term doesn’t make literal sense. Were- means “man,” so the translation is “man-people.” No animal-form reference. From what I understand, it’s designed to emphasize that they’re people first.

  The driver is ignoring us. The girl hops out of the front and, from the other side of the hood, calls, “Show me your map.”

  I jog to my SUV, parked ahead of them on the side of the rural road, and fetch it for her. I’m not surprised to have run into other students along the way.

  Meanwhile, Kieren goes around to the back of the hearse. He waits until I wade into the ditch with him before single-handedly half-pushing, half-lifting the car up and out.

  “I could’ve actually helped,” I say.

  “I know. But if you injured your back or shoulders, could you still fly?”

  Valid point, though I’m hoping to get through this without doing anything as showy as flying.

  As we return to the roadside, the girl has already climbed into my idling SUV. The guy in the hearse peels out, swerving on the ice.

  Our new passenger introduces herself as Bridget Gregory from San Jose. She had a rough flight to JFK and decided to take the train to Burlington. She called the school to explain she was getting in late. Someone named Seth suggested that Bridget carpool with another student, Andrew, the hearse driver.

  “Andrew told me he got a recommendation letter from the mayor of New York City. New York City! Can you believe that?”

  “We’re glad to have you along,” Kieren says — his way of wondering out loud why she switched cars —“but the school is only a few minutes away.”

  “That is exactly what I was thinking when we went into that ditch,” Bridget replies from the bench behind us. “If you two hadn’t shown up, who knows? I might’ve frozen to death. I’ve wasted the last eight hours of my life in that death trap on wheels with Mr. Morose, listening to something called ethereal wave music. It’s a relief to finally talk to some normal people.”

  It occurs to me that Bridget is chatting with an earthbound GA and a human-Wolf hybrid. Then I realize that, unlike Andrew, she doesn’t seem the least enamored of the eerie. “What about Scholomance Prep appealed to you?” I ask.

  “When the judge interviewed me for the admissions committee —”

  “Judge?” Kieren asks.

  “A ninth-circuit federal appellate judge,” Bridget replies. “Some say he’ll be the next tapped for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination.”

  “Let me guess,” the Wolf says. “When you grow up, you want to be a lawyer.”

  “I will be a lawyer,” she agrees. “Like my father.”

  “About the judge . . . ?” I nudge.

  “He’s an alumnus of the flagship school in Eastern Europe.”

  Of course he is. The Scholomance in Romania has a worldwide network of successful graduates.

  “He promised to write me a recommendation letter to law school if I graduate, and if I want to get in to Stanford or Yale, I’ll need every advantage.”

  “What grade are you in?” Kieren asks.

  “I graduated from high school last spring on my sixteenth birthday, but you know what happens to smart kids? We get older, and nobody thinks we’re that remarkable anymore. Then we’re smart grown-ups, and there’re plenty of those in the world. Now is the time to capitalize on my intelligence and set myself up for the future.”

  Bridget is either highly verbal by nature, uneasy about our destination, or trying hard to impress us. The beige sweater peeking out of her unzipped ski jacket appears new. Her diamond-stud earrings look real, not that I’m an expert. Her hair is gathered at the back in a bun and accented with a satin bow that matches her sweater. This is one preppy, well-to-do kid.

  “You’ve put a lot of thought into this.” The Wolf clears his throat. “Me and Zach are late admits, so we didn’t get to interview. What else did the judge say?”

  Kieren is a brainiac. Growing up, he split his time between his public school and Wolf studies. Otherwise, he could’ve graduated years early, too.

  “I went to my interview armed with questions,” Bridget replies. “We’re in the first class. The school admits only ten students at a time. It’s very exclusive, with an amazingly low faculty-student ratio. The majority of admits have a personal referral from someone connected to the Scholomance family. Most of us graduated from high school early.” She finally takes a breath. “Maybe not you, Zachary.”

  Kieren replies, “Zach’s education has been unconventional. Go on.”

  “My parents liked all that. Given my age, they weren’t keen on the idea of my going off by myself and meeting college boys. A small, elite boarding school sounded ideal. When I asked the judge about course work, he said the final curriculum was still in development, but I’d be sure to leave with a solid foundation for legal study.”

  She reminds me of Quincie, so driven and focused from such a young age.

  Is that the idea behind Scholomance Prep, to turn unwitting prodigies to evil? Is Lucifer becoming more strategic? Trying to build a brain trust?

  It’s a puzzle. Bridget and Kieren fit the student profile — underage, brilliant, motivated teens. I don’t, but that could be explained away by my recommendation from Sabine. Connections. What about Lucy, though? She’s a smart enough kid. Above average, but no Baby Einstein. What would the devil want with her?

  “You don’t suppose Andrew took my bags in,” Bridget says, getting ou
t of my SUV to check. “Or at least left the hearse hatch unlocked?”

  I turn off the engine. It’s about 6 P.M. Orientation is tomorrow. I hope to convince Lucy to leave tonight, well before Sabine calls our bluff.

  “Looks like an office building,” Kieren says, exiting the car.

  He’s right. Scholomance exudes none of the playful Goth posturing of Sanguini’s. None of the old-world elegance of Sabine’s castle. It looks modern, fungible, and utilitarian, which does nothing to reassure me.

  Outside in the moonlight, I realize we’re at the bottom of a valley, surrounded by snow-blanketed hills.

  Kieren is muttering something about hell freezing over and a volcano in Iceland. He wanders over to the man-made lake. He sniffs the air and bends to touch the water.

  “What is it?” I call.

  The Wolf shrugs. “Something I’ve never smelled before.”

  It’s not the kind of thing that full human beings say. The slip tells me he’s more unnerved by our mission than he’s been letting on.

  Bridget doesn’t seem to catch it. She loops a garment-bag strap over her shoulder. “It’s probably a moose.”

  Kieren turns to look at me. “The water is tepid.” He doesn’t have to point out how strange that is for Vermont in January. The temperature right now is about twenty degrees and falling fast.

  Hopefully, the Wolf and I overpacked. We each brought a duffle bag, a backpack, and a garment bag. They’re not just for show. We have a change of clothes and toiletries. But we’ve also got my sword, Kieren’s battle-axe, holy water and wafers, and an interfaith collection of religious symbols from Alpha and Omega to Zen Circles.

  Plus, the Wolf has his teeth and claws.

  San Diego Sun-News, April 19

  HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER IDENTIFIED AS HIGH-SCHOOL DEBATE STAR

  By Farid Karam

  San Diego — The hit-and-run driver who struck a 2002 gray Subaru Legacy has been identified as a San Jose teenager on her way to a high-school debate competition, according to San Diego police spokesperson Jill Lowell.