Evil Librarian

by Michelle Knudsen

  “All the demons are going to have that?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “How long will it last?”

  Mr. Gabriel shrugs. “Not sure. Long enough, anyway. Now, off you go.”

  No one needs to tell me twice. Off I go indeed.

  My fingers are still throbbing quietly as I walk down the hall outside the library. They don’t hurt anymore, exactly; it’s more of a pulsing hyperawareness. I find it hard to believe that other people can’t see it. I hope the demons will be as unsuspecting as they are supposed to be. I realize too late that I forgot to ask what happens if I touch a non-demon. That seems like important information, but there is no way I am going back in there now. They might decide I need some other dose of demon magic to better serve the bargain. I will just not touch any non-demons until this thing is over with.

  I begin seeing the demons right away. I have to admit, the halo thing is pretty handy. Not all of them are as obviously inhuman as the security guards.

  But, God, there sure are a lot of them. I think Gabriel and Kingston’s estimate of twenty was a bit on the conservative side.

  I approach the security guards first, because they seem kind of stupid and also because they are standing conveniently nearby. Security guards in our school don’t generally wander around in pairs, but I guess these two only did minimal research.

  They stare again as soon as they notice me. I decide to use that as my opening.

  “What?” I say, marching over to them. “Why do you keep staring at me?”

  “We know what you are,” one of them says in a scratchy voice. “Roach.” Only he really says that horrible demon word for it, of course.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lie. I flip my hair angrily. “Who’s your boss? I’m going to tell him you’re acting inappropriately toward the female students.”

  I turn as if to go, and the guard on the left grabs my wrist. Gotcha. I start, naturally, trying to pry his fingers loose. There is a slight feedback vibration, different from the static-electricity feeling I have come to expect — kind of like typing on a virtual keyboard with the vibrate feature turned on. I take this to mean the tagging has been successfully accomplished. The demon does not seem to notice.

  The second demon puts his hand out, clearly intending to push the other one back warningly (he seems to be the brains of the operation, such as they are), but I deliberately misinterpret his movement and slap his hand away. “Don’t you start, too!” I snap.

  The first one lets go, finally, and I take a step back. “If you bother me again, I really am going to tell,” I say. I turn to leave, and this time they don’t try to stop me.

  Two down, a whole lot more to go.

  After a few awkward oops-my-hand-slipped-so-that-it-accidentally-touched-your-hand maneuvers and other nonideal approaches, I finally settle on appointing myself the student government welcome ambassador for the new substitute teachers. There’s no way they can really know there’s no such thing, and it allows me to march right up and shake their hands while explaining my nonexistent role as their student liaison.

  There end up being thirty-two all together. I think. I’m making my third full circuit of the school, blowing off yet another class, and I don’t encounter any more glowing red halos that I haven’t already tagged. If there are secret demons hiding out in secret rooms somewhere, I don’t know how to seek them out. And the day is almost over, and I want to be finished.

  I head back to the library. Mr. Gabriel is showing his Dewey decimal PowerPoint presentation to a group of students, but he looks up when I poke my head in.

  “All finished with that special project, Cynthia?”

  “Yes, Mr. Gabriel. Just wanted to let you know.”

  He thanks me and I retreat, relieved to be done. It’s a study hall day, and so I can just go and sit and try not to think too much until rehearsal. I reflect a little anxiously that if we do end up surviving this mess, I’m going to have some serious work ahead of me to catch up in all my classes. But whatever; that’s still way, way better than dying. And not my immediate problem anyway. I have had a weird, hard day; I deserve forty-five minutes of peace and quiet.

  I look up and see that Ryan is leaning against the wall ahead of me.

  For the first time in pretty much ever, I am not one hundred percent happy to see him.

  “Hey, you okay?” he asks. “You haven’t been texting. I wanted to make sure Mr. Gabriel didn’t kill you or something.” He smiles, even though it’s not actually funny.

  I smile back anyway, because even now I can’t help but smile back. But I don’t want to talk about what I’ve been doing all day, and I don’t want to lie, and I’m not sure how I can avoid both of those things at the same time.

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m fine. Just distracted, I guess.”

  His too-perceptive eyes take me in for a few seconds. “You sure?”

  Dammit. “Yeah. You know, it’s just — just everything. Sometimes I succeed more than others in not thinking bad thoughts. I’ll be okay.” I give him another smile, a little twisty despite myself. “Better already, in fact.”

  I can’t quite believe I just said that.

  He smiles again too, a little wider than before. Acknowledging my accidental flirting? Liking it? Embarrassed on my behalf and trying to cover for it? As usual, I cannot read him at all. But I can feel myself grinning stupidly back at him. Even with everything else going on, his smile still makes me have trouble standing. And thinking. And breathing.

  After one more awkward moment in which I simultaneously want him to look away and to never, never look away ever, he says he’d better get to class. Before he leaves, he takes my hand and squeezes.

  “It’ll be okay,” he says. “We’ll think of something. No giving up, right?”

  “Right.”

  I don’t know where this recurring hand-squeezing thing is coming from, but I am not going to complain.

  He gives me one of those chin-first nods and walks away.

  It’s not until he’s gone that I remember how I wasn’t going to touch any non-demons.

  Crap.

  I don’t know what to do. I can’t run after him. I mean, I could, but then what? I really, really don’t want to tell him about my side deal with the librarian. And probably the tagging doesn’t even work on people at all. Wouldn’t Mr. Gabriel have mentioned that, if it did?

  Probably not, actually.

  The bell rings, and I make myself go inside. It will be fine. I’m sure it will be fine.

  I take out a book and stare at it, not reading.

  And then, after a few minutes, my fingers suddenly feel — odd. More odd. The throbbing intensifies, and I find myself staring at the wall. Through the wall. Toward — what? I want to get up. I want to get up and go out and walk down that hall.

  It’s the librarian, I realize stupidly. He’s drawing the tagged demons to the place where he and Kingston are going to kill them. I can feel the pull of whatever he’s doing. It’s not quite compelling me to go. I can feel it, and it makes me want to move toward that place, but I can resist it. It’s like when you know there’s ice cream in the freezer and you really want it and you have to sit there reminding yourself about how you really, really want to fit into those pants you bought that are a little too tight and so should not eat the ice cream and you know this and so you can resist, but it’s hard and unpleasant. But you can still do it. Usually.

  But what if I’m able to resist not because I’m human, but because of my roach thing? What if Ryan is also feeling the draw and can’t resist?

  He won’t even know that he should. He’ll just feel like he wants to go there. It might not even occur to him to question why he wants to go.

  I get up as slowly and casually as I can and take the bathroom pass from the front of the room. The teacher covering study hall doesn’t even look up from her papers. I walk slowly over to the door and open it and step through and close it behind me.

/>   And then I run.

  I let my pulsing fingers lead me down one hall and then another. I realize I was sort of assuming the destination would be the library, but instead I’m being drawn up another floor, to one of the science labs. I pass a couple of demons who are walking along, chatting, not really noticing where they’re headed. “Hey, no running in the halls!” one of them calls after me.

  I keep running, obviously.

  The throbbing in my fingers is getting even stronger. I can tell now that the place I’m being drawn to is the last lab at the far end of the hall. Partly this is because of the intensity of the throbbing, but it is also because Ryan is standing outside, his hand on the doorknob.

  I manage a burst of extra speed and throw myself at him, tackling him to the ground almost in the way I used to fantasize about, except for the throbbing fingers and the close proximity of many demons masquerading as substitute teachers and other high-school staff. Also, I never thought about how much it would hurt when my knees and elbows slammed into the floor like that.

  “Cyn! What —”

  “Shh!” I roll off of him and let him get to a sitting position. But when he tries to stand, I yank him back down.

  “Hey!”

  “Hey, yourself. I don’t know where you think you’re going, but you need to just forget it.”

  “But —” His forehead wrinkles up in confusion. “I have to, uh —”

  “No, you don’t. There’s, um, something else going on here. Something not for you.”

  He still looks confused. Understandably. And kind of annoyed.

  “What’s going on, Cyn?”

  I take a few final seconds to search frantically around in my brain for any ideas about how to not have to tell him. The two chatting demons open the door and go inside and close it behind them again. They pay no attention to us.

  My brain fails completely to help me out. Stupid brain.

  I take a deep breath and force myself to look Ryan in the eyes. “So, okay. Remember how we were talking about what we could do to stop all the extra demons from killing extra people and draining extra students and stuff?”

  “I remember how I thought your idea was too dangerous,” Ryan says, dangerously.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t agree with you.”

  “You went to Aaron? Without me?”

  “Well, yes. But actually, he was completely unhelpful. As was what’s-her-name. Oh! Except that she said the final-battle thing is probably going to happen on opening night. After the show, of course.”

  Ryan closes his eyes for a second and shakes his head, as if to clear away some of this nonsense I am tossing at him. “So, then what did you do?”

  Yeah. This is the part I really didn’t want to get into.

  “I made a deal with Mr. Gabriel.”

  “You what?!”

  “I know. I know! It seemed like a good idea at the time. And it was a good idea! I mean, it is, still, at this time, too. I think it’s going to work out, and at least we’ll only have two demons to deal with instead of more than thirty!”

  He speaks slowly and quietly. “What was the deal, Cyn?”

  I tell him the deal, leaving out the part about making Gabriel and Kingston promise never to hurt him but including how I must have accidentally tagged him when he squeezed my hand outside of study hall. “I’m sorry, I had meant not to touch you, not to touch anyone —”

  “What, forever?”

  “No! Just until after they were done with whatever they were going to do.”

  “And what are they going to do, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Destroy the other demons and use the power released by the mass sacrificial killing to shore up the wards or whatever and stop other demons from coming through.”

  The whole time we’ve been talking, there’s been a low rumble of voices coming from the other side of the wall. Just regular talking, like there was a science lab cocktail party going on, with friendly teacher chitchat and little groups of small-talkers and stuff, possibly drinking colorful alcoholic beverages out of glasses in the shapes of test tubes and beakers by the light of many artfully arranged Bunsen burners. I notice now that the sound of the voices has suddenly disappeared. Could it be over already? I guess I thought there’d be more, I don’t know, ritual to the ritual sacrifice. Like when Mr. Gabriel went all demony in the library that time with the blood and the shapes on the floor and everything. This was so quick and quiet.

  Then, the screaming starts.

  Ryan and I look at each other, wide-eyed, our argument temporarily forgotten.

  There is more screaming, lots of it, and someone — something, remember, they’re demons, bad evil murderous treacherous demons — something throws itself against the door. I guess it’s possible it’s been thrown, but the hand-shaped silhouettes slapping desperately against the frosted glass of the window suggest self-throwing. There are other sounds, wet, horrible sounds, that I can’t quite identify. I do not try too hard to address this.

  “Cyn,” Ryan says. “Are you sure they’re all demons?”

  “Yes!” Of course they are. Right? I mean, they have to be. I saw the halos.

  Which I was able to do because of whatever Mr. Gabriel did to my eyes. What if it just made me see them randomly?

  No. That’s dumb. I can’t start questioning that now. Gabriel and Kingston both had the halos, and so did the security guards, and I know they’re all demons . . . and all the rest I tagged were new, strangers, and they had the halos, dammit, and they were, they have to be . . .

  The screaming is still going on. There is now a streak of what I think is blood across the window. The hands and whomever they belonged to are gone.

  In that moment I know I’m going to open that door. I need to see — something. Something to reassure me that they are, in fact, all demons. I have no idea what that would be.

  I stand up and move slowly toward the door. I expect Ryan to try to stop me, but there must be a part of him still responding to the tagging, because he just comes silently along with me.

  Slowly, I turn the knob and open the door a tiny crack.

  Something huge and dark and screaming comes flying at the opening, and in the single frozen moment before I am able to slam it shut again I am satisfied that nothing in that room is human. The door shudders violently as the thing smashes against it, but somehow the door stays closed. Gabriel and Kingston must have done something to it, secured the room somehow, so no one — no thing — could get out.

  Ryan and I back a few steps away, still staring at the shifting shadow shapes that can just be seen through the thick frosty glass.

  “Yup. I’m sure. All demons.”

  “Okay.” He’s silent a moment, then adds, “But, you know, not okay. Not really, Cyn. Jesus. How could you just go and do that, without even talking to me?”

  “I tried talking to you! You were too afraid to try anything!”

  He glares at me, surprised and hurt, and I instantly regret those words.

  “I’m sorry,” I try. “That’s not what I meant. I just meant that you didn’t seem to like anything I came up with —”

  “You only came up with the one stupid plan!”

  “And I was afraid that if I told you about this stupid plan, you’d try to talk me out of this one, too. Probably because you’d be right, that it was stupid and too dangerous. But I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing. If we do nothing, everyone is going to die.” I take a breath, realizing that I’m angry at him again. “And besides, it worked! I saw a chance, and I took it, and it worked. So don’t go criticizing me for having stupid plans. At least I tried something!”

  He’s quiet for a minute more, and I’m not sure what that means or what he’s thinking, and we stand there looking at each other in the otherwise empty hallway, hearing only the muffled crashes and screams and other sounds from the sealed lab room. They are beginning to taper off.

  “All right,” he says finally, and I don�
��t know whether that means all right I understand or all right but I kind of hate you or just all right I’m done talking about this right now. I don’t ask. “You’re done here now?” he continues.

  “I think so.” My fingers aren’t throbbing anymore. And the deal was only that I had to do the tagging; I would never have even come here if it weren’t for having accidentally involved Ryan. “Yes.”

  “So let’s just get out of here, and we can talk more later.”

  That sounds like an excellent idea.

  But we are still standing there when we hear the door swing open.

  We spin around and I register two things. One: the noises have all stopped, and two: a woman has just stepped inside that room. I catch just the trailing edge of her skirt as she goes in. She leaves the door open behind her, and I can see bits and pieces of — things — scattered around the floor and the walls. And a little hanging from the ceiling, too.

  “Well,” a female voice says into the silence. “I guess it’s a good thing I like to be fashionably late.”

  “Dammit, Cynthia,” Mr. Gabriel’s voice calls from inside. “You missed one.”

  Apparently he knows I’m out here. I step toward the door, Ryan right beside me. We lean in.

  Gabriel and Kingston, looking human again, are standing at the far end of the room. I can’t see the woman’s face, because she’s turned toward them and away from me, but I can see the red halo glowing over her head.

  “I just got here,” she says. “I must have missed your invitation. I just felt something interesting going on and thought I would come investigate.”

  “But we closed the gate,” Kingston says. “The wards —”

  “Yes,” she says. “I think I got through right at the last possible second. Really, it appears my timing was stunningly perfect. As usual.”

  Mr. Gabriel and Principal Kingston both appear to be temporarily speechless. They just stand there glowering at her.

  “Well,” I say. “We’ll just be going. You guys look like you’ve got some catching up to do. And, uh, cleaning up.” I am trying very hard not to look at anything other than the three demons who are still standing upright and alive.