“That was when I met Jake. He was one of the young officers overseeing the camp, but he looked different from how he does now. His hair was lighter and in his uniform he was not so conspicuous. I knew he liked me. He smiled at me and tried to make conversation whenever I served food to the officers. One day I was saddened thinking of Esther and he stopped me to ask what was wrong. I made the mistake of trusting him and took the opportunity to tell him about my fears for my childhood friend. When he told me he might be able to help, I couldn’t believe my luck. I thought if I could do one good thing I might be able to respect myself again. Karl, that was what Jake called himself then, was so beautiful and so mesmerizing. The fact that someone like him would acknowledge my existence, let alone show interest in my problems, was flattering. He asked me whether I believed in God and I told him that the way my life had played out so far, if there was ever a God, he must have deserted us. Karl told me he had a secret he wanted to share, because he felt he could trust me. He told me he served a higher master, one who repaid loyalty. He said I could help Esther if I swore undying loyalty to him. He told me not to be afraid and that I would be rewarded for my sacrifice with eternal life. When I think back on it, I don’t know why he bothered to single me out. I think he must have been bored and looking for someone to play with.” Hanna paused as her mind traveled back to her dark past. “It sounded so simple at the time.”
“What happened?” I asked even though the answer was obvious.
“Esther was healed. Jake restored her to health so the guards would have no reason to harm her and I came into the darkness. But I wasn’t sure Jake had kept his end of the bargain … .”
“Did he?” I asked breathlessly.
“He made her well again.” Hanna’s sad brown eyes flickered up to meet mine. “But that did not keep her from the gas chambers two weeks later.”
“He betrayed you!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “He tricked you into bargaining away your life. That’s despicable, even for Jake.”
“It could have been worse,” Hanna said. “When I was thrown into Hades, I somehow avoided the pit. I was assigned duties at the hotel and I’ve been here ever since. So you see, miss, I brought this fate upon myself. I cannot complain.”
“But your intentions were good, Hanna. I think there’s hope for everyone.”
“There is while you are walking the earth. This is a final destination. I don’t hope for anything now and I do not believe in miracles.”
“You have seen the devil at work,” I said. “Why can’t you believe in the power of Heaven as well?”
“Heaven has no mercy for the likes of me. I made a pact and belong to Hell now. Not even angels can dissolve those ties.”
I frowned and sat on the edge of my bed. Could Hanna be right? Would the laws of Heaven and Hell bind her to this prison? Surely her sacrifice had to count for something. She had well and truly served her sentence. But maybe it didn’t work that way. I hoped I hadn’t made a promise to her I wouldn’t be able to keep. Hanna busied herself tidying the items on my dressing table. They were mainly French perfumes, lotions, and powders—the sort of things Jake thought would make me happy. He really didn’t have a clue.
I looked at Hanna, who was now shuffling around the room and avoiding making eye contact.
“You don’t believe they’ll find me, do you?” I asked softly. She didn’t answer but only tidied more energetically. I felt an overwhelming urge to grab her forcibly by the shoulders and shake her into understanding. Because if I succeeded in convincing Hanna then I might convince myself that I wasn’t going to be a prisoner for eternity. “You don’t get it!” I yelled to my own surprise. “You don’t get what I am. Right now I have a whole covenant of archangels plus a seraphim looking for me. They’ll find a way to get me out of here.”
“If you say so, miss.” Hanna gave a perfunctory reply.
“Don’t say it like that.” I glowered at her. “What are you really thinking?”
“All right, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.” Hanna put down her dust cloth and faced me. “If it was so easy for angels to storm this prison, don’t you think they would have by now?” Hanna’s tone became more tender. “If they could just free the souls in torment, wouldn’t they have done so? Wouldn’t God have intervened? You see, miss, Heaven and Hell are bound by rules as old as time itself. No angel can enter here uninvited. Think of it this way, could a demon just walk into Heaven?”
“Not a chance,” I said as I reluctantly tried to follow her train of thought. “Not in a million years. But this is different. Isn’t it?”
“The only thing that works in your favor is that Jake tricked you into trusting him. Your angels will have to find a loophole, just like he did. It is not impossible, but it is very difficult. The entries to Hell are well guarded.”
“I don’t believe you,” I proclaimed as loudly as if I were addressing an audience. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and Xavier has a will stronger than anyone I know.”
“Ah, yes, the human boy from your hometown,” said Hanna ruefully. “I have heard some talk about him.”
“What have you heard?” I asked, fired up by her mention of Xavier.
“The prince is very envious of him,” said Hanna. “He has every blessing a human could ask for—beauty, strength, and courage. He is unafraid of death and he is aligned with angels. Plus, he possesses the one thing Jake wants more than anything.”
“And what’s that?”
“The key to your heart. That makes him quite a threat.”
“See, Hanna?” I said. “If Jake feels threatened that means there’s hope, after all. Xavier will come for us.”
“For you,” Hanna corrected. “And even so, he is just a boy with a valiant heart. How can the strength of one man stand against Jake and an army of demons?”
“He can,” I countered, “if he has the power of Heaven on his side. After all, Christ was a man.”
“He was also the Son of God, there’s a difference.”
“Do you think they could have crucified him if he wasn’t human?” I asked. “He was flesh and blood, just like Xavier. You’ve been here so long you underestimate the power of humans. They’re a force of nature.”
“Forgive me, miss, if I cannot hope as you do,” Hanna said humbly. “I don’t want to raise my dreams out of the dust only to have them cut down. Can you understand that?”
“Yes, Hanna, I can,” I said at last. “That’s why if you don’t mind, I’ll hope enough for the both of us.”
I thought about Hanna’s story for a long time after she left. Although I wanted desperately to go and check on Venus Cove, I couldn’t free my mind. It remained stuck on Hanna and the hardships of her young life. I thought about how little I really understood about human suffering. What I knew about the blackest episodes in human history was nothing but cold hard facts. Human experience was so much more complex. There was probably a lot more I could learn from Hanna than I’d realized.
There was one thing I did know; Hanna had made a mistake. But she had expressed regret and she was sorry for her actions. If she was destined to live beneath the ground for the rest of eternity, then there was something wrong with the system. Surely Heaven couldn’t stand by and let such corruption go unpunished. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I will repay. Hanna was wrong. Heaven would seek justice. I just had to be patient.
13
Speak of the Devil
I had no idea what time it was in Venus Cove, but I kept imagining Xavier’s bedroom with its sports paraphernalia and lopsided piles of textbooks on the carpet. For some reason that’s where I most wanted to go. The thought of being in his room surrounded by his things made my heart race with longing. Where was Xavier right at this very moment? Was he happy or sad? Was he thinking about me? One thing I knew with certainty was that Xavier possessed the kind of decency that made heroes out of mortals. He had never abandoned his friends in times of need and he wasn’t about to abandon me
now.
I felt cold and saw that the embers in the grate were dying. I reached for the wine-colored throw draped over the foot of my bed and wrapped myself in it. The candles were burned almost to the wick and cast strange elongated shadows across the walls.
Having decided that I would not be left to languish in Jake’s airless kingdom somehow made me feel calmer. As soon as I felt the first waves of sleep, I focused my energy on reconnecting with Xavier in my mind. My body grew heavier and yet I felt an indescribable lightness. It was not possible to pinpoint the exact moment of scission, when matter and spirit chose to follow different paths, but I knew it was happening the minute the details of my hotel room blurred and suddenly the plaster rose on the ceiling was in front of my nose. All I had to do then was allow myself to drift.
As I drifted, like a humming vibration, I travelled through time and space and over water until I reached my final resting place. I was standing in Xavier’s bedroom. I didn’t land there so much as blow in like a wind under the door. Xavier had thrown himself full length across his bed and was lying on his stomach, face buried in the pillow. He hadn’t even bothered to take off his shoes. On the floor a hefty volume of the Princeton Review’s Best 371 Colleges lay abandoned. His mom, Bernie, had arranged a copy for me too—insisting we both had to make a list of our top ten choices. I smiled at the memory, recalling the conversation Xavier and I had had only days before the Halloween party. We’d been lying on the south lawn taking turns reading aloud the most interesting statistics about our short-listed schools.
“We’re going to the same college, right?” he’d asked, but it was more of a statement than a question.
“I hope so,” I replied. “But I guess it depends on whether they want to station me somewhere else.”
“They can just butt out. No more ifs, Beth,” Xavier said. “We tell them what we want now. We’ve been through enough to have earned that right.”
“Okay,” I said and meant it. I took the hefty volume from him and flipped causally through the pages.
“What about Penn State?” I asked, trailing my finger down the index.
“Are you kidding? My parents would have a combined coronary.”
“Why? What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s known as a party school.”
“I thought the choice was up to you.”
“It is, but that doesn’t mean they’re not rooting for Ivy League. Or at least somewhere like Vanderbilt.”
“University of Alabama?” I asked. “Molly and the girls have applied there. They want to be sorority sisters.”
“Another three years with Molly?” Xavier wrinkled his nose teasingly.
“I like the sound of Ole Miss,” I said dreamily. “What do you think? Oxford would be just like here, our own little world.”
Xavier smiled. “I think I like that idea. And it’s close to home. Put it on the list.”
The conversation replayed itself in my head as if it had happened yesterday. Now, here was Xavier, slumped on his bed, all plans for the future abandoned. He flipped over to lie on his back, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. He looked lost in thought and his face showed visible signs of exhaustion. I knew him well enough to be able to read his mood. He was thinking: What now? What do I do now? What more can I do? Xavier’s rational side was very strong. It was the reason so many people brought their problems to him. Even students he didn’t know very well would come to him for advice on which AP class to take or what sport to try out for. Whatever the question they rarely walked away disappointed. Xavier had this uncanny ability to examine a problem from all angles at once. In fact, the tougher the problem, the more determined he was to solve it. Except the one facing him now floored him completely. This time it didn’t matter how many angles he considered it from. He had no answers and I knew it was killing him. Helpless was not something Xavier was accustomed to feeling.
I thought of all the things I so badly wanted to whisper to him. Don’t worry. We’ll work this out. We always do. We’re invincible, remember? It felt strange, our roles being suddenly reversed. This time it was my job to try and get Xavier through. I willed myself forward so I was hovering just inches away from his face. His eyes were half open, slivers of sky, but melancholy, missing their usual brilliance. His light walnut-colored hair fell across the pillow and his lashes glistened with unshed tears. The wave of emotion that hit me was so strong I almost had to turn away. Xavier was never like this. His eyes were full of life even when he was being serious. He could brighten a room just by entering it. This was the senior class president of Bryce Hamilton; respected and loved by the entire school population. He was the one person nobody ever spoke a bad word against. I hated seeing him so defeated.
A tentative tapping at Xavier’s door startled me so much I flew across the room, generating a rush of wind that almost overturned a chair, but Xavier barely seemed to notice. A few moments later, the door opened a crack and Bernie stuck her head into the room. She looked apologetic for interrupting his privacy, but as soon as she saw her son lying listlessly on the bed, concern flooded her face. She covered it quickly with feigned cheerfulness. I could see in her expression her love for Xavier and her intense desire to protect him. He looked so beautiful he could have been an angel himself, but so profoundly sad, it frightened me.
“Can I get you anything?” Bernie asked. “You hardly touched your dinner.”
“No, thanks, Mom.” Xavier’s voice was flat and lifeless. “I just need some sleep.”
“What’s going on with you, honey?” Bernie inched toward the bed and tentatively sat down. She looked wary; worried that invading the space of her troubled teenage son might not be the wisest idea. Xavier’s unresponsiveness told her he wanted to be alone. “I’ve never seen you like this before. Is it girl trouble?”
I realized his mother had no idea what’d happened. He hadn’t told her I was missing. I guessed it was because she’d want to contact the sheriff, demand to know why they weren’t investigating my disappearance more thoroughly.
“You could say that,” Xavier said.
“Oh, well, these things have a way of sorting themselves out.” She laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “And you know your father and I are always here if you need us.”
“I know that, Mom. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t take it so hard,” Bernie said. “When you’re young everything feels a hundred times worse than it is. I don’t know what happened between you and Beth, but it can’t be so bad.”
Xavier let out a short, humorless laugh and I guessed what he was thinking. He wanted to say, “Well, Mom, my girlfriend was abducted by a demon ex-student of Bryce Hamilton and dragged into Hell on the back of a motorbike and right now we’ve got no idea how to bring her back. So, yeah, actually it is that bad.”
But instead he shifted his weight to look across at her. “Just let it go, Mom,” he said. “This is my problem. I’ll be okay.”
I could see in his eyes that he didn’t want to worry her. My family was already beside themselves; there was no sense in getting Bernie involved. The less she knew, the better for everyone. My disappearance wasn’t an easy thing to explain and not exactly the news you’d want to break to an overprotective parent just before you were due to take your SATs.
“Okay.” Bernie leaned down to kiss his forehead. “But, Xavier, hon …”
“Yeah?” He looked up but couldn’t hold her gaze.
“She’ll be back.” Bernie gave him a knowing smile. “Everything will work out fine.” Then she got up and slipped out the door, closing it softly behind her.
When she was gone, Xavier finally allowed his exhaustion to overcome him. He kicked off his shoes and rolled onto his side. I was glad that soon he would fall into a deep sleep and the torment of feeling so helpless would disappear, at least for a few hours. Just before physical exhaustion took over his body I saw him rummage under his pillow and withdraw something I recognized immediately as one of my
cotton knit sweaters. I’d worn it a lot over the summer on cool evenings. It was a pale aqua color and had tiny daisies embroidered around the neckline. He said he liked the way it brought out the auburn streaks in my hair. Xavier pushed his pillow aside and buried his face in my sweater, inhaling deeply. He stayed that way a long time until his breathing changed and became deeper and more regular, and I knew he’d fallen asleep. I sat cross-legged on his bed, watching over him as a mother might over a sick child. I stayed that way until weak beams of predawn light fell over the rumpled bedclothes and Xavier’s eyelids began to flutter.
“Rise and shine, doll face!”
Who did that voice belong to? Xavier wasn’t awake yet and he hadn’t moved or spoken in his sleep. It didn’t sound like him anyway. I looked around me, but Xavier’s room was empty apart from the two of us. A metallic sound like a door opening made me jump and a doorway materialized in the room, a dark figure leaning against the frame. Suddenly I knew what was happening. My two worlds were blurring, which meant I had to act quickly. I had to get back right now or Jake would wonder why I wasn’t waking up. But why was it so hard to tear myself away?
“Sweet dreams, my love,” I whispered to Xavier. I bent down to press my specter mouth against his forehead. I didn’t know whether he felt anything or not, but he stirred in his sleep and mumbled my name. I saw that his face had cleared and he looked more peaceful. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I forced myself to return to my body and blinked away the sleep to see Jake watching me intently. He was dressed in a fitted suit jacket over skinny jeans and looked slightly rumpled. The sting of disappointment always followed my return to Hades, but with Jake there it was even worse. I couldn’t summon the energy to drag myself out of bed and face another day as bleak as the last. So I decided to stay curled under the covers, at least until Hanna came to coax me out. Jake seemed undeterred by my lack of response.
Hades Page 13
