“Lovely,” I say. “Really suits you.”
“How do you know about Peter?” Ryan asks. His eyes narrow suddenly. “Do you have something to do with what’s happening?”
“Simmer down, tough guy,” Aaron says. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just know that Peter is here, thanks to Cyn, to follow his dreams and stuff. How’s all that going, by the way? Has he won over Broadway yet?”
“Not quite,” I say, trying to think. I need to get Aaron alone somehow. The fine print of my deal with the demoness prevents her from snatching me away in front of people who don’t know about demons, and that obviously doesn’t include Ryan. But I can’t let him find out this way. I just can’t.
“Anyway, Cyn is definitely not going anywhere with you,” Ryan says. “So you can go right back where you came from, and send her regrets.”
“Ryan, wait,” I say slowly. “Maybe this is actually a good thing. Maybe the demoness can help us figure out what happened with Peter’s tether.”
“No. No way, Cyn. I watched you get sucked down there once already. And you’ve told me how horrible it was. You are not going back to that awful place.” He glances at Aaron. “No offense, man.”
“None taken.”
“But we need help,” I persist. “And if she wants to talk to me, maybe I can make a deal —”
“What? No! No more deals! Cyn, are you nuts?”
“Okay, not a deal. Bad choice of words, sorry. But . . . a trade, something. Peter obviously doesn’t know how to fix things on his own. And I don’t know about you, but I am not filled with overwhelming confidence regarding Hector and any useful skills he may have.”
“Cyn . . .”
I turn to Aaron. “Can you give us a minute? Please?”
“Sure. I’ll just be over there somewhere.” He points to the expanse of moonlit nature outside the theater and strides purposefully away.
Ryan is looking at me with an expression I don’t like one bit.
“You’ve already made up your mind to go, haven’t you?”
“Ryan . . .”
A thought seems to strike him. “Did you . . . was this your idea? Did you summon him here somehow?”
“No! Of course not!”
“Well, I don’t know, Cyn. You certainly accepted the invitation mighty quickly. You didn’t seem nearly as surprised as I was, either.”
My stomach twists in an agony of guilt. I could still tell him, right now. The reason why I wasn’t entirely surprised to see our old friend. But he’s already mad, and clearly not in a very understanding or forgiving mood. Dammit, why couldn’t Aaron have waited just a little longer to show up?
Ryan leans forward. “Cyn, this isn’t Annie’s life on the line this time. You have absolutely no responsibility to help Peter. None. He used you without your consent. His problems are not your problems. You can walk away. I know why you couldn’t before, but this is not the same.”
“No, it’s not . . . but people are still dying, Ryan. At least one so far, anyway, and he won’t be the last if we don’t do something. And no one else here is equipped to deal with demons.”
“Peter is! And his freakish sidekick, too!”
“I know, but . . .”
“No buts, Cyn. If you do this, you’re doing it because you want to. Not because you have to. And I’m sorry, but I can’t get on board with that.” He stands up.
“Ryan, wait, come on.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t need me here. You’re not going to listen to me anyway. You’re going to do what you want, just like always. No matter what the consequences are.”
He walks off into the darkness.
I didn’t like that reference to consequences. I want to run after him to ask what he means, exactly. But I don’t. Because I need him to go away so I can go with Aaron without further argument or explanation.
I will just have to make it right later. Somehow.
Aaron, whistling, ambles back over to where I am sitting.
“You didn’t tell him, you bad girl.”
“Shut up, Aaron.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “Hey, is that any way to talk to me after I covered for you?”
I sigh wearily. “No. I’m sorry. Thank you for not telling him.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell him by now.”
“I was going to. I am going to. I just haven’t gotten the chance yet.”
“Mm-hmm.” Aaron looks at me a second, then rubs his hands together briskly. “Well, anyway. Ready to go? Never a good idea to keep a demoness waiting.”
Suddenly the terror feelings completely drown out the anger and the sorrow ones.
“What does she want? Do you know?”
“She wants you to fulfill your part of the deal. Trip number two, at a time of her choosing. Which is now.” He reaches a hand down to help me up, and I take it, to be polite, even though I kind of don’t want to touch him. His hands still look (and feel) like normal hands, but my eyes keep darting to those fish-fin-shoulder things, which are very much creeping me out. He must have cut little fin-holes in his shirt for them to stick through. I can’t quite imagine the physical procedure of Aaron getting himself into his clothes with all the extra appendages. Not that I’m trying very hard. Ew.
A new thought occurs to me, which I guess I hadn’t dared to wonder about before. “Is it going to hurt? The last time . . . it was pretty terrible.”
“No,” Aaron says. “That was different, that whole thing with the vortex and all the demons going down at once with their consorts. This . . . won’t be like that.” He hesitates, then adds, “But how long can you hold your breath?”
“What?”
He grabs my wrist. “Deep breath now and hold it, okay? Go!”
I barely have time to inhale before there’s another flash and everything swirls away into a chaotic mess of color and sound. And then keeps swirling. I can’t see because nothing will hold still — everything is motion and noise, and if it weren’t for still being able to feel Aaron’s hand tight around my wrist, I wouldn’t even know he was still there beside me.
I brace for the pain despite Aaron’s reassurance, but he wasn’t lying about that. There are no feelings of knives slicing me open, which is definitely a plus over my last journey. But my chest is already starting to object to the not-breathing, and I have no idea how long this trip is going to take or what will happen if I do try to breathe.
The colors continue to swirl by, but they are getting darker, and the wind rushing around me starts to feel heavier somehow and Aaron’s grip gets a little tighter, and just when I am starting to feel like I can’t possibly hold my breath for one more second we . . . arrive. The colors settle into a slower-moving spectrum of black and gray and blue and violet, and Aaron lets go, and I take this as a sign that it’s okay to breathe again, which is good because it’s either breathe or pass out at this point.
“Home, sweet home!” Aaron says jovially.
It’s . . . different, but the same. But different. The landscape once again refuses to settle down completely, and things seem to shift from harsh metallic angles and edges to softer, rounded, bloated shapes to something like an underwater seascape, except without the wetness. But the giant arena is gone, or else we’re just in a different location. That probably makes more sense. I’m sure the demon world is a big place, and I only saw one tiny fraction of it last time. Not that that wasn’t more than enough, of course.
Aaron leads me down shifty alleyways and across streets/rivers/big blobby things. I look around nervously, remembering how the demoness had told me last time that I would be “meat and prey” to everything else down here. It’s hard to even tell if there are demons anywhere nearby, with all the shifting and shapes and my constant effort to stay close to Aaron, who is moving pretty fast. Which I try to hope is because he’s eager to get back to his mistress and not because he’s afraid of something catching and killing us.
Suddenly we turn a corner, and there�
��s an enormous castle. Well, sometimes it’s a castle. In between shifting into a mountain and something that resembles sea coral stretching up into infinity. In all aspects, it’s dark and sharp and forbidding.
My first internal reaction to her dark, scary place of residence (since surely that’s what this is) is to feel it’s surprisingly wrong. I realize I had sort of fallen into thinking of the demoness as the good guy, since, you know, compared with Mr. Gabriel and Principal Kingston, she totally was, and some part of me was expecting her to live in a pink Disney-princess castle or something. Dumb, Cyn. She’s still a demon. And not one of the alleged few non-evil demons, either. Just a regular evil one willing to make alliances when it suits her interests.
I have to remember that. The demoness is not my friend.
She is not the good guy.
We go inside.
I watch Aaron’s tail as I follow him down dark corridors and up long and twisty stairs. It’s so weird that he has a tail now. He’s really on his way to becoming demonified, or whatever the appropriate term is. He seems super happy about it, but then, this is what he always thought he wanted. It’s just that usually when people get what they always thought they wanted, they end up realizing they were wrong. Like Annie did.
I guess I’m another exception, though. I wanted Ryan, and I got him, and I still want him. I wasn’t wrong. I just . . . wish it weren’t so complicated.
It doesn’t have to be, Old Cyn says from the back of my brain. Just tell him the truth!
It’s too late for that now. Confessing after the fact gets you no points.
It’s not entirely after the fact, she insists. There’s still the third trip.
I don’t even want to think about that. I ignore Old Cyn and her overly idealistic perspective until she goes away.
Eventually Aaron and I come to some kind of smallish throne room or audience chamber (I don’t really know the terms for various castle parts), and there is the demoness, part fishy and part human.
“There you are,” she says. “Finally.”
“Why, I’m fine, thanks for asking,” I say. “And yourself?”
She gives me a look. “I have no time for pleasantries. Maybe later. Give me your power.”
“Lend me, you mean,” I say. “Remember, you have to give it back.”
She doesn’t say anything, just looks at me, and I feel that horrid sensation of having my roachy goodness pulled away and stretched over to where the demoness can use it. She wears it like a coat, almost. Like a coat that settles in and becomes, temporarily, a part of her. And I am left coatless and cold and unable to protect myself from the elements. Or anything else. I sink down slowly into a chairlike thing nearby, trying to adjust. At least this time I can just hide out here in this room, instead of having to race around dodging demons and trying to rescue people while not getting eaten or otherwise becoming dead. Always good to look on the bright side, when possible.
“Ahh,” the demoness sighs, stretching luxuriously. “I could get used to this.”
“No, no,” I correct her. “You could not, because you have to give it back. We have a deal.”
“Yes, yes,” she says. She glides airily (swimmily?) toward the door.
“What do you need it for this time, anyway?”
She pauses, apparently torn between wanting to go and wanting to stay and talk about her problems. Talking about problems wins by a snout.
“There are still those who are . . . resistant . . . to my style of ruling,” she says, turning back to me. “No demon sits easy on the throne until she crushes all who might oppose her. Which is to say, no demon ever sits easy on the throne, because there are always enemies lurking somewhere, plotting to bring one down.” She shrugs. “It’s what we do. But some of my opposition have been proving especially troubling of late, and I want to put a stop to their annoying behavior before it gets out of hand. It shouldn’t take long. Stay here with Aaron until I return.”
She finishes her journey to the door and goes through it and away.
I expect Aaron to complain about being left behind, but apparently he knew this would be the drill. He settles down into another of the chairlike things. “So when are you going to tell him?” he asks.
I’m too tired to have this conversation. I’d forgotten how weak I feel without my demon resistance. “Soon. I don’t know.” I give him an angry look. “I was actually just about to when you appeared, you jerk. I mean literally just about to. My mouth was open and everything. And now we’re fighting again, and I’ll have to wait until things calm down.”
Aaron shakes his head. “Just tell him. Don’t wait for the perfect time. The longer you wait, the worse it will be.”
“Why are you giving me boyfriend advice?”
“It’s not boyfriend advice. It’s general common sense advice. You know you should tell him. You feel guilty about not telling him. He suspects there are still things you haven’t told him. By telling him, you address all of these issues.”
“And maybe drive him away forever,” I mutter.
He rolls his eyes. “Humans are so melodramatic. You won’t drive him away forever. He loves you. He wants to trust you. Just let him see that he can.”
Aaron is making sense, which can’t be right. I attribute this impossibility to the strange shifty context of the demon world in which we are temporarily kicking up our heels. “I will. Eventually.”
He shakes his head again but says nothing.
“So,” I say, wanting to change the subject. “How are you liking it down here?”
He grins widely at me. “It’s so awesome. You have no idea.”
“Really?” I cannot help being skeptical. “I mean, really? This is really what you want? To be here, with them? To become one of them, at least as far as that is possible? Don’t you miss being with other humans?”
“Yes, this is really what I want, and no, I do not miss other humans.” He pauses. “Well, maybe Erica from the store. She was cool. But honestly, that’s about it.”
“Do the other demons even talk to you? I got the sense that they don’t think much of humans.”
“Well, they don’t, in general. But it helps to be consort to the queen. And it helps to no longer be fully human. Plenty of them want to be in my good graces in hopes of getting into her good graces, which gets me all kinds of fun perks and stuff. Most of them are idiots, but still, the benefits are worth it. And there are others who are really brilliant and interesting. I mean, some of them have been alive for thousands and thousands of years, Cyn! It’s fascinating, the stuff they know, the things they’ve seen. And others are really curious about humans, and so I have something to offer them because of having been one myself.”
“So basically you’re selling us out to them?”
He smiles frostily at me. “This is where I belong now, Cyn. My loyalties are here.”
“So I can’t really trust you.”
He laughs. “Could you really trust me before?”
It’s a good point. Aaron only does what is best for Aaron. We have known this pretty much since the beginning with him. I have to remember that, too.
And yet . . .
“Hey, so do you know anything about this tether situation with Peter and me?”
“I know the tether formed when he made himself a tiny stowaway on your return trip the last time you were here.”
“Tiny?” This part is new.
Aaron laughs again. “Yeah, apparently that’s how he got through without anyone noticing. He made himself tiny and hid inside your pocket or something. Crude but effective. But then of course he had to spend some time working back up to full size once he got up there.”
A terrible thought suddenly occurs to me. “Wait — what effect does it have on the tether for me to be down here? Did we pull Peter down after us?” I’m still mad about his lying, but not enough to wish that on him.
Aaron waves a hand dismissively in the air. “Oh, no, don’t worry about that. The tether between you
and Peter only exists in the human world. Since you’re not there right now, the center of the tether is the place from which you left the human world to come here. He can’t go more than the allotted distance from that corner of the theater, but otherwise he’s not going to be affected.”
I sit back in my chairlike thing, relieved. I hate when I think of questions like that too late. I decide to keep thinking of more questions, since Aaron appears to be in a chatty, sharing kind of mood.
“Is it really true that Peter feeds on drama?”
Aaron shrugs. “As far as I know. Demons feed on what they desire most. Most demons, being demons, desire most to kill and hurt things, and to suck up their life forces and watch them weaken and wither and die. But Peter, for some reason, has been obsessed with humans and theater and theatrics of both the stage kind and the interpersonal kind for as long as he can remember. So, yeah, I think it’s true. He picked a good focus for his tether, in that case. You can’t seem to avoid the drama even when you try.”
I decide to ignore that last part. “So, how do we break it? He seems to think someone down here is interfering somehow.”
“Hmm.” Aaron visibly goes into bookstore mode before my eyes. “There’s probably a couple of options. . . . Hold on, let me consult my references.”
He gets up and jogs through the door, presumably on his way to where he now keeps all his books and stuff. I wonder if he brought that computer and ancient printer with him, too.
While I’m waiting, I decide to explore the room. It hits me then that I’m no longer terrified. This is much different from last time. Last time there were demons everywhere, some of whom were actively trying to kill me, and there was so much at stake, and I had to find Annie before it was too late, and everything was horrible and scary and full of danger and pain. This time . . . I apparently just need to hang out here with Aaron until the demoness gets back. That doesn’t seem so bad, all things considered.
It’s pleasantly non-shifty in here, everything staying in the same form from second to second; I wonder if the demoness somehow made it that way for me on purpose. If so, that was unexpectedly nice of her. I push myself up out of the chair to take a better look around. It’s like a mix of temple and tearoom. There’s an actual throne/altar thing at one end on a dais, with elaborate sculptured forms in the wall behind and above it, where I suppose the demoness holds court or whatever. Although the room is on the small side . . . maybe she just has a throne in every room so she can sit on one wherever she is. Everything is dark and angly like the outside was. There are pictures on one wall, actual framed images like a person might have hanging along the side of the stairway in their pleasant suburban home showing family and vacation shots, but when I get closer I begin to see bits of bodies and blood and quickly decide I don’t want to know anything else about what they might depict. The area where Aaron and I were sitting is almost cozy, in an alien kind of way, with three of those chairlike things and a small black-velvet love seat arranged around a coffee table shaped like some sort of creature I can’t quite identify.
Revenge of the Evil Librarian Page 10
