Crossed (14 page)

She looks sharply away and her tone takes on a creepy lyricism. “And
He
saw it, and I saw it, and it set me free.”

She climbs to her feet and stretches, her arms over her head. The she drops her arms and bounces on her toes, side to side, soul-drunk energy bubbling through her. “I’ve wasted my life with worry and death, and what for? What have all my sacrifices won me?” Even if it weren’t rhetorical, I wouldn’t answer that one. The answer is too depressing. “I’m not going to waste any more time.” She drops to a squat, a sudden movement Good Jo wouldn’t have been capable of, and puts her hands on my knees. “Let’s leave. Let’s get out of here, right now.”

The abrupt change startles me as much as her words. “
What?
”

“Let’s go, Meda. Let’s take Chi and run and drink and dance, and live for today because when tomorrow comes, we won’t be here.”

“But—but—” I stutter, completely taken aback.

“But what?”

“You just spent hours arguing to be allowed to go.”

She shrugs. “I told them what they wanted to hear to let me in. To let me get to you, to Chi.” Her lips curve into a devious smile. “So
they
would say what
I
needed to hear.”

Right. Graff’s rejection of her plan.

She leaps to her feet, startling me. She bends her knees, going into a few graceful dips, delighting in her perfect leg. She stretches it out in front of her, pointing the toe like a dancer. “Pretty nice, eh?”

My mind is on bigger things. “So it was all a lie?”

“I can’t lie,” she says, still looking at her leg, which she is now bending as if to test the limits of its mobility. “I told them what we
could
do, not that I was going to, or even that I wanted to,” Her eyes flash to mine. “Loopholes.”

“But-but what about your soul? We have to get it back.”

“And we will—one day.” She’s offhand, as if we weren’t talking about her eternal damnation. “But why do we have to do it now? We’re eighteen.
Eighteen
, and I can’t die. At least not easily. Freeing the souls is a suicide mission. Why risk it all now?”

“Because the Crusaders might help us—’

She laughs. “Help us? You heard Graff.”

“He could change his mind, or the other Crusaders could—’

“
Could
,” she scoffs. “We don’t need them.
They
need
us
. I can get us into hell, Armand knows his way around, and you can break the spell. They can’t help us. I can’t even disguise them—they’ll only get us killed.”

“But—’

“Why are you arguing?” she asks, waving her hands. “This is what you’ve always wanted.”

She’s right, and I don’t know why I
am
arguing. Jo, Chi and I out of this hellish war, on our own, free to do as we want. Everything I ever wanted is being handed to me, and I’m too startled at my unexpected fortune to do anything but try to hand it back. Leaving the Crusaders, running away, living to a ripe old age with Jo and Chi was a dream so unlikely, no, so
impossible
, that I never seriously considered it. Never even mentioned it out loud.

But Jo knows anyway.

Or should I say,
Bad
Jo knows. I don’t trust it. “What about the Crusaders? The,” I stammer trying to find the word, “the . . .
cause
.”

“The
cause
,” she says it derisively, but not with a sneer. It’s more like she’s laughing at the silliness of it. “Whose cause? Your cause, Meda?” She doesn’t allow me to answer. “No, it’s never been your cause. My cause then?” She says it with an arched brow then she shakes her head. “Not anymore. I’m
free
. Let’s get out of here. Go have fun. Avoid a painful and imminent death.” She lifts her arms over her head and does a little spin.

“
Chi’s
cause.” My words stop her.

She doesn’t say anything, just blinks her demon’s eyes.

“If we go, he won’t come with us.” I’m surprised by the gentleness in my own voice.

She lowers her arms and stares into the oncoming storm, and I almost wonder if she heard me.

When she speaks, for all there isn’t a single “s” in the short sentence, it somehow contains the hiss of a serpent. “Oh, won’t he?”

There’s a long beat of silence. I don’t know what to say to that.

Suddenly I jolt to my feet, it’s as if the pause gave my brain time to rouse from the shock. “Jo, How did you get out of your cell?” But I shake my head, not waiting for her answer. “It doesn’t matter. The Crusaders will know it was you. We have to leave. Like right now.”

“Yes,” she says softly, her eyes drifting closed as she inhales the scent of blood and wind. “We do need to leave.” Her eyes pop back open, lit with a feral glow. “Ooooh,” she sighs. “They’re here.”

“What? Who?”

Then I feel it, just the tiniest tingle of demon energy. I shove her aside and squint into the dark, howling night, but can’t find anything in the darkness. Clouds have swallowed the moon. I turn on her. “I thought you said you didn’t tell the demons where we are.”

“I didn’t.” Still dazed, still dreamy. The soul-drunk is a tenacious thing. “They already knew.”

My mouth hangs open.

“Loopholes,” she sings.

THIRTEEN

“Armand, get up!” He jolts upright, then squints, trying to find me in the dark.

“Jo’s back. She’s a demon,” I say shortly.

He rubs his eyes and blinks.

“The demons are also coming. Any minute.”

That gets him moving. “Oh—” He shoves back the covers.

“Also, you should know Jo killed Graff.”

That stops him again. “I’m sorry, what now?”

“We’ve got to go,” I conclude.

Armand swallows everything I told him in the blink of an eye. He holds up empty hands. “Good thing I pack light.”

Armand’s always been good in an emergency.

Jo and Chi stumble into the living room a few minutes after Armand and me, Chi still snapping his pants. Jo washed off the blood and is doing her best to hide the effects of the soul drunkenness, but I can still sense it, see it in flare of her nostrils, in the too-fluid movements of her hands. She hands Chi a shirt and he pulls it over his head, speaking before he finishes the task.

“We have to sound the alarm, get down to the—” Chi says, muffled through his shirt. His face pops through the neck hole, “—rendezvous.” He doesn’t wait for a response, but mutters the words and I feel the electric
ping
of the emergency signal.

“Chi, we can’t go down to the rendezvous point,” Jo says resting a hand on his forearm.

“Why?” he asks, his face open innocence.

“Because they’ll think I did it,” Jo replies, and I shoot her a warning look. We decided it best not to tell Chi about Jo’s recent . . . activities regarding Graff. “Called the demons,” she clarifies. It’s not a lie. Not quite. They would think that, among other things.

Loopholes
.

“Oh, what wicked webs we weave,” Armand murmurs, then he freezes and tips his head towards the front of the school. Then I feel it, and I look at Jo. She too stands perfectly still as a fresh wave of demon energy breaks over her.

They’re here.

I hear shouting in the distance as the Crusaders, awakened by Chi’s alarm, realize what’s happening. A brilliant, silent flash lights up the windows in the front of the school. The explosion of one of the many magical landmines laid by the Crusaders.

Jo turns back to Chi, taking his hands. “They’ll blame me. I show up, and the demons are right on my heels. Chi, we have to escape without everyone else.”

“But we can’t just leave them—’

“They’ll evacuate,” Jo reassures him. “They won’t stay and fight, it doesn’t make sense.”

Chi thinks this over. Not something he’s good at under the best of circumstances, and his eyes are still cloudy with sleep. “You’re right,” Chi finally agrees with a short nod. “Graff will get them out.”

He doesn’t seem to notice the supremely awkward silence that follows. Jo forces a bright smile.

The Crusaders always choose a base with an escape hatch. In this case it’s a rabbit hole that drops them about six miles off the shore into the ocean, not a place the demons are likely to stumble upon. The Crusaders just need to tread water until the pickup can be made. As for us . . . “Uh, Jo? How exactly
are
we going to evacuate?”

Jo’s answering grin is a little too bloodthirsty for my taste.

There’s a shouting from the hallway outside our room. Looks like that way is not an option.

“Window,” Chi states with a pointed finger in case we didn’t grasp this complicated concept. Armand bolts the door to the hallway in an attempt to slow our pursuers down, while the rest of us barrel into Jo’s room, I lead the way as befits someone of my cowardice. When I get to the window, I pause. Demons pour over the front fence at the other end of the quad, their numbers obscured by the dark and the flames and smoke from the magical explosions from the Crusader’s landmines. Self-preservation keeps me from looking long, and I hoist myself out the window. Jo pops her head out. The wet wind buffets me and Jo’s wild curls are whipped into a frenzy. She shoves them out her face with one hand, but they refuse to stay put and fly around her head with a mind of their own.

“No, Meda. Go up. They won’t be expecting up!” Jo says, throwing her own leg out the window.

“That’s because it’s stupid.”

She flashes an impish grin and climbs horizontally from window to window, and I have no choice but to follow, then Chi and Armand after me. She reaches the corner and hoists herself up a drainpipe. There’s a flash and a boom that seems to come from everywhere at once. For an instant I think we’ve been hit by a blast of magic, then realize the promised thunderstorm has reached us. When the rumble dies down, I hear Jo humming as she climbs. Something about the sound of it, the way the lilting notes intermingle with the whistling of the wind, makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The bursts of lighting that reveal the boiling, storm-filled clouds don’t make the setting any less eerie.

“The itsy, bitsy spider went up the water spout . . .” Jo’s hum turns into words.

“Jo!” I sputter, staring up at her behind. “This is serious! We could die.”

“I already did,” she calls down, then leans out from the drainpipe to throw her head back and laugh into the wind.

The hell. “Jo, I can
not
be the sane one in this relationship!” She just laughs again but at least she starts climbing again. The roof of the school is shingled and slanted, except in the center around the bell tower, where it’s flat with a small white fence. We run bent over to make less of a target of ourselves, but with the chaos below we probably needn’t bother.

Below us, the quad is a battlefield. Jo was right; the plan must be to evacuate, because there are only a few Crusaders left behind to reinforce the magical protections as necessary. The rest will leave, then the last stragglers will try to hop down the rabbit hole before the protections completely collapse, leaving one behind to seal up the passage so the demons can’t follow.

I hear Chi slow behind me, and I pause to look back. He watches the battle below with a clamped jaw. Then suddenly, it relaxes and he stops altogether. Armand, behind him and also watching the battle below, barely misses running into him.

“Chi.” I make a
psst
sound. “Move.”

He turns, his standard expression of bland blood-thirstiness replacing his earlier tension. “Sorry, guys, this is wrong,” he says to us. He shrugs, almost sheepish. “I gotta go.”

“What?”

He jerks his head toward the fight below. “I gotta help them. Someone has to stay behind and close the rabbit hole. Since we’re staying anyway, it might as well be me.”

“See. This is the kind of thing that makes me knock you over the head.”

“Too bad you promised.”

“What’s happening?” Jo comes back a few paces.

“Chi is committing suicide,” Armand says blandly. “Have a nice trip.” He slaps him on the back, then sighs when none of us move.

Jo in particular is holding very still. She studies Chi, and I see something flicker in her expression. Then she looks out over the quad, her expression calculating. Suddenly she stills and a slow smile spreads across her face. “Fine,” she says, a daring little twinkle in her eye. “We’ll pick you up at the front door in fifteen minutes.”

She grins and Chi grins and I’m overcome with the urge to smash their lunatic heads together. “I can
not
be the sane person in this relationship!” I whine again, uselessly.

Armand pats my back in a “there, there” while Chi disappears over the side of the building, just as Jo calls after him. “Don’t be late!”

“Well, Jo, what now?”

“Now we get ourselves a ride.”

“Bubba?” I sniffle hopefully.

“Oh, no.” She’s staring back across the quad, her eyes lit by the flickering explosions below. “Something rather a bit bigger than Bubba.”

We race across the roof, then over the side we go, and down to the quad. We keep a sharp eye out for both Crusaders and demons—something I seem to do embarrassingly often, but at least, for once, it’s not my fault but Jo’s. Fortunately we’re moving towards the south side of the campus and the battle is happening to the West, at its entrance. We pause only long enough for me to case the spell to undo the Crusader protections so we don’t get blown up, but otherwise move as quickly as possible.

Jo doesn’t share her plan, but I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s better than the nothing I’ve come up with. Armand, of course, doesn’t feel similarly and pesters her until she threatens death and I point out that their quarrelling is going to ensure all our deaths, or, in the very least, theirs at my hands if they don’t shut the hell up.

They do shut up, and just in time. We slide between two dorms and reach a brick fence, separating the showy part of the campus from what I assume is a maintenance road. On the other side is a large building. It’s still done in the columned Greco-fako style of campuses everywhere, but its rolling doors betray it as the garage it is.

Jo stills and I hear voices on the other side of the fence. Jo peers through the gaps in the pretty-brick design and holds up five fingers. Armand and I slide up to the fence. Five demons have evidently found the school’s other entrance, used to smuggle in deliveries, peasants and other distasteful evidence that the not-rich exist.

“Oh yes,” Jo breaths. She slides her tongue across her teeth, as if reveling in their sharpness. “Let’s get them.”

“Wait,” Armand says, instinctively putting a hand on her arm to stop her. She eyes it with a curl of her lip and he removes it.

“There’s only five,” she says, her voice the barest whisper. “What’s the problem?”

Armand’s jaw tightens. “I know you’re new to this, but the demons basically have one rule.” He holds up a finger. “Don’t kill your own.”

“Or what?”

“You don’t know the kind of suffering they’re capable of inflicting.” He returns her scorn in equal measure. I glance through the fence to make sure the demons didn’t hear.

Jo’s eyes flash. “No,
you
don’t know the kind of suffering
I’m
capable of inflicting.” We’re huddled close together but she still manages to inch even closer to Armand so she can snarl in his face. “Just give me a reason, Armand,” she whispers dangerously. “Get in my way, I dare you—’

He makes a disgusted noise. “I’m trying to help you. You belong to them now. If they get a hold of you—’

Her snort cuts him off. “We either succeed in setting the souls free or we die and they’ll be punishing us for eternity anyway. Either way, it isn’t going to matter.”

With that, she places her hand on the top of the fence and leaps over it as fluidly as a deer. In her face her I see undisguised joy in her newly gained mobility.

Then she lands among her foe.

Jo’s fighting style by necessity has always been restrained. Her natural gift for violence simply can’t overcome her injury. Watching her fight in her new form is like glimpsing through the window of what-might-have-been. She’s graceful, even elegant, if the act of disemboweling and dismembering one’s enemies can be called such a thing.

But it’s more than just a physical difference in the way she fights. I kill out of love. Not of my victims, naturally, but my love of the act.

Jo has always killed out of hate. Before her transformation, that hate has always been checked, a tacit attempt to obey the dictate to love thine enemy. The deaths she dealt were controlled, almost perfunctory.

Her hate is not checked now. It’s as if the dark wings of her soul have unfurled and set her free. She murders and maims with a delightful, hateful glee, gorging herself on the misery of her enemies in a way that is as awesome as it is awful. I see in her clearly what a part of me has always instinctively known was there. Our monsters’ souls have whispered secrets to each other all along, and now, for the first time, they can shout; the thin veneer of “good” and “should” has been thoroughly shattered by her descent to the dark side.

I shake off my trance and hop over the fence—she
is
still outnumbered five-to-one. Armand hesitates then jumps over after me with a curse.

There are cracks and pops and screams.

And laughs and blood and vengeance.

And when it’s over, when we stand over the gory bodies of our victims I see in Jo the same sick delight, the same head-spinning soul-drunkenness that rockets through my blood and I know we are the same. We are the same now, and she understands and I understand. And for a moment I forget that this isn’t really her.

For a moment I don’t care.

Then, fast as a whip, she turns and smashes open the door in to the garage. She stumbles in the room beyond, throwing on the light and sees something that lights her blood-spattered face with the delight of a child. Armand sends me a look, then we join her to see what our battle has won.

A snow plough.

Rather bigger than Bubba, indeed. The monster could play second cousin to a dump truck. Or a bulldozer.

Jo clambers up the side, hauling open the door and sliding into the driver’s seat. She sweeps her hands along the dash leaving bloody smears, then under the sun visor and into the cup holders, looking for the keys. There are another dozen or so vehicles in the room, vans, for the most part, emblazoned with the school emblem, a work truck with a rack full of tools on the back, and a couple of black town cars. Armand takes off for a small office in the back and kicks down the door, reappearing a few minutes with a key on a little fob, looking smug.