The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant (27 page)

And then there’s Dia.

Luxuria put me in a lust challenge with him. Because of our past.

He said he came back here for a purpose. He wasn’t sent here; he came here intentionally. Was I that purpose? Did he come to win me back?

Was Ben never meant to be mine?

I slide down the tree and slump on a mossy stump.

“I’m a demon.”

“To define is to limit.” Teddy sits opposite me. “You gave up everything you had in the underworld to help me. And, along the way, to seek revenge on Dia.”

“Revenge?”

“Dia hurt you. Embarrassed you. Betrayed you.”

Daylight turns to night as I sit in silence, my hands on my mouth, my eyes skyward, and let it all sink in. With the calming tone of a friend, which makes me wonder why I’ve always felt such tension with Teddy, he explains that he and Gia were close friends almost from the moment he feigned a fall from grace and landed in her command. She showed him that even condemned souls were not entirely black.

I listen, but all I can think is,
This is how it feels to die
. You’re just going about your business, on your way to an appointment, thinking about what’s for dinner tonight, and then a bus hits you. You’re just swimming laps, wondering why you don’t do this more often, and a clot loosens to find its way into your heart. You’re just looking for stronger pills to fight your migraines, and the doctor says it’s cancer. And me? I was just trying to help Ben win the Big V, and Anne Merchant died.

“There was a reason you came here, Anne. A purpose.”

I stare at him. I can’t speak.

“Gia wanted to destroy Dia. And I need to destroy Mephisto, though admittedly I can wait.”

“But Dia has a tattoo of her name. And he speaks so fondly of her.”

“Trust me on this.”

“Gia became
me
so she could kill Dia? But how would she know Dia would come to Earth?”

“It’s destiny.”

“And what does that have to do with you and my mom’s plan?”

“We want Dia gone as badly as we want Mephisto gone. You were on board with this, too, when we were friends in the underworld.”

I grip my hair at the roots and groan. “Mephisto
made me
Anne Merchant,” I say. I must be in shock to voice the words without getting sick. “Why would he agree to let me come here if I was only going to destroy him?”

“He didn’t know. He was your mentor, you see. You loved him like a father.”

Now I
am
gonna be sick.

“Haven’t you wondered why your punishment for breaking the rules left Molly Watso dead and you barely bruised? Haven’t you wondered why he hasn’t killed you yet? He knew you as Gia. He loved you as Gia. If he didn’t love himself and his Earthly activities more, he might have found himself serving you. But Anne, never forget this: when he made you into his first proper, real, functioning human being—when you agreed to be part of his experiment—he became, in his mind, your father.”

“But he tortured me in Valedictorian Hall,” I say. “Why would a so-called father do that?”

He smiles. “It’s so nice to hear you ask questions Gia never would have.”

“Teddy, why?”

“Miss Merchant, isn’t it clear? That was a show of love.”

“Oh, please.”

“Demons seek pain. Pain is pleasure. It’s how we operate.”

Kate, Eve, and Elle didn’t run from the lounge when Dia entered the room. And Elle looked disappointed when she realized Dia wasn’t going to hurt her.

“That’s twisted,” I say.

“The combination of your distaste for the underworld and mastery of the darkest arts—”

“Mastery of what? I’m not a master of anything!”

“You will find that you are. And you will see that the two parts of you, Anne and Gia, make you perfectly suited to execute Dia Voletto. Start with him. He’s the easy one,” he says. “It will help earn Mephisto’s trust. And it will be easy to do without me.”

“Wait, wait,
wait
. You want me to destroy Dia…on my own?” I leap to my feet. “Forget this. I’m out! I don’t care who I was. I’m someone else now.”

He shouts after me, “I’ll do my best to return to help you. And Anne, don’t forget that your mother is party to this.” He had to play that card. The Dead, Angelic Mom Card. “You wouldn’t have agreed to become Anne Merchant if we hadn’t talked through all of this and you hadn’t agreed.”

Slowly, I turn to face him again. “To destroy Dia.”

“Destroy him first. Build up your courage. And then face the one you’re scared of.”

“I’m only
afraid
of Mephisto because I got my ass handed to me when I went up against him in Valedictorian Hall!”

“The bravest amongst us is afraid of himself.”

“What? Are you, like, quoting someone? God, just talk normal.”

“Miss Merchant, you ultimately won against Villicus.”

“Barely. And only because of Ben, who’s out of the picture now. And let’s not forget that I was trying to save myself then, not destroy a devil.”

“Imagine if you were to
try
to end the simpler of the two.”

After the casual way Dia executed twenty students today, I’m not averse to returning the favor. “Fine. But you’d better have a plan.”

“I have a strategy, yes. Many of Dia’s servants were once yours. Take them back.”

“Get them to serve me?”

“Yes. Start with the lesser demons. Don’t begin with the Seven Sinning Sisters, or Dia and Mephisto will see you as a threat.”

Finally, decent advice. Crazy, but something I can busy myself with.

“You will find yourself at least as powerful as Dia in little time—because although he has beauty on his side, you have brains.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“Never underestimate genius! I’ve seen with my own eyes that genius lasts longer than beauty.”

“I’m hardly in the realm of genius.”

I’m starting—slowly—to come to terms with this. It’s as if I’ve always known my life would be a short one and my fate something to run from. There’s a reason my paintings are never of rainbows and honeybees.

“So I try to get demonic followers, and then you come back, and we, like, somehow, I dunno, battle Dia?”

“That’s fine. But I’ll need a reason to return,” he says. “Dia continually rejects my requests to return here. I know I’ll be allowed to return for graduation day when all Guardians are here. Do you think you can re-establish Saligia by then?”

I throw my hands up. “It’s my first time re-establishing demonic powers, Teddy. I’ll do my best.”

“Very well, Gia.”

“I’m Anne!”

“Listen, you may not like the idea of being Saligia, Miss Merchant, but that is who you are. And my gut tells me that, once you start exploring Gia, you’ll have a hard time wanting to be Anne Merchant again.”

I glare up at him. “I’m
Anne
.”

A small smile colored gray and black cracks a line through his face. He presses his finger to his lips, reminding me that we must keep all of this on the DL. I wonder for a second why he didn’t use the Silencer to erase this conversation. We’re not so far from campus that we couldn’t be overheard.

“Remember: Many adored you once. Love doesn’t die. Nothing dies. It just shape-shifts.”

“You’re a real poet, Ted.”

“And you thought I was just a pretty face.”

The sun has set on the longest day of my life, the day in which I lost Ben, lost Molly, and even lost my parents—I am not their creation as much as I am Mephistopheles’. It is also the day I gained something I’ve never wanted and still don’t: a spiritual connection with the underworld.

I leave Teddy in the woods and stagger, in a cold daze, back to the still, gray campus. I pass the boys’ dorm, inside of which Ben
is preparing for a new life with his old love. I have to numb myself. Immortality is a curse; it would be a relief to die of sadness right now.

I climb the stairs to the second floor of the girls’ dorm.

I walk into the bathroom, stumble past a group of sophomore girls who look surprised to see me still here, and turn on the hot water in the shower. Under the scalding rush of water, I strip off my uniform and stand like someone anesthetized. Like the walking dead. Like a girl in a coma.

I am joined by Hiltop. She observes me silently. My “father.”

I wrap a towel around my body and leave my uniform behind on the shower floor, under the still-running water, where Hiltop continues to stand.

Molly is asleep when I go to our room.

I sit on the edge of my bed and know I do not need to worry about falling asleep first. Molly will not scream if and when she sees my tail. She heard who I am. What I am.

I get under my covers.

I sleep.

I wake. Molly is gone.

I get ready. I go to my art workshop. My classmates look at me like I’m a spoiled brat, like I have so much life I can afford to throw second chances away. Augusto comments on the amount of time I have been spending under the mentorship of Dia.

The bell rings. I pack my bag.

I walk into the hallway.

Ben is standing in the hallway.

He does not look directly at me. He hands a note to me. He takes care not to touch my fingers.

Garnet joins him. She takes his hand. They walk. Garnet tosses her hair and looks over her shoulder at me. She giggles.

I open the note. I fold it again.

I go to study hall.

Molly looks at me, and I feel like a dog that has had two legs amputated. Like it would be humane to put me down. I sit at the desk in front of Molly.

Mr. Italy tells everyone to be quiet. Fisher T. Italy. Power? To shift reality. Could I make him serve me? If he served me, could I leverage his power to change my new reality back to my old, naive, loved-by-Ben one?

It is a blizzard outside. The windowsills are stacked high with snow.

I unfold Ben’s note.

Molly kicks the leg of my chair.

I read Ben’s words.

I turn the note over. The blank page stares at me. It wants to blind me. I want to let it.

It is good that Ben is gone. If he knew the truth about me, he would be revolted.

I pick up my pencil. I tap the end of it on the paper. The beat is slow. It keeps time with the memories I shared with Ben. Ben behind the village bench. Ben on the cliff, saving me, holding me. Ben in the twinkle lights of Gigi’s house, deep in a fantasy.

Maybe I, too, could play pretend for a while. Pretend I’m normal, not a girl with the worst case of inner demons known to mankind.

I stop drumming.

I hold my pencil in both hands.

Molly kicks the leg of my chair again.

I snap the pencil in two.

And, with that, a tsunami-sized wave of relief washes over me. The release of hearing the thin wood and lead snap, even as half my classmates swivel to scowl and even as Mr. Italy stares over the top of his narrow reading glasses at me.

Like I’ve been holding my breath for a day, I sigh and relax my neck, my shoulders. I just wish I had another pencil to snap. Just one more—no, maybe 100 more—to give me the push I need to cry, which I have yet to do.

I rest my head on my desk. I pull the note closer to me and, with the working half of the pencil, begin sketching Ben and Garnet’s intertwined fingers in the top corner. The stroke of my pencil lulls
my mind back into my conversation with Teddy last night, back to everything he told me in the stillness of the woods. I know now why I was allowed to step foot in this school. It had nothing to do with my dad’s position as a funeral director to the wealthy, although surely that’s been a perk for Mephisto. I’m here because I’m one of the bad guys.

Molly kicks my chair again. I jerk my head but don’t look at her.

I draw a heart around Ben and Garnet’s hands.

I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the window and squint to try to make out Gia, but I see only a wild-haired blonde with her dad’s eyes. Surely the reason I was able to see Gia that night in the mirror was because we are more spirit than flesh here, and something—what, I’m not sure—triggered it; I would never see her in California, and I might never have known about my soul’s past had I not been thrust into a coma at the hand of my mother.

Will I ever see Gia again?

Will I see her soon?

If I’m more spirit than flesh here, am I more Gia than Anne?

Do the demons here know who I am? Dia knows. Mephisto obviously does. And if the Seven Sinning Sisters served me, surely they’ve known my secret all along. That’s why they wanted to meet me in Dia’s office. I told myself they wanted to see the girl who’d outsmarted Mephisto, but they really wanted to see their former leader.

I glance at Harper and Agniezska, who are sitting on the opposite side of the room swapping lip glosses, kissing their compact mirrors, and blotting their lips clean to start again. All this time, I’ve accused Harper of profiting from her own objectification; I’ve never let the image of her on her knees before Trey Sedmoney, exchanging sexual favors like they’re some sort of currency, leave my mind. And yet she’s got nothing on Gia. I started as a succubus. I traded sex for souls.

I close my eyes.

I can’t bear the thought.

I can’t bear any of this. Especially not if I have to bear it alone.

So I scribble a note on the back of Ben’s and, stretching like I’m yawning, drop it on Molly’s desk. I listen for the familiar sounds—unfolding, pen scratching, refolding, fake scratch of her leg so she can
drop the note and kick it my way—and scoop it up. We spend the rest of study hall feigning deep studying while writing back and forth.