The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant (30 page)

“Spill it, Merchant. How can you help me? And why the hell would either one of us agree to help the other?”

I start at the beginning. My beginning as Miss Saligia, and my incarnation as Anne Merchant. She listens impatiently, more patiently, solemnly, and then with wide eyes. I tell her everything I need to, leaving out only the details that will hurt others and, as always, avoiding any mention of destroying Dia in order to ultimately destroy Mephisto. Teddy doesn’t even come up. Harper doesn’t need to know the whole truth; she just needs to know enough to trust me. And join me.

“So Hiltop’s actually Villicus, and Villicus was actually Mephistopheles, and Dia’s from Hell, too, and our teachers are the creators of sin?” she asks. “I knew some sicko-type stuff was up ’round here, but I didn’t know the place was crooked as a barrel of fish hooks.”

“No one knows, although I think some have a hunch. I was sworn to secrecy. But, well…”

“You’ve got Hell’s dust on your boots, Merchant. If anyone’s allowed to break an oath, it’s you.” She leans back. “But what’s all this got to do with me and the Big V?”

“I’m not talking about the Big V. I’m talking about a second life sooner than next May. You have followers,” I explain. “Trey Sedmoney worships you. And then you’ve got your, um, friends.”

“I know you call us the Model UN from Hell.”

“In all fairness, Pilot taught me that.”

“Alls I know is you must need my help awful
ba-a-ad
to come nosin’ around me. So what’s up your sleeve?”

I hand her one of my mom’s glued-together barrettes. She recognizes it. Months ago, she snapped it in two.

“
Ew
, there’s hair in this,” she says as she holds it far from her, between two pinching fingernails.

“That’s my hair.”

“Grody.” She hands it back to me.

I don’t take it. “I need you to serve me, Harper.”

She laughs. “You’re about two sandwiches short of a picnic, Merchant.”

“Look, Gia was powerful. Super-powerful.”

“I ain’t surprised you’re a monster underneath.”

“If I can build up the fanbase she once had,” I continue, “I can gain the power Dia and Villicus have. I can attract demons with the
power to vivify, and we can give you—and your whole clan, if you want—what you’ve been looking for.”

“
Life
,” she says in a breath. She’s looking at the barrette.

“Life off this island. But I need you to help me get started. I need you to serve me and grow your own fanbase, which will, in turn, serve me by serving you. Get it?”

“Are you seriously asking if
I
get how hierarchy works? I invented it.” She turns the barrette over. And eyes me carefully in the orange glow of the setting sun through the windows. “Prove it.”

“Sorry?” I say.

“Prove. It.”

“You saw Gia with your own two eyes. What more proof do you need?”

“Wait, am I the first soul that’d be serving you?”

“No, Pilot’s on board, too. He’s also going to get a new life out of helping me.”

“Then bring him to me right now. He can tell me it’s all possible. And that’ll prove it.”

“Fine. We’ll go to the staff quarters.”

“Uh-uh.” She wags her finger in my face. “If you’ve got this power, if you’re this big shot in a dummy’s body, then bring him to me now. He can tell me in person, right here. Or, what, can’t you even communicate with your own servants telepathically?”

“That’s not how it works.”

“Why not? Because you’re lying like a sidewalk? I knew it!”

“I’m not lying. I just…don’t know.”

“You’re slippery as a pocketful of pudding. What a whopper.”

No matter how I beg and try to convince her, I can’t get Harper to listen. She shoves my barrette at me and disappears out the doorway, muttering as she goes. If I’d just been able to summon Gia somehow, I might’ve been able to call Pilot like Harper said.

I know now I’m never going to be able to do this if I can’t start proving who’s under my skin. So that night, while Molly sleeps, I lie in bed and try to recreate the scenario in which Gia last appeared to me. I’d gone to sleep thinking of Ben, hoping to see him in my dreams—but I hadn’t dreamt of him at all. It was Dia in my dreams. Dia and me. In a compromising position.

Dia, the ex-lover of the woman I once was, awakened her.

“Oh, damn,” I groan, knowing what I’ve gotta do.

S
ATURDAY MORNING FINDS
me at Dia’s office door for a meeting I’ve avoided as long as I’ve known about my inner demon’s history with him. But he’s not here. He’s left a note taped to his door, as if he knew I was coming—that, or he tapes the same note to his door every Saturday:

Miss Merchant, I’m at my house. Come on over
.

Double damn! His house. His private home. The former home of Ben and Dr. Zin. I make my way down the island to his mansion. The last time I was here, I snuck in through the back window with Molly. I’m at least as anxious now as I was then, and I’m not even breaking in.

“Do this for Ben,” I coach myself. “Do it for Mom. You can’t help either of them if you don’t wake up Saligia.”

I ring the bell. No one answers. I try again.

Then, amid the sound of melting ice trickling from the gutters into basins, I hear footsteps around the side of the house, just beyond the porte cochere. Footsteps crunching through the hard shell of snow. I look to my right just as Harper, Agniezska, Plum, and Jasmina—all of whom must have been inside Dia’s only moments ago and snuck out the back when I rang the bell—stop dead and, in unison, look at me. The girls stack up behind Harper like they’re a living version of dominos.

The girls clutch most of their clothes to their chests. You don’t need to look closer to know what they’ve been up to. The messiness of their normally stick-straight hair. Their matching lacy undergarments: garters and fishnets. It’s a no-brainer for four girls who share the same PT: to use their desirability to win.

“We’ve tuckered him out,” Plum tells me proudly. Harper pretends to inspect the snow at her boots. “So good luck.”

“Well, I don’t do sloppy seconds.”

“
Seconds
? More like
twentieths
, Murdering Merchant.”

Everyone but Harper breaks into giggles.

“She’s paintin’ a picture of him, you numbskulls, not screwin’ him,” Harper says, cutting through their laughter. She marches up to the road, stomping the snow. “Honestly, y’all get me so
agger-vated
.”

“Hey, Harper!” I shout. Her shoulders jerk, but she doesn’t turn back. “Great call choosing this option instead of mine. Genius decision. Good luck with the whole Big V thing, if Plum doesn’t beat you to it.”

I ring the bell again. I’d feel kinda bad for Harper if I wasn’t jealous of the souls she’s got under her command. Lucky bitch. How long is it going to take for Pilot to get
me
some followers?

The door swings open. Dia is sans shirt. “Anne!”

I frown as I look him up and down. “I can come back another time.”

“Hang on.”

He darts away. Moments later, he slides back into view wearing a tuxedo shirt and grinning. He is still far too casually dressed—light pants that look like they’re about to fall off his narrow hips, most of the buttons undone on his shirt, his sleeves rolled up to reveal his tattoos, as always. I see
Dia + Gia
on his arm; it’s a reminder that I
need
to be here right now.

“Better?” he asks me.

“Is there a reason you wanted to meet at your house instead of your office today, Mr. Voletto?”

“I got tired of waiting in my office every weekend. Now come in, come in. Superbia and her crew have gone home for the weekend, so it’s just us.”

“They live with you?”

He smiles. “We all have our own bedrooms.”

I step inside, silently marveling at how different it feels compared to when Ben lived here. Comparing now and then will torture me, so I try not to. As I tug off my boots, Dia hangs my coat, takes my bag, and gestures for me to follow him.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says. He’s astute. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you wanted me to chase you.”

“Chasing me and luring me to your house are two different things.”

He laughs. “We can be more comfortable here. No nasty secretaries knocking on the door every ten seconds. Come, come. Are you thirsty? I’m chilling a pinot grigio.”

“Even if I wasn’t underage, it’s ten in the morning.”

“I can add OJ.”

The house smells like body heat. Plum’s comment about
twentieths
sticks in my head as I leave the marble foyer, walk through a hall lined in actual fur—which must be one of Dia’s “upgrades”— and find myself in the library Molly and I once broke into. But it, like the hallway, has been transformed. Most of the books are gone, and erotic statues have taken their places on the shelves, with under-mount lights drawing the eye to them.

He’s holding a bottle of wine, two glasses, and a corkscrew when he joins me in the library.

“So why do you stay here on the weekends?” I ask him. “Don’t you want to go back to the underworld?”

“Do you think I want to go back there?” He pops the cork. “Downstairs has its charms, but this is where beauty lives. Little wonder the heavens have kept this place so greedily for themselves. You forget how lovely this world is until you return to it. But when you do,”—he smiles wistfully—“you can forgive a soul for choosing life here.”

Oh, God, is he talking about Saligia? The way he’s looking at me, there can be no denying it. But he doesn’t know I know. The last time I spoke with him, I had no clue about Saligia, a fact that seemed to stun and disappoint him.

“How long will you stay?” I ask with a choked voice.

“How long would you like me to?”

If he only knew my and Teddy’s plan.

“I’m asking because, if Wormwood Island is Mephisto’s now, why hasn’t he sent you home?”

“You honestly think I was
sent
here? I chose to come. I’ve told you that.”

I can’t believe Mephisto would just let him stay. But perhaps it’s as Ben said months ago; perhaps Mephisto wants Dia to babysit us while he works out a larger world-domination plan.

He pours a glass. “Do you want to know why I chose this life?”

Fearing he’s about to tell me about my past as Saligia and our connection in the underworld, I wuss out. I know I came here so he’d help me awaken Saligia. But now that that’s actually an option, I’m not sure I can handle it.

“I actually don’t,” I say and, to take the edge off, accept a glass of wine from him, “because I’d like to keep your intentions a mystery. It might make for a better painting.”

“Ah, yes, the matter of the portrait.”

“But there is something I’d like to know.”

“Your wish is my command.”

“Do you remember the…lust challenge? In the Scrutiny?”

“I do.”

“Were you aware it was happening?”

He sets his glass down and nods. “Shall we recreate it?”

Eventually we might have to, if that’s what it takes to wake Saligia. But not yet.

“I was actually just wondering about what you said,” I stammer, “about not being able to ‘reveal anything’ to me about a superior devil. I assume you meant Mephisto.”

“Yes?”

“Well, what can’t you reveal about him?”

He laughs. “Why, Anne, how could I answer that? I can’t reveal it. That’s the whole point.”

“But there’s something to reveal?”

“Isn’t there always?”

“Something with Mephisto? Is it why I’m here?”

“You tell me why you’re here.”

I sit before the easel he’s put out for me. He’s reorganized the library to look like the artist’s studio he set up for me in his office. The leather chaise, the white drop-sheets, the easel and stool, even the champagne stand filled with warm water. He sits across from me, watching me with his too dark, too large eyes. His irises are dark purple and big, as if his eyes are all pupil.

The better to see you with
, I think.

His smile is too broad, and his lips are too full.

The better to eat you with
.

I can’t help but look at him now and see someone buried deeper inside. Someone my soul once loved, even if I have no conscious recollection of our relationship. There’s definitely a connection.

“I’d like to present the portrait to the whole school on graduation day, which will be the opening day of Cania College,” he tells me. “If we work exceptionally hard between now and then, we just might meet that deadline.”

“Great. But before we begin,” I say, taking a deep breath and hoping this all works as I need it to, “you took a sketch of mine a few months ago.”

He thinks about it. Then he flips through a large hard-cover scrapbook and pulls one out. “This?”

My breath catches when I see that the sketch is not of Saligia; it’s my old sketch of Ben in his casket. His beautiful eyes are closed—I had no idea then how lovely they could be—and his face is peaceful in a seemingly endless sleep. I take a second to collect myself and, feeling protective of the ties that were only severed for Ben, roll the sketch up. I tuck it into my bag. That one’s going in the vault.

“Where did you get that?” I ask.