The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant (47 page)

Before he can say anything to reclaim his soul, I shove his hand away from the painting. His soul, captured entirely now, stays in the painting as he crumples and falls to the floor. I hear the crowd gasp at the noise from their side of the curtain.

Through a gap in the curtains, I see Villicus take the stage.

“Good afternoon,” Villicus says to the crowd. “As you may know, this college will be run by my esteemed colleague, Dean Dia Voletto. In a moment, he’ll join me on this stage to welcome you to Cania College.”

The crowd applauds. Dia, who’s listlessly shaking his head, groans. I hush him and pull the sheet back over the painting. I try to tug him up, but he’s dead weight.

“Just like Dorian,” I whisper to him. “You’re the one who said I should read it.”

Villicus’s voice interrupts me. “Dean Voletto has commissioned a portrait by one of our very own students. Please join me in welcoming Dean Voletto and Miss Anne Merchant, the artist behind his portrait, to the stage.”

The audience applauds as the curtains are drawn back.

But when they see Dia lying on the ground at my feet, their clapping fades. Villicus looks from me to his hobbled, empty counterpart. He hasn’t seen the painting yet. No one has. To see it, you’d know you’re in the presence of a soul, dark and tortured though it is.

I step forward.

“I’m pleased to present,” I say to the crowd and, after a pause, tug the sheet down, “
Dia Voletto
.”

The audience is a single gasp.

Most people look away. Others cover their eyes. Only Villicus can look at the soul of a devil captured, like Dorian Gray’s was, in a portrait. But Villicus isn’t looking at the portrait; he’s looking at me. And I at him. As if we’re in the Silencer, I can hear his every thought— or what I hope to be his thoughts, his fear at having allowed me to become a destructive force—and I hope he can hear mine. Because I’m not afraid of him. He should take this as the warning it is.

No one is looking directly at the portrait of Dia Voletto.

And so no one notices when Garnet clambers onto the stage and slips right by the podium. Not even Villicus or I see her. I wouldn’t notice her at all if it were not for the shadow that falls over me as she raises the enormous portrait over my head. I duck. Villicus flinches. She brings the painting sailing down on me with all her might, cracking its heavy frame on my spine.

I cry out.

There are more cries from the audience. At first I think they’re screaming at Garnet. But then I hear them. I hear what they’re saying.

“
Something’s burning
.”

It’s true. It smells like something’s on fire. Outside.

I look up to meet Villicus’s gaze as Garnet lifts the painting off me. She’s made a hole in it. She loops her arm through it and hoists it up. Then bolts between me and Villicus. Neither of us stop her. She races down the aisle and out of the building, taking that painting—something she must see as a sign of my achievements and her failures—as she goes.

Dia’s body is at my feet, soullessly shifting toward the mounting cries of the crowd.

I hear Molly and my dad call for me. Ben shouts my name.

“Was this always your plan, Saligia?” Villicus asks me.

“Not Saligia,” I say. “Anne.”

All at once, the room goes silent. As if we’re all trying to decide what to do now.

I turn to look for Ben, Molly, my dad.

That’s when the first student disappears.

She is a freshman. She disappears soundlessly from inside her father’s arm. It’s not her father who screams but the woman sitting behind them; first she points at the empty spot, then stammers, then screams.

Across the room, another student vanishes. And another, sitting near where I stand.

They’re there, and then they’re gone.

Parents grab at their children. But it’s no use.

Someone else vanishes. I look in time to see a red-haired man and a woman—I’ve seen them both before. I saw them hug their daughter this morning, and they were in my Scrutiny challenge— cry out when she vanishes.

“
Harper
,” I gasp. Harper just disappeared.

Villicus grabs me by the arm. “And this, Anne? Was this your plan, too?”

No
, I think.
No
. The plan was to destroy Dia by casting his soul into the portrait and burning it and only it. Molly has the lighter and everything. I search the crowd for her, but she’s gone. Everyone’s rushing out of the room, as if the cathedral is cursed by a lamia, doomed to take the lives of all the children who enter.

Harper can’t be gone. She can’t be.

I hear “Fire” and I try to free myself from Villicus, but he won’t have it. Villicus tugs me with him up to the second floor of the cathedral, where he thrusts open a window facing north. Below us, hundreds of people pour out of the cathedral, through the gates of Cania College, and onto the road that will take them to the Cania Christy campus, from the center of which an enormous, ominous black cloud of smoke rises. I watch my dad, Mr. Watso, and Dr. Zin lead the pack. I can’t see Ben or Molly. As one student after another disappears from the crowd, to great cries, I pray Ben and Molly are still here.

There are a handful of buildings on campus, and any one of them could be burning right now. But I know which one it is. The only one Garnet would burn, hoping to destroy Ben’s vials, careless to all the other lives she’d end.

“Valedictorian Hall,” I whisper.

Villicus scowls. “Did you expect Garnet to allow you to have the one thing she wanted most?” Abandoning me, Villicus shape-shifts into a broad-winged hawk. He sails over the crowd, over the woods that are filling with frantic parents and students, swiftly to campus. As he goes, I spot Teddy near Dia’s mansion, entering the woods…with Pilot following him at a safe distance.

“Pilot?”

Does he know that Teddy and I are working together?

I race back downstairs. Dia is groaning on the floor.

“Garnet’s going to burn your painting,” I say to him.

“Why?”

“Teddy told me why Saligia came here. To escape you. And to destroy you.”

“Don’t…believe him.”

“You came back to win me back. But that was never going to happen. Saligia hates you.”

“I told you. I came back…to protect you.”

“You should have protected yourself!”

That’s when Dia vanishes. If Garnet took his painting to the fire she set, it seems she’s made it there now. Which means Dia’s soul is destroyed. And his legions are without a leader.

I flee the cathedral. I find myself at the back of the pack.

Out of nowhere, the chemistry teacher Miss Incitant flies at me. She grabs my shirtsleeve and tugs hard at it. She was one of Dia’s followers, and now she’s without a master.

“Let me serve you, Miss Saligia,” she begs as, finally, she strips the fabric off me.

Before I can speak, the woods come alive—and its new inhabitants, dressed in their freakish circus gear, charge at me. Guardians that were only moments earlier running toward the Cania Christy campus have turned and are now, to my horror, running toward me. They grab at the sleeve Miss Incitant is holding and yank the other one off me. They tear both to pieces, taking threads and fighting over the buttons. More hands grasp at my clothes. My collar is torn off. My shirt hem. The tab of the zippers on my boots. I might be swallowed up by this horde of master-less demons or trampled to death.

But then their energy begins to grow inside me.

And, one by one, they fall to their knees, bowing before me.

But their servitude is no good without vials. If the Seven Sinning Sisters are or will be mine, I’m going to need vials. And so I command them to help me.

“Put out the fire at Valedictorian Hall,” I say. “Hurry!”

They obediently turn and charge up to campus. My heart is going on overdrive. Dia’s dead, kids are dying, but I’m so close to being able to grant new lives for everyone. If I could just get to campus and find the Seven Sinning Sisters!

I race forward, too. Up the road. Past the mothers and fathers who’ve just seen their child pop out of their embrace, forever gone, his or her vial destroyed irrevocably. These parents stand like zombies. Or cling in desperation to the ground. Or slow from racing breathlessly to barely holding themselves upright. I run past them all. Past empty rings of arms that were, only a blink earlier, clinging to a beloved child.

I run harder, calling for Ben. And Molly.

I stumble and have to scramble back to my feet as I dart through the gates of Cania.

Valedictorian Hall is engulfed in flames when I skid to a stop in a crowd of people and demons stripping to pat away whatever flames they can. Some are running up from the water. Their arms hold sloshing buckets, bowls, large fronds, bins, anything they could swipe from the nearby dorms and fill with seawater.

Men carrying a massive fallen tree heave it—one, two, three— against the locked door of the hall. Flames gust out as the doors swing in. The men fly back with the force. Students race by them, stripping off their clothes as they sprint into the hall, knowing their burns will heal but their vials, once gone, are irretrievable.

A woman shouts that they’ve got to put the far wall out.

“Forget the rest of it!” she hollers. “Just get the wall with the vials!”

I join one of many chains of people swinging buckets of water up from the ocean. And that’s when I see Ben. He’s right across from me.

“Ben!”

He turns. His face is covered in soot.

“I’m safe!” he shouts. “My dad kept an extra vial on the yacht.”

Just as he says that, he vanishes. The bucket he was swinging drops to the ground, and the guy who was swinging another one his way cries out.

I haven’t even had a chance to get my head straight—to tell myself it’ll be okay, Ben said he has more vials, don’t worry—when someone grabs me from behind. I collide with Superbia’s slapping hand. I reel back. She’s slapping me? I thought she’d serve me!

“You killed him!” she screams wildly. “He loved you and you killed him!”

“Killed who?”

“You stuffed his soul in that painting. And you let her burn it. And he’s destroyed now.”

“Dia Voletto?” I say in astonishment. “But I thought you wanted me to end him. He’s a devil! You were warning me all along about him.”

“He loved you! He tried to free you on the day of the Scrutiny. He built the whole challenge around your PT, you idiot! So you’d go free. Live again.”

“But,” I search for words, stunned, “you made me read
Dorian Gray
. To give me the idea!”

“Not to kill
Dia
! He was harmless.”

The flames are hot against my back. They’re shooting off Valedictorian Hall in all directions, catching nearby trees on fire, slashing by the arms, legs, and faces of parents and students, who cry out.

“Then why?” I cry, confused, worried that I’ve actually made a terrible mistake. “Why
The Picture of Dorian Gray
?”

“Because of Dorian.”

“Dorian? Dorian Gray?” I’m about to say,
He’s fiction
, but I know better than that. “He’s real?”

“You know him well. We’ve been trying to separate you from him.”

“Who is he?”

All at once, Villicus yanks me out of the line, away from Superbia. She’s yelling through tears after me. I struggle to hear her as I shove at Villicus.

“Dorian made a pact!” Superbia shouts.

“Who is he?” I holler.

“Don’t trust them!”

“Who?”

“Shut up!” Villicus commands. Unwilling to let me hear another word, he risks full discovery and lifts me off the ground. We’re suddenly flying past the heat of the inferno and heading straight for Goethe Hall. “I’m gravely disappointed in you.”

Everything is a whir. A blur. I know I hit him, and I know I call for my dad, and I can’t help but call for my mom. I call for Superbia, too, but she doesn’t follow.

Dorian Gray is real. And I know him well. They’ve been trying to separate us.

I wrack my brain. Superbia’s been giving me hints all year, but I didn’t know what to make of them, and I was too busy with my own agenda to care about hers. What has she said to me? I can’t remember! I can’t think straight, not like this, not flying in Mephisto’s hold.

Who is Dorian? The real Dorian Gray?

Superbia said something this afternoon. Something about the truth being plain as day—or, no, she said
plainly written on one’s face
.

Dorian Gray was impossibly beautiful. Could that be what she was hinting at? That Dorian is someone I know who’s gorgeous beyond words?

Do I know anyone like that, other than Dia?

Oh my gosh.

No, it can’t be. It can’t.

I’ve been played all this time? It wasn’t real at all?

They were trying to keep me from him. That’s what she said.

Villicus lands at the back door to Goethe Hall and shoves me inside. But not fast enough. Not before it hits me who Dorian Gray is.

It can only be him, too-beautiful
him
.

Dorian Gray is none other than Ben Zin.

thirty

IMPOSSIBLE BEAUTY

VILLICUS FLINGS OPEN THE DOOR TO HIS OFFICE, DIA’S
former office. He pushes me in. I stagger in—and stop dead. I can’t believe my eyes.