The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant (6 page)

“What did you come up here for? Planning your next escape?”

“I don’t know why I’m here.”

“To celebrate your victory over Mephistopheles.”

Our eyes meet. I’m the first to look away. “There was no victory.”

“I beg to differ.” He holds his hand out for me. “Come.”

I don’t take it, but I reluctantly shuffle to stand at his side. Thick rain has started to fall again. We stare through it and over the pinkish-gray ocean. Droplets make disappearing divots in the low waves across the water. The setting sun will soon take its warm glow to the mainland. I should leave, but I don’t know where I’d go.

“Imagine all of this as your kingdom,” he says. “Only a fool would risk losing something so beautiful.”

“Some people don’t feel worthy of beauty.”

“Those people are the world’s biggest fools. Beauty is a human birthright. Your souls are by far the loveliest entities I’ve ever beheld, but this landscape—this world—is a close second. Fools turn from it.”

“Physical beauty is impermanent,” I counter absently. “Some would say fools fixate on it.”

I see his mouth drooping in disappointment for perhaps the first time since he glimpsed his reflection in the water. I don’t want to risk the ire of this devil leader; as nice as he may be acting, I know it’s all just an act. So I backtrack. If he wants to be dazzled by beauty, who am I to stop him? Ben dazzled me, and I would have rather never been woken from that trance.

“That’s what artists are for,” I offer. “We preserve beauty as we see it, Headmaster.”

“Call me D.”

That’s not gonna happen.

“So,” I say, wishing he would leave and wondering if I should, “when did you find out you were being sent here?”

“Sent here?” He tsks. “I came. Intentionally.”

“To build the college?”

“If you think any devil gives a damn about educating the masses.”

“So why, then? Why are you here—aside from replacing our shamed ex-headmaster?”

“Why are
you
here?”

I scoff. “A devil wants my dad’s network, and he got a demon to bring me here.”

“Is that really the reason?”

He stares ahead. I glance at him, wondering what he means, and in that second, I can’t help but deconstruct his profile as any artist would do. Each of his features is flawed, yet in combination they’re striking. Little wonder he was as taken by his reflection in the water as Narcissus.

“You’re an artist, Anne?”

“In some sense of the word.” I wipe raindrops from my face. “It’s hard to be an artist when your every move is graded. Not much
room for creative license.” I catch him looking at me in the strangest way, as if he’s deconstructing me like I did him. There’s something about him. A familiarity. “Have I seen you before? Did you visit Cania last week or something?”

He shakes his head no. He looks like he’s about to add something, but his glistening stare drifts to the entry point of the cliff-top. I follow his gaze to find Ben, out of breath and looking bewildered, standing in the shadows at the top of the slick hill. He is watching us just as I watched him and Garnet. How did he know I was up here? Or did he?

“Am I interrupting?” Ben asks us.

“Mr. Zin,” Dia says. “This must be a popular spot.”

Dia moves to help Ben up the last step of the steep hill. The three of us stand awkwardly—at least, it feels awkward to me—until Dia realizes Ben and I are not leaving. He wraps himself tighter in his cardigan, nods our way, and retreats easily down the slippery path to campus, vanishing in the brush.

That leaves me alone with Ben.

“Did you already go to Gigi’s?” I ask him.

He’s still trying to catch his breath. “There and back. Mr. Watso was there, and so was Gigi—vivified Gigi. They were dragging her remains into the water.”

“You saw them?”

“They told me you hadn’t come by. I had a hunch you’d be here.”

Silence settles over us like the cold rain on our hair. Ben and I are separated by a mere three feet. That’s not a lot of room to cross, but right now it feels like the English Channel. Whatever miracle brought down the walls around him and around me last night is unlikely to make a reappearance. Too much has happened.

It’s not just Garnet.

It’s that the thing we created together—my escape—failed spectacularly. How can we move past that?

“You’re shivering,” Ben says at last.

I hadn’t noticed. I feel like we’ve been standing in the cold for a lifetime—a proper one, not a Cania one—when Ben takes off his school blazer and wraps it around my shoulders.

I thank him.

He says it’s no problem.

Our voices are quieter than they should be. They are, like the inches of physical space between us, bricks rebuilding the walls. If I were Garnet, I could get close to him, I could kiss him like she easily did and laugh with him like she easily did. Instead, I rock on my heels and try not to shiver too noticeably. He’s going to think we ought to go in to escape the rain, and then what? And then it’s all over, like it never happened? We can’t leave. I need to say something. Do something.

“I’m sorry about the way I was on campus just now,” he says at last. “Please don’t be angry.”

“I’m…confused, Ben.”

“What you saw with Garnet, it wasn’t real. She doesn’t know that yet, but trust me.”

I slip his jacket off and hold it out to him. “You can understand how that might be a little tough for me.”

“I really can’t.”

“Well, then there’s even less hope for us than I’d thought.”

We both eye his coat, this symbol of something much bigger than polyester lining, itchy wool, and the Cania crest. He surprises me by taking my bare, freezing arm and sliding it, clumsily, into the sleeve. He shuffles behind me to drape the coat, and he bends and shifts my other arm into the other sleeve, trying to be delicate, until I think my shoulder might pop out of its socket.

“Could you make this any harder?” he says under his breath. “This is why I work with clay.”

Trying not to smile, I shift my shoulder and shape my hand so he can pull his coat up and over me. He adjusts it a little. Rolls a cuff. Unrolls it. And stands back to admire his handiwork. Girl in a school blazer. Major success.

He tugs the collar up. And, in doing so, pulls me onto my tippytoes. Close to his face, close to his lips. Not close enough to be
close
, but close enough to make me believe that we could close the gap in little time.

Am I wrong to think his jaw is more defined than it was just yesterday? Or that small lines now run in thin rivers at the corners of his brilliant but sad eyes? Or that his shoulders are broader and he’s at least an inch taller? Ben looks the part of the twenty-one-year-old guy he is, the guy who was trapped in a teenager’s body and doomed
to live forever as an unaging, beautiful sixteen-year-old boy, the eternally youthful boy Teddy scorned.

“You think there’s no hope for us?” he asks me, still holding me by the collar. “Is this part of your dark, brooding mortician’sdaughter façade?”

“Is stringing along multiple girls part of your hot-guy-in-school façade?”

“Is that what you think of me?”

“That you’re a philanderer?”

“That I’m a hot guy?”

I smirk. Was there ever any doubt? I’ve been a gelatinous mess since he first uttered my name.

My gaze moves back and forth between his eyes and mouth. I see myself reflected in his darkening irises, his dilated pupils. I look away. Because I don’t want to lose myself in him—God knows that would be easy.

“I’d say there’s hope for us, Miss Merchant.”

“Hope is the worst of all evils,” I whisper. “It prolongs our torments.”

“You’re quoting Nietzsche?”

“Loosely.”

“Here, all we have is hope,” he says.

“Well, isn’t that ironic?”

“The irony of hope in Hell on Earth?”

I shrug. “‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’—isn’t that written on the gates of Hell?”

“In the
Inferno
.” He smiles, and his bright eyes meet mine. “Do you have any idea how much it turns me on when you quote Dante and Nietzsche within seconds of each other?”

I’m about to laugh when he, at last, presses his lips to mine. I’m on my tiptoes, so I stumble a little until he wraps his arms around me, steadying me. How this happened, how we’ve crossed the chasm that seemed greater than the distance between Hell and Heaven, is a testament to either our humanity or our divinity here. We’re either completely weak and foolish or part of something bigger. This kiss is part of something bigger.

“My Anne,” he whispers into my hair, near my ear, as he pulls gently away, leaving me in shivers. “We tried to outsmart the devil, and we screwed it up royally, didn’t we?”

“Like Charles and Camilla,” I say. He laughs a little. “
Royally
. Get it?”

He leans back. “That’s pretty bad.”

“You could’ve done better?”

“Working with ‘screwed it up royally’?” He thinks about it. His hands are on my lower back. I pray we’ll never, ever move. Let the rain freeze us in place. “Maybe something like, ‘Like a lightbulb in Buckingham Palace.’”

I wrinkle my whole face.

“Not good?” he asks.

“Worse than mine.”

His grin grows. But as our shallow breaths come and go, as rain collects on us, and as his eyes darken, it fades. At least his arms stay around me. And mine around him.

“I heard your dad’s working with my dad now,” he says. “So we were right about what Mephisto wanted with you.”

“I’ve never wanted to be wrong so much.”

“Always the A student,” he says. “I assume your dad’s new job was your punishment?”

“That plus two cherries on top.”

“Two? Lucky you.”

“Harper is my roommate.”

“Ouch.”

“And Pilot is my new Guardian.”

“Double ouch! Damn, I thought
I
had it rough.”

“What’s your sentence?” I ask him. “You’re being forced to produce twenty more soulless copies of the Dance of Death sculpture?”

His smile is weak. “You’re wearing it.”

I glance down at his blazer. He’s always worn a school blazer; it’s part of the reason I’d assumed he was a senior. But I understand his meaning in little time.

“They made you a student,” I guess.

He doesn’t respond; that’s response enough. I stumble out of his hold and steady myself against a tree stump, which we soon sit on, side by side. In silence. I drop my chin onto my hands and stare ahead, piecing together the implications of Ben’s punishment. The reason he looks like he’s twenty-one now is because the curse that
kept him young has been lifted; he’s now cursed with a fraction of the life he could have had.

“Tell me you’re a junior,” I say hopefully.

He shakes his head. “Cania’s newest senior.”

So much for hope! Ben’s only got a little over eight months until graduation at the end of May, when they’ll award the Big V to one senior—and kill all the others. Eight months in which to prove himself. Not impossible, but most seniors started the competition in their junior year and, thus, have a whole extra year on him.

“I can’t believe this is the fallout of what we did. You’re going to need the most insanely motivated Guardian to help you win this late in the game, Ben.”

“Let’s be real. Winning is unlikely,” he says. “You don’t know who my Guardian is.”

“Oh, God, who?”

He raises his gaze to mine. “You saw her kiss me on the cheek a half hour ago.”

“They gave you Garnet?” I jump to my feet and start pacing as he looks on. “
She’s
your Guardian?”

“Did you think I was helping her move her own boxes into the guys’ dorm?”

“Is that why she kissed you?”

“That’s why I let her.” His voice is a whisper as I stomp back and forth. “I thought you were gone. Sucking up to her is—was— my only chance of being with you again. She was, as heartless as it sounds, a means to an end.”

“
She’ll
be fighting for you?”

“Ha.”

“Ben.”

“And you’ll never guess my PT.”

“I don’t want to know.” I stop pacing and roll my head up to the sky. “You will succeed in life by giving crazy ex-girlfriends second chances. You will succeed in life by making out with girls formerly known as Lizzy who sold their souls to be with you.”

“It’s to make sacrifices,” he says. “That’s my PT.”

I sigh. And give it some thought. “Well, that doesn’t sound
that
bad.”

But he’s a step ahead of me, explaining before I can speak. “She wants me to be with her. The first sacrifice, if she had her way, would be you.”

I close my eyes. The rain is letting up, but it feels heavier and colder than ever. I was
this
close to being with Ben.
This close
. And now she’ll have him again. I’ll have to walk the halls and see them holding hands, eating lunch together, and kissing. I’d tear my eyes out rather than watch that.

“So that’s the last nail in the coffin. In
our
coffin,” I say, resigned to our doom.

“No, Anne, listen.” Ben joins me and cups his palms around my face so I can’t help but look into his beautiful eyes and watch his lips—lips that were
juuust
about mine. “It’s you I want.”

I shrug out of his hold. I can’t pretend that being with Ben makes sense. Not if his life will be even shorter because of it.

“You have to give Garnet what she wants if you’re going to win.”

“Who said I wanted to win?”

“You’ve been hanging around Pilot Stone too long.”

“Har har.”

“She’s a wily one, Ben—I’ll give her that. She figured out how to separate us. No wonder she won the Big V last year.”

“She may be clever, but she misjudged my feelings for you.”

His feelings for me are perhaps the only topic I’d ever like to discuss, if given the choice, but that’s not in the cards right now. Hearing about his feelings will only make it harder to sever our ties so he can play, and win, her game.

“Anne, I want to opt out of the Big V competition.”

“That’s not an option.”

“I’m already dead.”

“Everyone is.”

“You’re not.”

“Yeah, and I’d like to live again. With you.”