She pushed on the trapdoor with her shoulder as hard as she could. It didn’t budge.
Celia pounded her fists against it. Nothing.
Please don’t be there, she thought. Please don’t let that huge snake be right behind me. Slowly, she turned around.
The cobra wound its thick body up the last couple of steps, taking its time now that Celia was trapped.
She crouched in the space between the trapdoor and the top stair and kicked at the snake. It swayed out of her reach. The snake opened its mouth and hissed around fangs dripping with venom. It pulled its hooded head back.
As soon as it strikes, I’ll move left and throw myself down the stairs. I’ll get past it and run, she vowed, eyeing the slim space that she could maybe, just maybe, get through.
The cobra flared its hood wider and leaned farther away from her.
Any second now, and it would strike.
Celia’s heart felt like it was going to explode.
The trapdoor popped open above her. Hands reached down and yanked Celia up just as the snake struck.
17
Something Strange
The trapdoor slammed shut behind Celia. A metal bolt slid into place a moment later, locking it. Amber must have made it up before me, Celia thought.
The hands let go of her. Celia scooted away from the trapdoor, back and back until she leaned against a cold stone wall. The room was dark, lit only by a sliver moon. Everything was blurry as hot tears ran down her face. Celia didn’t want Amber to see her crying. She buried her head in her knees. I should be dead right now, she thought. I was almost dead a second ago.
“Sorry,” Celia whispered. “Why didn’t you let me up sooner?”
“Because I wasn’t sure I should,” said a boy’s voice with a soft accent.
“Demetri?” She kept her head buried. She didn’t want him to see her crying either. “You rescued me? Thanks.” Her voice cracked. “The snakes—”
“We’re safe from the snakes—we’re at the top of the cathedral and there’s no other way in. They can’t climb up the sheer walls,” he said.
Something thumped against the trapdoor. Celia yelped. She imagined the cobra hitting the other side of it. “My friend Amber is out there,” she stuttered. “Did you see her? She ran in the other direction and we were supposed to meet up and—” What if Amber was alone and surrounded by snakes?
“She’s a hunter?” Demetri asked.
Celia nodded.
“Hunters are resourceful. This kind of magic is too strong to last. The snakes will be gone before dawn.”
“But . . .” Guilt flooded Celia. She was up here while her friends were down there fighting hundreds of snakes, and she should . . .
“You getting bitten by a cobra won’t help anyone,” Demetri said.
A dull thumping on the far side of the trapdoor accentuated his point.
He was right. She didn’t like it, but he was right. Celia wiped her snot- and tear-covered face with her sleeve, took a deep, ragged breath, and raised her head. Demetri stood at the opposite end of the small round room, as far away from her as possible. He stood at a stone window, watching the city.
There was something strange about him, and as soon as she saw it, Celia looked away. It was too much. Everything was too much.
Screams rose up from across the city, far enough away that they could almost be mistaken for crows or sirens.
Celia took a deep breath. She looked at Demetri again and inhaled his apple and sunlight scent. Demetri stood in the shadows. His shirt sleeves and the cuffs of his pants leaked smoke. Orange smoke. She hadn’t seen it when she’d first met him, because her mind hadn’t let her see it, back when she didn’t know about monsters yet. And after that, she’d only seen him in daylight. “You’re a Little,” she whispered. She realized that a part of her had already thought that might be true.
He sighed, turned toward her, and sank toward the ground. “I am, and I’m sorry to say that you’re stuck with me for the night.” Demetri pulled off his knit hat. Underneath it, horns wound around his head where a normal boy would have hair. They were brown and thick, like a goat’s, and lay in spirals against his skull.
They would have been pretty if they hadn’t meant he was doomed, Celia thought, and had an urge to brush her fingers over them. She pressed her back against the wall. “Why do you keep following me? Are you trying to turn me into a monster?”
“No,” he whispered. “Celia, I would never do that.”
Which was the same thing every other Little she’d met had said. “Then why were you on my roof? Why did you come to my apartment, twice?”
He shook his head. “After the earthquake, magic flooded the streets and I needed to get elevation to see what it was doing. We picked your building at random.”
“The thing thumping on the roof, it was a Big, looking for you, wasn’t it?”
Demetri nodded. “You shouldn’t have pointed out where you lived.”
“I didn’t realize at the time that you were a child-destroying monster.” She sat up straighter.
“I’m not. I . . .” Demetri sank to the ground and hugged himself. “Believe what you want, but I’m not going to destroy you. I don’t know why, but we keep ending up in the same places.”
Celia watched him and thought that, despite what he was, she didn’t think he was lying. “Maybe it’s because of the prophecy. Maybe there’s something we have to do together to save the city.”
Demetri’s fingers played with the edges of the trapdoor, like the huge cobra waiting on the other side of it might be a better fate than hanging out with her. “Maybe, or maybe after tonight we should never see each other again.”
Celia brought her knees up to her chin. “Ten seconds. I can’t believe that’s all it would take for you to turn me into a monster.”
How could it be that easy? She rubbed her cheek.
Demetri watched her. “You fell. I didn’t mean to touch your cheek. It was only for a second, not long enough to hurt you, and I won’t do it again. I never want to see you again. But”—he scowled—“I have a feeling we will run into each other again and again.”
“If it’s not something either of us is doing, maybe it’s some kind of spell,” Celia said.
Demetri looked thoughtful, then shook his head. “I’m warded. If no one can find me, they can’t put a spell on me.” He ran his black-tipped fingernail over the horn that curled around his ear. It’s not fingernail polish, it’s a claw, she realized.
Celia stared at him, wishing there was more light to truly see all his strangeness. “Before the snakes came, the hunters said you were a myth. They said you didn’t exist, Demetri.”
Demetri laughed. “Good. They must never realize I’m real.”
“Why?” she asked.
“We have a sanctuary. I’d rather they didn’t find us and attack us.”
“It’s a . . . sanctuary for Littles?”
He nodded. “For those who have escaped from our masters. We live free there. None of us attack kids. We’ve made a vow.” His smell took on a bitter edge. “The hunters think that’s impossible.”
“But . . . you will attack a kid someday, right? The hunters said Littles always . . .” She stopped talking as his eyes narrowed and his hands turned into fists. Howls and screams echoed through the city outside the window. A cold wind blew through the room. “I’m just repeating what they told me,” she added.
Demetri nodded. His face softened. “The hunters only know one story, but the world is made of many stories.”
Celia smiled and pulled her knees closer. “I like that. Tell me more.”
“Tell you what?” Demetri asked.
“Anything. What it’s like. How did you become . . . what you are?”
He sighed. “I’ll tell you, Celia, but only as a story that happened to me. It will never happen to you, okay?”
“Deal.” His words made her feel safe.
“Once upon a time,” Demetri said, “my m
other died. My father would visit me once a month at the orphanage. He and my mother were Russian immigrants, and back then, in their culture, a father didn’t raise a child alone.”
Back then. “How old are you?”
“Thirteen.” He let out a long sigh. “Always thirteen, no matter how many years pass. Always stuck here.” He looked down at his body and then tapped his head. “And here. I can’t grow up in my body or my mind.” Sadness filled the room, as real as his orange smoke. “One day I met a girl named Kristen at the muddy park next to the orphanage. She was small and sickly, and smelled like honey and rainwater. All the kids from the orphanage liked her. She was pale, wore leather gloves, and would bring her small red rubber ball to the park to play with us every day. It must have been terrible.”
“It doesn’t sound bad.”
Demetri sighed. “I mean for her. My kind’s longing? It gnaws into us when we are near you. She smelled wonderful and seemed sad, but when I made her laugh, it felt like everything bad in the world went away. She never mentioned what she was, or why she, a girl who dressed so nicely and brought us boxes of boiled sweets, would spend her days with twelve dirty orphans.”
“She was a Little?’ Celia asked.
“Not exactly. I like to think Kristen didn’t know what would happen when she touched us.”
“She would have to know, though, since someone did it to her, right?”
Demetri frowned and shook his head. “No. Kristen was different. She had been . . . changed by her father. He was a powerful magician who wanted to use her to stop all other humans in the world from using magic. That is a huge spell, a world-changing spell, that requires great sacrifice. So he sacrificed his daughter to the spell.”
“Why did he want magic to go away for humans?”
Demetri gazed out the window and shrugged. “Power. There have always been men who would do anything for more power. He must have thought he could make this spell, control Kristen, and rule the world. For years he worked magic on his own daughter to make her powerful enough to survive his spell. He worked to turn her into a vessel who could hold all of the world’s magic. He put spell after spell in her and used dark magic to shape her. But, when the time came, the last part of his great spell, where all magic would bind only to her, it did not work. He could not, for a long time, figure out what had gone wrong. When his daughter, who had grown deathly pale and whose fingers had turned to wood, told him that she was filled with a hunger to play with other children, he grew angry at her and at how she was still nothing more than a child. When she told him it gnawed at her and she could smell them from the bedroom she was never allowed to leave, he understood why his spell had not worked. A great spell needs a great sacrifice, and more children needed to be destroyed before his spell worked.”
Celia swallowed and gripped her own hands. She knew what must have happened to Demetri, and anyway, this was a story from a long time ago. Even so, she bit her lip and hoped she was wrong.
“Kristen taught us a game one day, Ring a ring o’ roses, where we held hands and ran around in a circle until we grew dizzy and fell down. She looked small and near death as she slipped off her gloves and joined our circle. Her smooth wooden fingers gripped my hand. We touched and magic surged through me for the first time. Magic thundered and exploded through the world as it changed and came to us and only us. It sparked and crashed into our circle in that small and muddy park. That much magic is not easily controlled, not even by a magician as great as Kristen’s father. It went wild. It took what we were and amplified it.”
“I was ever lost in my head, so I grew horns. Janice had always loved to run. She sprouted wings. Liam ate constantly, and got a wide mouth with fangs. All of our bodies twisted and changed. And deeper than all of that, it made us need to hurt other kids, just like we’d been hurt. Because Kristen had accidentally done an evil act, the magic erased what she’d been and remade her more powerful than any of us. She became purely evil, like every Big since. All goodness in her got erased.”
“That’s how it started,” Celia whispered. She realized this wasn’t just a Demetri story but the first monster story.
Demetri nodded. “Kristen became the first Big, and all of us became her Littles. Her father had been a fool: nothing could control what she was, even though he’d tried to weave into his spell a way of controlling what he had made. She hated him. There was no way she would ever let him get close enough to find her heart.”
“So that heart outside the body thing, that was made to control Bigs?”
Demetri nodded. “Kristen’s father made the heart spell to control his daughter.”
“And all of you were the very first monsters? Every other monster comes from all of you?”
Demetri nodded again. “Youngstown is our birthplace. Monsters are everywhere, but they started here. They are particularly nasty and plentiful in this town. All the other Littles Kristen made became Bigs. They have created domains across the seven continents and are the worst and most powerful monsters in the world. They put evil thoughts into the hearts of dictators, cause famines and floods, steal people’s happiness, and create misery wherever they go.”
“But not you. You didn’t change.”
He nodded.
“And you help other Littles do the same, even though all the time all you want to do is touch a human kid?”
Demetri sighed and nodded again.
“But . . . isn’t there an easier way? Can’t you come up with a spell to not feel those urges?” she asked.
He didn’t answer for a while. The snake thumped its head on the other side of the trapdoor.
“Magic can’t change everything,” Demetri said softly. “It can’t change what you are.”
Celia pulled her legs closer and leaned back against the cold wall of the room.
She remembered Amber telling her that the longer a Little stayed little, the stronger he would become as a Big. “You’ll be powerful if you ever change.”
“When I change, as everyone is so sure I will, I’ll be horrible. With my longevity, and my skills as a magician.” He shook his head. “I shudder to think of what I will be capable of.”
“And right now, being in this room with me, you want to attack me?”
“Yes, but I decided I’m less of a threat than the snakes,” he said.
Celia heard the smile in his voice and relaxed.
“But it’s not easy, since I touched your cheek.” His ragged breathing filled the room.
I should be scared, Celia thought. “I promise I’ll push you out of the tower if you try to touch me.”
“How kind,” Demetri said. “I promise I will fall. I’m truly sorry, Celia. You shouldn’t have to know about any of this.”
“Me too. I mean, I wish you didn’t know any of it either. I wish no one did, and that that Little girl Kristen hadn’t known either.”
“It’s hard for me to feel sympathy for her. She owned me and hurt me for a long, long time,” Demetri said softly. He rubbed the tip of one of his horns with his thumb.
“But she was your friend. There had to be some of that left. Was she nicer than the other Bigs?” Celia asked.
“No. Crueler.”
“But maybe, deep down, there was a part of her that—”
“No,” Demetri interrupted. “I tried for years to make her remember, to make her come back a little, but . . . Kristen died the day she became Krawl.”
“Krawl?” Celia shivered. “Krawl is your maker?” She took a deep breath. “Um, so did you know that she’s back and is probably uniting Bigs and making the earthquake? And the snakes too, I bet.”
“She can’t be back,” Demetri whispered.
Demetri stood and paced across the room. He leaned out of one of the windows. “The biggest spell I ever made was to banish her from Youngstown. It almost killed me. I set up spells across the city to keep her out. Why didn’t I feel her break them and enter? It’s all this magic everywhere.” He sniffed the air. “Are you certa
in?”
Celia inhaled the inky darkness. “No. But a hunter heard she’s here because . . .” Celia paused. She didn’t want to say the next part. “Because she wants revenge on you. I’m sorry.”
Demetri laughed, ragged and bitter. “Revenge? Then it’s revenge she will get. It’s all starting to make sense, Celia.” He turned toward her. His dark outline stood silhouetted in the window. His eyes pulsed bright with magic. “This doom prophecy? This quake and snakes? It’s one enormous spell she must be weaving. Krawl is conjuring something huge to hurt me, and she doesn’t care if she wrecks the whole city in the process.”
“How do you know that?”
Demetri turned and stared out the window. “She owned me for years. I know her. From the very beginning, she always loved the big, complicated, multiphase spells.”
“Great,” Celia whispered.
“So she starts this spell with an earthquake and follows it with a plague of snakes. Why? And what about the third part of the prophecy, the city will fill with silent words? There are dozens of spells she might be building.” He sniffed the air. He leaned out into the emptiness of the night air. His lips peeled back in an ugly grin. The sad boy disappeared, and someone else took his place.
“Come find me, Maker Krawl,” Demetri growled. “Come find the boy you owned. Wherever you are, whatever you’re planning, I’ll be waiting for you. And I will destroy you.”
18
Rainbows and Unicorns
Time passed in the dark room that sat above the city. Celia tried to lie down on the stones and sleep, but the world was full of wind and snakes, and she had no idea if her hunter friends were okay, and anyway, going to sleep around a Little was probably the worst idea ever.
Demetri sat perched in one of the stone window frames, gazing out at Youngstown. “I won’t harm you. You should sleep,” he said.
“I keep thinking about that cobra almost biting me,” Celia whispered.
“You should rest while you can,” Demetri said. “More bad things will be coming.”
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