She holds out her hand, the amulet stone in her palm. “Take it. I know you have to go. And I know . . . I know it would be stupid to go with you.” Now she meets my eyes, and I can see she’s struggling not to cry. “But I still wish I could. I hate this. I want to be there to see it end.”
“I know.”
“Please kill him for good this time, Cyn. Okay?”
“Oh, Annie. I promise.” And I so want that to be a promise I can keep. But we didn’t have time to make a plan. I have no idea what we’re going to do once we give the stone to him and he un-curses Ryan.
She hugs me again and then presses the stone into my hand. It’s no longer glowing, but I can feel the electricity of it, the pent-up power. Waiting.
“All right,” Peter says. “Portal time.”
For the first time I notice that he’s not looking quite a hundred percent himself. “Hey, are you okay? Did — did you take in more of LB’s poison?”
“Just a little. It’s okay.”
“I can try to heal you again —”
“No. You’re going to need every bit of your strength down there. I’m fine. Now hurry up before your boyfriend dies right here in the comfy reading chair.”
With that, he starts sketching out another symbol on the floor. I go back to Ryan and help him to his feet. Annie goes back against the wall, watching us sorrowfully.
“Where are you going to take us?” I ask Peter.
“Outside the prison gate,” he says, still sketching. He has to make a much larger shape this time to be able to include LB. “I think Mr. Crunchy will be waiting there to escort us back. Which is probably safer than trying to make our own way around unprotected.”
“We can’t just go directly back to where Mr. Gabriel is?”
Peter shakes his head. “I don’t know exactly how to get back there from here. And . . . it might be good to keep LB a secret from him as long as we can. LB is pretty much our one advantage, and he’ll be more so if his appearance is a surprise.”
With everything else to worry about, I’d completely forgotten about the unpleasantness of the journey ahead of us. When LB, Peter, and I, supporting Ryan between us, step into the diagram, the cold and noise hit me like a truck. I focus on Ryan, who seems barely conscious. Hold on, I tell him, pressing my forehead tightly against his, willing the words to penetrate into his brain.
As before, the cold vanishes when we arrive, only to be replaced with the appalling blast of fiery heat.
“Where is he?” I ask Peter, looking around for our expected escort.
But it appears he was indeed waiting nearby. Just after I ask the question, Mr. Crunchy comes strolling around the corner, smiling at us brightly. But once his eyes fall on the spidery presence of LB, Mr. Crunchy’s smile somehow becomes, while still technically a smile, much less happy. His head swoops down and forward to directly in front of LB’s beetle face-parts. They begin to have what is clearly a very heated conversation in the ear-damaging strings of syllables that make up the demon language.
“Hey!” I shout up at them. “We don’t have time for this!” I indicate the ailing Ryan beside me, then glare up at Mr. Crunchy’s angrily inquisitive face. “If Ryan dies before we get back to your master, he’s never getting what he wants from us.”
Mr. C dips his head in still-technically-smiling acknowledgment and begins to lead the way back from the gate, but not without many suspicious glances over his shoulder at LB.
After a few awkward steps, it becomes clear that Ryan is never going to manage the trip back to Mr. Gabriel’s hideout under his own power. I ask LB to give him a lift; Ryan is too weak to object, and I’d have overruled him if he tried.
This walk seems somehow both shorter and longer than the walk to the gate had been, what seems like years ago now, but which I guess was only two days past. I am still painfully aware that we don’t have any kind of plan. I realize that some part of me had been hoping that the queen would show up at the last minute, once more our ally against our common enemy. But from what Aaron has indicated, the queen is down for the count. Maybe forever. Which means no more stupid-but-powerful magic items, no more advice, no chance of her materializing in the eleventh hour with a plan or an attack or even a distraction.
This time it has to be just us. I glance at LB, thankful that “us” now includes his significant addition of strength and experience, if not exactly brains. Whatever we attempt, we’re going to need LB to be a part of it.
I try to think about what we know. We know Mr. Gabriel has that amulet that is making him super strong, even in its incomplete state. We know he has at least two demon minions, in the form of Mr. Crunchy and that terrifying cart-guy. We know Mr. Gabriel wants to re-create his body. Will be re-creating his body, very shortly, if we actually give him the missing piece of the amulet, which we have to do because Ryan is about to die. But until he creates his body, that amulet is — I’m pretty sure — sitting in the urn. The cart-demon certainly reacted like there was something important in there to protect, anyway. Although I guess if Mr. Gabriel’s true essence is in there, that would be important enough.
Could we get the urn somehow before he manages to make a new body? Smash it, destroy whatever is left of him before it’s too late?
I edge closer to Peter. “We need to try to destroy that urn. After Mr. Gabriel un-curses Ryan, but before he’s able to re-create his body. If we get even the slightest chance . . .”
But Peter’s already shaking his head. “Destroying the urn wouldn’t be enough. We’d have to destroy Mr. Gabriel’s essence, too. The urn is just a container; if we break it, his essence will just dissipate into the air. It might weaken him temporarily, but he’d be able to re-collect himself fairly quickly.”
I drop my voice even lower. “Can we destroy his essence? Maybe . . . maybe if I used my power somehow, like I did against the monsters in the prison? Now that I don’t actually have to touch him to use my power, I might be able to target his essence in the air. Or — hmm. Assuming I can see it.”
Peter seems to consider this. “I’d be able to see it, even if you can’t. Maybe I can direct you somehow.”
“But what about the amulet? We should try to get that, too.”
“How? If he’s still got that other demon guarding it . . .”
The memory of the tentacle around my throat and the tiny, hateful eyes glaring into mine makes me shudder. “Maybe LB . . . ?”
Peter glances back at the spider-demon. “Maybe. But I still think we have to keep him in reserve until the last possible second. If we just let him march right in with us, Mr. Gabriel might be able to stop him.”
He’s right. But I really hate the idea of marching right in without him. I look hopelessly at Peter. “You realize this is more of a wish list than an actual plan, right?”
He gives me a heartbreaking smile. “Yeah. We’ll just . . . we’ll just have to do the best we can. We’ll watch for an opportunity to smash that urn and snatch the amulet. And we’ll make sure LB is ready to come in as soon as we call for him.”
“God, this is terrible. It’s never going to work. Is this really all we’ve got?”
“Yup. Unless one of us gets some other really brilliant idea very, very soon.”
But just then I see the familiar building with the hole in the side that we now know is Mr. Gabriel’s hideout up ahead. And then we’re there, right beside it, and Mr. Crunchy performs his astonishing feat of contortion/contraction and goes in through the hole. And then there is nothing left to do but follow him inside.
It seems that our time for thinking of brilliant ideas has just finally run out for good.
“LB,” I whisper hurriedly. “Stay here until we call for you, okay?”
He seems confused as he gently sets Ryan on his feet. “But it is time to fight my brother.”
“Not . . . not quite yet. Please. Just trust me. Do you trust me?”
He blinks his expressionless eyes. “Yes.”
“Okay, then. Stay
right here. And when we call you, come right away. Right away, okay?” I give him a few extra pats on the abdomen. I take Ryan’s hand and pull him toward the opening. And then I take a deep breath and go back into the dark.
“The travelers return!” Mr. Gabriel calls out jovially as we climb back inside the interior ruins of the building. I’m the first to set foot on the rocky/rubbly ground, and then Peter and I help Ryan through the hole. Ryan looks awful. My heart hurts to see it.
Mr. Gabriel smiles at each of us. “Your mission was successful, I presume?” He’s pretending to sit on his cart, next to his urn. Pretending, since, as a hologram, he can’t actually sit on anything. But he can’t resist striking this casual pose, flaunting how completely he’s at his ease. How confident he is that he’s already won.
We don’t bother to answer. He has clearly prepared a monologue for this occasion. He beams out at us from his flickery projection, taking in our no doubt palpable sense of defeat. “But then why the long faces? Oh! Of course. Because you are about to hand over the very means of your own undoing!”
“You’re ridiculous, you know that?” I ask him. “Seriously. Do you lie awake at night making up those kinds of lines?”
His smile doesn’t falter, even as he places his hands over his heart in pretended pain. “Ah, even your barbed and hurtful words, dear Cynthia, cannot diminish my current good mood. Kindly hand over the item I requested, and we can get on with the rest of my to-do list.”
For a second I am torn between competing impulses. I want to demand whether Mr. Gabriel knew that the Craftsman would not part with the stone willingly. I want to run to his stupid urn and smash the shit out of it, despite knowing the cart-demon would stop me before I got close. But nothing is as urgent as getting him to un-curse Ryan. Even if that means giving him what he wants. I console myself with the idea of LB, waiting outside to be our secret weapon. Surely he will be so unexpected, his presence so, dare I hope — upsetting? — to Mr. Gabriel, once he discovers that his formerly spineless little brother has turned against him . . . surely that will give us some kind of advantage, some window of opportunity that we can’t quite see right now but will immediately recognize when it presents itself?
But then Mr. Crunchy steps forward, and I realize he is about to reveal our secret right now.
“Whatever it is can wait,” Mr. Gabriel tells him, gesturing for his giant minion to go back to his place along the wall. Mr. Crunchy widens his eyes in annoyance and frustration, smiling extra aggressively, but Mr. Gabriel is obviously intent upon his preplanned script for this moment, and does not mean to be diverted.
Peter gives Mr. Crunchy a what can you do? kind of shrug and smiles grimly.
“Now,” Mr. Gabriel continues. “Cynthia, please step forward.”
This is it, the moment when I have to actually give him the thing that is going to make him strong enough to kill me and go after Annie and all the rest. Which . . . I have to do, I have to, because otherwise Ryan will die, and then later Leticia and Diane and William and Peter will die. At least now they will get to live, no matter what else happens. I’ll give him the stone and fulfill my part of the deal and my friends will get to be okay.
But not all of them, the panic beetles whisper from where they writhe beneath my skin. Not Annie. Annie will be his forever. You couldn’t save her. Even after all of this, you couldn’t save her.
Shut up, I tell them fiercely. It’s not over yet, you stupid beetles.
It’s not, I tell myself more quietly.
The beetles hear me, though, and laugh.
I look back once more at Ryan and Peter in case they have any last-minute helpful hints, but Peter only stares back at me with the same hopeless expression I’m sure adorns my own face, and Ryan seems to be focusing all of his energy on simply standing up. Then I step forward and hold out the stone in my palm. It begins to glow again, perhaps sensing the rest of the amulet nearby. Or perhaps it just likes to show off.
Mr. Gabriel gestures, and the cart-demon shuffles toward me. I stand perfectly still, not wanting to give him any reason to explode into that much larger and scarier version of himself. Once he is close enough, he plucks the glowing stone out of my hand. He carries it over to the urn and drops it unceremoniously inside. It falls with a small clank to the bottom.
“Ahh,” Mr. Gabriel says with disheartening satisfaction. “Now, I will need a bit of privacy, so if you don’t mind . . .”
“Fix Ryan first!” I demand, stepping forward. The cart-demon snarls threateningly in my direction, but I ignore him. “The deal was for delivering your stupid stone, not waiting around for you to use it.”
“I wasn’t —”
“He’s about to die! If he does, the deal is forfeit, isn’t it? I did my part; you have to do yours!”
Mr. Gabriel sighs and rolls his eyes theatrically. “You’re so very irritating sometimes, you know that? I was about to say, if you’d have let me finish” — he gives me an exasperated glare — “that I would therefore remove the curse and you could be off along your way. For now.”
“Wait, what?”
“Creating a new body takes a little time, Cynthia. Even with the help of my amulet at its full strength. What, did you think I was just going to pop offstage for a minute and then return to wreak my revenge right away?” He chuckles and shakes his head.
Then he turns toward Ryan and makes a quick pulling gesture in the air with one hand. Ryan gasps and falls to the ground.
I run over to him. “Are you all right?” I grab his palm and turn it toward me, looking for the mark, and the line. I pull up his shirt again and search his chest, run my hand gently over his heart.
It’s all gone.
He’s safe now. Forever.
I could weep, both with relief and with the guilty knowledge that Annie has no such protection. But I don’t. Because I am still going to find a way to save her. Somehow.
“I’m okay,” Ryan confirms. “Much . . . much better.”
“Now,” Mr. Gabriel says, “please go away.” He turns to Mr. Crunchy. “Stay here and keep watch. Kill anyone who approaches. Well, unless it’s one of these” — he gestures lazily at Ryan, Peter, and me — “or my Annie. They should merely be . . . detained.”
“Wait!” I say, no idea what I’m supposed to follow this with. But we have to take our shot before it’s too late. I step toward him, arm outstretched, and the cart-demon is before me at once, tentacles and teeth exploding from his human facade.
I fall back, screaming. I can’t help it. My legs give way and I’m suddenly on the ground, still screaming, staring up into all of those terrible demon features and curling back into myself, desperate not to have that thing touch me ever, ever again.
“Patience, Cynthia,” Mr. Gabriel says, smirking down at me. “Don’t worry, we’ll see each other again very soon.”
Mr. Crunchy tries again to alert Mr. Gabriel to the fact that he has Very Important Information to share, but Mr. Gabriel ignores him, swirling into a sparkly cloud and funneling himself melodramatically back into his container. Even Peter rolls his eyes. The cart-demon, still snarling, backs away from us with the cart, but his tiny, horrible eyes stay fixed on me until the shadows swallow him completely.
I watch them go, hot, furious tears pricking at my vision. That was our chance, our chance to try to take the amulet and destroy Mr. Gabriel before he got his body back. And we missed it.
“You can bet you’re still going to get in trouble later,” Peter tells Mr. Crunchy once the others have vanished. “Even though you tried to warn him.”
Mr. Crunchy smiles angrily at Peter and then looks pointedly away.
“So —” Ryan looks around, slightly bewildered. “So now we just go home?”
“Yeah,” I say, defeated. I’m still on the ground. I can’t meet anyone’s eyes. “We go home and wait for Mr. Gabriel to put himself back together and then come to kill me and take Annie.”
Ryan comes over and makes me get up. “Come
on, Cyn. It’ll be okay. We’ll . . . we’ll figure something out.”
I don’t have the heart to point out to him how we keep saying that but never actually do figure anything out.
“Yes,” Peter says. “Let’s just . . . let’s just go outside. The light in here isn’t very good for drawing diagrams.”
We go outside. Mr. Crunchy glares after us, but does nothing to interfere.
LB is still waiting where we left him.
“Now it is time to fight my brother?”
I look at him sadly. We never even tried to call for him. But the moment came and went so quickly. If it was really even there at all. There wasn’t time.
“Well . . . no. We have to — we have to wait. More. For him to create his body again. And then we can fight him.” I’m exercising a lot of dramatic license here, but I’m sure some of what I’m saying is at least technically true.
I must be getting better at reading LB’s bug features, because his disappointment is crystal clear right now.
I sigh and turn to Peter. “We have to bring LB with us.”
“What?”
“Mr. Crunchy saw him with us. We can’t leave him here defenseless and alone.”
Peter jabs a hand in LB’s direction. “Have you seen him? In what possible sense is he defenseless?”
“He’s on our team! We can’t leave him behind!”
“Cyn,” Ryan says, “how? We can’t exactly bring him to school with us.”
“We did before!”
“For like five minutes! And he half destroyed the library!”
I look at Peter. “Couldn’t he take human form? Like you? Like all those other demons did when they came to our school?”
Peter runs a hand over his face. “I — maybe. That was different — those other demons weren’t coming through with their full bodies like LB would be now. It’s harder this way. But . . . I could help him, I think. To disguise himself.”
LB has been watching this conversation silently, his face turning from one of us to the other like a three-way tennis match. I have no idea how much he understands. But I really am afraid to leave him behind. We need him. If we’re still going to try to fight back, we need him. And . . . I made a promise. That we would fight together.
Curse of the Evil Librarian Page 19