The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant

by Joanna Wiebe

  “And superbia means pride. And avaritia means greed. And…”

  “And? Am I supposed to be following your train of thought?”

  “The seven deadly sins. Pride, greed, envy, and so on. Invidia is one of them.”

  “Maybe that’s, like, her special demon power or something: to inspire envy.”

  “Or,” Ben positions a candle under his chin to cast dramatically eerie shadows over his face, “she is envy.”

  I nod and whisper, “She’s totally envy. I guessed that she was one of the Seven Sinning Sisters—she left Mephisto for Dia—but I hadn’t realized they are the seven deadly sins…personified.”

  “Where’d you hear all that?”

  “Teddy told me.”

  Oops. I’m supposed to hate Teddy, not reveal our private convos. My easy tone hasn’t escaped Ben’s attention. Leaning back on his hands, he chews his lip as he observes me.

  “Why was Teddy telling you all this?”

  Keeping Teddy’s secret mission for me from Ben will be about as hard as keeping your heart from knowing what your brain is doing. I don’t want to keep secrets. But until I talk to Teddy more, I’m not going to risk anything.

  “You know me,” I say. “People just love spilling their souls to me.”

  “I actually haven’t noticed that.”

  “Maybe it’s just demons then.” Time to maneuver back to safer territory. “Mr. Zin, you are a smart dude, figuring out who Invidia is. I guess I know why my ego takes a beating every time I see her. She makes me envy her.”

  After a beat, he confesses, “She makes me feel inferior.”

  “Envy.”

  I scoot next to him and, careful not to knock a big pillar candle over, tug his book until it’s half on his lap, half on mine. We read everything we can about the Seven Sinning Sisters.

  “Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth,” Ben reads. “Those would be some powerful demons to have on your side. They were all Mephisto’s?”

  “That’s what Teddy said. But, you know. Who would trust him?” I choke.

  He continues reading aloud, but, word by word and line by line, I find myself thinking more about the fact that my left knee is pressed against his right knee, part of his thigh is against mine, and our shoulders brush every time his chest rises with a deep breath. He smells delicious. His hands are very strong looking. And there’s no denying that he’s most irresistible when he’s either reading or talking about books. But he’s made it clear that he doesn’t want to move too fast, not that I do, either—but I think he may have more self-control than I do. So, to keep from throwing myself at him, I slam his book closed.

  “What just happened?” he asks with a smile.

  I grab his hand and jump to my feet, tugging him up. “Let’s look up Dia Voletto next.”

  Ben and I dart down to the first floor, where a few Guardians and their students angrily hush our excited whispers, and dash to the card catalog. In our previous lives, we both lived in the library, so we’re fine with the Dewey decimal system, which Harper’s peon Plum is groaning about near the periodical section. Hurriedly, we find four cards for books that mention or are about Dia Voletto.

  “He’s the demon of ego,” Ben reads on a card as we take the stairs two at a time back to the fourth floor. Only to find the books on Dia Voletto are all gone.

  “He took them,” I say.

  “What more could we expect from the demon of ego?”

  “Major faux pas.” We settle back to the middle of the ring of candles, which thankfully haven’t burned the place down in our absence. “Stealing books from the library.”

  “Yeah. If he wasn’t already condemned to Hell.”

  I begin closing the books. And Ben stacks them. But we’re moving at about half speed. I pray he’s killing time for the same reason I am: I don’t want a reason to leave. I’ll gladly pretend we need to be here as long as possible. I don’t want to go yet. I can’t imagine ever wanting to go.

  When we’ve made towers of the books we read, books Ben has been reading for years, he starts unfolding dog-ears, and I pull my knees into my chest as I watch him. He’s talking absently about the world of demonology, and it’s not until he sighs and sits back that I realize I haven’t told him about his dad. He notices my face drop, and he comes to my side, wrapping his arm around my shoulders.

  “What is it?”

  “I saw your dad today.”

  “Was he sober, by chance?”

  I turn to look him in the eyes. “He was burned. On his neck. And he looked…dejected. Like he’d lost all hope.”

  “He probably has.”

  “Ben.”

  He shrugs. “‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ My dad held out longer than the average man would.”

  “Hiltop said your dad wanted the burns. As a reminder of your car accident.”

  “He’s doing what he has to do to cope. Y’know, with my decision to die.”

  “But if you were to fight for the Big V…”

  “I’m not going to fake I’m into Garnet. Please, Anne. Drop it.”

  He lifts my hand and holds it up flat, and we watch as he folds his fingers between mine. The lines distinguishing my skin from his blur, like they’re glowing at the edges, like we’re melting into one person.

  “More spirit than flesh,” I whisper.

  He brings our hands to his lips. And, when he doesn’t let up, I shift until my lips are pressed against the other side of the fist we’ve made. Our eyes meet. We lower our hands.

  “Ben, you’re going to have to choose Garnet.”

  “I hope you mean garnet the gemstone.”

  “You need to win the Big V.”

  “Shh.” He puts his finger to my lips, and I pretend to bite at it. “I’m with you. Not her. Any plan that keeps me from you is no plan for me.”

  “But Ben—”

  “If I have to choose between death and life without you, I choose death.”

  “That’s very”—I pause—“cheesy.”

  Because we can’t actually stay in the library forever, we make our way outside and, holding hands, meander down the dark island, past the red line that used to mean so much, past the old Zin mansion in which Dia and Invidia now live, past Gigi’s old cottage, toward the village. Most of the villagers’ homes, which were enormous, are being demoed to make way for the college.

  “Why do you think Mr. Watso’s here?” I ask Ben. “Everyone else is gone.”

  “He made a deal with the devil. I assume he’s here because he has to be. Maybe if he signs the island over to them, they’ll let him go.”

  “Sign it over?”

  “My dad has this idea that Villicus wanted you and Molly to break the rules and be friends. He put you at Gigi’s so you’d be more likely to run across the only village girl. That way, he’d have some leverage—he could dangle Molly’s life in front of Mr. Watso in exchange for the island.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Mr. Watso is a shaman. He’s the spiritual owner of this island. Or so the story goes.”

  “So he can just give the island to the devil if he wants to?”

  “If he had to. It’d be a clear gateway in for the underworld. But I doubt he’d do that.”

  “He’s got no reason to now that she’s gone.” I meet Ben’s gaze. “Do you think Mr. Watso will hate me forever because of what happened to Molly?”

  “Molly’s gone because you guys were friends. She was a part of that friendship.”

  “She’s dead because of that friendship.”

  “Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself,” he says.

  “I just can’t believe how dumb I was.”

  “Hold on there.” We stop walking and he turns me to face him. His hands are on my shoulders, and he’s looking quite serious when he says, “That’s my girlfriend you’re talking smack about.”

  With that word—girlfriend—running through my head and the warmth of his hand on mine, we return to c
ampus and cross the quad. I watch Ben walk to the boys’ dorm. He smiles back at me when he opens the door, and we wave again, smile again, say good night, and eventually, with me suppressing dumb giggles that I sort of love, retire indoors.

  Harper isn’t in my room when I curl up with thoughts of the beautiful Ben Zin, the boy who is, at last, mine. I see bright lights like fireworks behind my eyes. Ben’s my boyfriend. We’ll figure the Big V stuff out. He’ll find a way to win. I’ll help Teddy—maybe I can find a way to wrestle the Seven Sinning Sisters away from Mephisto and Dia—and then get Teddy to wake me up. And, after that, Ben and I will be together in California. It won’t be easy, but we can do it.

  It is that gloriously satisfying thought that sends me swiftly into dreams, dreams I’m quite certain will feature a tall, lovely, mint-eyed sculptor.

  Except it’s not Ben in my dreams.

  It’s Dia.

  At first he and I are arguing, but we swiftly find ourselves in a far more compromising position than I’ve ever been in. I feel the soft ring of his open mouth moving down my neck to my shoulder, leaving a glowing tattoo that looks just like Invidia’s. When he leans away from me, his mouth is open—and he’s screaming.

  My eyelids burst wide to find Harper standing over my bed in the glow of a lamp. She’s screaming at me. She reels back as I stagger out of bed, holding my arms out defensively.

  “What is it?” I cry, looking for an intruder. “Where? Who?”

  “Y-y-you!”

  I catch a glimpse of myself in Harper’s full-length mirror as she staggers backward.

  And I do a double take.

  Everything about my reflection is exaggerated: my lips and cheekbones are fuller; my eyes are huge and a strange violet color; my curves are inflated like helium balloons; my legs are sinfully long. It’s only my big, everywhere hair that looks like me.

  “I’m dreaming,” I utter. “This must be a dream.”

  I shift, watching the movement in the mirror to be sure I’m looking at my own reflection. As I do, I see what Harper was screaming about and what she is now, from the furthest corner of her bed, pointing at in dumbfounded silence.

  “What on Earth?” I breathe as a shimmering silver tail wraps over my shoulder.

  I look at it, and it wags once. Then it disintegrates into a million sparkling fragments that glow, dance, and vanish, taking my larger-than-life exterior with them.

  six

  INNER DEMONS

  IT SMELLS LIKE WET DOG OUTSIDE THE CLOSET IN WHICH Lou Knows and Pilot keep their janitorial supplies. I must have walked by this closet a dozen times in the last month and seen Lou bent over, filling his dingy yellow bucket with soapy water. All along, he’s known something about me. Or so Pilot suggested the other day.

  Today, I’m going to find out what Lou Knows knows about my soul.

  And so restarts my attempts to act on my PT to “look closer” when, in fact, all I really want to do is close my eyes and, like all the other Cania students do, act as if nothing weird is going down. But last night I saw something I’d have to be brain dead—not just in a coma—to forget. I saw something I’d be crazy not to investigate. I saw something that Harper is so going to blab to the whole school; even in a land of sworn enemies, Harper has a way of spreading news. So before I have to deal with girls in the bathroom whispering trash about my (I can’t believe I’m actually admitting this) tail, which has thankfully not reappeared since Harper screamed it away, I need to get a handle on what’s up.

  So I wait for Lou.

  I lean against the wall. I drum my fingers on the cool painted cinder blocks. The clock above me ticks so loudly, it echoes all the way down the hall, bouncing off the lockers. I’m next to the chem lab, inside of which Miss Incitant—one of many new faculty members Dia brought in—is conducting a lesson I can just overhear. Her name is Latin, just like Invidia, though incitant isn’t one of the seven deadly sins, so Miss Incitant can’t be one of the Seven Sinning Sisters; this is a little more proof that my hunch was right: Dia’s demons go by Latin names.

  “The study of chemistry dates back how far?” Miss Incitant asks her students, who are so quiet, their silence echoes. Evidently none of her students’ PTs is to be successful by throwing the teacher a bone. “Thousands of years. To where? Anyone? To the Middle East, where philosophers and scientists engaged in what we now call… anyone? In what we now call alchemy. And what is alchemy?” She waits, patiently pulling teeth. “It is the art of freeing parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence. To what end? Yes, Jackson—oh, you’re just stretching. Anyone else care to try? Alchemy achieves the goals you seek here: longevity, immortality, and redemption. And thus chemistry is magic.”

  Magic. Immortality.

  Was what I saw last night magic? Was it the work of alchemy? Did someone put a spell on me? Does every student at some point look like I did, thanks to our proximity to demons? Or am I, like, possessed?

  I slide to the floor to wait for Lou. I open my sketchbook. Time ticks by. Before I know it, I’ve filled page after page with hasty renderings of the vision I saw last night: her voluptuous body, her pillowy lips, her commanding stance and impressive height. The movement of her hand as she tugged her nightie to cover herself. Yes, I’m thinking about my own reflection as if it wasn’t mine at all. That’s because whatever I saw, it was nothing like me.

  I tear out a page and absently roll it into a long tube. I stare down the hall through it, like a telescope. Still no Lou. I flip it over and write his name on it.

  “Lou knows my soul,” I whisper. “Why do you know my soul?” I ask the name on the page.

  I tap my pencil over Lou Knows and stare ahead. Lou is a demon with a non-Latin name, a demon that was here before Dia arrived. It’s probably safe to say he serves Mephisto.

  “But why does Lou know something about me? Or why does he think he does?”

  Lou suggested the same thing that Teddy did: that I could succeed by using my “feminine wiles.” But Teddy only said that after he’d read my soul; I’ve never even touched Lou, so he couldn’t have read my soul. How did he gain special insight into who I am?

  A noise up the hall steals my attention. It’s just a heater cranking on.

  I look at the page again: Lou Knows.

  And then I see it.

  I can’t believe I’ve missed it.

  I jot a phrase under his name: know soul. And then, moving between his name and those two words, I strike out letters until I’ve proven my guess right.

  His name is an anagram for ‘know soul.’

  Wondering if that’s just lucky—just a one-time coincidence— I write down the next staff name that pops into my head: Trey Sedmoney, Harper’s Guardian, the only teacher I’ve had the displeasure of seeing in the buck (purely for artistic purposes), and a decidedly creepy dude. He was here before Dia, so he’s one of Mephisto’s. Do all demons have a special power? Is it possible that all of Mephisto’s servants, when they arrive here, get names that are anagrams of their powers? And maybe Dia’s followers have kept their underworld names because he was rushed here; I’ve already seen that Dia needs Hiltop’s help with almost everything related to this school, so he definitely wasn’t prepared to come here. It’s possible…

  I stare at Trey Sedmoney.

  Rearranging that name is a lot harder because I have no idea what Trey’s power could be, unlike in the case of Lou Knows. Trey is Harper’s Guardian, so maybe something to do with sex? But no matter what I try, those twelve letters don’t rearrange to form any sex-type phrases.

  I scribble his name out. Maybe I’m wrong about this. But before I discount the whole idea, I remember that, my first day here, the secretary Kate Haem used all sorts of anagrams for my name. I thought it was just an annoying game, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was a hint. Was Kate trying to tell me something almost from the moment I stepped foot on this island? But why would she do that?

  I write down Kate Haem.

  That turns
into “aka theme,” “take me ha,” and “meet kaha” until eventually I land on something that just might be right.

  “Make hate,” I whisper.

  Kate Haem’s power could be to make hate.

  Immediately, I write down Hiltop P. Shemese, which rearranges easily into Mephistopheles. It’s not a single power, but perhaps that’s because Mephisto is higher-ranking and, thus, has multiple powers.

  I list everyone I can think of. The secretary, Eve Risset; my sculpting teacher, Dr. Weinchler; the music prof, Maestro Insullis; the gym coach, Stealth Vergner; the history teacher, Star Wetpier; the poetry prof, Levi Beemaker. Then my housemoms, Elle Gufy and Shera T. Bond. And Ben’s housedad, Finn Kid.

  I start with the short names. They’re easier.

  “Finn Kid might be able to find kin,” I say as I write it down. “And Elle Gufy could be feel ugly. Maybe Shera is bond hearts? And I think…Star is…rewrite past. Or trap sweet.” No, that leaves an extra I and R. “Rewrite past. That’s what Star can do.”

  As I’m working on Stealth Vergner’s name, Lou finally rounds the corner. He’s hunched over his yellow bucket, steering it with the mop and the lever he uses to ring the mop out. Between the gap in his teeth, he is whistling a low tune. Until he spies me. Then he stops in his tracks.

  I close my sketchbook and stand.

  “If you’s looking for Pilot—” he says and starts pushing his bucket again.

  “I’m looking for you.”

  “Some idiot throw up or something?”

  “No, I don’t need you to clean anything.”

  Watching me from the corner of his dark purple eye, he pushes the bucket past me, jingles with his keys until he unlocks the door, and shuffles into the cramped space of the janitor’s closet. I follow him in, almost pass out from the muggy chemical stench, and close the door behind us. Lou dumps brown water out of the bucket and sticks a hose in it to rinse the remaining grime down the drain.

  There’s nowhere to sit.

  “Cut to the chase,” he says over the rush of water.