Desolate (Desolation)

by Ali Cross

  The dim chime of the bell sounded from the hallway. “Oh shoot,” Miri said. “Time to go.”

  “So much for lunch.” I wrapped my delicious sandwich and sadly chucked it into the garbage can by the door.

  “Consider it a well-meaning attempt to keep me from being too depressed that I was eating PB&J for the zillionth time while you ate one of my boyfriend’s delicious concoctions.”

  “Ha,” I said, letting her link her arm in mine and walk me through the door.

  chapter six

  During our free period, Miri and I opted for study hall, despite the fact that not much studying ever got done there. But Miri said we needed a place where we could talk about the Shakespeare assignment, and since it still poured buckets outside, the study hall was our only choice. Neither of us were in a hurry to face Sister Mary Theresa, either.

  The room looked like the reception hall after Sunday mass (Miri’d taken me a few times since I moved into Lucy’s place). A table at the front of the room should have held a plate of cookies. Poor Sister Margarite made bigger and bigger batches trying to accommodate our ravenous desire for her delicious double-chocolate-chip creations—never knowing that Marcus took them all and mainly threw them at the jocks while they walked down the hall.

  Noisy talkers doing anything but studying, sat at the plain, round tables with uncomfortable plastic chairs.

  Miri and I grabbed two chairs from a table where a couple (I couldn’t tell who) were mauling each other and contaminating the space around them in at least a three-foot radius. We set our chairs as far away from them as we could.

  I didn’t like school—it seemed I wasn’t alone in that. But it gave me something to do, filled my time with something other than the constant guilt and self-loathing that occupied my mind 99% of the rest of the time. Plus, I understood school. Understood what the teachers wanted from me—and I could provide it. School was pretty much the only thing I could control in my life, and that was a good thing.

  “We have got to get some work done on our scene,” Miri said, pulling out her book of plays, a notebook and pen. I knew she’d do the note-taking, so I took out my silver Sharpie, put my ankle on my knee and went to work embellishing my new black Chucks.

  My old ones—the ones Aaron had doodled on—were still in my room in Hell. Sneakers or boots were not exactly dress code but since being exiled to this human life I decided I could only concede so much. The staff seemed to have gotten the memo that they shouldn’t push me on it. Maybe Knowles, maybe Cornelius, had said something to the Dean, I didn’t know. And I didn’t care.

  “Should we act out a scene? Or should we paint or something? I mean—we’re pretty good at painting.” Miri laughed, high and fluty. I gave her a half-smile and accompanying eye roll. By “painting” she meant the extreme makeover we gave her bedroom from depths-of-Hell black to normal-girl pale green.

  “Oh! Or we could make a modern version of the story. But I guess we should figure out which play we’re going to do, huh? I was thinking maybe King Lear—that could be funny. Or we could do . . .”

  The smell of Sharpie takes me back to another day, almost a year ago now. Aaron and I hide under the bleachers during lunch, chocolate bars and a shared Coke our meal. Instead of my own hands, I see Aaron’s, his knuckles tattooed with Celtic knots.

  “Why’d you do that?” I ask, tracing my finger over his skin. Aaron stops, frozen in place until I remove my finger. It must bug him, freak him out or something. “Forget it.”

  It feels like forever in which we do nothing. Neither of us move or speak. I’m not even sure we are breathing.

  Finally Aaron sighs, like a long, low whistle, and resumes his drawing. After a minute he says, “I don’t know.” He draws an intricate knot that looks a lot like the crosses on his hands. I figure he isn’t going to say anything more, so it surprises me when he clears his throat.

  “See, there’s this thing. You’re gonna think I’m a total freak.” He looks up, startled at his own words, an apology already on his lips—and we both bust up laughing. Everyone calls Aaron a freak—and since I hang around him, everyone calls me a freak, too. If this is what it means to be one, then I like it.

  Time seems to stand still around us, and it’s like I’m standing outside of myself, watching the scene instead of living it. I’ve never laughed before. Never felt the sensation that starts in my head and moves all the way into my stomach. Even my feet feel different.

  I am different.

  Our eyes meet, our laughter trickling away. Aaron leans forward and I hold my breath. I don’t know what he’s doing, but I see something new in his eyes. Something like hope. My mind races—I can’t be responsible for his hope. I am desolation—not hope. I jerk back, knocking the Sharpie out of Aaron’s hand with my foot.

  “Oh! Sorry,” I say, though I’m not sorry at all. I lean over to grab the pen at the same moment Aaron does and our heads thwack together with an audible thunk.

  “Shit,” Aaron says, slapping his hand to his head.

  Belatedly I remember I’m supposed to be human and that the head-bonk should have hurt me too. “Ow,” I add and wrack my brain for something. Something to say or do to make things better. “What’s the thing?” I practically shout in my effort to get it out, to fill up the heavy air between us with something other than this awkward silence.

  “Thing?” For a moment, Aaron’s expression is blank before his eyes light up with understanding. “Oh. The thing.” He reaches over and pulls my foot back toward him, then holds out his hand for the Sharpie. I put it in his palm, careful not to let our fingers touch. I suspect I’ve given him the wrong impression about our friendship, and I’m unsure of how to change it. But not touching him seems like a good idea.

  I’m intensely aware of my ankle on his knee, but I leave it there because I like the contact. I am forever, always, selfish.

  “Yeah. The thing. What is it?”

  Aaron laughs, sort of, and flicks the rod in his lower lip with his tongue. He goes back to drawing, leaning down and paying extra attention. I can’t see his face behind the curtain of black hair that hides him from view.

  “See, I started having these dreams—wild dreams with crazy creatures and bad dudes and . . . Have you ever seen Nosferatu?” He doesn’t look up, but he pauses, waiting for my answer which I don’t give. Of course I’ve seen it—Father takes great enjoyment from the dark tales humans tell.

  “Well, anyway, these dreams have demons and all kinds of scary crap in them. And I’m not talking Bram Stoker’s vampires either. These aren’t Count Dracula types. These are bad-as-all-get-out, straight-from-the-fires-of-hell evil things.” I shiver and he rubs my leg, but withdraws his hand like I’ve burned him, though I know I’m as cold as they come. “Sorry,” he says, and I hear the tiny tink-tink sound his lip stud makes when it clatters against his teeth.

  “Anyway, I don’t need to tell you all that crap, I guess. Thing is, I had these funky dreams and they totally freaked me out. But every time I had one, when I woke up, I’d have these images in my head. Knots and crosses—I looked them up, and they’re all Celtic things. Like from thousands of years ago. When I look at them, and especially when I draw them, I feel safer.”

  Silently, he adds another knot spiraling out from the Converse logo on the ankle of my shoe. I don’t want him to stop talking. At first I was afraid of what he’d say—that he’d say he’d seen me in his dreams as this horrible awful, black-as-night creature—but now I need to know more. I want to feel safe too.

  “Keep going.” I hope he knows I don’t mean the drawing—though I don’t want him to stop that, either.

  “Anyway, it’s weird, like I said. Maybe I really am a freak.”

  “But what about the designs—the tattoos on your hands?”

  He sighs, and I know the sound. It isn’t frustration or anger; it’s hope. Hope that I really want to know. Hope that he hasn’t scared me away. He has no idea how much neither of those fears are true.
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br />   “I fell asleep one night with my sketchbook. And I had the same dream—or at least, I started to. But then it was like the monsters couldn’t cut through, like they were stuck behind a glass wall or something. At first I didn’t know what the deal was, but when I slept over at a friend’s house one night, it was the whole carnival of freakiness all over again.”

  He finishes the design on my left shoe and pulls my other foot onto his lap. “So I started keeping the drawings on me all the time—and I felt better.” He shrugs. “I got my first tattoo right after that and while the bad guys still show up in my dreams, it’s better than before. And the more knots I have, the safer I feel.” He looks up at me, then and wiggles his fingers, each one decorated with a protective tattoo. “So that’s why I’ve got these babies.” His dark brown eyes glint with a hint of humor—something foreign in Aaron’s eyes. “And others too.”

  His face flames red and he drops his gaze. I can hear his lip ring clicking against his teeth even over the scritch of the pen on my shoe.

  “Earth to Desi. Come in, Desi.”

  “What?” I struggled to bring Miri into focus, and had to look around to get my bearings. Study hall, rain pounding the windows, kids talking (or other stuff). Not the gym, not the past. Not with Aaron.

  “Where the heck were you? You missed my brilliant ideas.”

  I blew out a breath. “Sorry. What’d I miss?”

  “You okay? Was it . . . like . . .” She waved her hand in the air.

  “No, it wasn’t Father. It was just . . .” I put the cap back on the pen. “Just a memory.”

  Miri watched me, reading me as well as any demon could. She nodded. “Well, as I was having this awesome conversation with myself, I found the perfect scene for us to do.”

  She paused for dramatic effect.

  “Ophelia’s mad scene.” She threw her hands up in the air in a ta da! sort of way. “You know. From Hamlet?”

  Yeah, I knew the scene. Knew it really well. I’d actually met Ophelia—and so had Shakespeare. She was this totally beautiful girl who Shakespeare loved madly. Except Ophelia was, well, crazy. Seriously. And she wasn’t nice. What Shakespeare ever saw in her, I had no idea because Ophelia was one of the cruelest people I’d ever met in Hell. Shakespeare thought she’d committed suicide, but her death had only been made to look that way.

  In reality, she’d been murdered by the father of a young boy Ophelia had abducted and . . . done stuff to. Like I said. Seriously messed up.

  I shivered involuntarily and Miri said, “Yeah, it’s so creepy. That’s why I think it’d be perfect.”

  “Well, which one? The bawdy singing and dancing scene or the one where she hands out flowers?”

  Miri looked at me as if I were stupid for having to ask.

  “Then a modern retelling for sure.” I threw my arms out to the side. “‘You promised me to wed. So would I have done, by yonder sun. And thou hadst not come to my bed,’” I added in a sing-song voice. And then I realized the entire room was dead silent. Because everyone was watching me.

  “Whoa,” Miri said.

  I covered my face with my hands.

  chapter seven

  “Anything?” Longinus asked in his usual clipped manner. He definitely didn’t mince words, that guy. I had barely set my bag down before he spoke.

  I shook my head as I dropped into a chair, pulled my knees to my chest and draped my school sweater over my bare legs. Resting my cheek on my knee I fixed my gaze on the tapestry of the Tree of Life—or Ygdrisyll, really. The world tree.

  Silence waited until I lifted my head and looked around. “What?”

  “Tell us,” Knowles said from his shadowy corner.

  “There isn’t anything to tell. I stayed out most of the night, and I watched. I watched and watched and watched. I’m telling you—there was nothing.”

  Knowles didn’t blink, didn’t breathe. Just stared.

  “Really,” I finally said. “Nothing happened, no one showed up—no creepy gray guy on a creepy gray horse.”

  “But?” Knowles prompted. Sometimes I hated him. Seriously. He would stare me down until I gave in. I decided to save myself the trouble.

  “It was just . . .” I pressed my forehead to my knees, wishing I could disappear. “There was this faintest feeling of Hell. That’s it.”

  Longinus pushed himself away from the wall. “What do you mean? Did the horseman come, or no?”

  “No, no,” Cornelius said, lifting his glasses from where they hung against his chest. “She said she saw no one, and I believe her. But, you say you felt something?” He added the last with a softer tone, meant to draw me out of myself. And it worked. I knew his kind face would be waiting for me when I looked up. Knew that I could tell him.

  “Yeah. From the ocean—it felt like . . . well, it felt like Hell. Like a Door. But how could there be a Door to Hell in the bay? Heimdall guards the path between the worlds—he would only do it for a god and despite what Father pretends, he’s not a true god. The only other Door to Hell on Earth is the one Heimdall opened when Midgard was created—when all the Doors to the Nine Worlds were created. But the Door to Helheimer’s been destroyed. Right?” I aimed that question at Knowles, who leaned forward on his knees, his hands twisting, twisting, twisting, between them.

  “The Door’s been destroyed, right?” I repeated. My tone had bite, a promise of pain should he attempt to deceive me.

  “That Door . . . has been damaged, yes.”

  “That Door—damaged.”

  “Yes.” Knowles refused to meet my gaze.

  “Damaged.” I paused for his reluctant nod. “And are there others?”

  He raised his eyes to mine. “I swear I don’t know much more than that—the only thing I have heard is that Loki has created another Door, another bridge between his world and ours.”

  “How is that possible?” Longinus’ words lashed into the room like the crack of a whip. Startled, Miri jumped so high she nearly dropped her laptop.

  “How is what possible?” James stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.

  “Knowles says Lucifer’s opened another Door,” Miri said, reaching out to James. He took her hand and sat down beside her.

  “Damn,” James said.

  Damn didn’t even begin to cover it.

  “What do you mean, Knowles? Spit it out.” I stood, rigid as Longinus, both of us facing the ancient demon, ready to pummel the truth out of him if necessary.

  “I don’t know anything more than that. I’m not even sure if it’s true. I overheard that—that boy. The one with the disturbing followers.”

  “Eleon.” Hatred for that creature welled up inside me like a black tide.

  Knowles nodded. “I heard him talking with Taige, the girl with the blood tattoos. He told her Lucifer had succeeded in opening another Door and that he thought he could introduce her to the master soon. Of course that’s a lie. Lucifer would never agree to such a thing. So perhaps there is no truth in the Door’s existence, either.” He said it, but he tugged at his short-cropped beard in a way that suggested he didn’t really believe it.

  “I’ll talk to him.” I didn’t wait for their permission, just grabbed my bag and left the room.

  The halls were empty and my sneakers squeaked on the linoleum. I wished for my Docs—right about now, the sharp drum beat of stomping boots would be a comfort.

  I slipped into the girls’ bathroom, making certain there were no witnesses. I set my bag down and closed my eyes. It was effortless now, the Becoming. Dark or Light, it didn’t seem to matter—a simple command, a call to action, and my power was there, Shadow or Halo or . . . whatever you called the hybrid I’d Become. But this time I sought the gifts of my shadow-self and reached out for the demon named Eleon.

  There.

  I ran for my car, stashed my bag inside, then ducked behind a crypt and closed my eyes once more. This time I embraced all that I was and Became.

  Seconds of exhilarating flight, not c
aring who might glimpse me as I slipped through the twilight sky, and I arrived at a one-room guest cottage on the grounds of a local mansion. Hearing the voices of a boy and girl inside, my stomach turned. I stepped onto the porch and with a thrust of my power, blew the heavy wooden door inward in a shower of sparks and splintered wood.

  “What the—” Eleon wheeled around, not bothering to cover himself, while the girl shrieked and pulled the blanket up to her chin, scooting against the headboard in one smooth movement.

  “Desolation.” Eleon slipped from the bed and fell to one knee, his fist to his chest in the manner of Akaros’ Spartans—an affectation I felt sure. There was nothing of Akaros in this weakling.

  I withdrew my power just enough that it no longer held physical form, but still had presence in the room. I could feel Eleon’s desire to call upon his own Shadow, but he resisted. So there is some steal in him after all.

  “Princess. To what do I owe this honor?” He still hadn’t looked up, still had his eyes glued to the floor, but the harshness in his voice belied his obeisance. He had no real respect for me—any honor he afforded me was for my father. He, like many others, questioned why Father had not disowned me since my betrayal.

  I flicked my eyes to the girl—Vamp-Girl from the library yesterday. “Leave.”

  She practically flew from the bed, barely stopping long enough to pull on the most necessary of clothing before dashing for the door. I stood in the small entryway to the studio cottage. The girl hesitated, clearly unwilling to get close to me, but unsure how she could leave without doing so.

  I made no move to give her more room.

  When she passed, she stepped through the reach of my Shadow and bit back a cry. It would have been nearly unbearable for her—like a zillion ice crystals beating against her skin, each as sharp as a well-turned blade. To her credit, she did not run.

  At least, not until her feet fell on the driveway. Then she ran at break-neck speed, not once looking back.