I rolled my eyes. “Like that’s the first time a freshman has tried that. Mr. Barry would have just started mispronouncing a bunch of other words until he made the frosh so embarrassed he never considered doing it again.”
“Well, Ms. Forest turned purple and started threatening him in German. No one had any idea of what she was saying, but I heard rumors that there was smoke coming out of her ears or something like that.”
“Smoke?” I said, suddenly nervous.
“But they were all too afraid of her to report her to the principal. And besides, it’s not like he would have done anything. We all know the teachers here are babysitters first. No one cares if they actually teach us anything, and heaven forbid we think for ourselves. We just have to perform well on tests.”
“My mom says that in the old days, they used to actually read books in school. And not just the Cliff Notes. The actual books.” I wondered if it had been like that for Rumpy. I still hadn’t gotten his name out of him. We had that conversation about his whole life, and no name.
“I think they still have a library, but I don’t know if anyone checks books out of it anymore,” I said.
“Yeah, well, they don’t have any money, so that makes it tricky. I think they mostly just hope the books that are already there don’t get checked out so they stay in good shape, and then they take free books from authors who are trying to unload them. You know, those kind of books.”
I made a face. I knew the kind of books. Those were generally the authors we had come to our “career” day fairs. And when we asked them about how much money they made, they ended up admitting that they actually paid more to get their books published than they’d ever earned. Which didn’t sound like a job to me at all.
“I’ll watch her today. See if I notice anything weird,” I promised. I hesitated, my hand on my locker door. “Georgia, can I ask you something?”
“Sure. Anything.”
“If a guy was totally in love with you, so much that he had given up everything for you, wouldn’t you feel obligated to at least give him a chance?”
“Fallin, is someone stalking you?” asked Georgia. “No matter what he says he’s done, that doesn’t mean you owe him a date. Or anything else.”
“No, it’s not me. It’s this guy I know. He hasn’t said anything to the girl. But—I wonder if maybe he should.”
“This is the janitor guy, isn’t it?” said Georgia. She’s too smart sometimes.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Who’s the girl?”
“I don’t know. Someone from a long time ago. He—made a bargain with a demon to find out who was his true love. And then he never told her. All this time.”
“That’s kind of sweet. And a little stupid,” said Georgia.
“It wasn’t like they were dating or anything beforehand. She didn’t even know him.”
“And years later, you think he should walk up to her and tell her he made a bargain with a demon for her? I don’t think that will turn out well.”
I could see her point. Sort of. “But what if she just needs a little push? What if she’s lonely and he’s lonely and they could be together? It seems like it could work out.”
“Because they’re old and they’re desperate?” said Georgia.
“No! Because it would be cool. Like a movie where the people wait forever to be together, and then finally—finally—it works out.”
Georgia makes a face. “You get turned on by the weirdest things.”
“I’m not turned on. It’s just—sweet. And he’s a nice guy. He really is.”
“Except that he’s like a hundred years old.”
“Yeah, except for that.”
Georgia shook her head. “You should stay out of it, Fallin. It’s his problem, not yours. You sticking your nose in will just make it worse. And besides, it will look weird. She’ll think he’s paid you to do something.”
“I know, I know.” Like Rumpy said, it was years ago, even if it felt like yesterday. And even if she wasn’t dead, she had to have moved on with her life. Maybe she was even married, had kids. He couldn’t just suddenly reappear and declare undying love for her. He’d missed his chance, and now he had to live with that loss. Grown-ups had to do that. They lived with disappointment.
“The movies always make it sound like love should be this passionate thing. Like if I guy will give up his life to protect you, then he proves he’s the right guy for you. But it’s not real life. In real life, you don’t necessarily want someone to throw himself in front of a train for you or fight off bad guys for you.”
I smiled, thinking of a bunch of movies with guys who always had their shirts ripped off, blood dripping down their faces, dirt covering half their features, but the hair falling just right, and somehow looking sexier than ever before when they were clean and just normal.
“First of all, most girls don’t want to be treated like they are helpless and can’t be trusted to walk down the street without tripping over something. And second of all, most of the time, what we need isn’t life or death all the time. Like, I want a guy who pays attention to me when I’m talking and sits by me at lunch. A guy who remembers what time he’s supposed to pick me up and isn’t so late that he leaves me wondering if he is ever going to show up. A guy who notices when I get my hair cut and tells me I look pretty every day.”
I got what she was saying, but I wasn’t sure I completely agreed with her. I wanted someone who noticed the little things, too, but what about the big things? Now that I knew demons were real, and could steal your soul—or other stuff from you—I guess I thought about things a little differently. “You don’t want him to make a big deal out of it, and tell you how awesome he is. But what if the guy is doing it secretly, behind the scenes? What if he watches over her, but knows he can never have her? And never expects anything else?”
“Unrequited love? I think it’s better in books. I mean, we all fall in love with people who don’t return the feeling. It’s called life. You don’t always get what you want. And I’m not sure it’s real love if the other person doesn’t return it. You just don’t have the chance to find out how it would grow, if it would really last.”
“But what if you knew it was real love?” I asked. “Some magical way?”
She made a face. “Fine. So he’s really in love and he’s never going to be in love with anyone else? It’s hopeless and she’s never going to love him back?”
I nodded.
“Then I guess he’d better find something else meaningful to do with his time.” Georgia could be heartless sometimes.
“You don’t think she could be convinced to look at him again?” I thought again about her life. Her family. It would just be destroying something else that might be right and good.
“You don’t convince someone with love. That’s not the way it works. It’s not like giving someone a job by looking at their resume. No matter how good their qualifications are, you can’t love someone for the facts. You love another person because of the chemistry, because of lots of irrational and completely unpredictable stuff.”
“I thought you were the one who thought you should be rational about love,” I said.
She waved a hand. “Well, as rational as you can be. But that’s not very rational. After all, the species has to go on. We’re programmed to fall in love by our hormones. Or not by the same thing. You can’t force it, even if it seems right.”
I closed my locker and headed to my German class. There was definitely something strange about Ms. Forest. It was in the way she moved, in the way she spoke, even in the way she blinked her eyes. It was like she wasn’t used to doing any of it. Normal people just blink, but she seemed to take a breath, hold it, and then deliberately close her eyes and wait for an insane length of time before opening them again.
And the smoky smell in the room reminded me of the brimstone from Mr. Barry’s house.
I wished again I had some way of contacting Rumpy and getting his take on this. But it
seemed like I was going to have to do this on my own. I had the knife he’d given me, after all. I knew I wasn’t supposed to have something like that on school grounds, but if people understood there were demons around, they would think about changing the rules.
I sat through class and then when Ms. Fores dismissed us, I waited just outside the door. I was going to be marked tardy for my next class, since that was all the way on the other side of the school, but this was more important. I thought that my parents would understand that. Well, eventually they’d understand, when I could explain it all to them and make them believe me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to college anyway. At least, not unless there was a college for demon fighters somewhere.
I waited until the bell had rung and then I slipped back into Ms. Forest’s classroom. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t what I saw. She was sitting at the desk, making notes in the computer. A perfectly normal, human thing to do. What any teacher would do during prep time, right?
“Uh, hi,” I said.
“Oh. Fallin, right?” she said, after a moment. Her head tilted to the side in a way that seemed wrong to me, a little too far to the right, and held a little too stiffly. “What can I do for you?”
I could have taken the easy way out and said that I wanted to talk to her about class. I could have made up some question about German grammar. But I didn’t. “You’re not fooling me,” I said.
Another long hesitation. “I don’t know what you are talking about, Fallin,” she said, and she looked right into my eyes. Was there something about her excessive use of my name or her insistence on facing me squarely that proved I was right?
“I’m talking about who you are. Which is not a substitute German teacher. Or even human,” I said.
She looked back at the computer screen. Then up at me. “I am Ms. Forest, your German teacher. You can ask your principal if you have any questions about my qualifications. I assure you, I have the proper degrees.”
Yeah, I’ll bet she did. All of them faked. “You’re a demon,” I said bluntly. “And you’re here because you’re going to try to get me or some other poor schlub here to make a bargain with you, just like Mr. Barry did. But I’m warning you, it’s not going to work. We’re onto you.”
This was a bluff, since I was pretty sure everyone else in the class would call the men in white suits if I told them what I thought about Ms. Forest. But she didn’t know that.
“A demon?” she said. “I’m afraid that you are confused, Fallin. Have you been talking to others about this delusion of yours?”
It was so the wrong intonation, the wrong words. It was like she was translating everything from some other language. “What do you think will happen when we go down and tell the principal he should double check all your credentials because we think you’re a fraud?”
“My credentials are impeccable,” she said.
Hmm, maybe they were. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t a demon. Impatiently, I said, “Look, why don’t you just leave here? Disappear tonight after school and don’t come back. It’s a win-win situation.” I had my hand on the knife in my backpack.
“I can’t do this,” she said. She actually looked frightened now. Her eyes were flickering this way and that.
I felt sorry for her, somehow. “Let me guess. You have to find someone who’s willing to make a bargain before you get to leave?” Who knew what happened to demons who didn’t seal bargains? There were probably rules in the demon world that I didn’t know anything about.
She nodded just slightly, her eyes darting around the room.
“And then once you’ve found someone, you call your boss or something? You get points and get promoted?”
She didn’t answer, and I took out the knife.
“No, please,” she said. “Not that.”
I moved forward and she scrambled back away from the desk, then ended up against the wall.
I could have thrown the knife at her, but I hesitated.
Then there was smoke rising all around her, and suddenly, she burst out of her skin. It was like watching a tomato put into boiling water or one of those youtube videos where someone puts a potato in a microwave and it suddenly pops, spraying white potato flesh everywhere.
The smell of the brimstone turned more acrid and I stumbled back, retching at the overwhelming scent.
The whole room was filled with smoke by now, and when I looked at Ms. Forest as she was now, I could only think how disgusting she was. She was maybe three feet tall, with two spindly arms that looked as if they were covered in goo rather than skin. I could see straight through to the greenish black blood underneath, and the purple muscles that moved and flexed with every twitch.
Her legs were more like chicken feet, with paddles at the ends instead of feet and toes. She had a head, but it had four mouths, all filled with razor sharp teeth, no nose (which explained why she didn’t throw up at the smell of her own stench) and only a single eye in the middle of her forehead.
She hissed at me, two of her mouths working at the sounds. The other two were baring their teeth and snapping at me if I got close enough.
She’d been easier to deal with, in every way, in the human form. What had I been thinking to make her reveal herself like this?
“You should leave here and not come back. You’re not going to get any bargains from us,” I said. I didn’t know if she was trying to say something to me or not, but I couldn’t understand her.
Her hands started to shake and then I saw the expression on her face grow distant and terrified. If you’ve never seen a demon terrified, you’ve never really been scared. Horror movies can’t compare.
Her mouths moved quickly and then they stopped moving at all, her whole body frozen in a rictus of pain. She shivered and jolted once, twice, then fell to the ground.
I stared down at her, afraid to touch her. Was she dead?
There was a flash of fire, and then the body was gone, and the smell of brimstone changed, and became somehow sweeter and more intense.
Chapter 14
I wished I dared turn my back to open the window, but a moment later there was a flash of light, and a larger demon stood before me. He hadn’t bothered to try to look human, though. He had a head and four limbs, though his skin was reddish and he had a tail—yes, just like in the old drawings you saw of the devil. He was also tall enough that he had to learn forward so that he could fit in the room, his head staring at me from above as if he was hanging from the ceiling.
“You’re the boss, huh?” I said, trying to act calm and collected. I still had the demon knife in my hand that Rumpy had given me. He made me feel like I was a bug, a tiny insect under the microscope, and he was the human staring down at me, trying to decide whether to stick a needle through my carapace and let me hang up on the bulletin board, struggling until I died, or if he should put chloroform on a bit of cotton ball and stuff it under my nose.
“You may think you don’t want to make a bargain, but it isn’t true. Every human who has ever lived wants something that cannot be gotten in ordinary ways. It is only a question of figuring out what that thing is,” he said in a hoarse whisper with an echoing rattle in his lungs, like he was wheezing out his last breath.
“Well, then, I’m the exception to the rule,” I said. “I don’t want to make a bargain with you. I’ve seen the results of those bargains. It’s cured me.”
He shook his head and smiled. It was a terrible smile, really amused, but not in a “laughing-with-you” kind of way. It was definitely a “laughing-at-you” smile. “The results are never enough to deter a strong enough desire. That’s in the future, and humans never think of the future. They are creatures of the now. So what do you want now, I wonder?” He leaned in a little closer to me.
I pulled away, and wondered why I didn’t throw the knife at him right now. That would be the smartest thing. Just aim for his eyes, and—
But I didn’t do it.
“Anything you want in the world, you can have.
Money, fame, a long life, love. There is nothing out of my reach. Name anything and it can be yours. I only ask that you give me a little token of thank in return. Whatever you choose to give.”
Even though he didn’t look human, he had a smooth voice. Mesmerizing almost. I thought I could close my eyes and listen to his voice all day. I’d never need to do anything else, just lie there and be happy with that. It was so tempting to tell him he could give me what he decided, and take what he wished.
I thought of Mr. Barry’s body when I found it, and about Rumpy, and the woman he had loved and lost—without her even knowing it.
“No,” I said, and tried to make it sound like I meant it, like I wouldn’t change my mind.
“Oh, come now. What is it that you want? To be normal? Isn’t that what every teenage girl wants? Think of it. I could make your body sleek and thin. You could look like a model. A few inches taller, with perfect skin and perfect hair. Doesn’t that sound worth a little exchange?”
I stared down at my body. I liked it. It was strong and tough. But it was true that there were times when it made me stand out, and I didn’t want to stand out. I wanted to look more like Georgia and go out on dates like Georgia did. Every dance, most weekends if she wanted to.
I shouldn’t have been letting him get to me like this. I had trained all morning with Rumpy just for this. I had the demon knife in my hand. I should just throw it.
But what if I missed?
What if the knife only worked when demons had a human shell on?
What if I hit him and never had another chance to make a bargain for the rest of my life?
“You’ve spent your whole life in a world of white people, being stared at, talked about behind your back, always different. What if I could make you like them, Fallin. You could be white. You could be invisible. You could walk down the street and have no one notice you. Wouldn’t that be worth something to you?”
How did he know me so well? I felt as if he’d stripped off all my clothes and laid me out naked in front of the whole school. And yet—I also wanted what he was offering. I hated that I wanted it. I knew it was wrong. I knew I should be happy to be who I was, to be different. But I wasn’t. I tried to be, but it had never been fully true.
The Gift of the Demons Page 11