Bed hog, I think incoherently, and then what she’s taken — no, not taken, because it’s still connected to me, so maybe borrowed — what she’s borrowed, what’s she’s using, the part of me that she’s pulled over to where she is, settles into her like a second skin.
“Oh,” I say out loud as I stagger forward and land hard on my knees. That’s . . . really unpleasant. The umbrella analogy was so way off. I feel — diminished. Weak.
Vulnerable.
I fall forward onto my hands, head down.
“Okay,” I tell myself out loud. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” Because I have to pull it together here, right now. I give myself a few seconds to breathe, in and out, there you go, totally fine, and then I make myself start to straighten back up.
This is harder than I would like, and I stop once I get back to my knees. I give myself another few seconds, breathing, getting used to this new different feeling of being less than I was before. Temporarily, I remind myself. Just for now. Except now is probably exactly the time when it would be highly beneficial to be at full power.
Well, not much I can do about that at the moment. I have to work with what I’ve got. One more deep breath and then I get all the way back up to my feet and raise my head.
The demons are going at one another like maniacs.
They all have weapons of some sort, either semi-familiar weapon-type things like axes and knives, or else parts of their demon bodies that kind of extend into claws and hooks and things like that. The weapons — all of them, external and body-part — are glowing red at various intensities. I watch for a minute, and I think I finally get how this is going to work.
Scary as the demons have all become physically, the real fighting is being done with their demony magic energy. That is what Gabriel and Kingston were feeding with the souls of the high school kids, and it’s also why my roachy goodness is so valuable to Ms. Královna. Because if the demons were just fighting physically, my resistance would be next to useless. But they’re not. They’re using their demon essence. The same stuff that gives off the red aura that Mr. Gabriel made me able to see. I see it now, in what they’re all using to smite one another with.
And I see something else, too. The more intense the red aura on the weapon, the more the other demon seems to feel it, and suffer . . . but then the more diminished the attacker seems to be, energy-wise, immediately after. I think they’ve only got a finite amount of the stuff to work with, and the harder the hit, the less they have left to hit with the next time. Or to defend themselves with against the others. Which, again, puts the demoness in a very good position, since she can use my resistance to bolster her own defenses. And so she can hit harder, and suffer less damage. It’s really frickin’ brilliant. She’s totally going to win.
Right. So she’s all set, and I should get to work.
The initial shock of having a great swath of my own personal energy shifted over to someone else has eased a little, but I still feel shaky and weak. Which sucks, given that I am surrounded by terrifying creatures who are going to want to kill me if they notice me. Which so far they have not, since I am very small compared to everything else around me, and they are all focused on the general massacre happening in the center of the arena at the moment. Which means I should get going while they remain thus distracted.
I turn to scan the edges of the circle, to find where Gabriel left my best friend.
I see Aaron first, who seems just as happy to be here as he expected to be. He’s cheering for his demoness and screaming insults at the other demons and to all appearances having the time of his life.
It only takes me a second more to find Annie, and what I see makes it hard to keep my hard-won upright position.
She’s screaming. She’s screaming and terrified and, in stark contrast to Aaron’s insane joy, staring frantically around her in absolute and completely bewildered horror. I had half expected to have to drag her away against her will once I cut the cord to the librarian, but I can see that this is not going to be necessary. Whatever delusions she’d let herself believe in, whatever romanticized fairy-tale scenario she had bought into, I think her eyes are fully open to her awful situation now.
I can’t stand to see her like this. It was almost better when she was delusional. At least then she wasn’t so scared.
So go save her, you idiot.
I start to run. It’s a stumbly run, because I am still not feeling anything like my personal physical best here, but it’s still faster than walking. I keep to the edges of the arena, since obviously running into the middle of the demony fray is not an option. But I really, really wish the arena were not quite so enormous. Especially because I have suddenly remembered that I have to sever Annie’s connection to Mr. Gabriel ASAP not just to get it done and over with, but because if one of the other demons manages to kill him before I get to her, then Annie is going to die right along with him.
Oh, crap.
I cannot let that happen. Not now, not when I’m here and I’ve come so far and the end is finally in sight.
I force my legs to run a little faster.
I am about halfway around when I feel something fast and sharp and agonizing slice through my shoulder.
One of the audience demons has noticed me. It’s green and reptilian and gigantic, and one of its long, snaky appendages is wrapping itself around my ankle while another goes for my arm. Each one has long, needle-thin spikes at various intervals along the surface, and one of these is red with blood from my shoulder. I scream and try to jerk away, which only succeeds in tumbling me to the ground, since the thing still has a firm grip on my ankle. It begins to drag me toward where the main bulk of it is, and I stare in helpless horror as a second mouth opens lower down on its scaly abdomen, opening wide to show me all of the many long and pointy teeth it is about to rip me apart with. I scream again and without thinking I slice at the tentacle with the ulu-protractor, praying to God and Sondheim and all that is holy and good that the demoness hadn’t said anything about only getting to use the protractor once, too.
Both of the demon’s mouths scream in pain and surprise, and the tentacle loosens around my ankle and I scramble back to my feet and take off, away, not looking back to see if it is still coming. I don’t think it can; I think the noncompeting demons have to stay out of the arena proper. I hope this is enforced with some kind of absolute, impossible-to-break prevention magic, a demonic Invisible Fence perimeter, because if it’s just that they have to pay a hefty fine or something for breaking the rules, I am probably totally screwed.
But nothing new grabs me or slices through me and I keep running. And when I’ve covered about another quarter of the distance, Annie sees me.
“CYN!” she screams, and I can only pray again that Gabriel and Kingston are both too busy or too far away to have heard her.
Shut up! I scream back at her in my mind, still running. I can’t hold a finger to my lips to make the international shh sign because that is really hard to do when you’re running as fast as you can and anyway I’m afraid I might cut my nose off with the protractor.
She can’t seem to shut up, though, and she screams my name twice more before she dissolves into wordless sobbing shrieks. Despite myself, I turn my head to see if anyone has noticed. And I stumble to a stop.
Kingston is looking right at me from across the arena.
He looks from me to Annie and then back, still fending off another demon with several of his spider legs. And then he looks in another direction, and I follow to see what he is looking at, and it is Mr. Gabriel.
Mr. Gabriel is not looking at me. Or at Kingston or Annie. He’s facing away from us entirely, in the final throes of slaughtering a demon that looks kind of like a giant scorpion crossed with a Venus flytrap and a dandelion.
Kingston looks back at me and smiles a terrible lion-bear smile. And my heart shrivels into a tiny knot and sinks into the depths of my toes, and I wait for him to call some warning to the librarian.
And then
he turns to the demon he was still half fighting and gets back to it.
I stand there for a second, not getting it. Until I remember that Principal Kingston and Mr. Gabriel are not actually friends. In fact, they are enemies. They had a truce, but now it is over. That terrible smile was not because he was about to screw me and Annie. It was because I am about to screw Mr. Gabriel.
Annie screams my name again, spurring me back into motion and making me want to punch her in the face. “Shut up, dammit!” I scream, out loud this time, but I don’t think she can hear me. I don’t think she’s capable of much in the way of rational sensory input right now at all.
I glance again at Mr. Gabriel, just in time to see him deliver the killing blow to his plant-scorpion adversary. His energy weapons seem to be his long, clawlike hands, and as he stands over the other demon’s dead body, screaming up at the sky in savage triumph, he raises his hands above his head and I see that the red glow gathered there around them is growing stronger. And so apparently every demon you kill gives up its remaining energy to you, sort of Highlander-style. In the midst of everything, I can’t help wondering if anyone else I know has even seen that movie and would get that reference. I bet Ryan has. The thought of him is like being kicked in the heart, and I realize I have wasted several precious seconds in my own head, and meanwhile Mr. Gabriel is done with his victim and is casting around for a new one. There aren’t very many left.
I throw everything I have left into a desperate burst of speed. Don’t see me, please don’t see me, please don’t see me I beg the librarian in my head, but I don’t turn back around to find out if he’s seen me or not. I just keep running and running and running until Annie is there in front of me. And then I stagger to a stop and she collapses into my arms.
I shove her backward, away from me. No time for that, and anyway I’m still undecided whether I want to hug her and never let go or stick with my original desire to punch her in the face. I ignore her newly bewildered expression and find the tendril of the librarian’s demon energy that has her fixed to where she’s standing. It’s looped around both of her legs like manacles, anchoring her to the ground. She has clearly tried already to free herself; the skin around her ankles is red and angry and torn. She’s bleeding a little on one side, and the bit of Mr. Gabriel’s tether that touches her there seems to be pressing itself deeper against the wound. In fact — I stare, and have to fight back a wave of nausea. The tendril is lined with tiny . . . tongues. Lots of them. They are moving eagerly against her damaged ankle, literally drinking in her pain and fear and blood.
And through the semitransparent substance of the tendril itself, I can see a darker thread of Mr. Gabriel’s demonic essence, so deep a red it’s almost black, and somehow I know that’s what I need to destroy. It runs up and into Annie like a vein, carrying his terrible poison into her soul. She may be seeing things for what they really are now, but they’re still connected more than just physically. He’s still linked to her.
But not for long.
I drop to my knees beside her and swing my hand up and then down, slicing neatly through the librarian’s final hold on my best friend as easily as if his horrible demon-energy-binding were nothing but a piece of banana bread and I had the mother of all Ginsu knives to cut it with.
Mr. Gabriel’s scream of pain and horror and fury and surprise hits me from behind with actual physical force and knocks me over at the same time as it drowns out all the other sound in the arena.
For a second everything stops; the other demons freeze midfight, the audience goes quiet, and they all seem to be searching around for the source of the disturbance. I scramble to turn around, but I’m still on the ground when Mr. Gabriel stops screaming and whips his head around toward where he’d left his bride-to-be.
And he sees me, and he knows what I have done.
His terrible red eyes flash blindingly and he roars his horrible roar again. And then he comes for me. The rest of the demons — there are only a few still alive among the combatants — burst back into motion and sound, continuing their own efforts, but I can’t spare them much attention. My eyes are locked on the evil librarian’s. I can’t seem to look away; he’s got me pinned there like the bug that I am. Vaguely, I feel Annie pulling at me and screaming, and I see that the demoness is drawing her stingers from Principal Kingston’s carcass and turning to throw herself after Mr. G.
He only has eyes for me, though. He’s coming hard and fast, insane with rage and absolutely terrifying.
I can’t move. I can only sit there and watch as he raises his impossible claw-hand, preparing for the strike he is already visualizing in his mind, even though he is still relatively far away, and I think of my biology textbook / shield, still looped around my shoulder, and wonder whose astoundingly stupid idea it was to make it only work once. Was I supposed to negotiate that point during the deal-making process? Did the demoness expect me to talk her up to a three-strikes kind of scenario? Three is a much more reasonable number.
I do still have the ulu-protractor, but using it as a weapon against him would be like pricking King Kong in the toe with the point of a safety pin. He’d barely feel it, and in the meantime he’d be ripping through me with his claw-hands and tearing my insides out like spaghetti.
Well, you’ve got to do something, my brain says reasonably, and he’s getting close now, so make a choice and carry it out. It’s not like you’ve got all that many options to choose from.
This is very true. In fact, I think I’ve only got about two: get my textbook / shield up in time to catch his blow, or die horribly.
I like when choices are easy like that.
Annie is still screaming and trying to pull me away; she’s behind me on the ground, pulling me backward, and this is good, that’s a good place for her, because I don’t want her to get in the way.
I’m still half sitting, half lying on the ground, my legs splayed out before me, but I don’t feel pinned anymore. I feel patient and calm. I am just waiting for my cue. I make sure my shield is positioned appropriately on my upper arm, biology-side out. Timing is everything, and I have to get this exactly right.
The librarian staggers suddenly; this is because the demoness has thrown herself forward and is clinging to his back, crushing one of his wings and flaying him with her stingers. As I watch, she opens her mouth and bites deeply into his shoulder with her eel-teeth.
Mr. Gabriel keeps coming. Without Annie he’s lost everything, and I don’t know if he still thinks he can win and have his dreamed-of future of eternal demonic romance, or if he just wants to get to kill me before he dies, but either way he’s not stopping to deal with Ms. Královna. He’s growling and roaring, and I think there are some words mixed in there with the animal sounds, and I think some of them are mine and no and kill and bitch.
He’s coming, coming closer, and I’m waiting, and everything else just falls away. I’m listening for the call in my headset, waiting for the conductor’s baton to drop, and I’m ready. And then the moment comes. With a final scream of rage and pain and loss, he swings his claw-hand down to rip me open, but it is all happening as I have rehearsed it in my mind and I turn and raise up my shield and at the moment of contact there is a blinding flash of light and I have to turn my head from the brightness and the power of it. I can’t see, but somehow I can still tell that Mr. Gabriel is thrown violently backward. And as my sight comes slowly back, I see the demoness atop him, driving her stingers into him again and again and again.
There is that Highlander moment again, but this time it is Ms. Královna who absorbs her victim’s energy. She screams her own scream of triumph, and then the klaxon sounds again, and the battle is over.
Aaron is jumping around at the end of his tether like an overexcited dog, visibly beside himself with happiness. He’s gazing lovingly at his bloody, exhausted, exhilarated fish-featured demoness with the same naked want as when she was in human form. Perhaps more. She spares him a tolerant, fond smile, which is
particularly disturbing with her long eel’s mouth, and I swear he almost loses consciousness from bliss.
I finally turn around to look at Annie. She’s sitting behind me, still crying, but at least the screaming has stopped.
And honestly, I think she’s allowed to cry a bit after everything she’s been through. I think she’s allowed to cry a lot.
I scootch back to sit beside her, and put my arms around her, and she collapses against me into helpless sobs.
“It’s okay,” I tell her, smoothing my hand over her hair in that way that you do when someone is sobbing into your chest. “It’s over now.”
And I know that I’m right, and I also know that over has a lot of meanings for her right now, and that part of her is still probably mourning the loss of her sexy librarian fiancé.
And that’s all okay, too. Because she will still be fine in the end, because all heartbreaks heal in time, and life goes on, and we still have another year of high school to survive. And I’ll help her get through it, because that’s what best friends do. And I can do that, because I’m still here, and not dead.
Somehow, I have managed to make it through this relatively intact.
And more than anything else I’m feeling right now — residual terror and pain and relief and exhaustion and revulsion and mild yet somewhat amused contempt for Aaron and anxiety about the rest of what I promised the demoness and uncertainty about how I’m going to make things right with Ryan and everything, everything else — mostly, I’m just so happy to have my best friend back at last.
After a while, Annie whispers against my now very tear-dampened shirt, “Can we go home now?”
That’s a good question. I would like the answer to be yes.
The demoness is doing what I’m guessing are some kind of official demony things over by the judge’s bench / head table / satanic temple. There is probably some serious paperwork or something when a new demon ruler takes over, I would imagine.
I’m definitely antsy to get out of here. Both because, you know, it’s a demon world and we do not belong here and there are dead demon remains everywhere, but also because I’m starting to worry about all of the audience demons, who are no longer distracted by the fighting now that the fighting is over. They have left us alone so far, but I keep hearing the demoness saying meat and prey in my head. After all of this, I do not want to be eaten by some random demon who just wanted a postshow snack.
Evil Librarian Page 26