by Louisa Lo
Even the most negligent of school janitors would have gotten around to cleaning the mess up in seven years. The fact that it was still there, after all this time, could only mean that whoever put the vengeance magic there had made sure it was good and permanent. It reminded me of the Weasley twins’ final act before they left Hogwarts.
The words and the date dissipated, and in their place was something like a cartoon, a series of images forming in slow motion. It featured a symbol that, had this been the first time I was seeing it, would have made no sense.
The symbol comprised of a dragon on one side and a shield on the other. The shield was encrusted with two diamonds, and there was a sword positioned upright on top of the shield. The cartoon was a continuous loop of the dragon taking flight. As it flew off, it clutched the sword between its teeth and pulled it out of the shield, crapping a disgusting load of green gooey crap onto the shield.
Huh.
The sign off of P.
Gregory’s half-done tattoo.
I turned to him. “You haven’t just been to vengeance schools before. You’ve been to this school. That pool of goo was your way of saying ‘screw you,’ wasn’t it?”
Gregory’s upper lip pulled back in the start of a sneer, as if his instinct was to deny my claim. Then he smoothed out his facial features and he squared his shoulders.
“Yes, I was a student here,” he confirmed softly. “People didn’t take my bastard status kindly. I dropped out at thirteen, soon after the Becoming. The goo was my last act before leaving.”
It was his way of taking what was given to him by birth and owning it, shame and all. That was the day he became Pete, the fiercely proud mercenary with the capital P sign off.
I glanced at the green goo again, trying to memorize the symbol of Gregory’s house without looking like I was doing it. I was never very good at recognizing the different houses’ coat of arms. To me they all looked the same. Each slight variation in the angle of the sword tilt, the number of stars on the shield, the size and position of them, made them different. Hopefully, with all the Vengeance 101 tutoring that Serafina received, she would be able to tell me what house Gregory’s scumbag father had come from. I’d ask her later. Much later. After we had dealt with the current crisis.
The green goo had once again returned to its liquid form with the word Nevermore in its center. Gregory pointed at the letters, his tone matter-of-fact. “You got the nod to Edgar Allan Poe, right?”
“Of course.” The vengeance English class threw in a human poem here and there. “But I admit I always liked the Simpsons version better.”
An awkward silence fell on us as the true meaning of his initial lack of disclosure to me sank in.
I thought of how he didn’t say anything about being a student here, even when we walked straight into the administrative office, and even when we were talking about being in school just now. Maybe he figured the staff might have changed guard in seven years. Maybe he was hoping we wouldn’t come upon the gooey section of the school.
His gamble had almost paid off, as the administrative assistant showed no sign of recognizing him.
That was, if I hadn’t made the connection with him and the goo.
I knew how tough high school could be. Yet even with my challenges, I had a warm immediate family to go home to at night. I had no idea what Gregory’s mom was like, but his dad obviously hadn’t cared enough to offer the mother and child financial support nor the protection of his name.
Despite Gregory’s clinical description of his former bullied life, that kind of childhood had to leave a scar. Just what did it take to drive someone out of school and make him turn his back on any chance of ever becoming a respectable member of his race? Just how desperate did the situation have to be, that joining the shady profession of mercenary seemed like a better alternative?
Gregory looked at me, his eyes full of silent challenge. He must hate being forced to open up about that vulnerable period of his life. His jaw hardened, as if he was waiting for me to mock him, or worse, insult him with my pity.
And no matter how ticked off I was at him for dragging me into the whole changeling mess, I couldn’t do it.
Instead, I gave him what both of us needed at this moment, which was so not holding hands and bonding over having shitty high school years. I gave him something he could work with—my anger. “You asshole. You didn’t bother to tell us about this place when we first mapped the intersection. Are you trying to get Eldon killed? You realize that if he dies, nobody is getting anything, right?”
Gregory blinked, looking surprised yet grateful for the direction I was taking our conversation. “Well, I didn’t think of it at first. It was a long time ago and the frozen yogurt trips never even crossed my mind. Only losers went out for frozen yogurts.”
“What did you do then, while they were gone?” I asked.
Gregory grinned. “I went up to the roof and drank Blue Unicorns with their girlfriends, of course.”
There it was. That flirtatious side he used as a shield; when we both knew full well that just like me, he had never made the type of friends that he could skip class with.
I smirked. “You needed to get high on Blue Unicorns to impress a bunch of losers’ girlfriends?”
“No, I was impressive enough so that they were the ones who offered to go up to the roof with me. And they were the ones who supplied the Blue Unicorns.”
I tried to imagine all the cool kids’ girlfriends going after Gregory behind their backs. I wondered what the teenage version of Mr. Dark-and-Handsome would’ve looked like. He would still be a boy like the rest of them, his shoulders and chest not as well-developed as now, but I imagined that his handsome face, his defiant spirit, and the lure of the forbidden would have been enough to make the average teenage girl swoon.
Hey, Megan, my inner voice said, just because we decided to be nice out of decency, can we not get carried away here? He’s still the enemy, albeit a co-operating one for now. Can you, like, stop drooling over him for five seconds and get on with the mission? You know, that one where you’re trying to prevent an all-out war?
What do you think I’m trying to do here? I asked my inner voice.
I dunno. First you met his “family,” now you’re at his old high school. If I didn’t know better I’d say you’re going steady.
Shut. Up.
“Hey, I think we found something,” Fir called out from the locker area. With one last look at the puddle of green goo, I walked over to where Fir and Serafina were. Gregory followed.
The students had mostly settled into their next class by now, and whoever was still loitering in the hallway couldn’t see us. Fir had put up a protection shield around us, making this section of the hallway appear deserted. It was a good thing, too, because he was pawing over stuff from a locker, one which I had no doubt he’d forced open.
“What is it?” I asked. “Is that Alpha’s locker?”
Fir held out a chemistry textbook. “Put your hand on this.”
I did as he requested. Nothing.
Then after a while, something. It wasn’t anything based on logic, just an impression of fresh-baked bread and clean laundry, all the comforts of home.
And family.
Yes, that was it. Something about the textbook reminded me of the rightness of a loving family, a sense of conviction that the owner of the book was kin, yet the energy signature wasn’t of anyone from my immediate family.
Fir took the textbook from my hand, put it back into the locker, then held up a magnetic photo frame with a picture of three teens in football gear. He pointed at the middle one. “That’s our changeling.”
Serafina nodded. “I agree. He’s Alpha.”
“His last name is Agricola. Thomas Jadrien Agricola.” Fir flipped through what looked like a binder for math.
Agricola in old Latin meant farmer. It was a typical working class vengeance family name. Just like humans, vengeance demons had developed their surnames by using t
heir professions as identifiers. It was another instance when the planes mirrored each other. Mr. Doctus, the teacher whom Fir was pretending to be in order to rein in the teens on the street, for instance, had a last name that meant to teach.
Given the type of school Alpha, or Thomas, was going to, it was no big shock that he wasn’t with an influential family. The question was, why? I thought the whole point of the switch was to steal secrets from the rich and powerful.
Armed with an actual full name, we went back to the administrative office. Fortunately, the administrative assistant was nowhere to be seen, and we were free to snoop around. Unfortunately, trying to locate one single student record in a sea of unfiled ones was like finding a needle in a haystack.
Until I saw a note lying on the ancient fax machine among the spams, indicating that Alpha had called in sick this morning. Just who the heck used a fax machine to report absences anymore? Didn’t anybody at this school hear about emails, texts, or online forms? I made a mental note to have a chat with Grandma about pouring resources into this school. It needed a much better staff and better equipment.
Fir snapped a picture of the note while I ran a simple Internet search of the home address from the fax number. We were now ready to visit Alpha.
Chapter Fifteen
Pencil Pushers
ALPHA’S HOST FAMILY LIVED in one of those condos that people who couldn’t afford to buy multi-million dollar houses, but still wanted to be in the city, crammed into. The tiny units themselves weren’t that badly maintained, though the rent dollars definitely could’ve gone further in more suburban areas. Apparently the rich families who lived in houses in the same area sent their kids to private schools, so updating and maintaining the public school was never a priority.
All this, we learned from Fir as we made our way to Alpha’s home.
“I don’t get it,” I said as the elevator closed with a ding. “Why isn’t Alpha placed with a richer and more prestigious family, if the changelings want the best bang for their buck?”
“My guess is that hosts aren’t always chosen based on money or power, but whether or not they’re strategically important in the long game that the changelings play.” Serafina thought for a moment. “My own case is actually the exception, not the norm. It’s not every day that a changeling princess gets switched, and it’s not every day someone with my family background happened to be born around the same time. Mine was what was considered a switch of equals, between matching, er…”
“Royalties?” I offered.
Serafina flushed. She was never a big fan of her so-called privileged life. I didn’t blame her. Since birth, her social status had brought her nothing but pain. “We no longer have royalties, Megan.”
“Yeah, but your family practically is. Mine, too, if they actually considered me one of them.” I laughed self-deprecatingly. There was a time when it would have really bothered me; now it was just a fact of life. I had enough love in my life to not let it get to me much.
“Anyway,” Serafina continued, “from my understanding a switch like mine and Eldon’s sister is quite rare. In Dualsing, most of those sent out are children from the middle-class, and they don’t always get matched with the wealthiest families. It’s all a matter of luck and timing.”
“They’re earning their way up the changeling society by switching,” Gregory commented. Count on him to be able to see the upward mobility angle.
Serafina nodded. “It would seem so.”
The elevator door opened and we filed out. I threw up a privacy shield around us at the waiting area to finish the conversation, keeping my eyes in the direction of the hallway where Alpha’s unit was.
“So what do we know about Alpha’s host parents? Why were they targeted?” I looked at Gregory, who had made a few calls on our way here. I assumed he was hitting his contacts to find out all he could about the environment in which Alpha grew up. If we were to turn the teen to our side, we had to know who he was, and what knowledge he was supposed to unknowingly steal from his host family.
“Pamela Dorothy Agricola and Harold Zachariah Agricola,” Gregory recited. “Both working as entry level clerks for the Department of Service Administration; their main job responsibilities seem to be the filling out and filing of various federal forms.”
“Bureaucratic pencil pushers.” I knew I liked to talk about the vengeance demons in the field as if they were the only kind in existence. But the truth was, the field agents were whom I aspired to be, what my co-op hours would hopefully train me for. Not everyone got to be James Bond. Somebody always ended up doing the paperwork nobody else wanted to do. “What’s the point of placing a kid with them? What value could they possibly be to the changelings?”
“Don’t underestimate those working behind the scenes, Megan. They’re the ones with the real magic,” Gregory cautioned. I wondered if he wasn’t just talking about the government worker ants. “The little guys are the ones who see everything from tax returns, expense reports, to the logbook of the Council members’ bodyguards. They know who eats at what restaurants, who has money for extra pension contributions, and who placed their kids into gymnastics class and where. Some of my most valuable intel comes from these ‘pencil pushers,’ as you’d call them.”
He had a point.
It wasn’t until now that I realized my ambitions of being certified as a front line worker had always colored my perception of those on the supporting side. Not on a conscious level, but by pursuing the licensed career with an utter single-mindedness, as if it was the end all and be all, I was in a way belittling every other job there was out there.
A sobering thought.
“Okay. Let’s pay them a visit. Hopefully Alpha is up for a talk, being sick from school and all.” I headed toward unit number 806 to the left of the hallway. “Fir and Gregory, why don’t you two wait outside? All four of us showing up at the door may be a bit much. People tend to open their doors to girls more often than boys.”
Fir and Gregory looked at each other. They both weaved a quick invisible spell around themselves, practically in sync.
I rolled my eyes. Looked like nobody wanted to miss the fun.
I fished a tampon tube out of my bag. Long ago I’d learned to take the cotton out of unused tampons and use the tubes to hide stuff from my nosy half-brothers. A safe bet they wouldn’t be too curious about that. Yes, female vengeance demons got PMS, too, but the pain was better controlled with magic, and the bitchiness was channeled into good old productive vengeance.
I shook the tube, sprinkling de-aging fairy dust all over my face and body. I bought it on sale and I had just enough of it for Serafina and me. I passed the tube to Serafina and she put the rest on herself. From the mirrors in the hallway, I could see that we looked just like the eleventh-grade versions of ourselves.
Alpha was in that grade, according to his chemistry textbook. I conjured two backpacks and gave one for Serafina to carry.
I knocked on the door of 806.
Nothing.
Suddenly, I was aware of noise coming from the apartment.
I knocked again. Someone was running in the apartment; a man yelling and then what sounded like a woman, begging him to calm down.
Then I could see the light from the peephole disappeared, suggesting that someone was looking at me and Serafina on the other side. I tried to look as innocent as possible.
The door opened.
A woman in her forties with swollen eyes and untamed hair looked at us tentatively. “May I help you girls?”
“Hi, ma’am. We are Thomas Jadrien Agricola’s classmates,” I said in a squeaky, teenage voice. “We heard that he’s sick so we wanted to come and see how he is. We brought him some class notes.” I gave her my most I’m-so-harmless smile.
The woman’s fingers tightened around the doorframe. Her lower chin was shaking. She looked at a spot behind her, possibly at the man who was yelling earlier. Then she seemed to steel herself. “I-I’m afraid Thomas isn’t available
right now. Maybe, um, you can come back tomorrow?”
“Don’t tell them to come back tomorrow, Pam.” I could hear the man as he hissed. “Just tell them to go away. This is a family matter. We’ll handle it.”
He kicked something in the foyer in apparent frustration, and a shoe tumbled behind Pamela. He must have kicked the front hall shoe rack.
“I’m sorry, girls. This just isn’t a good time.” Pamela sighed, starting to close the door.
I planted my foot between the door and the doorframe. “Oh, I don’t think so. We’re coming in.”
I pushed the door open and walked through the threshold as I shook off the de-aging fairy dust. Serafina did the same while Fir and Gregory made themselves visible again. Pamela backed against the shoe rack, her face pale as a sheet of paper. Then she tripped over a shoe and fell onto the floor.
I helped her up. “Ma’am, you alright? I apologize for the entrance, but we really must speak with Thomas.”
She started crying.
“Go away! Leave my wife alone.” The man whose voice I’d heard earlier came into full view, his face twisted with fear and anger. He was wearing his pajamas, and he had a full day of beard growth. Looked like he might’ve called in sick for the day himself. “We don’t want you here!”
“Harold, let the authorities help. They’re going to find out sooner or later,” Pamela pleaded with her husband. Then she turned to us. “I’m so sorry. My husband is never like this. He’s under terrible shock. We all are.”
“The authorities?” Fir and I echoed. My half-brother had the most amused expression on his face. I doubt he’d ever been mistaken for the law before.
“Help? How are they supposed to help? There’s no fixing this,” Harold spat, then to us, “Just go away!”
The civil servant must have been drinking, I realized as he staggered toward us with bloodshot eyes, his movement menacing had he not had a potbelly and a pair of weakly erected vengeance wings.
Fearing our combined effort would hurt him, we all held back thinking that someone else would prevent the wobbly, disheveled vengeance demon from crashing into us. Then when it was apparent nobody was doing anything about it, and the collision seemed imminent, we ended up each sending out a blast of energy at the same time.