Conspiracy Boy (Angel Academy)

by Cecily White

  “I’m seeing the kitchen of my parents’ house before they were killed. That’s the breakfast table I used to eat at every morning.” He pointed at an empty space. “And that’s my backyard out there with Dookie playing on the patio.”

  “Dookie?”

  “Dachshund,” he explained. “He got eaten by a demon the year before my parents died.”

  Huh. Not the usual thing a kid has to put up with, but probably not the worst, either. “If we get out of this, I’m buying you a new dog. He can help with the chickens. And the goat.”

  “Let’s just focus on the getting-out-of-this part,” he said. “I’m wondering if it’s safe for us to go in there.”

  I stared at the empty room. The last few times I’d had contact with Lucifer, it had been in dreams, and yeah, it had felt incredibly unsafe. This place just felt like a place. No magic. No charms. No tricks.

  “I think it’s safe for me,” I said. “But probably not for you.”

  “There’s no way I’m letting you—”

  “—go in there alone,” I finished for him. “You’re really cute when you’re predictable, you know that?”

  He glared at me. “It’s just an empty room?”

  “Couch and a table,” I reminded him. “Stone walls. Dirty floor. I really think I’m seeing what’s actually there.”

  He thought about it for a second then shook his head. “I don’t like it. I’m coming with you.”

  I’m not entirely sure why I knew that was a hugely bad idea, but something deep inside me started flapping its hands and shrieking danger messages at the thought of Jack setting even one foot in the room. Really, that’s the only explanation I have for what I did next.

  “Desisté,” I said, and Jack’s body froze.

  He could see and hear me—I knew that much. And judging from the annoyance in his eyes, I figured he probably had a solid sense of what had just happened.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I know this sucks, but I need you to trust me. Just stay here, and I’ll be right back, okay?”

  Not like he could respond. I was about to head into the chamber to face my evil destiny when something else occurred to me.

  “One more thing.” I turned back to him. “I hesitate to mention this because it was pretty insignificant and only messed with me a little, but I guess you should know. Luc kissed me. On the lips. And there’s a decent chance we’re sort of quasi bonded. I think that’s why we can jump portals together so well—because he’s part angelblood.”

  Jack’s eyes slowly flooded with rage and disbelief. If I hadn’t tugged a little more power into the freezing charm, I’m pretty sure he would have broken out of it.

  “Don’t overreact,” I said, “and quit mentally yelling at me. There’s nothing shady going on. I’m not marrying him. I’m not in love with him. In fact, I’m pretty sure he kissed me more out of trauma than actual feelings, especially since he was sort of dead and completely mental when it happened, so don’t kill him or anything. Anyway, I thought you should know. And since you’re going to have a few quiet minutes right now, it seemed like a great time to let you process it and start thinking up ways to forgive me.”

  I tiptoed up to his cheek and gave him a kiss.

  “I love you,” I said. “More than oxygen and coffee and chocolate, and even more than my favorite glyph-engraved throwing knives. Don’t forget that. Okay?”

  For the record, I’m aware this was the most cowardly confession in the world. Possibly the whole universe. But it had to be done. And this way, if I died in the next few minutes, I could perish with one fewer sin on my rather considerable rap sheet.

  I gave his hand one last squeeze and then gently shut the door in his face. It’d probably take him a while to forgive me. Not like I could do anything about that now.

  Ahead of me, the empty cavern stretched out in front of me in endless gray ambiguity. Okay, not entirely empty. In the middle of the room where the couch used to be now stood a kitchen stool. And on that chair sat Brutus, Lisa’s cat.

  “I know you’re not really a cat,” I told Brutus, “but I appreciate the effort.”

  I swear he cracked a smile before he jumped off the stool and waddled to a red wood-paneled door with a cat entry, situated in the side of the wall—a door that, prior to a few seconds ago, hadn’t existed.

  “I’m supposed to go through it, huh?” I asked, not really expecting an answer. Which was good, because I didn’t get one.

  The edges of the room had gotten fuzzy with that soft, dreamlike quality, and the dirt on the floor wasn’t visible anymore. Neither was the stone. Along the side walls, dull orange paint peeled off in uneven sheets, and huge cracks ran up the stucco walls like hollow bolts of lightning. The weird thing was that I could still tell I was in the cavern, because my allergies swirled and bucked behind my nose. And I could still feel the Jack bond pulsing warmth behind me, so I knew everything was at least mostly okay.

  Ahead, warm light spilled out of the cat door, begging me to go through.

  “The book’s in there, isn’t it?” I asked again, except this time I knew the answer. I’m not sure how, but I could almost hear it whispering. It needed to talk to me.

  Out of instinct, my hand reached for the doorknob. Before I could touch it, Brutus swiped at my ankle with a paw. No claws, but I could definitely tell he meant business. Not the big door.

  As I looked closer, I could see he was right. The lighted glow pulsed through the cat entry, but the space around the big paneled door stayed ominously dark. Vaguely annoyed, I sank to my knees and followed Brutus through the narrow opening.

  I have clear memories of last fall, traipsing through the cavern to get to the Book of Omens with Jack. And although every piece of that experience was odd, at no point did I feel like I’d left reality. My feet were always attached to the ground, my hair was still connected to my head, and I always knew who I was. Today, not so much.

  As soon as I passed through the opening, my body ceased to exist. Not only was my hair not attached to me, I’m pretty sure there was no me. It’s like I became part of the light.

  “Stay,” Mom’s voice said from somewhere inside me—the light me, not the real me. Even though I couldn’t feel it, I had to believe that version of me still existed somewhere. That I had something to go back to.

  “I’m only here to ask a question,” I called out. “You said if I needed you, I could come. Well, I need you.”

  “Then ask,” the light mom said. “But before you do—are you sure you want the answer?”

  I started to say yes, then hesitated. That was the exact same question she had asked when I told her years ago I wanted the truth about Santa Claus. She said sometimes we ask questions we don’t really want answers to, and then we spend the rest of our lives trying to forget.

  It had seemed a bit hyperbolic to a kid trying to figure out where her Christmas gifts came from, but the point was well taken.

  In this case, whatever the answer was, it meant I would have to become a killer—a monster like Lisa, chased and hunted through life. I would never be safe. I would never have a normal life. Yes, the prophecy would be fulfilled and the Guardians’ burden would be lifted, but only because I would have to carry it for them.

  Did I really want to know the answer? No, I didn’t.

  But I needed it.

  Before I could give an affirmative response, the air started twisting and writhing, as if the light itself had taken on form and substance and was shaping itself into something meaningful. It took me a second to realize that the something was me.

  Another breath, and the world congealed into a nighttime sky, the floor below firming into a concrete window ledge. Behind me, a sheer drop fell off a couple dozen feet, and on the ledge in front, Brutus perched, looking snooty and catlike.

  Vertigo washed over me as I grabbed at the stone. “Could you give a girl some warning next time?”

  Brutus’s nose twitched, which is about as close to compassion as y
ou get with a cat.

  Through the glass windowpane, I saw myself sitting cross-legged on Luc’s bed, my shoes discarded on the floor, my coat draped carelessly over the desk chair. Casual and familiar. Nothing unusual.

  The unusual part was that Luc sat across from me, his knees lightly touching mine, hands dangling close to mine. And wound around our fingers was a cluster of pearly bond threads.

  Linking us.

  Connecting us.

  I kept waiting for it to resolve, like maybe my eyes just needed to focus and it would go away. But it didn’t. It stayed there. Not one thread, like what had sprung up between us during the dinner attack. This was far, far worse. Dozens of them, all squirming and alive, like a nest of baby Thracta demons. It was a train wreck. It was a nightmare.

  The strange thing about it was how possible it seemed. Like this could exist if I let it. Dad always said reality is what you make it. Your choices define you. It felt like Brutus was telling me that this was one of my choices.

  I glared at the cat. “Maybe I wasn’t clear. I came here to find out who the last Gabrielite is so I can finish the prophecy. Not to be assaulted with stupid lies about my future love life.”

  The cat seemed to shrug, like, Hey, this is the Book of Lies, duh.

  Yet another reason why you should never trust a cat.

  Fully annoyed, I glanced back through the window. Luc had his hand on my cheek and had leaned in to kiss me. Only this time I didn’t fight him. I was actually smiling, and so was he. We looked so content. So at peace. Was that even possible, that I could be happy with Luc?

  No. I shut my eyes tight, trying to force the image away.

  “Stop it,” I said through gritted teeth. “I asked a question, and you said you would answer it. Now quit screwing around and do what you promised.”

  Inside my head, something clicked. When my eyes opened, the scene had shifted in two significant ways. First, Luc and I still sat together, but instead of me looking into his bedroom, now I was looking out the window to where we knelt in a field of ash. Or possibly a Nether cul-de-sac of ash, since burned-out houses lined the suburban wasteland and demon hordes swarmed the air above.

  Second, instead of pearly bond threads, this time my hands encircled a flat dagger. Not like the hooked one Jack always carried, but smaller and less lethal-looking. I held it in my lap, absently running my fingers over the blade—top then bottom, as if my fingertips could polish it to a shine. As my hand flipped to swipe the underside, I caught sight of the glyph I’d seen in my vision at Bertle’s house, the same glyph Petra had on her wrist. Two circles, lightning bolt slash, loopy vines twined around the perimeter—the mark of the Guardian Elders.

  The demons above us tightened their flight loops, coming closer and closer to where we sat, but neither of us moved. After a few seconds, I watched myself lean forward and kiss Luc on the cheek. He looked at peace. Not the same sort of contentment as the earlier vision, but calm, nonetheless. I drew a deep breath, and then I drew the knife back and stabbed it into his heart.

  “No!”

  My fists reached up to bang on the glass, like maybe I could break through and stop myself from doing it. But it was too late.

  The scene had already vanished into a shatter pattern of tempered glass shards that skittered across the cavern floor. In front of me, the ash field had been replaced with the same ratty red velour couch and time-scarred coffee table I’d seen before. Brutus sat on the couch, staring at me with slitted eyes. It took me a second to process the shift, then another to make sure my body had solid shape.

  “What,” I said, “was that?”

  Brutus started licking his paw but didn’t reply. He didn’t have to. This was a tragedy of the most epic order, magnetic and horrifying.

  And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my imagination.

  I’ve recently come to the conclusion that true disaster doesn’t happen all at once, like an earthquake. Sometimes the worst atrocities are in the tiny things. Things you don’t notice. This disaster, for example, had been building for months, and I hadn’t seen it at all. Even now, after it had played out for me in raw Technicolor, I still didn’t want to see it.

  “Fine,” I said, mostly to myself. “I’ll just kill him and bring him back. It worked with Jack and it worked with Lyle. Why should Luc be any different?”

  As I spoke, Brutus lifted his head from the paw-licking-fest and rolled it over to rest on top of a dog-eared paperback romance novel, which also hadn’t been there five seconds ago. I glared at the swirly title font and windblown cover models that graced the front of the paperback novel. The Book of Lies.

  “Seriously?” I asked Brutus. “Could we not do this with a bit more elegance?”

  The cat watched as I picked up the book and read. Last time I’d seen a Great Book—the only time I’d seen one—it had been very serious and emotional. Even touching the thing made me feel like my life held more meaning. This was the complete opposite. It felt flimsy in my hand, like the pages had been printed on old newspaper and sat in a basket next to a toilet for a decade. And every page said exactly the same thing:

  Kill him. Close the cracks forever.

  The end.

  I slammed the book and hurled it at the wall, then kicked it a couple times for good measure. There had to be some way around this. I’d found a loophole with Jack. I could find it with Luc, too.

  Couldn’t I?

  “Reanimé,” I snapped at Jack as I stormed through the antechamber, slamming the chamber door behind me. “That was the most pointless, ridiculous, insane… Ugh! Remind me never to come down here again. Like, ever.”

  Jack blinked a few times, snapping out of the spell. “Wait, what happened? What did you—”

  “Get me out of here now.” I leaped up to grab the lowest rung on the ladder and tried to swing myself up. I’m not sure if my hands were sweating or I was just shaking too hard, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t get a grip.

  “Amelie, stop,” Jack said after a few failed attempts. “What happened?”

  “I hate being a Guardian,” I said, still jumping around like a psycho cricket on a crack high. “I hate having stupid angelblood. I hate being in a prophecy. I hate it, hate it, hate it—”

  “Stop,” he ordered.

  I dropped to the ground and sat. The aimless rage feeling of wanting to yell and scream and kick things still welled inside me, but I had no idea what to do with it. Down the tunnel, five books hid behind five doors, actively ruining people’s lives. I wanted to go rip those doors off their hinges and burn the whole situation to ash.

  “Talk to me,” Jack said. “You need to talk to me. What did it say?”

  I shook my head for a second. This was going to hurt.

  “Ami, we’ve been through death and hell and most of high school,” he pointed out. “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.”

  “Touché,” I breathed, leaning into the muddy cavern wall. “Well, to start with, Lisa’s cat is the Antichrist.”

  My recounting was peppered with silence and occasional weird bouts of shaking, but I managed to get it all out. Lisa, Dominic, the Nether realm, my vision with Luc—the second one, not the first. Given my recent confession, the last thing I needed was Jack on even more of a jealous rampage. When I got to the part about the paperback, Jack exhaled deeply.

  “The end, huh?”

  “That’s what it said.” I huddled into his chest and shut my eyes. “The end. The end of everything. Everything about us ends, and we go back to being—”

  “Functionally human.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, no more Guardians, no more Crossworlds draw,” he confirmed. “You realize that means if you kill him, there’s no way to bring him back.”

  I wrapped my arms around my knees and pressed my forehead against them.

  The other part of this that niggled the back of my mind was that if I had to kill Luc in the Nether—which made sense, since the Nether was essentially a Crossworld crack
—then without power or a Watcher, I would have no way of getting myself back, either. I would be stuck there for as long as it existed. Which could be as little as a few minutes or as long as eternity.

  After a minute, Jack lifted his head. “Ami, if I get you to the surface, can you get home okay?”

  “Probably. Why?”

  “I need to do something.”

  “Something like—pick up your dry cleaning? Grab a sandwich?”

  “Something important,” he said but didn’t explain further. Not that I expected him to.

  Usually when he got quiet like this, it was because he knew something big was about to happen and he was plotting it through in his head. And not sharing the details, of course. So, whatever Jack had planned, it had to be complicated.

  Like a robot, I forced myself back up the tunnel, letting him help me only when it felt like my arms might give out. By the time we made it through the church to the cobblestone street, my body was shivering—with cold or shock, I couldn’t tell.

  “I’ll see you back at Luc’s place,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere until I get back. No matter what, okay?”

  “Where would I go?”

  “Just trust me.” He kissed me softly on the lips then started backing away. “Stay put. Also, I’m still pissed at you for freezing me. And for kissing Luc—especially that,” he added. “I don’t care if you are supposed to kill him. He and I are going to have a conversation.”

  “Can’t wait,” I mumbled.

  In all the hubbub, I actually had forgotten about that. Or maybe I just really wanted to forget. As he dashed off, I gave him a quick thumbs-up then tried to start the walk home.

  I say “tried” because what actually happened had less to do with walking and more to do with me sitting on a curb with my head in my hands.

  Wow. Whatever power channels I’d pulled to keep Jack frozen and also navigate the Chamber of Lies had done a serious number on me. It felt like my blood had been replaced with tar and my brain had been run through an industrial food processor.

  I’m honestly not sure how I got home. Or how I made it upstairs without collapsing. At the staircase, the room spun sick circles around my head, and I gripped the railing with a force that left tiny indents in the wood.