Revenge of the Evil Librarian

by Michelle Knudsen

  Too bad, Old Cyn says in the back of my brain. Get on with it, you hussy.

  Old Cyn has turned into someone’s aged grandmother when I wasn’t looking, apparently.

  Stop stalling, I tell myself in my own present-Cyn inner voice. It’s now or never.

  Right. Okay.

  Showtime.

  I take a deep breath and speak as loudly as I can, making sure my voice will carry to where Peter is still valiantly but increasingly hopelessly toiling away.

  “I kissed Peter!”

  Everyone turns to look at me. Even, for a moment, the two demons, who freeze mid-grapple on the grass.

  Ryan is staring at me like I’ve sprouted some demon appendages of my own. “What?” he manages finally.

  “That night I came back from the demon world.” I get down from the bleachers and step out a few paces onto the field, calling back to him. “You had left with Jules and you weren’t talking to me, even though I really could have used your support right about then, you know, and instead you walked off with her, holding hands, and Peter said he wanted to thank me properly for helping him break the tether, and then he kissed me. And . . . and I let him. And I kissed him back.”

  Ryan is still staring at me, open-mouthed. So is Jules. So are Annie and Leticia and Diane and William.

  “And I liked it!” I shout. “It was amazing!”

  Ryan jumps down and comes over and grabs my hands like he’s trying to capture my sudden explosion of crazy and keep it contained. “Why are you saying this?” he asks. “Cyn, what are you doing?”

  Dimly, I am aware of the demons fighting each other again. I want to turn to look and see if Peter seems any stronger, if this feeding-on-drama thing really works like that, only I’m a little too caught up now in what I created. I can’t look away from Ryan’s shocked and deeply unhappy face.

  “You said no more secrets, well . . . there you go. My final secret revealed. I’m attracted to Peter, and I kissed him, and sometimes, in my dreams, we do other things that I’m not going to go into detail about right now. I don’t want to be with him, I want to be with you, but . . .”

  “But you kissed him,” Ryan says flatly. “And you liked it. And you think now is a good time to tell me all about it.”

  “You were holding her hand!” I scream at him, and I realize this part is not coming out solely for Peter’s benefit. This part has been lying in wait inside me like an infection, silently growing and festering, and I didn’t have any idea how big and painful it had gotten until this moment. “She’s been your best friend for practically your whole life and you never even mentioned her to me! Why would you do that? Why would you keep her a secret unless you had something to hide? And then I saw you, I saw you turn your back on me and walk away with her, holding her hand, like you were together, like it was the most natural thing in the world, just like everyone has been saying to me since I got here . . .”

  “Cyn, stop it! You’re being crazy! Jules and I are just friends, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that!”

  “We are not!” Jules shouts suddenly, and Peter makes a sound of near ecstasy off to my right, and this time I can tell without even looking that he is indeed taking all of this in and that it is working.

  “What?” Ryan says, turning now to stare at her.

  She jumps down from the bleachers to join us. “Do you not remember what happened at the end of last summer? The last night, when we stayed up until dawn behind the seats in the theater? Something changed that night, you know it did. I’ve liked you for so long, struggled through so many summers of waiting, and finally, finally you were starting to like me back. . . . You kissed me good night, right outside my bunk before I went inside. You stood there, with your arms around me, kissing me, and I thought, this is it, finally . . .”

  “Jules . . . that was . . . it didn’t mean . . . it was late, and we’d been up all night, and of course, of course, I care about you, but I don’t . . . I’m not . . .”

  “No,” she says in the same sort of flat voice Ryan used just a few minutes earlier. “It did mean something. It doesn’t now, I know. It’s too late. But it did. You were finally starting to let me in, to think of me in the way I had wanted you to for so long. I couldn’t wait for this summer, to see what would happen, to see you, and then you get off the bus and casually introduce me to your girlfriend, who you never mentioned to me, either, not in any of your texts or e-mails or anything . . .”

  It makes me nauseous to think of Ryan texting and e-mailing Jules all year long, and never saying a word. Especially if what she’s saying is true, and he kissed her . . .

  Suddenly there is a scream of anguish from the field, and we all whip our heads around to look. Peter is driving his spiked hooves into Mr. Gabriel’s brother’s abdomen over and over, and the flailing spider legs are starting to slow and fall still.

  “Cyn!” Peter shouts. “Now, Cyn! He’s out! He’s trying to run!”

  I pull my hands from Ryan’s grip and stumble forward, yanking my ridiculous fan from my waistband and beginning to fan at the weakened demon body like a maniac.

  “I can’t see him!” I shout at Peter. “Am I even fanning the right place?”

  “Yes! Keep going!”

  So I do. I try to channel my churned-up emotions into the muscles of my arms. I try to focus on the motion of the fan and not on my all-too-vivid mental image of Ryan and Jules standing in the middle of the path with their arms around each other and their mouths pressed together. I realize that at some point I have started crying, but I’m using both hands on the fan for maximum intensity, and I’m afraid to take a second to wipe my eyes. I’m getting tired already, but Peter is staring intently at . . . something . . . which I take to mean that Mr. Gabriel is not gone yet and I have to keep going.

  I sense someone coming up behind me, and I hear Annie’s voice. “Hey,” she says. That’s all, just Hey, but she stands behind me and puts her arms around me and I feel like I can fan for a little longer, so I do. I stand there, taking comfort in my best friend’s silent presence, silent and so much stronger than I ever realized, and I move the fan up and down and up and down, and I try not to think about anything else at all.

  Finally, Peter reaches out a hoof to stop me.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s done.”

  I let my hands drop. My arm muscles are burning. I know it’s just a fan, not a kettlebell or anything, but you try fanning with that much effort and intensity for that long and see how your arms feel afterward.

  Then I see one of the spider legs move and I leap backward, pulling Annie with me. “Peter! He’s not dead!”

  “No,” Peter agrees. “I couldn’t . . . once Mr. Gabriel was gone, I had to stop. I didn’t want to kill him.”

  “Why not?” Annie says, flabbergasted. “He’s a monster. He deserves to die.”

  Peter just shakes his head.

  “That’s not his thing,” I tell Annie. “Let it go.”

  Then I look back down at the barely alive demon. “But what are we going to do with him?”

  Before anyone can make a suggestion, there’s a flash of light, and then Aaron is standing there. He’s bloody and disheveled, but he grins widely at us all the same. His shoulder fins are waving in excitement.

  “Hey, nice job, you guys! We were getting a little worried there for a while, but finally we felt him come through the tether. My mistress was ready for him on the other side, and now all of him is safely contained once again.”

  “Contained?” I ask. “Why didn’t she just kill him?”

  “She wasn’t exactly at full strength anymore,” he says defensively. “And he still has a lot of supporters down there. She thought it might be wise to keep him alive for now, as a bargaining chip if nothing else. Plus, I know she wishes to . . . have some words with him. And perhaps discuss some possible methods of punishment for his behavior. But don’t worry — he can’t come up here and bother you again.”

  “How do you
know?” Annie demands. “Last time we all thought he was dead, and he managed to come back. Now we know he’s not. What’s to stop him from trying again? And again?”

  “Now that we know about him, we can keep him safely locked away,” Aaron says. “I swear. He has a lot to answer for, and my mistress is going to see that he does. Which he can’t do if he’s up here gallivanting around. She’ll make it so that he cannot possibly escape the demon realm. Really. It’s going to be okay.”

  Annie still looks doubtful, and I can’t say I blame her. Plus, it’s Aaron. Who, granted, has been fairly forthcoming and helpful over the past several days, but still . . . you never really know with him.

  “What about this one?” I ask, giving Little Brother a kick in the leg with my sneaker. It comes back sticky with some sort of goo, and I scrape it frantically against the grass. Ick.

  “I will take him off your hands,” Aaron says briskly. “This is good-bye for now, since there’s a lot of cleanup and stuff that needs to happen down there.” He winks at me. “Not good-bye forever, though, of course. See you next time!”

  He vanishes, and Mr. Gabriel’s brother vanishes with him.

  Peter coughs delicately. “If you all don’t mind, I’m going to go change back somewhere a little more private.” He heads for the trees at the far end of the field.

  “Why did he want to change back in private?” Annie asks. “He changed the first time right in front of us.”

  “I think when he changes back, he’ll be naked,” I say. “Just a hunch, but it makes sense. His clothes do seem to have evaporated somewhere along the line.”

  “Oh.” She sounds a little disappointed and glances over her shoulder at where Peter is walking away from us.

  “Quit it,” I say, elbowing her. “You have a boyfriend now. No peeking at other naked men.”

  “Screw that,” she says. “Looking is totally allowed. Back off, relationship police.”

  We go back to the bleachers, where the others are waiting. Most of the others. “Where’s Jules?” I ask.

  “She . . . left,” Ryan says.

  “Speaking of leaving,” Leticia says, “I think it’s time we went back to our hotel. I need to sleep for about ten hours. You ready to go, Annie?”

  “Yes,” Annie says definitively. She goes over to William, who slips an arm around her waist.

  Sweet, sweet William. I really like that guy.

  “Okay, then,” Diane says. “See you two tomorrow, yeah?”

  I nod, and they head back toward the main campus and the parking lot.

  And then it’s just me and Ryan standing alone in the empty moonlit soccer field.

  “Was that true, what you said?” he asks. “Did you really kiss him? I . . . got the sense you were saying it for Peter’s benefit somehow, but . . .”

  “Peter feeds on drama,” I explain, not sure how this had failed to come up before now. I guess Ryan and I were always just talking about other things. Or not talking at all. “Like most demons feed on souls or pain or fear or death.”

  “Really?” He looks at me hopefully. “So you were just . . . ?”

  For one teeny second, I am tempted to lie to him. To pretend it was all made up, and to maybe even express shock and dismay that he could possibly believe that it was true.

  But just for a teeny second.

  “Fake drama wouldn’t have worked,” I say. “It was true. I really did kiss him. Or at least, I really kissed him back. For a second. But then I told him to stop and said that it could never happen again. And it has not.”

  He gives me a sad smile. “Except in your dreams.”

  “I can’t help that. And it doesn’t mean anything except probably that I feel guilty about it and my subconscious is trying to work through it.” I pause and then ask, “What about what Jules said? Was that true?”

  Ryan goes over and sits down on the bleachers. I follow and sit beside him.

  “Yes,” he says. “And she’s right . . . something did happen that night. Things felt like they’d changed between us. But when I kissed her, I didn’t . . . I thought I would feel differently than I did. I guess I convinced myself that she felt the same way, that we were still just friends. She didn’t bring it up all year, and I didn’t, either, and so I thought maybe we could just let it go and pretend it never happened.”

  “But you didn’t really think that,” I say gently. “Or you would have told her about me.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I guess that’s true.”

  I make myself ask the next question. “Are you sure you don’t want to be with her?”

  “Yes! I really do just want to be her friend.” He reaches out and pulls me closer to him. “I want to be with you.”

  “Even after I kissed Peter?”

  He makes a show of thinking about this for a minute. “Yes,” he says finally. “But please do not ever do that again. And also try to stop dreaming about him. What exactly happens in these dreams, anyway?”

  “That is between me and my subconscious,” I say firmly.

  “Hmm.”

  I take a breath. “Ryan . . . you know we are always going to have some things we don’t tell each other. I don’t mean secrets like the kind I kept from you before. No more of those, for real. I mean little things, stupid things . . . I am never again going to tell you when I have a sexy dream about someone other than you, for example. And just so you know, I do not want to hear about it if you have a sexy dream about someone else, either. But also you should just never do that.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Hmm.”

  He’s quiet for a moment, and I rest my head on his shoulder while I wait for his response. He smells good. Like soap and that stuff he uses in his hair and the underlying Ryan-scent that I love, that always makes me think of rugby and theater and his leg-weakening smile and of curling up together in his bedroom, his arms wrapped around me and my face tucked safely against his chest.

  His arm snakes more tightly around my waist and gives me a squeeze. “I guess I can live with that. But . . . do try to share all the important things, okay? Even the things you’re not totally sure are important but might be. Also anything demon-related that happens outside of your dreams.”

  “Deal,” I say.

  “Deal,” he agrees, kissing the top of my head.

  “So kissing Jules wasn’t nearly as good as kissing me, then?”

  “I’m not sure I remember clearly enough. Let me check.” He tilts my face up to his and kisses me nice and slow, just like the first time, only without the having-to-be-careful-about-the-stage-makeup part. “Yup,” he says when he pulls away. “Kissing you is definitely better.” He hesitates, and then asks in a voice that makes me think he’s not entirely kidding, “Is kissing me better than kissing Peter?”

  “I think so,” I say. “But I should probably make sure.” Now it’s my turn to lean in. I kiss him less gently. And for a lot longer.

  He doesn’t seem to mind.

  For the first time pretty much since I got here, camp life becomes somewhat normal.

  Of course, normal for the few days before opening night is kind of a relative term, but even the craziness of squeezing most of tech week into one long day and getting all the finishing touches squared away on the set and the scene changes and everything else seems blessedly routine when there are no evil demons trying to kill and/or abduct anyone. That’s one thing about demons: they really put things in perspective.

  And finally the shows go up, and they are amazing.

  I think the offstage drama between Ryan and Jules made their performances even better. The tension between them works so perfectly with their characters and the story . . . they are both really excellent. Really, really excellent. I can’t even bring myself to hate Jules for anything. I mean, it’s Ryan. Of course she secretly fell in love with him after all those summers together. And it sounds like he was not entirely forthright in how he dealt with what happened, which could not have made things easy for he
r. I’m not saying I want to be her best friend. Or even her friend at all. But I can watch her onstage and admire and respect her, and be civil to her, and even feel some empathy for her, which is more than I would have expected to be capable of after learning she’d kissed my boyfriend. I mean, before he was my boyfriend. But still.

  And yes, I know that makes me a raging hypocrite, since I kissed Peter while Ryan was my boyfriend. But in the end, that turned out to be useful, and so I’m not going to keep beating myself up about it. But I do hope the dreams stop happening eventually. They are very . . . disconcerting. Peter and I have done things in my dreams that I’ve not gotten close to doing with Ryan yet. And I always wake up feeling confused and unsettled and . . . sweaty.

  Moving on.

  Our own show, of course, was the best of all. I mean, it really was — that’s not just my opinion. Everyone said so. Well, not the official camp Tony Award committees, not yet. But they will. And, okay, Jules didn’t exactly say it, but she didn’t say any other show was better, either. Annie and Leticia and Diane and William started a standing ovation on our opening night, and every single person in the theater stood up. I was really proud of Peter. He was so happy, and he totally deserved it. He’s really talented, that one. And he went through quite a lot to get to be here. I know he’s going to go on to do great things.

  We broke the tether again later that night after the fight in the soccer field, so Peter is no longer connected to me in any physical or demon-energetical way. He does want to keep in touch, though. Which is good, because I can use that kind of connection when I graduate from college and am looking for real theater jobs. He’ll probably have at least three popular and critically acclaimed musicals going by then.

  Annie and William and Leticia and Diane go home the day after Scarlet Pimpernel’s opening night.

  Annie and William seem to be okay again. I take Annie aside when they come over to say good-bye.

  “How are you doing?” I ask her. “I know this was not the fun camp visit you were imagining.”