A few more students straggled in as Father Hermosa skipped out, darting in just before the bell rang. Riona went to her desk and straightened a stack of papers, taking a moment and a deep breath. One more period, and then a break for lunch. Maybe then she could scan the cafeteria and see if she picked up any of the tingles that suggested either the presence of evil or very bad ventilation. Who knew otherworld wickedness felt like frostbite on the skin? So far, nothing had come onto her radar.
Fifteen teens, dark of brow and curly of lip, gaped at her from their individual seats when she looked up. Something was off. And wouldn’t you know it: Damien Johannes sat squarely in the midst, back for another round of “Pin the Fail on the Donkey.” Her spidey senses were ignited from unvetted suspicion.
Damien, it seemed, was just as thrilled to see her as she, him. “I was certain CPS would have shown up by now and installed a real teacher in your place.”
This time, instead of a stunned silence from his cohorts, a low rumble of chuckles followed his jibe. A girl who was clearly lacking both Vitamin D and a hairbrush even fist-bumped him, or tried. They failed to connect in the middle, sending both their arms dashing past each other’s, which only seemed to entertain them more.
Riona shook her head and clicked her tongue. “Man, white men can’t bump.”
Damien rolled his eyes. “Seriously? Is that the best you can do? Fine, let me hit you up with this one.”
Damien stood, making a great show of snorting as loudly as possible, as though it were a mating call given in the marshy backland by a creature that hoped Nat Geo was filming his every move. In a heroic fashion, he whipped his head forward and released, covering his desk and his books in grimy, green goo.
“Look!” he bellowed to his captive audience of losers, “I’m snot for teacher!”
As their cackles doubled, they all turned on Riona with jesting sneers. Your turn, Teach.
Riona prepped a variation on the theme of snot-nosed children, but something stopped her dead. The whole class’s eyes flickered. Flickered, then deadened, like a good idea in the eyes of a bad politician. Like someone had put red LED’s behind their irises and were attempting to signal the Coast Guard.
“Holy… Okay, kids, bell’s rung. Everyone, listen up!” In a sturdy voice she hoped belied her sudden insight, Riona made her proclamation and slapped her hand down on the corner of the desk. “I think you had homework due today, so get it out and ready. I just… I just need to run across the hall for a second.”
As she skidded into Marc’s classroom, she wasn’t sure if she were looking for help, or an excuse to get out of the homeroom of the children of the corn.
“Ms. Dade?” the priest asked when Riona failed to talk. “Something I or the history class can help you with?”
The weight of two-dozen sets of eyes bore down on her. She tried to form words, but came across instead as a person pulling off a pretty decent goldfish impression.
Finally, she coughed out “in my classroom,” and turned about. A clip-clop rhythm of sensible shoes on the linoleum floor trailed her.
In the hall, she stopped. “Is there a type of demon that, instead of trying to get you to kill or maim or murder, only tries to make you feel bad about yourself?”
Marc’s eyes searched the air above them. “Um, yeah, rare, but there’s something called a Downer Demon. It uses insults to capitalize on a person’s self-doubt and drive them into depression to drive them towards greater evil.”
Riona’s jaw fell. “It’s a sin to be depressed?”
The priest crossed his arms over his chest. “Not just feeling a little down, or otherwise I don’t think a single poet or blues guitarist would ever get into Heaven. But it is a sin to feel powerless despite your own abilities. God hates it when he gives you all the tools to accomplish a job, but all you do is focus on how hard the work is so you never get started.”
Riona’s head dipped in contemplation, and only when Marc’s hand reached out and nudged her chin up so her eyes met his did she really hear his words. “Depression is a gateway sin, Riona, kinda like a parking ticket. Not serious, but dangerous if you start racking them up and ignoring them. If you feel like you can’t find your own worth inside yourself, you’ll go off looking for it from other people. That gives them power over you and takes you away from God’s purpose for your life. In the wrong hands, that type of power can be used to propagate all kinds of evil.”
His thumb pressed into her bottom lip, and though she was certain the feeling was one-sided, she couldn’t help but go weak in the knees.
Which was so not penciled into her knees’ daily schedule.
Standing up straight, eyes shooting open, Riona ground out the words through clenched teeth. “Will you please stop doing that?”
Marc pulled back his hand and his warmth. “Doing what?”
“Making me feel like goo,” she hissed. “I get it, you don’t like me, but you don’t have to toy around with my emotions just to be an ass. God, you’re like… Antarctica one second, then Brazil the next. Could you maybe shoot for that subtle indifference bordering on contempt you had pinned down for so long?”
“I make you feel like goo?” It was as though he’d been accused of some heinous crime or fault, like being a fan of strip bocce ball. An obvious response eluded him.
Riona clicked her tongue. “The gooiest of goo. Could we please focus? Downer Demon? Yeah, I think I found the darkness at St. Cecilia’s, and I think it’s a Downer Demon, and I think he’s in my classroom right this very second.”
Marc scoffed. “Whoa there, hex! Slow down your horses. Yeah, Downer Demons exist, but they’re rare and they don’t tend to manifest as teenagers. Teens are too volatile for them to spend so much energy on, and you know the treaty between the Big Bad and the Big Boss specified that seventeen is the minimum appearance of age for demons to manifest themselves as mortals, so I don’t really think…”
“His name is Damien.”
“Damien?”
Riona nodded.
Marc’s brow became stern and his gaze fell on the adjacent classroom door. “Shit! Yeah, definitely a demon. Okay then, Keystone, let’s go kick some parochial poser patutti.”
Chapter 11
“Come on, kids! Only a half-mile to go, then you can hit the showers.”
Of all the members of the teaching staff who happened to wander into St. Cecilia’s while Riona was casting her sickness hex, one of them was Brother Krieger, the PE teacher. Dee couldn’t believe his luck. Now, leading the gaggle of teens in an invigorating run along the bank of the Charles River, he knew he’d been missing out. People got paid to work out while simultaneously making sure the teens didn’t spend all their muscle mass working PS3 controllers? No. Freaking. Way.
He had to hand it to the lot of them: except for a few stragglers at the back whose bodies were already weakened by cigarettes and whisky, the class was keeping up pretty well, despite the crisp autumn air. No matter the general negative reputation, he found these kids… charming. Dee couldn’t help but imagine for a moment what it would be like to take his own son out for a run like this. Assuming he could ever find another girl who’d go along with that whole when you look seventy, I’ll still only look forty-five thing, and oh, by the way, I’ll also outlive you by about another fifty years and my dad will probably try to bang you the first time he meets you, ‘cause that’s just what Zeus does thing. Then, once she bought that, he’d have to convince her to father his child, with the understanding that with the extra caveat of being a Pure Soul’s progeny, he or she would stand a greater chance of being folded into the calling someday. Maybe not as a Pure Soul himself, per se, but perhaps as a demon tracker or angel chronicler or worse, a certified public accountant.
Rounding out the last block, the school’s graffiti-covered edifice coming into view, he gri
maced. The clock on the school’s tower read six after the hour. Damn, he kept them out too long. Hopefully that didn’t make the principal decide not to call him back for another sub job…
Wait, what? He wasn’t a sub. That was just his cover while they checked out St. Cecilia’s. Why was he here again though, if not to sub? Oh, yeah, Ramiel said there was a demon problem in the school. Well, weren’t no demons in the third period gym class. And maybe if they managed to make it the whole day without destroying a classroom or something, even with the lack of an actual teaching degree, he could talk with …
“Principal Hermosa!”
The father who also served as the school’s headmaster blanched as he stood gawking on the front steps, his eyes narrowed and fierce. His tone vibrated as much as the tip of his finger, which he wagged around in Dee’s general direction, as though with each twist of his wrist he was conducting a musical masterpiece composed on the theme of disappointment and discipline.
“Mr. Zitka! It is forbidden… for-BIDDEN… to take the children off school grounds without written parental permission. Do you have any idea the type of risk you open us to if one of the kids were to get hurt off campus? And then, on top of that, keeping them out into the next class period!”
The class continued to file in with his insistence as Dee remained behind and took up his own defense.
“Sorry, sir. I guess once we hit our stride, we sort of lost track of the time. I didn’t realize it would take so long to…”
“Holy hell!”
Both their heads cranked up to a classroom window on the second story when they heard a boom, followed by a girlish scream. Dee reached the stairs first, but Father Hermosa was close on his trail. The little, ancient clergyman was a surprisingly limber octogenarian. That the sound had come from the classroom where Riona was teaching came as no surprise, of course. What did come as a surprise was everything else they found when they skidded into the mathematics lab.
Riona and Marc stood at the front of the classroom, each doing a spot on impression of a beached koi. Their mouths flopped without sound. In the midst of class stood one dark-haired student, blinking wildly, only the singed cuffs of his shirt remaining on his torso. Burn marks covered the sides of his face and chest, and Dee could still smell the putrid, carcinogenic scent of scorched human hair. It was a textbook example of a demon-vanquishing-spell-used-on-a-human. Every human had a little sin in them. When the hex hit, it brought the sin to the surface and flamed its edges. It didn’t, however, do more than give superficial injuries. Emotionally, however…
“What the fuuuuhhhhh…?”
“You’d best not finish that word, Mr. Johannes!” Hermosa cautioned as he rounded Dee and marched into the classroom.
The rest of the students let off a bit of residual smoke, but remained clothed. Everyone looked dumbfounded, but none so much as the befuddled Pure Souls standing in the front.
“What happened?” Dee mouthed to Marc.
Marc shrugged and whispered back. “Misdiagnosis.”
“Can someone please explain to me what happened here?” In rapid procession, Hermosa’s face took a quick tour of the color spectrum, passing from white to red to purple. His eyes went wide, and his hands shook.
The student in the center of it all began to stutter. “Can’t… feel… my … hands.”
Marc’s hand ran through his hair, his eyes on the ground. “Um, yeah, that’s temporary. Sorry, Father,” he said, turning to Hermosa, “we were just doing a little math demonstration that got slightly out of hand.”
“Math! You are supposed to be across the hall in the history classroom!” Hermosa shot back. “Children, start cleaning up this mess. You three,” he pointed accusingly at three wide-eyed Pure Souls, “my office, now! I’ll be there in a few minutes as soon as I see to the class across the hall. MARCH!”
Riona looked at Marc confusedly, begging with her eyes for his guidance.
“Just do what he says,” Marc suggested. “We can sort it all out after.”
Five minutes later, Marc and Dee sat in the two wooden office chairs that were set up for the principal’s visitors and suspects. Riona paced back and forth, before she stopped in front of the office’s one window and huffed.
“I could have sworn that kid was a demon. Turns out, he was just a creep.”
“Hard to tell with teens, sometimes,” Dee offered, hoping this didn’t discourage her too much. “Rookie mistake. Don’t get too worked up over it.”
“Rookie mistake?” Riona crossed her arms. “Things are getting too serious for me to make rookie mistakes. And especially with children involved, even if they are spiteful, horrible, little, maggoty creatures that give me a new appreciation for the Spartans. You know what the worst thing about this is? How typical this is. Like anything would change just because I’m grown up and everything. All through high school, the nuns were constantly getting on me and sending me to Father Donnegan’s office.”
Marc sat up straight. “You went to parochial school? How did I not know that?”
“You’re surprised?” She chanced him a smile before turning back to the window. “You always tune out whenever Dee and I start talking, but yes. I am a psychologically-scared alumnus of St. John of the Cross Girls’ Academy. Oh my God, how I hated it. The stuffy nuns, the narrow-minded dogma, the tiny little skirts they’d make us wear that we’d freeze our asses off in during the winter.”
Dee grinned, thinking of Riona as a petulant fifteen year old. He turned to his right, intending to give a “Well, lookie here” expression to Marc, but Marc, it seemed, was already lookie-ing there all on his lonesome. That is, right at Riona’s hand, which snaked around her waist and was cutting an imaginary line across the top of her legs, presumably showing where the plaid skirt of her parochial past left off, and Marc’s imagination began.
Dee’s eyes narrowed. He knew that glare, that heavy stare. And when next Riona added, “And Sister Marie Therese was a firm believer in corporal punishment. I can’t tell you how many times that fricking banshee laid into me… Right. Here…” and demonstrated the effect by smacking her backside hard enough that the crack made even Dee flinch, the priest all but went to pieces in his chair. Marc licked his lips like they were covered in honey, his breath hefty. Unless there was a box of fried chicken on the windowsill that Dee couldn’t see, however, the finger-lickin’ good that Marc was salivating for tasted something like a wiccan-gone-wild.
The door slammed behind them, shaking the pane of glass set within it, on which the title “Principal, Father Jose Hermosa” was etched in the lower right corner.
Hermosa’s color had softened since their face-to-face in front of the children. He now only resembled an irradiated peach, rather than a bottle of hot sauce. The return to Zen hadn’t yet reached his vocal cords, however, when he began to lash out like a stockbroker bidding up pork belly futures.
“Luckily, whatever you did seems only to have rattled the students a bit,” he began, but didn’t think to stop there. “Ms. Dade, do you care to explain what happened to Mr. Johannes’s school blazer and dress shirt?”
“Um, they’re gone?” Riona stumbled for an answer. “The lost and found maybe?”
Dee suppressed a giggle, but Hermosa was not impressed.
“And you, Mr. Zitka! Don’t think that just because of Ms. Dade’s screw-up I have forgotten about what you pulled.”
Marc’s eyes flashed accusingly to Dee. “What you pulled?”
Oh, hell no. How could this guy even begin to compare having students off campus without permission to almost exploding one?
Dee shrugged. “I took the kids on a little run by the river, and we got back a little late. No harm, and lesson learned, sir.”
“And I’m happy to pay to replace Damien’s uniform,” Riona added in a rush. “And pay for hair implants,
if he wants to fill in the pieces that burned off.”
The comment seemed to remind Hermosa that Riona was in the room. “You most certainly will, Missy. In my twelve years of running this institution, I have never seen a substitute teacher less capable of classroom management than you. And I’ve never… never had a situation where I had to explain to the parents of a student why their innocent child, with whom they entrusted us, was attacked by a teacher, and a woman no less!”
“It wasn’t an attack.” Riona rolled her eyes and cocked her hip. Dee so hoped she’d let the chauvinist comment fly. “And he wasn’t that innocent, even if he wasn’t… what I thought he was. That Damien has some real serious authority issues.”
Hermosa balanced on his fists as he leaned over the desk and glared. “Sounds like a case of takes one to know one, Miss Dade. Are you even really a teacher? Or is that just your day job?” His eyes traced Riona’s fashionable, but slightly revealing blouse and pencil skirt. “Things on the street a little slow these days?”
Marc was on his feet before Dee had a chance to reach out.
“Now, hold on just a minute! Riona was only trying her best.”
“So she’s not a teacher, then,” Hermosa concluded. “So why did you so highly recommend her and so readily to me, Marc? Our years of friendship and counsel don’t make me worthy of your honesty? Or have you run through all your granddaddy’s trust fund money and this was your way of paying her for last night’s services?”
In comparison to Riona’s ghostlike shock, Marc was burning embers in his checks. “How dare you…”
Hermosa’s eyes narrowed, a grin spreading across his aged face. Each wrinkle looked like it was placed by an artist to increase the annoyance of his mocking expression. “You were seen in the hall with her, you know?” Marc and Riona blanched as their eyes darted away. “Have you any idea of the scandal it would cause if word got around one of my most trusted fill-in priests, a man known to work widely with troubled youth, was grinding himself all over a whore in my hallways?”
Pure & Sinful (Pure Souls) Page 9