“If he had to. It’d be a clear gateway in for the underworld. But I doubt he’d do that.”
“He’s got no reason to now that she’s gone.” I meet Ben’s gaze. “Do you think Mr. Watso will hate me forever because of what happened to Molly?”
“Molly’s gone because you guys were friends. She was a part of that friendship.”
“She’s dead because of that friendship.”
“Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself,” he says.
“I just can’t believe how dumb I was.”
“Hold on there.” We stop walking and he turns me to face him. His hands are on my shoulders, and he’s looking quite serious when he says, “That’s my girlfriend you’re talking smack about.”
With that word—girlfriend—running through my head and the warmth of his hand on mine, we return to campus and cross the quad. I watch Ben walk to the boys’ dorm. He smiles back at me when he opens the door, and we wave again, smile again, say good night, and eventually, with me suppressing dumb giggles that I sort of love, retire indoors.
Harper isn’t in my room when I curl up with thoughts of the beautiful Ben Zin, the boy who is, at last, mine. I see bright lights like fireworks behind my eyes. Ben’s my boyfriend. We’ll figure the Big V stuff out. He’ll find a way to win. I’ll help Teddy—maybe I can find a way to wrestle the Seven Sinning Sisters away from Mephisto and Dia—and then get Teddy to wake me up. And, after that, Ben and I will be together in California. It won’t be easy, but we can do it.
It is that gloriously satisfying thought that sends me swiftly into dreams, dreams I’m quite certain will feature a tall, lovely, mint-eyed sculptor.
Except it’s not Ben in my dreams.
It’s Dia.
At first he and I are arguing, but we swiftly find ourselves in a far more compromising position than I’ve ever been in. I feel the soft ring of his open mouth moving down my neck to my shoulder, leaving a glowing tattoo that looks just like Invidia’s. When he leans away from me, his mouth is open—and he’s screaming.
My eyelids burst wide to find Harper standing over my bed in the glow of a lamp. She’s screaming at me. She reels back as I stagger out of bed, holding my arms out defensively.
“What is it?” I cry, looking for an intruder. “Where? Who?”
“Y-y-you!”
I catch a glimpse of myself in Harper’s full-length mirror as she staggers backward.
And I do a double take.
Everything about my reflection is exaggerated: my lips and cheekbones are fuller; my eyes are huge and a strange violet color; my curves are inflated like helium balloons; my legs are sinfully long. It’s only my big, everywhere hair that looks like me.
“I’m dreaming,” I utter. “This must be a dream.”
I shift, watching the movement in the mirror to be sure I’m looking at my own reflection. As I do, I see what Harper was screaming about and what she is now, from the furthest corner of her bed, pointing at in dumbfounded silence.
“What on Earth?” I breathe as a shimmering silver tail wraps over my shoulder.
I look at it, and it wags once. Then it disintegrates into a million sparkling fragments that glow, dance, and vanish, taking my larger-than-life exterior with them.
IT SMELLS LIKE WET DOG OUTSIDE THE CLOSET IN WHICH Lou Knows and Pilot keep their janitorial supplies. I must have walked by this closet a dozen times in the last month and seen Lou bent over, filling his dingy yellow bucket with soapy water. All along, he’s known something about me. Or so Pilot suggested the other day.
Today, I’m going to find out what Lou Knows knows about my soul.
And so restarts my attempts to act on my PT to “look closer” when, in fact, all I really want to do is close my eyes and, like all the other Cania students do, act as if nothing weird is going down. But last night I saw something I’d have to be brain dead—not just in a coma—to forget. I saw something I’d be crazy not to investigate. I saw something that Harper is so going to blab to the whole school; even in a land of sworn enemies, Harper has a way of spreading news. So before I have to deal with girls in the bathroom whispering trash about my (I can’t believe I’m actually admitting this) tail, which has thankfully not reappeared since Harper screamed it away, I need to get a handle on what’s up.
So I wait for Lou.
I lean against the wall. I drum my fingers on the cool painted cinder blocks. The clock above me ticks so loudly, it echoes all the way down the hall, bouncing off the lockers. I’m next to the chem lab, inside of which Miss Incitant—one of many new faculty members Dia brought in—is conducting a lesson I can just overhear. Her name is Latin, just like Invidia, though incitant isn’t one of the seven deadly sins, so Miss Incitant can’t be one of the Seven Sinning Sisters; this is a little more proof that my hunch was right: Dia’s demons go by Latin names.
“The study of chemistry dates back how far?” Miss Incitant asks her students, who are so quiet, their silence echoes. Evidently none of her students’ PTs is to be successful by throwing the teacher a bone. “Thousands of years. To where? Anyone? To the Middle East, where philosophers and scientists engaged in what we now call… anyone? In what we now call alchemy. And what is alchemy?” She waits, patiently pulling teeth. “It is the art of freeing parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence. To what end? Yes, Jackson—oh, you’re just stretching. Anyone else care to try? Alchemy achieves the goals you seek here: longevity, immortality, and redemption. And thus chemistry is magic.”
Magic. Immortality.
Was what I saw last night magic? Was it the work of alchemy? Did someone put a spell on me? Does every student at some point look like I did, thanks to our proximity to demons? Or am I, like, possessed?
I slide to the floor to wait for Lou. I open my sketchbook. Time ticks by. Before I know it, I’ve filled page after page with hasty renderings of the vision I saw last night: her voluptuous body, her pillowy lips, her commanding stance and impressive height. The movement of her hand as she tugged her nightie to cover herself. Yes, I’m thinking about my own reflection as if it wasn’t mine at all. That’s because whatever I saw, it was nothing like me.
I tear out a page and absently roll it into a long tube. I stare down the hall through it, like a telescope. Still no Lou. I flip it over and write his name on it.
“Lou knows my soul,” I whisper. “Why do you know my soul?” I ask the name on the page.
I tap my pencil over Lou Knows and stare ahead. Lou is a demon with a non-Latin
