Devilish (18 page)

It’s always interesting to have a look in people’s bedrooms. It can tell you a lot. Owen’s room took up the entire third floor, but it was hardly spacious; the ceiling came to just an inch or two above his head. There was an old dresser with the knobs hanging a bit loose. There was a switched-off electrical heater, so it was absolutely frigid.

“You can sleep in my bed,” Owen said.

“Your bed?”

“I’m not sleeping tonight,” he said quickly. “I’m not saying we’re going to share.”

I walked over to a desk with a neat stack of notebooks and textbooks on top. On the shelf above, there was a perfectly organized row of books. I walked over and read the spines—they were all old books, in some cases held
together with carefully placed pieces of yellowed tape. Most of them were adventure novels—
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Treasure Island, The Time Machine, Around the World in 80 Days.
There were others as well, larger books with titles like
The Modern World
and
The Future of Flight.
I reached for one of these but stopped when I noticed that Owen had frozen with an armload of folded blankets that he had just removed from his closet.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay. Just … be careful. They’re kind of fragile.”

I took down
The Modern World
and opened it gingerly. The pages were strong and shiny despite their age. I looked over the drawings of “modern” cities, with strange lemon-shaped flying machines attaching themselves to the tops of skyscrapers.

“You like classics,” I said. “These are all pretty old books. Are you some kind of collector?”

“They were all mine,” he said, resuming movement but still watching me out of the corner of his eye.

This stopped me cold. I closed the book with excessive caution and slid it back into place on the shelf. Owen visibly relaxed a bit, but then turned a wary glance to the heater.

“I guess if you’re sleeping here, I should turn that on,” he said.

“Don’t you usually?”

“These things are fire risks,” he said, bending over and examining the cord.

“So how do you sleep? It’s freezing in here.”

“I dress warm. Anyway, I’ll be awake tonight.”

He switched on the heater and squared himself off in a chair just opposite it.

I pulled off the coat and got into Owen’s bed. It may have looked like a military cot, but it felt like the warmest, most welcoming refuge on earth. I looked up to see Owen’s gaze fixed on me, his fine eyebrows set in a straight line. Then I went to sleep.

I woke up with a snort and a start. Owen was wide awake, standing at the window. I automatically reached up and gave my spikes a tufting and rubbed my face. He didn’t seem to notice how I looked.

“Morning,” he said gruffly. “You should go down and get some breakfast.”

“Don’t you want any?”

“I think better on an empty stomach,” he said. “Go downstairs and eat. Brother Frank is waiting for you.”

“Did you have any good ideas overnight?”

“I’m working on it. Go eat. You need to have lots of energy today, so don’t be all girly and say you aren’t hungry.”

I ignored the girly remark.

Brother Frank was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee. The oak outside the window was completely naked except for a few straggling dead leaves that had survived the last few weeks, clinging to the branches
like those kittens in the Hang in There! posters. The sky was an unpromising steel gray.

“Jane,” he said, perking up at my appearance. “Good morning. Let’s have some breakfast.”

He proceeded to make me a breakfast that could easily have fed eight—pancakes, toast, a leftover cinnamon roll, bacon, fruit salad. When it was all on the table, I picked at a pancake and he pushed around a piece of bacon, but really, neither of us ate much.

“Okay,” I said, “just tell me. What does it mean?”

He knew what I was asking. I was asking,
What does it mean to sell your soul
?

“Do you really want to know?”

“I think I should,” I said. “Knowledge is power, right?”

“That point is debatable.”

“Come on,” I said. “There has to be a perk to this. Do I get any cool abilities? Will I be able to breathe fire or anything? I mean, Lanalee seems to like being a demon.”

“I suppose demons have a place in our world,” he said thoughtfully. “In a sense, they actually help get things done because good things often come from bad. In this world, we have to have both. They balance each other out.”

“So it’s not
all
bad.”

He rubbed his forehead and pushed the plate toward me.

“Here,” he said, “have another pancake.”

We ate in silence until I worked up enough courage to speak again.

“How do you know Owen?” I asked.

“He’s lived with our order since the early 1900s,” he said. “Not just here—in various locations. Every few years or so, one of the brothers or sisters who works in a hospital arranges to get him a new birth certificate. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain someone who’s been fourteen years old for as long as anyone can remember.”

“You’d think they’d send someone … older,” I said.

“Don’t underestimate Owen.”

Outside, some little kids were off to school in their costumes. Among them, there were tiny devils in red pajamas carrying plastic pitchforks.

“Maybe it won’t be too bad,” I said. “Maybe it will be like that.”

He put his hand over mine.

“You’ll never find out,” he said. “I believe that. They’ve taken a lot of people, but they can’t have you.”

I knew my parents had to be beside themselves with worry. I’d been kicked out of school and then disappeared from my bed in the middle of the night. I had to call them. But my parents were smart people—they could trace the number that came up on the caller ID. So I shuffled out of Brother Frank’s house into the cold morning to find a pay phone. I knew there was one on Thayer Street, but that was too common a thoroughfare and was a direct line to Brown, so I could have easily bumped into my dad. That wouldn’t work.

I opted instead to walk toward the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence’s other big school. This had several advantages. There was likely to be a phone around somewhere, I didn’t know anyone who would be going that way, and art students were a lot less likely to notice a very small girl dressed up in hand-me-down guys’ clothes, several sizes too large.

This worked well. I found a fairly secluded phone behind the student center, and with my scruffy spikes and
hobo wear, I fit right in with the stream of art students making their bleary way to class, dragging massive portfolios and art boxes. When I reached for the phone, my arm disappeared up the long sleeve. I looked like I was trying to do a magic trick where I was trying to slip my way out of a massive sack while handcuffed. It was not graceful.

Joan picked up the phone on the first ring.

“Joan,” I said quickly. “I’m fine. Don’t say anything about the Biltmore.”

“Oh my God, Jane! Where are you?”

My mother was on the line in the next instant, demanding everything a panicked parent demands in situations like this. Where was I? Was I okay? Was I coming home? Was I upset about the school in Boston? Was I with Allison?

I almost laughed at that last one.

“I just need a day,” I said.

“Jane …”

There was so much worry and love in her voice that I felt a physical pang—a kind of broken-guitar-string plunk. This was likely to be one of the last times I ever spoke to my mother. Then I would be gone. How I would go, I had no idea. Maybe tomorrow they would find a body—maybe I would just vanish…. There would be questions forever, and they would never know that the reality was worse than even their very worst nightmares.

And I would never see them again. Joan would never ask me if Canada was in South America; Crick would never try to wake me up by chewing at the fringe of my
bedspread. I would never see my mother, tousle-haired at noon, coming downstairs and telling us about the nightly adventures she had with the head chef of the restaurant. My dad would never push over his Sudoku and ask for my help, which he never needed. He just always liked to show me how much he thought of my abilities. My family loved me. And I loved them. And now I was hurting them, and the pay phone clamped to my ear was cold. My world was over. Jane Jarvis was coming to an end. A very bad end.

I set my teeth hard and steadied myself. I could not give in to those thoughts.

“You have to trust me,” I said quickly. “I need this day, more than I’ve ever needed any day in my life.”

I pushed on when she tried to speak.

“Please,” I said. “Trust me. I am fine. I love you. Okay? I have to go now.”

I clapped the phone back onto the hook with too much force. It must have sounded like an angry, crazy hang-up. I stood there, my hand still on it, as if trying to soften the blow after the fact. Then I let go, pulling one finger loose at a time, and made my way slowly back to Brother Frank’s.

Owen was sitting in the living room, cross-legged in the middle of the floor, poking at a gap between the floor-boards with his fingernail.

“Where have
you
been?” he greeted me, jumping to his feet and coming over to me. He grabbed me by the shoulders, as if checking that I was actually there and wasn’t just a walking pile of laundry.

“Calling my parents.”

“What?” He stepped back, and his face contorted in panic. “You didn’t tell them where you are, did you? They’ll come for you. They’ll try to take you….”

“I’m not stupid, Owen,” I said. “No. I didn’t tell them.”

I brushed past him and threw myself into a chair near the space heater. I stared into the glowing orange coils inside the metal casing. It was like hell was already everywhere.

“Brother Frank’s out sending a message to the order,” he said briskly. “We need to get to work. We lost time this morning while you were out.”

He said it in just a slightly accusatory way, as if instead of calling my parents to assure them that I was alive, I’d gone and gotten a manicure.

“Look, don’t you have a weapon or something?” I asked. “Some kind of magic water or something for fighting demons?”

“It’s not
Lord of the Rings
,” he said. “Do you think things really work like that?”

“Well, I didn’t think there were angels or demon hunters, either,” I said. “So forgive me for thinking you might have something useful, like the pointy stick of righteousness.”

“The pointy stick probably wouldn’t do much good,” he said. “It’s not like you can kill her.”

Kill her. Why hadn’t this occurred to me before? Why had it never crossed my mind to just kill her?

“Why not?” I asked. “Why
can’t
I just kill her? Why can’t you just kill her?”

He shook his head.

“I can’t kill her and she can’t kill me because our sides have an agreement. We never directly get involved with each other. We’re like two countries with a border that we agree on. The battle is all about human souls. They want to consume them. We want to protect them. Those are the rules between us.”

“But what about me?” I asked. “I don’t have those rules.”

“You could try to kill her body, but that would be bad.”

“Why is that bad?” I asked. “Why is killing the demon not something we want to do?”

Owen shook his head.

“There’s a demon expression—you go for the pearl, but you get the oyster shell too. The soul is the pearl, and the oyster shell is what it comes in, the body. Lanalee can only have one body at a time, but she can switch as many times as she likes. As long as she’s bought the soul, the body is hers. If you killed Lanalee, she could go right into your body. Up until midnight tonight, she has a valid contract on you. You’d lose instantly. Also, killing is wrong. Even killing demons.”

“So we’re back to the contract.”

“Right,” Owen said with a note of disgust. “I can’t believe this ends with kissing. I hate Lanalee … as much as I can hate anybody. Which I can’t, really. Which sucks. She’s doing this to get at me…. I know it.”

“You think this is about
you
?” I said irritably.

“I’m not saying it’s all about me. I’m just saying the kissing part is to get at me. She’s always trying to get at me. What does she mean by
kissing
?”

He punched his fist into the air a few times for no clear reason. He looked so bothered by it that I felt sorry for him.

“I think she means kissing,” I said.

“But what does that mean? What’s the legal definition?”

“Is there a legal definition?”

“Well, it has to vary a little, right?” He ran his hand through his hair. “From culture to culture? Like, there’s French kissing….”

“She didn’t specify tongue,” I said. “And the physical specifications don’t matter. It’s the motivation, and that we’ll never figure out.”

“We could dare him,” he said. “Maybe he would do it as a dare.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“I’m just trying to think.”

“You can talk about it all day, but you’re not Elton, so you don’t know what it would take to want to kiss me.”

“Are you saying I don’t want to kiss you?” he asked. “I am a guy, no matter what it seems like.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Yes, you did,” he said plainly. “You wanted me to say that I would know exactly what it would take to want to kiss you. In fact …”

“In fact, nothing,” I said.

“I can’t kiss you,” he said.

“What do you mean, can’t? And I don’t want you to.”

An icy feeling had come over me. I had wanted him to. I’d wanted him to grab me and start making out with me wildly. I had no idea where the impulse had come from, but I was mortified that he had known it was there.

“There are rules,” he said. “We can’t get involved.”

“Owen,” I lied, “I did
not
want you to kiss me.”

“Why do you just say the opposite of whatever someone else is saying?” he said. “Do you just have to be difficult?”

“No. I just want to be clear.” Why was I lying? Why did I feel like I was on the verge of tears? Why was I having this fight when I should have been working feverishly on the problem?