Evil Librarian (13 page)

“Ah.” Mr. Gabriel tilts his head and regards me with that hateful knowing expression. “But you wish he were, don’t you? Don’t bother denying it. It was obvious enough yesterday, but today . . . well. I saw the way you were watching him just now. Wanting him. It was all over you, all around you, wafting from your skin, oozing from your pores. That sense of wanting something more than anything else you’ve ever wanted. The kind of wanting that makes you willing to let everything else go if only you can have your heart’s desire.”

The way Mr. Gabriel purrs the word
wanting
creeps me out. Also the part about my pores. “You’re — I don’t —”

“I can give you that, if you want.” He smiles his charming, awful smile. “Let’s make a deal, dear Cynthia.”

This is confusing. In several ways. The top two are (1) what does he mean, he can give me that? and (2) why would he possibly need to make a deal?

“I don’t understand you,” I say. “Why haven’t you just killed us both already?”

Mr. Gabriel sighs. “Sadly, it’s not quite that easy. It would take a lot of effort to kill you right now, and I don’t have unlimited resources. But it is becoming clear that you could make things annoying for me, and I don’t like to be annoyed. And now you have your friend buzzing about along with you. It’s one thing to squash a single bug, if necessary, but if enough of them start swarming around, it can get very tiresome to keep swatting them all away. I’d rather settle this with you right now.” He leans back, stretching, and puts his feet up on the back of the seat in front of him. “So: back the hell off, and your sexy singing heartthrob can be yours forever. What do you say?”

He waits for my response, watching me, sitting there beside me in the creaky wooden auditorium seat just like he was some normal kind of person with every right to be here.

“What are you
doing
here?” I ask.

“Right now, what I’m doing is offering you a chance to save yourself and your dream-boy.”

“No, I mean —”

“I know what you mean.” He appears to be studying the ceiling tiles. The playfulness is dropping from his voice. “You haven’t answered my question. Do we have a deal?”

“What about Annie?”

“No.” And now he faces me again, and the playfulness is gone entirely. “Annie is mine. Annie is nonnegotiable.”

“No deal.” The words are out before I really consider them, but I know that I mean them. Really I know that I’m not actually thinking about any of this: about what Mr. Gabriel is truly offering, about the wisdom of making deals with demons, about what moral and ethical implications might be involved in making some under-the-table arrangement to spare myself and get to be with Ryan while letting this monster continue to do whatever he wants to do to the rest of the school. None of these things have been evaluated or decided upon or anything, mostly because I’m still not quite believing that I am even sitting here having this conversation at all. But none of that really matters, because I can’t even begin to consider considering any kind of deal if it doesn’t involve saving Annie. I just can’t. No matter what he’s starting to turn her into, she’s still my best friend. I can’t just walk away.

Mr. Gabriel looks at me steadily for a moment, then turns to look at Ryan, who is now, along with the apparently mostly recovered Gina, entertaining everyone else with “A Little Priest,” in which they sing about all the delicious flavors of meat pies one might bake using people of various (former) professions as ingredients.

I notice the intensity of Mr. Gabriel’s gaze and my heart lurches to a stop.

“Please,” I whisper, knowing it is stupid, and pointless, and that there’s no way I can stop him from doing anything he wants to do. “Please don’t hurt him.”

Mr. Gabriel swings his head back around to look at me in surprise. “Are you kidding? He’s incredible. Oh, sweetheart, I’m not touching him until the show is over, no matter how much you piss me off. All demons love
Sweeney Todd,
you know. It’s kind of a given. And your Ryan may be one of the best Sweeneys I’ve ever seen, high-school production values notwithstanding.”

I gape at him. I can’t even get past my surprise enough to feel insulted by his dig at high-school production values.

“No, seriously,” he goes on, apparently entirely in earnest. “The whole cast and crew is safe, at least through opening night. I expect that will be all the time I need, in any case.”

“Time for
what
?” I shout at him, infuriated and starting to completely lose my grip on the whole conversation. “What are you
doing
? What do you want?”

“I want a lot of things,” he says, and his eyes go dark and huge but not in the same swirly-black-hole way from yesterday in the library. He is somehow looking at something far away and elsewhere but also at me and
through
me. The force of his gaze is like a knife in my gut and I can’t breathe and his eyes are kind of burning deep inside the pupils with black and twisty flames and suddenly I am very sure that I don’t want to know what most of those things that he wants actually are. But he keeps talking. “There are some things here that I need in order to get what I want. And I am going to have them. And one of them is your lovely friend Annie, and one of them involves the souls of pretty much all the students in the school.”

He looks at me again and the flames vanish and the knife is gone and his voice goes light and breezy and all coffee-shop conversational, as if he wasn’t just one second ago impaling me with fiery eyes and discussing the dark fate of my best friend and the souls of all my classmates. “I tried a women’s gym first, you know. I thought that would be an excellent place to find a bride. I mean, right? It seems so logical. Someone lithe and flexible with good strong thighs and nice triceps. And while I was looking, I would have all those other souls to taste.” He leans in as if about to impart some valuable words of wisdom. “The souls of women are more — more exquisite than the souls of men. Like the best wine you’ve ever tasted. Or for you, my underage friend, maybe melted chocolate. The best melted chocolate you’ve ever had, warm and thick and so unbelievably sweet as it slides slowly down inside you, filling you with syrupy hot delicious goodness as you suck out every last . . .” He blinks and clears his throat.

I say nothing. This is clearly a monologue, not a conversation, and I’m too appalled and freaked out to even attempt to try to speak. Also:
bride?
He wants Annie to be his
bride
?

“Anyway, it didn’t work out as I’d hoped. I set myself up as a personal trainer, and the ladies all flocked to me like flies to honey because they could not possibly do otherwise, but . . .” He shakes his head, still apparently dismayed by his miscalculation. “They were all too hard, too tired; they came before work or after work or to escape their husbands and children and their stunted frustrating lives, and they channeled all their heat and fire into the elliptical machines and there was nothing left for me. It was very disappointing. But then I got this one girl, a teenage client, young and hungry and so full of life and energy . . .” His face brightens horribly at the memory. “I drained her little by little, mostly while stretching her out after a session, and while I was savoring the final remnants of her on what became my last night there, I thanked her for reminding me. Teenagers have more fire than anyone. Their souls are burning with life and youth and hormones and desire and all the things they want and need and hate and love. And no one would miss those pieces of them that I took away at first; no one pays attention to teenagers except other teenagers, who of course don’t matter either. And I knew I’d be able to take my fill, take my time, gathering what I needed . . . and by the time enough people finally caught on, it would be too late.”

He looks at me then, looks at me stricken into silence with my horror at what he is describing, and for a second flickers of black flames dance again in his eyes. “I didn’t expect someone like you, dear Cynthia. You are very . . . inconvenient. If you are smart, and I think you can be, you will not push me. If you stay out of my way, I may decide to let you live at the end of things. You and your Sweeney both. Think about it.”

And then he is gone, and the world rushes back in around me. “A Little Priest” is just finishing and everyone is applauding and shouting out compliments, and Mr. Henry struggles to make himself heard long enough to call a break before we start the next scene. Mr. Gabriel is clearly insane, evil and dangerous and insane (and, let’s not forget, you know, a
demon
), and even though I still really have no idea what he’s doing and why, it is all the more evident that we have to find a way to stop him.

But how?

Ryan accepts the congratulations of everyone near enough to say something or smile or high-five him as he goes by. Mr. Henry beams radiantly at him, then goes back to scribbling enthusiastically on his legal pad. Ryan is glowing when he reaches me. The stage lights have made him kind of sweaty in (of course) a very sexy way, and he’s breathing a little hard, and despite everything, I feel an extra surge of
want
as I take in the sight of him. But then I hear Mr. Gabriel’s voice in my head, observing my wanting in that gross and disturbing way he did, and most of the pleasure drains out of it.

Something must show in my face, because Ryan’s smile fades as he looks at me. “What?” he asks.

I tell him. As well as I can, anyway; some of it is kind of hard to explain, and I don’t want to repeat the part about Mr. Gabriel calling Ryan my boyfriend and certain related statements. But I tell him the rest, modifying the deal offer slightly to be just about letting me and Ryan survive, not letting me “have that” in the sense that Mr. Gabriel seemed to mean, and by the end of it Ryan is sitting on the dirty carpet of the aisle beside my seat, looking up at me with evident and reasonable dismay.

“Jesus,” he says.

“Yeah.”

Mr. Henry calls five minutes. Ryan and I look at each other.

“I think the fact that he wanted to make a deal means something,” Ryan says finally. “He’s obviously got some limits on his abilities, and if he was trying to bribe you to back off, that must mean that you are capable of messing up his plans somehow.”

“Do you think . . .” Visions of swarming insects fill my mind. “Maybe if we really can find someone who will believe us, that could be the start of, I don’t know, some kind of formal resistance. If we got enough people to fight him . . .”

Ryan is nodding. “I think that’s still the best plan. If we can find someone.” He looks over his shoulder, then back. “What about Mr. Henry?”

“Maybe,” I say doubtfully. Mr. Henry would seem to be a great choice; he’s pretty laid-back as far as teachers go, and he likes me, and he
loves
Ryan. But somehow I’m not feeling it. Maybe just because I don’t want Mr. Henry to think we’re crazy. Or morons. Or that we’re trying to play some mean trick on him or something. Mr. Henry has always struck me as kind of the tenderhearted type. And he’s not . . . I try to put my feelings into words. “I don’t know if Mr. Henry is — powerful enough.” I look beseechingly at Ryan. “Do you know what I mean? He’s super nice, and everyone likes him, but he’s not the guy I would necessarily pick out to follow into battle. He’s more dreamy than deadly. I think we need someone a little . . . meaner. Capable of serious ass-kicking.”

“Which is probably exactly the kind of person who would never believe us in a million years.” Ryan sighs. “
I
can still hardly believe us. I know, I know —” He puts up a hand defensively. “I know it’s really happening. I get it. I’m in. I’m not trying to jump ship. But still . . . it’s
nuts.
You know that, right?”

I give him my best eyebrow raise. “What do you mean? This kind of thing happens to me
all the time.
It’s getting so old I can hardly stand it.”

“Okay, okay. You are equally as freaked out as I am. You just seem to be handling it so much better.”

I laugh. “I’m not handling it better. I’m just — I’m just not letting myself fall apart. Because then we automatically lose, right? And you seem to be in about the same place, I thought. Are you not? How are you not handling it?”

“I’m
terrified,
Cyn. All day I was so sure he was just going to jump out and rip my throat open or something. And yesterday — when he had me frozen there, hypnotized . . . that was awful. I mean, once I realized what was happening, after you shook me out of it. To be trapped there, helpless, just waiting for him to kill me . . .”

“You do a good job of hiding it,” I say. “I screamed so loud when he showed up here next to me; I swear my heart stopped completely. And all day, waiting and wondering . . . it was horrible. And, oh, my God, when that kid came to get you in Italian, and you just sauntered out, like nothing was wrong . . .”

“What else could I do? Tell De Luca I just didn’t feel like talking to the AP?”

“Well, still. You didn’t look scared. And you didn’t seem at all distracted just now on stage — my God, Ryan, you were so amazing. . . .” I feel the
want
suffusing my voice and clamp my jaw closed, but it is too late. Ryan’s mouth has curved up in a very pleased-looking twisty half smile, his expression suddenly focused in a way it hadn’t been a moment before.