Evil Librarian (27 page)

So now it is later, and back I come. I ignore my twinges of guilt at keeping all of this a secret from Ryan. It would be wrong to tell him. Selfish. He would only be mad, and it’s too late for him to try to talk me out of it anyway. I just need to get through this on my own. And it’s not even that big a thing. It’s not like I have to kill the demons myself. All I have to do is touch them. Easy peasy.

Principal Kingston is sitting at one of the long tables, flipping through a copy of
Sports Illustrated.
He looks up as the doors close behind me.

“Our little roach girl! Come in, come in. Mr. Gabriel’s finishing up in the back. Have a seat!” He indicates the chair across from him.

I sit and look at him warily.

“I have to say, I was surprised when Mr. Gabriel told me about your offer,” he says, leaning forward over his magazine. “But I think it’s fantastic that you’re able to see the big picture here. Thinking outside the box and all that. And even if your reasons are a little misguided, I am happy to be doing business with you. People so rarely consider alliances with their enemies to reach the greater goal these days. It’s a shame, really.” He shakes his head, apparently at the shame of it all. “So! How are your classes going?”

I am saved from ridiculous small talk with the demon principal by the demon librarian’s emergence from the office behind the circulation desk. He’s carrying a large blue ceramic bowl with both hands, which he places on the table in front of me.

“All right,” he says. “Ready to begin?”

“How is this going to work, exactly?” I ask. All kinds of misgivings are starting to flutter around deep in my belly region. I ignore them as best I can.

“All you need to do is place your fingers in this liquid. It will make you able to tag the other demons with just a touch, and I’ll be able to draw them to where we want them. You let me know when you’ve got them all, and then Principal Kingston and I will take it from there.”

I look at the liquid dubiously. It looks like dish soap.

“What is it?”

“Palmolive. The base substance doesn’t really matter, although thicker liquids tend to hold the magic a little better.”

“And this stuff smells a lot better than, say, tar or congealed gravy,” Kingston adds.

They are both looking at me expectantly.

I push back my sleeves and take my rings off, then gingerly lower my fingers into the bowl. It is so almost exactly like soaking your cuticles pre-manicure that I am half expecting Principal Kingston to whip out a nail file. Instead he glances at Mr. Gabriel and then reaches out and clamps his hands over mine, holding them in place.

“Hey! What —”

“This next part might hurt a little,” Mr. Gabriel says from behind me. “But it’s important that you don’t take your fingers out until I’m finished. Principal Kingston is just helping to make sure that happens.”

My misgivings have exploded forth from the little corner I had stuffed them into and are flinging themselves around inside me like mad, damaged birds. I had instantly tried to jerk my hands away when Kingston grabbed them, but it’s like being encased in concrete. They didn’t move a millimeter.

“This wasn’t part of the deal.” I direct my words over my shoulder to Mr. Gabriel.

“We never discussed the details. You should have asked more questions. And anyway, it won’t be
that
bad. It only hurts for a few seconds. Now be quiet and let’s get this over with.”

I don’t really have much choice. I sit and glare at the principal, who smiles pleasantly back at me.

Mr. Gabriel starts saying some of those jagged-edged words and suddenly my fingers feel like they have burst into flames. The world goes red and after a second I realize I am screaming. The Palmolive has clearly become acid or liquid fire or something equally horrible and Mr. Gabriel’s voice gets louder and Principal Kingston is nodding at me encouragingly across the table. I throw myself backward, or try to, but Kingston’s hands still have mine fast and all I succeed in doing is twisting my arms painfully and nearly falling out of my chair.

“Stop it! Please, stop it, oh, my God my
hands
 —” My initial shocked screams have mutated into crying, pleading whimpers. The pain is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. I can barely process that I’m actually feeling this. It doesn’t seem possible.

Mr. Gabriel growls a few final syllables and there’s kind of a silent
whoosh
and it feels like something is being sucked in through my fingertips and then the fire goes out and there’s just a throbbing memory of awfulness. Principal Kingston releases me and I yank my hands back, terrified of what I will see, expecting the flesh to have melted clean away to bone, or worse. But there’s nothing. I hold them up, twisting them around. There’s no evidence of what they have just suffered through. They don’t even have a soapy residue.

“Oh, you’re fine,” Mr. Gabriel says dismissively. “Teenagers are such babies.”

“You
asshole,
” I say, standing up to, I don’t know, maybe punch him in the face or something, but he steps neatly back and just points to the chair.

“Sit down so we can go over what you need to do. A deal’s a deal, Cynthia.”

I stand there a moment longer, my poor hands curled into furious fists at my side. Then I sit back down. Because he’s right, and I still have a job to do. And the quicker we get on with things, the quicker I can get the hell out of here.

They think there are about twenty other demons in the school at this point. They know about the security guards, and most of the rest are probably subs. All I have to do is touch them, skin to skin. Hands are probably easiest, but I am welcome to use my imagination. Once I get them all, to the best of my knowledge, I am to let either Gabriel or Kingston know. And then I’m done.

There’s one more thing.

“You need to be able to tell who the demons are, of course,” Mr. Gabriel says, which sounds reasonable, except there is something about the way he says it that makes my nerve endings shudder, and not in that good Ryan kind of way. Also, I am still extra-hating him for the acid-dish-soap thing.

He takes a step toward me. I get up out of the chair so I can back away more easily.

“Okay,” I say. “How will I do that?”

“You need to let me touch your eyes.”

I back away some more. “No way.”

“It won’t hurt.”

“That is not the point. There’s got to be another option.”

Mr. G. shakes his head. “There’s not. Don’t be difficult.” He comes toward me again, and I run around to the other side of the table.

Principal Kingston gets casually up out of his chair and grabs my arms, yanking them up behind my back.

“Ow! What are you, his hired thug? Get off me!”

“Now, Cynthia. Don’t make such a fuss. Mr. Gabriel is just making it possible for you to carry out your side of the bargain. An unfulfilled bargain satisfies no one.” He makes it sound like something you’d have embroidered on a pillow. He pulls my arms up another painful couple of inches. “Stop whining and do what needs doing, young lady. I don’t want to have to send you to detention, but I will if you make me.”

Mr. Gabriel has by this point circled around the table. He reaches out and takes hold of my face with one hand, his fingers resting just under my jawbone and his thumb pressing into the skin below my eye.

“Now, just hold still,” he says softly, and the thumb and forefinger of his other hand come slowly at my face, in pretty much the way they would if he were about to gouge my eyes out. I clamp my eyes tightly shut. I expect him to try to force them open, but he just makes an exasperated sound, and his fingertips come to rest on my eyelids instead. There is a flare of power that makes me gasp, but it’s not quite pain I’m feeling, and so I guess he’s not exactly a liar. About this part. After a second they both release me.

I open my eyes.

Mr. Gabriel and Principal Kingston stand a few feet away, watching me. I stare despite myself. They both have a kind of red glowing halo above their heads.

“All the demons are going to have that?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“How long will it last?”

Mr. Gabriel shrugs. “Not sure. Long enough, anyway. Now, off you go.”

No one needs to tell me twice. Off I go indeed.

My fingers are still throbbing quietly as I walk down the hall outside the library. They don’t hurt anymore, exactly; it’s more of a pulsing hyperawareness. I find it hard to believe that other people can’t see it. I hope the demons will be as unsuspecting as they are supposed to be. I realize too late that I forgot to ask what happens if I touch a non-demon. That seems like important information, but there is no way I am going back in there now. They might decide I need some other dose of demon magic to better serve the bargain. I will just not touch any non-demons until this thing is over with.

I begin seeing the demons right away. I have to admit, the halo thing is pretty handy. Not all of them are as obviously inhuman as the security guards.

But, God, there sure are a lot of them. I think Gabriel and Kingston’s estimate of twenty was a bit on the conservative side.

I approach the security guards first, because they seem kind of stupid and also because they are standing conveniently nearby. Security guards in our school don’t generally wander around in pairs, but I guess these two only did minimal research.

They stare again as soon as they notice me. I decide to use that as my opening.

“What?” I say, marching over to them. “Why do you keep staring at me?”

“We know what you are,” one of them says in a scratchy voice. “Roach.” Only he really says that horrible demon word for it, of course.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lie. I flip my hair angrily. “Who’s your boss? I’m going to tell him you’re acting inappropriately toward the female students.”

I turn as if to go, and the guard on the left grabs my wrist.
Gotcha.
I start, naturally, trying to pry his fingers loose. There is a slight feedback vibration, different from the static-electricity feeling I have come to expect — kind of like typing on a virtual keyboard with the vibrate feature turned on. I take this to mean the tagging has been successfully accomplished. The demon does not seem to notice.

The second demon puts his hand out, clearly intending to push the other one back warningly (he seems to be the brains of the operation, such as they are), but I deliberately misinterpret his movement and slap his hand away. “Don’t you start, too!” I snap.

The first one lets go, finally, and I take a step back. “If you bother me again, I really am going to tell,” I say. I turn to leave, and this time they don’t try to stop me.

Two down, a whole lot more to go.

After a few awkward oops-my-hand-slipped-so-that-it-accidentally-touched-your-hand maneuvers and other nonideal approaches, I finally settle on appointing myself the student government welcome ambassador for the new substitute teachers. There’s no way they can really know there’s no such thing, and it allows me to march right up and shake their hands while explaining my nonexistent role as their student liaison.

There end up being thirty-two all together. I think. I’m making my third full circuit of the school, blowing off yet another class, and I don’t encounter any more glowing red halos that I haven’t already tagged. If there are secret demons hiding out in secret rooms somewhere, I don’t know how to seek them out. And the day is almost over, and I want to be finished.

I head back to the library. Mr. Gabriel is showing his Dewey decimal PowerPoint presentation to a group of students, but he looks up when I poke my head in.

“All finished with that special project, Cynthia?”

“Yes, Mr. Gabriel. Just wanted to let you know.”

He thanks me and I retreat, relieved to be done. It’s a study hall day, and so I can just go and sit and try not to think too much until rehearsal. I reflect a little anxiously that if we do end up surviving this mess, I’m going to have some serious work ahead of me to catch up in all my classes. But whatever; that’s still way, way better than dying. And not my immediate problem anyway. I have had a weird, hard day; I deserve forty-five minutes of peace and quiet.

I look up and see that Ryan is leaning against the wall ahead of me.

For the first time in pretty much ever, I am not one hundred percent happy to see him.

“Hey, you okay?” he asks. “You haven’t been texting. I wanted to make sure Mr. Gabriel didn’t kill you or something.” He smiles, even though it’s not actually funny.

I smile back anyway, because even now I can’t help but smile back. But I don’t want to talk about what I’ve been doing all day, and I don’t want to lie, and I’m not sure how I can avoid both of those things at the same time.

“Yeah, sorry. I’m fine. Just distracted, I guess.”

His too-perceptive eyes take me in for a few seconds. “You sure?”

Dammit. “Yeah. You know, it’s just — just everything. Sometimes I succeed more than others in not thinking bad thoughts. I’ll be okay.” I give him another smile, a little twisty despite myself. “Better already, in fact.”

I can’t quite believe I just said that.

He smiles again too, a little wider than before. Acknowledging my accidental flirting? Liking it? Embarrassed on my behalf and trying to cover for it? As usual, I cannot read him at all. But I can feel myself grinning stupidly back at him. Even with everything else going on, his smile still makes me have trouble standing. And thinking. And breathing.

After one more awkward moment in which I simultaneously want him to look away and to never, never look away ever, he says he’d better get to class. Before he leaves, he takes my hand and squeezes.

“It’ll be okay,” he says. “We’ll think of something. No giving up, right?”

“Right.”

I don’t know where this recurring hand-squeezing thing is coming from, but I am not going to complain.

He gives me one of those chin-first nods and walks away.

It’s not until he’s gone that I remember how I wasn’t going to touch any non-demons.

Crap.

I don’t know what to do. I can’t run after him. I mean, I
could,
but then what? I really, really don’t want to tell him about my side deal with the librarian. And probably the tagging doesn’t even work on people at all. Wouldn’t Mr. Gabriel have mentioned that, if it did?