CHAPTER 18
A week later, things still weren’t any better. No one had heard anything from Chaston, so Jenna was still the number-one suspect.
After dinner, I was in the cellar with Archer again. This was our fourth time down there, and we’d begun to work out a kind of routine. For the first twenty minutes or so we just worked on the shelves. Half the stuff we’d catalogued the last time had usually moved, so we’d spend time trying to sort that out. Once this was done we’d take a break and talk. Our conversations hadn’t really graduated beyond small talk about our families and the occasional insult, which wasn’t that surprising. Other than being only children, Archer and I had almost nothing in common. He’d grown up super wealthy in a big house on the coast of Maine. I’d lived with my mom in everything from the cottage in Vermont to a room in a Ramada Inn for six weeks. But I still found myself looking forward to our talks. In fact I’d started dreading the days when I didn’t have cellar duty, which was almost too pathetic to contemplate.
Archer sat in his usual place on the steps while I hoisted myself onto a bare space on top of Shelf M.
He pointed at a pile of empty dust-covered jars in the corner. Two of them rose in the air and twisted and contorted until they were cans of soda. He flicked his hand in my direction, and one of them sailed straight toward me. I caught it, and was surprised by how icy cold it was.
“I’m impressed.” I meant it, and he nodded his head in thanks.
“Yeah, turning jars into soda. Let the world tremble before my power.”
“Well, at least it proves you still have powers.”
He looked up at me quizzically. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Crap. “I—uh, I just . . . some people said that you left last year because you wanted to get your powers taken away.”
I’d assumed he’d heard all those rumors, but he looked genuinely surprised. “So that’s what everybody thinks. Huh.”
“They know you didn’t,” I replied hastily. “Lots of people saw you drop Justin on the first day.”
A smile played around the corners of his mouth. He looked up at me. “Bad dog.”
I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t help smiling back. “Shut up. So where did you go?”
He shrugged and rested his elbows on his knees. “I just needed a break. It’s not unheard of. The Council acts like it’ll never let anybody out of Hecate, but they’ll give you a leave of absence if you petition them. I guess they figured I needed it, especially after Holly.”
“Right,” I said, but the mention of Holly had me thinking about Chaston again. Her parents had come to get her the day after her attack. They’d been in Mrs. Casnoff’s office for over two hours before Mrs. Casnoff had come to get Jenna.
When Jenna had come back to the room, she hadn’t said a word, just gone to lie on her bed and stare at the ceiling.
The sudden shift in my mood must have showed on my face, because Archer asked, “Is Jenna okay? I noticed she wasn’t at dinner tonight.”
I sighed and leaned back. “It’s not good,” I told him. “She won’t go to class or meals. She barely gets out of bed. I don’t know what they said to her in that meeting, but the fact that they called her in there seems to prove her guilt to everybody.”
He nodded. “Yeah, Elodie’s pretty pissed.”
“Wow, what a shame. I hope it doesn’t give her wrinkles.”
“Don’t be like that.”
“Look, I’m sorry your girlfriend is upset, but the only friend I have here is being accused of something she didn’t do, and Elodie is leading the charge. I just can’t feel sorry for her right now, okay?”
I waited for him to fire back, but apparently he decided to drop it. He got up off the steps and went back to his clipboard.
“Have you seen anything that looks like ‘Demon-possessed Instrument: J. Mompesson’?”
“Possibly.” I hopped off the shelf and went to the space where I’d found a drum the other day, but of course it had vanished. By the time we found it (it had hidden itself behind a pile of books that disintegrated when we moved them. “Really, really hope those weren’t important” had been Archer’s only comment), our hour was nearly up.
I heard the lock above us click open. The Vandy had stopped coming down to the cellar to get us; she just unlocked the door.
We tossed our clipboards down and headed for the stairs.
As we started up, I could’ve sworn I saw a flash of green out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned around to look, there was nothing. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and I rubbed my hand absently over them.
“You okay?” Archer asked as he opened the door.
“Yeah,” I said, but I was freaked out. “It’s just . . . Can I ask you something really weird?”
“Those are my favorite kinds of questions.”
“Do you think anyone around here could raise a demon?”
I thought he’d laugh or make a sarcastic comment, but instead he paused outside the cellar door and looked at me in that intense way he had. “Why would you ask that?”
“Something Jenna said the other night. She thinks Holly may have been killed because, uh, some people raised a demon.”
Archer took that in before shaking his head and saying, “Nah, there’s no way. Mrs. Casnoff would know if there was a demon on campus. They’re pretty conspicuous.”
“Why? Are they green and horny?” I willed a blush away and said, “I mean, as in having horns, not . . . the other.”
“Not necessarily. They can look as human as you and me. Some of them even used to be human.”
“Have you ever seen one?”
He looked at me incredulously. “Uh, no. Thank God. I like my face where it is and not eaten off.”
“Yeah,” I said as we reached the main staircase. “But you’re a warlock. Couldn’t you take a demon?”
“Not unless I had that,” he said, pointing to the stained-glass angel above the stairs. “See that sword? Demonglass. Only thing that can kill demons.”
“And so originally named,” I commented, making him laugh.
“You mock,” he said, “but that’s some hardcore stuff. The only place you can find it is in hell, so it’s kinda hard to come by.”
“Wow,” I said, looking at the window with new appreciation.
“Archer!” I heard Elodie trill from somewhere upstairs. I walked past him. “Well, thanks. See ya.”
“Mercer.”
I turned around.
He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and in the soft lights of the chandelier he was so handsome that my chest hurt. It was easy to forget how irritating he was when he looked that good. “What?” I asked in the most bored voice I could manage.
“Arch!”
Elodie came bounding past me, and Archer’s eyes went from me to her.
I turned and ran up the stairs before I had to see her in his arms.