“Phaedra! I knew it was you!” Michael yelped. “And by the way, Ruby knows it’s you too. So would you mind explaining what’s going on here?”
To the untrained eye, Phaedra looked like just another patron whose night at the movies had been ruined, but Michael could tell that she was different. He could see the blue veins underneath her skin, and her hair, still curly and slightly disheveled, seemed to be floating around her face like the wisps of fog that it truly was. It was a depressing sight because Michael realized she was, without a doubt and without reversing the trend, more efemera than human.
“I’m sorry, but I had to do something,” Phaedra said, her voice floating in the air like a wayward piece of cloud.
“This is all you could come up with?” Michael asked, slightly dumbfounded. “You know shouting fire in a crowded movie theatre is illegal, not to mention highly dangerous.”
“Ruby is dangerous,” Phaedra countered.
Michael wanted to touch Phaedra’s hand, but he knew it would only make him feel sadder; he knew it would be like trying to hold onto air. “We know that. Why do you think we’re here?” he said.
“We’re actually doing some spiritual reconnaissance work.”
If the situation hadn’t been so grave, Phaedra would’ve laughed, but her time was limited. “You have to be careful around her,” she implored. “And you need to keep her away from Fritz.”
He should’ve known. Once a teenage girl, always a teenage girl. “Okay, I get it. Is this how efemeras act when they’re jealous?” Michael asked. “They turn a movie theatre into their own little playroom?”
“This isn’t a game, Michael!” Even though Phaedra had tried to shout, her voice was hardly more than a sliver of sound. She was using all the strength she had just to appear in human form; she didn’t have any strength left over to shout. “Listen to me, this is important,” she said. “Wherever Ruby goes death will follow.”
Talk about an exit line. Before Michael could question Phaedra further, get her to elaborate, find out if she was exaggerating or downright lying in an attempt to scare him so he’d do something that would break up Fritz and Ruby, he saw her fade away. There was so much commotion and so much smoke all around him that no one saw her evaporate. It was almost as if he had experienced a hallucination, until Ronan confirmed that he wasn’t crazy.
“You saw her too?”
“Yes,” Ronan confirmed. “I held back because I figured she’d talk more openly to you if you were alone. Did she say anything important?”
Michael quickly relayed Phaedra’s brief message. “I don’t know, Ro,” Michael said, suddenly confused. “I can’t be sure if she’s telling the truth or if she’s just royally pissed off that Fritz’s got a new girlfriend.”
“Well, the only thing we do know, love,” Ronan said as he threw his arm around Michael as they started to walk out of the theatre, “is that your double dates really do suck.”
The drive back to school was mainly silent. Ronan wasn’t known to be a jabberjaw, Fritz wasn’t happy that movie night had been cut short, and Michael wasn’t sure who was in his back seat—Ruby or Rhoswen—so he hesitated to start a conversation. There was some small talk, but it was forced, so Michael let out a sigh of relief when he parked his Benz in the lot near David’s office and turned off the ignition. The night was finally over. In Michael’s mind, it hadn’t been a complete catastrophe. He had gained another piece of information about Ruby, albeit from a completely biased source, but still, it was something new and that’s why he had arranged the evening in the first place.
Fritz’s motives for their night in Eden had been much more basic: He had just wanted to snuggle next to Ruby during the movie. Since that hadn’t worked out he’d have to settle for holding her hand as he walked her back to her dorm room. After they had exchanged their good-nights and Michael and Ronan walked in the other direction toward St. Florian’s, Fritz thought he’d take the long way home to get as much one-on-one alone time with Ruby as possible. She had other plans.
When they reached the clearing behind David’s office, Ruby stopped to face Fritz, and the boy almost fainted. Her irises were gone; only the whites remained. Even though her body wasn’t shaking, he thought that maybe Ruby was having a stroke or something. Nothing was going to happen to her; it was Fritz who was being put under a spell.
“Leave Ruby alone and go home,” Rhoswen ordered. “When you wake up tomorrow you’ll remember none of this. You’ll believe you walked Ruby safely to her door.”
It was as if a see-through door had slammed shut in front of Fritz’s eyes, like he was locked within an invisible cell; he could see the world around him, he just couldn’t interact with it. He had no control over his body; he had relinquished it, unaware, to an unseen power. Without saying another word, Fritz started walking into The Forest; from behind no one would have known that he was being manipulated like an untethered marionette. And no one could imagine why his girlfriend would want to visit the headmaster at such a late hour.
As she walked past the mirror in David’s greenroom, Rhoswen smiled at Michael, the archangel, who had always been her favorite. She looked up at the carving and took in his heroic face, his powerful body, Satan cowering under the weight of his boot, and she was overjoyed. Good always did triumph over evil. Sometimes it took centuries to win a battle, but what did several hundred years mean when the end result was victory?
Glancing at the other archangels that graced the mirror’s frame, the feeling of joy grew. There was so much evil in the world that sometimes it was easy to forget that there was also good. That was because the evildoers penetrated every aspect of society, earthly and otherwise. She knew that Zachariel’s eyes had turned bright red and were glowing in her direction, but she didn’t feel the need to acknowledge his presence. He was one of those charlatans who had posed as virtuous, who had infiltrated a corps of peace-loving guardians, but was nothing more than a lowly, despicable creature and undeserving of her attention. She would never understand why her brother was so fascinated with him.
Silently, she entered David’s office and spied him sitting next to the fireplace, its flames suddenly igniting, crackling enthusiastically upon seeing her again. David didn’t look up. He didn’t share in the flames’ applause. He couldn’t; he didn’t know she was there, and so he continued to drink blood from a brandy snifter and remained deep in thought. Until his thoughts were interrupted.
“Hello, brother.”
The snifter slipped through David’s shaking fingers and crashed onto the floor. Pieces of glass flew in every direction, but the blood defied nature and didn’t splatter. Like a crimson snake it slithered on the floor, curving slightly to the left, then the right, but maintaining its path, building speed as it traveled toward its goal, not stopping until it reached Rhoswen. When the tip of the blood trail was a few inches from her feet, it veered to the right and continued until it connected on the other side.
Looking at the circle of blood that surrounded her, Rhoswen smiled. When she looked at her brother, her smile disappeared.
“It looks like the circle of blood that enveloped me the night I died,” she said. “Do you remember placing me in its center, Dahey?”
The sound of his Christian name made David wince. He remained seated, his face flushed. The only visible movement on his entire body came from a muscle in his right cheek that twitched every few seconds. Of course he remembered the night Rhoswen had died. No matter how hard he tried to forget, it was a memory that would never leave him.
“Do you remember telling me to sit quietly in the circle and to wait for Zachariel?” she asked, her voice becoming more agitated, less calm. “I was so young, so trusting. I had no idea that I was waiting for my brother to murder me.”
Finally David was able to command another part of his body to move, and he slammed his fist into the arm of the chair. “It wasn’t murder; it was a sacrifice!”
A slow smile formed on Rhoswen’s lips. “Which is merely murder that comes with a reward.”
Finally, David found the strength to stand. The ascent took longer than he had anticipated, and when he stood upright he felt his legs might collapse underneath him; they were amazingly weak, and so he didn’t stray far from his chair. “What are you doing here?!” he asked, his voice unable to hide its desperation. “Why have you returned?!”
“Three hundred years is an awfully long time to be away from home, don’t you think?”
When David saw Rhoswen’s spirit step out of Ruby’s body and walk toward him, he was grateful he hadn’t
