The Afterlife of the Party, page 3
An interdimensional mixer with Heaven.
This. Was. Amazing.
We were going to own the place.
FOUR
I landed in front of my school the next morning with a burst of glamoured blue glory. The flames immediately retreated to their subtle flickering, but I had made my spectacular entrance, and really, wasn’t that what mattered?
I flashed a smile and a wink at a couple of people and hiked my bag over my shoulder. A couple of the try-hards in my year rolled their eyes. Whatever. They didn’t want to be like me? That was fine. I didn’t want to be like them, either.
The truth was, the people I was closest to were my squad. I knew people in my track but hadn’t really gotten to where I had any connections with them beyond knowing their faces. I missed seeking out Lilith or Aleister when I got to school. Heck, even walking the halls with Crowley would have been welcome, but instead I just pretended I was so cool that I didn’t need anyone else to hang out with.
With a shocking burst of insight, I realized that that was what Crowley typically did. Huh.
Well, I had the concert to look forward to, and an interdimensional party on my mind, so I figured I could get through the day without too much effort.
“That’s pretty cool.”
I turned, surprised at the sincere tone. Azael gestured to my wings and hair. “Did your magician do it?”
“No,” I said. How had I never asked Crowley if this was something he was capable of? On the other hand, would I really trust Crowley with my appearance? Probably not. “But I should probably ask him if he can, now that I think about it. Morgan at Glamourie did it.”
“Oh, the fae,” he said. “Is that who’s been changing your hair and doing the tattoo stuff?”
I hiked my bag up farther onto my shoulder. I hadn’t realized Azael, or anyone else for that matter, had paid attention to my changing fashion. At least not beyond the first Unholy night, what is he wearing? reaction.
“Yeah, have you been?” I asked.
“Nah,” Azael said. “I’m not sure my parents would let me, and I wouldn’t even know what to do.”
“Yeah, my mom had her squad’s Intelligence investigate before I could go,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Dad still isn’t convinced, but I think that has more to do with the look than any worry about danger. Morgan has good ideas even if you don’t know what to do. The dragon tattoo I had a couple of weeks ago was their idea.”
“The one that kept moving and transformed into a phoenix?” Azael asked. “That was cool.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “I thought so too.”
An ear-piercing siren rang out across the courtyard.
“I’ve got to go,” Azael said. “I have Art of War. But the flames are cool too. Maybe not dragon cool, but, you know, cool.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Azael waved awkwardly, and I waved back, then set off across the courtyard through the swarm of my classmates moving to their various lectures. My chat with Azael meant I still hadn’t hit my locker, and I didn’t want to lug this bag all day. I slipped it off my shoulder to free my wings, and twisted my way between bodies. Once I was through the doorway, I started to fly.
“No flying in the hallways!” yelled a teacher.
“Watch it,” snarled somebody else as I dropped to the floor as gracefully as possible.
“Sorry,” I said.
“I know you,” said the voice, and I turned. She was a carbon copy of most of the other students in my track, straitlaced and just slightly full of herself. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, and freckles stood out on her pale skin. “You let the prisoner loose.”
I knew that people had heard about our adventures in Salem. It had certainly added to my cred in certain groups. But we had been cleared by the Powers That Be of any wrongdoing. Besides, I hadn’t let him escape—I wasn’t Parris’s guard—but I had gotten him back. I was hardly to blame for his escape. But this girl I didn’t even know certainly seemed to believe I was.
She leaned closer, a venomous expression on her face, and I leaned back with my upper body, trying to keep some distance. Her dark eyes flickered with a touch of flame.
“Some of us are onto you,” she sneered.
“Onto what?” I asked, finally finding my voice. “It’s called ‘fashion.’ I know you’re not familiar—”
“Fashion,” she scoffed. “If you’re trying to distract us or make us think you’re a fool by dressing like that, it’s not working. We know what you’re doing. We know about Chaos.”
The girl spun on the spot and left me standing stunned.
My classmate was a nutter.
FIVE
In all honesty I was a bit shaken by being challenged, even though my classmate was clearly mental, and grossed out that some of her spit had ended up on my face.
Ugh!
I wiped my hand across my face and ruffled my wings. Okay, clearly she was a conspiracy theorist, and probably a complete outlier. I was still getting to know people in my new school, and I was willing to bet she had a reputation for being crazy. I just hadn’t been here long enough to hear about it yet.
I took the last two steps to my black locker and pressed my palm to the surface. The runic variation of my name glowed bright red, and a small sound told me my locker had opened. I pulled the door open and hung my backpack on the hook inside. I grabbed the notebook for my first class just as the second wail warned me that if I didn’t move my butt, I’d be late to class. I slammed the locker shut, booked it to my first lecture of the day, and slid into my seat just as my teacher stood from his desk.
“Good morning,” said Professor Jophiel. “As you remember, we were discussing the division of the great hereafters in the first expansion.”
He swiped his hand across the mirror that covered a large portion of the wall at the front of the class, and with a few complicated hand gestures, the surface fogged and swirled. After a moment a map of the great hereafters took form. It was large and complicated, and my eye immediately went to Hell, and then to Heaven. But there was so much more to the map.
There were small offshoots and dimensions that overlapped or twisted between and around others. Still more that seemed unconnected on first view, but nothing in creation was really unconnected, so the way they interacted with the other great hereafters was more subtle. I wondered if I could steer the conversation to the invitation that had arrived at my house last night, but before I could speak, the image zoomed in further.
“Purgatory or the Gray is ruled by who?” asked the professor.
“Anubis,” recited most of the class, while I said, “The Jackal.”
“Correct,” said Jophiel, though he raised his eyebrow at me before he continued in a much sterner-sounding tone. “I wouldn’t call him ‘Jackal’ to his face. At least not until you’re on much friendlier terms, not that I’ve ever heard of that happening.”
I shifted in my seat as Jophiel maintained eye contact for an uncomfortably long period of time—okay, seriously, was he trying to read my mind?—before he turned his gaze away and resumed teaching in a more normal voice.
“Purgatory plays a key role in the judging and distribution of souls into their proper eternal homes. Before the establishment of Purgatory, the division was much less clear. Souls ended up in Heaven and brought chaos and ruin. Souls came to Hell, and the punishment of those not yet damned led to a destabilization in the energy inherent in keeping the balance between good and evil. As you all know, the balance is the be-all and end-all, the key to keeping everything in order. If the balance falls, Chaos will undoubtedly take its place as ruler, and chaos will reign.”
The classroom remained silent. Jophiel gave one of those sweeps of the room that required every one of us to meet his eyes. It may have been my imagination, or paranoia from my weird encounter in the hall, or the recent stare-down, but it seemed like he held my gaze a bit longer than he did everyone else’s.
This didn’t help my anxiety. At. All. Did people really think I was up to something? Our names had been fully cleared, but I was starting to get the feeling that some of my fellow hellions didn’t agree with the decision. People didn’t really think I helped Parris, did they?
Nah, I was being paranoid because of that weird girl.
My stomach twisted uneasily as my teacher directed his attention back to the mirror. He made an intricate gesture, and scenes of Purgatory flashed across the surface. The scales, a feather, gray swirling auras of ghostly souls, a door of flames and a door of white, and then the images stopped on a slender hound head, large, with pointed ears, and eyes that even on this false image looked as if they were seeing through us. He was wearing the traditional golden snake headpiece and holding a staff that I knew channeled his power.
“Why was Anubis selected?” asked Jophiel.
More silence.
“Did we just need someone there?” Jophiel pressed. “Draw straws? What?”
I lifted my hand from my desk, just high enough that if he didn’t call on me, it wouldn’t be obvious that I had volunteered. After all, I wasn’t 100 percent on this.
“Malachi,” Jophiel called, taking a seat on the edge of his desk.
“Anubis has the gift of pure sight,” I said softly at first, but when my teacher didn’t make a Dear Lucifer, are you stupid look, my voice grew a bit stronger. “He’s not swayed by artifice or glamour and isn’t convinced by sympathy or bribery, so he always judges true.”
“Very good,” Jophiel said, and he actually looked impressed. “Purgatory is an essential part of the system. It’s also the part that would be most susceptible to influence, if Anubis was not in charge. Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about that.”
Class continued, and I managed to sail on the high of grudging approval from my teacher, rather than being brought down by the dread that he and maybe a bunch of others thought I was a bad guy.
But I was surprised that there was no mention of the invitations. Was it possible that I was the only one who knew about them? Maybe it was just my squad who was invited. After all, we personally knew Cassandra. Did she think we were the only ones who lived here?
No, that messenger had had a whole bag of invitations.
Was it possible that my classmates were just rule-following try-hards and wouldn’t bring it up because it wasn’t on the syllabus? That was a very real possibility.
I considered that as I tossed my books back into my locker and headed for lunch. The dining hall was in the center of the academic complex. There were six separate stone archways that brought all of the various hallways into the main dining area, and I entered through one of them and looked around.
The room was already swarming with my fellow students, and unlike my old dining hall, with one food station that we all impatiently lined up at, this hall gave us a choice of stations. It was my favorite part of my new track, and while not as good as the food at Faust’s, my favorite café, it was a decent substitute.
What went well with hidden secrets? Hmm… barbecue.
I joined the line, which moved quickly, and selected from steaming trays that smelled sweet and spicy and vaguely mysterious.
I grabbed my now full tray and pretended I knew exactly where I was going, like I was on a mission to join up with friends. Instead I ended up at the same corner table I had been sitting at since school had started.
Alone. As usual.
I hadn’t been here long enough to make new friends to sit with, but it had apparently been long enough for me to develop a routine.
Ugh, I was boring and unpopular. This was a new feeling for me, and my mind was starting to reel from the injustice of it when a voice interrupted my thoughts.
“Is it okay if I sit here?”
I looked up, and for the second time that day I was looking at Azael. Was I giving off neediness vibes? Or just looking extra cool today? Probably a toss-up.
“Here?” I asked, eloquently. “Oh, yeah, sure.”
“Thanks,” Azael said. “I haven’t really figured out who’s, you know… not… so intense, but a friend of mine said one of your friends was pretty cool, so…”
“Yeah,” I agreed, knowing exactly what he was trying to say. “A lot of them are a bit… much. Was it that friend you were with at Frozen Over? My friend Aleister said he knew her.”
“Yeah, it was. She thought you might be worth talking to,” Azael said, smiling sheepishly. “No offense. It’s that people here can be… I mean, I don’t think it’s everyone. I just haven’t figured out who’s who yet.”
“Tell me about it,” I agreed. “It can be a little…” Lonely.
I almost asked him if he ever thought the universe had gotten things wrong. That he was really supposed to be something else, anything else. But even as I thought it, I wasn’t entirely convinced of that anymore.
If working with my squad to capture Parris had taught me anything, it was that as much as I wanted to fight it, I did have some inherent take-charge tendencies. Did Azael? I hadn’t even realized what his designation was until we had started the school year.
But I didn’t want to risk sitting alone at lunch forever. So instead of asking anything too serious, I took an overly big bite of my barbecue sandwich.
“What is this?” I muttered. “And how is it so good?”
“Don’t know,” Azael said. “Best not to think about it.”
I made a noncommittal noise and then, reaching for something safe to say, asked, “How’s the wing?”
“Better,” he said. “The healers say I can take the sling off today if my appointment goes well.”
“You’ll be able to fly again?” I asked.
“Eventually,” he said, grimacing. “It might take a while, though.”
That made sense. Was this boring? Was I boring?
“Hey,” I said, debating on whether or how to even ask. But I swore that if I didn’t get to talk about Heaven, I was going to scream. “Did you have any… visitors last night?”
“Sidney—the girl I was with at the ice cream place—came over,” he said innocently. “Why?”
“Oh, uh, just wondering.”
Cassandra knew there were other people in Hell, right? I was fairly sure she did, but now I had been quiet for too long and it was getting awkward, and Azael was never going to sit with me again. Think, brain, think. Conversation, you can do it.
“Is Sidney your girlfriend?” I asked.
Azael started coughing, and frantically grabbed the cider in front of him. He chugged it down and took a deep breath before shooting me a look. “What?”
“Sidney,” I said, starting to doubt whether this was the safe topic I had thought it was. “Is she your—”
“No, brimstone, no!” Azael protested. “She’s just a friend!”
“Okay,” I said, holding my hands up in surrender. “My bad.”
“No, sorry,” Azael said. He took another sip of his drink and sighed heavily. “It’s not your fault. Everyone thinks that.”
“Well, Beliel anyway,” I said, referencing our former classmate who had been sentenced to fifty years under the Styx for attacking Azael.
“Beliel’s an idiot,” Azael said, and for the first time since I had met him, there was a spark of fire in his eyes. “You heard about that, huh?”
“Everyone heard about that,” I scoffed.
“Well, there never seem to be any secrets here,” Azael said, with a smirk nowhere near as good as mine. More like Smirk 101, but still respectable. “You know what that’s like.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, rolling my eyes. Across the room I saw the girl who had accosted me earlier, and I gestured with my chin. “Do you know who that is?”
“Who?” Azael asked, turning in his seat. “The one with the dark hair?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Freckles, murdery eyes.”
“Um, yeah, I think her name is Rachel.”
“Do you know if she has any sort of reputation, like, I don’t know… prone to conspiracy theories?”
“No,” Azael said. “Pretty sure she’s head of the third-year class. Why?”
“Huh,” I said. “No reason.”
Over the course of lunch, I learned that Azael had broken his wing playing Red Rover; he had known Sidney since they were tiny, and they were best friends; and although he knew the members of his future squad, he hadn’t really connected with any of them enough to be friends. Sidney was assigned to another squad entirely. I also learned that he had a long history with Beliel and was ecstatic that he wouldn’t have to deal with him for another fifty years.
I tried hinting around, but if he knew anything about the mixer in Heaven, he didn’t give any signs, and despite what Azael thought about secrets being public knowledge, there were parts of our adventure known only to my squad.
By the time lunch was over, I had come to the solid conclusion that I was thankfully not the only person in my school who wasn’t a complete stiff.
The rest of the day dragged in the way that only happens when you have something to look forward to when you’re done. And it dragged even longer when the group project we were assigned in our last period got stuck in a spiral because no one would agree to anyone else’s idea.
“Can we just pick one?” I growled. “Throw a dart or something. Draw it out of a bag, whatever.”
“That wouldn’t show very good leadership skills,” said Uriel.
“Exactly,” argued Zachariah. “Which is why I say we use my idea, if you know what’s good for yourself.”
“Force. An excellent leadership skill,” I said with strained patience. “The idea is to get us to work together as a team. You know, like, actually listen and take input from other people.”
I could have sworn I saw the teacher smirk at that, but maybe she was just enjoying my misery. I got the impression that Professor Ruth enjoyed misery.
“Fine, we should follow my idea,” said group member number three with a crew cut, whose name I hadn’t bothered to learn yet. “The origin of the Dominion Accord.”
