The sun was sparkling on the snow, and the sky was so blue it almost hurt to look at it. “You do lots of romantic things, without even knowing it.”
“Like what?” He obviously thought she was lying.
“Like scattering all over the school a million copies of a note that changed everything for me. Like saving me every time I turn around. Can’t get much more romantic than that. And taking me shopping when you hate shopping, then buying me all those clothes, and the computer. You stood up to Brett for me at school, which made you stand out when you said you didn’t want that. You’re always making sure I eat, because you know I’m starving all the time.” She turned her head to look up at his profile. “And you’re not trying to coerce or cajole me into staying, even though it means so much to you if I do.” She didn’t mention the little box, or that she thought that was the sweetest, most amazing thing ever.
“So you’re not thinking I’m lame because I don’t bring you flowers, or write poems about you?”
“It’s not romantic if it’s not real, and the things you do for me are because that’s who you are, so it’s real.” She smiled. “Like really real.”
He squeezed her hand, then turned to walk her to the door. “Let’s eat and figure out how we’re going to keep you safe until next week.”
The hallway was wide; the walls were painted dark red, dimly lit by candles in sconces; and every so often, they passed a door or a painting. After a while she realized the paintings weren’t copies. “Jax?”
“They’re all genuine, and unknown because we commissioned them when the artists were alive, and no one but us has ever seen them. There are hundreds, all over the house.”
She heard a Green Day song that got louder as they approached another door.
“That’s Zee’s room. He’s a music freak. You should see his music room. He has every instrument known to mankind and can play all of them. In his room, he has a stereo system that’d blow you away.”
They turned a corner and were in another long hallway. “How big is this house?”
“It’s three floors, five if you count the basement and the attic. There are six suites. You maybe didn’t notice, but there’s another door in my room and it leads to a little sitting room, then another, smaller bedroom that could be a study, or whatever. All the suites are like that. Then there are twenty regular bedrooms, I think, but I’ve forgotten.”
“Why so many? Do the Purgatories have their own rooms?”
“No, they don’t sleep, or shower, or do anything human.”
“How old is this house?”
“Over a hundred years. After Phoenix lost Jane, we moved from Yorkshire, thinking a change would be good for him. It didn’t make any difference, but here we are.”
“Did you always live in Yorkshire until you came to Colorado?”
“No, we started in Greece, then Russia. We were there over four hundred years, until we moved to Jamaica, but it turns out we like snow more than sand. Then we moved to Yorkshire.”
They came to a staircase, wide and sweeping down into a circular grand hall with a white marble floor, inlaid with a black M, just like Jax’s birthmark. When they were standing on the M, she looked up. Far above the entry hall, the ceiling was domed, painted with sky, clouds, and angels; a round skylight was at the pinnacle. The walls were paneled in rosewood, edged in gilt, populated by portraits of men, women, and children in clothing from centuries past. There were three curved consoles spaced against the rounded walls, each one decorated with inlaid wood, topped with pink marble and a candelabra. To her right was a double doorway that led into what looked like a living room, equally as opulent and awesome as the front hall. To the left appeared to be a library. Jax steered her in that direction.
Bookshelves went from floor to ceiling all the way around the humongous room, and a narrow catwalk intersected them halfway up, accessed by a spiral staircase. An enormous fireplace graced the wall opposite the doorway, a portrait of a woman in a blue Regency-era dress hung above the mantel, and candle sconces provided soft, golden light to the dark corners where the sunlight from four large windows didn’t reach. It was like stepping into the pages of a nineteenth-century novel.
“You’re blown away, yeah?”
“Blown. Away.”
“Thought you’d like it. When you come back, you can hang out in here and look over the books. We have lots of first editions, some of them autographed.”
Still holding her hand, he walked her back through the front hall and around the stairs, toward an open doorway that led to the dining room. There was a table big enough to land a plane, gorgeous china, two humongous chandeliers, a sideboard with silver platters and chafing dishes, and five really big guys staring at them as they walked in. For some weird reason, seeing them like this, fully dressed, awake, and not in a panic, made her anxious. These were Jax’s brothers, and she wondered if they would like her, if she’d like them. If she stayed, they’d be her constant companions for the next million years.
They each had the same black hair and were dressed almost identically, all in black, standing a few feet apart, obvious in an attempt to look casual, but none quite pulling it off. She felt like a specimen in a lab experiment, and these were scientists, studying her to see what she was made of.
Jax began introductions. They were the same in so many ways, yet entirely different in their facial features, in the way they wore their hair, in their personalities. Denys was the gregarious one, the life of the party, she thought, the guy who made it his mission to make people laugh. He spoke first, eyeing her red dress and Jax’s red shirt. “Okay, fess up, you guys planned that whole dress-like-each-other thing, didn’t you?”
Considering the five of them were all literally dressed alike, it was funny, and she laughed.
The tallest of all of them, Ty, said, “Do you ride horses?”
“No, I grew up in San Francisco.”
“Then I’ll get you a horse and teach you to ride.” The brother next to him elbowed him, and he looked insulted. “What? I was just trying to be nice.”
“Hello, Sasha,” the elbowing brother who had a ponytail said with a smile. “I’m Kyros, but everyone calls me Key. We’re glad you’re here.”
“We’re glad you’re alive,” said another brother, Xenos, who went by Zee and had severely short hair, a tattoo of a question mark on his neck, and a very large diamond stud winking in one ear. “And we’ll be even more glad if you decide to stay. Do you like music?”
“Only a lot.”
“Like who, for instance?”
She named a few of her favorites and he nodded, as if she passed inspection. “Have you ever heard of Arcadia?”
“Zee, back off,” Jax said. “She’s not going to like your grunge punk.”
“Actually, I have. They’re out of Britain, and played at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Some friends and I snuck in and saw them.”
Jax looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. “You snuck into a concert?”
“We’d have bought tickets, but it was closed to anyone under twenty-one.”
The last of the brothers was Phoenix. He didn’t smile. “I have an idea about how to keep you from getting into any more trouble at the Shrivers’.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t go back.”
Before she could respond, a deep voice said from behind her, “Breakfast is getting cold.”
Turning, she had to stifle a gasp. A man with dark skin and dark eyes stood in the doorway, wearing an outfit that was straight out of the Arabian Nights. He looked ready to jump a horse, grab a broadsword, and raid a village in the name of Mohammed.
“Sasha,” Jax said, “this is Deacon, our butler.”
All righty, then. It was strange enough to have a butler, but to have one who looked like Deacon made it severely weird. “Hello, Deacon. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
The man nodded slowly, just once, not making eye contact. Then he turned and left.
/> “Did I say something wrong?”
“No, he’s old school and won’t look directly at a woman who’s not in his family. He’s a Moor, our first Purgatory, who came to us during the Crusades. His wife and daughters were killed by crusaders, and he’s nowhere close to forgiving God for letting that happen.”
“Why would a Muslim man be named Deacon?”
“It’s a nickname. He’s been after us for centuries because we’re filthy infidels who offend him, so he’s forever lecturing us. One night, maybe three hundred years ago, Key called him Deacon, and it stuck.”
Phoenix said, “Let’s eat.”
Ten minutes later, Jax wondered why he had thought it would be a good idea to introduce Sasha to his brothers. He should have listened to Phoenix, who told him to have breakfast served to her in his room, and to meet with the brothers alone. He’d warned him this could lead to disaster. At the far end of the table, Phoenix ate his breakfast without saying a word, but Jax knew what he was thinking, knew he would take the first opportunity to say, I told you so. Jax decided he’d pound him. Just as soon as he kicked the living daylights out of his other brothers.
Sasha was insanely beautiful today, her long, blond hair pulled back into some kind of apparatus so that it hung straight and silky to the middle of her back, and her slender body shown to perfection in a dress that wasn’t cut too low, but just enough to show the soft swell of her breasts. She positively glowed, and like a cluster of insects stupidly beating themselves up to get close to the light, his brothers constantly tried to one-up each other in front of her.
Except Phoenix, Mr. I’m Above All of This.
Deacon was his usual stalwart, silent self, gliding around the table to serve coffee and juice, but once in a while he’d glance at Jax, silently communicating that yes, this was a debacle. Of course, he didn’t help the situation. He worked for the Mephisto to learn humility, but after eight hundred years, Deacon wasn’t humble. He was proud and considered himself above most everyone, especially the Mephisto. He never tired of lecturing, but today, he didn’t say a word.
Although Jax admitted it wouldn’t have done much good anyway. He and his brothers usually ignored Deacon’s dire warnings of the consequences of bad behavior. If he called down his brothers for acting like stooges in front of Sasha, they wouldn’t stop. As breakfast continued, they got louder and more obnoxious, and Sasha got quieter.
At one point, she turned to him and said, “Do you eat like this every day?”
“Not the huge selection, but Mathilda and Hans are good cooks. Do you like the squab?”
“It’s a little like chicken, but different. Delicious.” She ate another bite. “What is a squab, anyway?”
“Pigeon,” Key said before Jax could even take in a breath to answer. Then he launched off into the culinary history of pigeons.
No sooner had he finished talking than Ty said, “I have a dovecote with homing pigeons. Did you know homing pigeons orient themselves to where they’re hatched, and no matter where they are in the world, they’ll try to fly back to their home, even if it’s across the ocean? I bought some breeding pigeons from a guy in Brussels, but I have to keep them caged or they’d try to fly back to Belgium.”
“You know,” Denys said, “there’s a bar in Brussels where the drinks are all free.” He grinned. “But there’s a five-hundreddollar cover charge.”
“The best bar in the world is the Black Orchid in London,” Zee said. “Lots of bands got their start at the Orchid.”
“Did you know we have a greenhouse?” Key asked. “I grow orchids.” He went off about some of his experiments, how he’d developed several new varieties.
Sasha kept eating, listening as though everything they said was the most interesting bit of information she’d ever heard.
She was so not like him. She was patient and kind and considerate. He wanted to tell his brothers to shut the hell up and stop monopolizing her attention.
He became more depressed as breakfast wore on. Even if by some miracle she decided to stay, how could she survive here, with a bunch of clueless guys, angry ghosts, and a job that entailed confronting evil souls, day in and day out?
When everyone was almost done, Key said, “I’ve given this a lot of thought, and the best solution isn’t to guard Sasha from Brett, but to keep him away from her in the first place. We need something to threaten him with.”
“He killed Reilly,” Sasha said. “He would probably rather not be arrested and tried for murder, so if you could make him think you have some kind of evidence, he might back off.”
“I can get a picture,” Jax said, thinking this just might work. “I could say I was taking pictures of Devil’s Ridge with my phone, and happened to capture him shoving Reilly.”
“He’d want to know why you didn’t already take it to the police,” Key pointed out.
“The school gossip says I got kicked out of boarding school for smoking weed. I’ll say I don’t want the cops looking at me, so I won’t show them the picture if he’ll leave Sasha alone.”
“Wait,” she said, “won’t he want to see the picture?”
“I’m sure he will, but M can get us a picture of anything that actually happened.”
Everyone agreed he should give it a try, and as he led Sasha out of the house and down the drive to the car Brody had pulled around, he hoped it would work.
He opened the door for her, and she turned to look back at the house. “It’s so amazing, really like a castle: all the gray stone and the million chimneys, turrets, lead glass, and gargoyles.”
On the winding drive to the highway, she looked from side to side, asking questions. He told her the small stone houses were the Lumina cottages, the big stone building was an old dairy they’d converted to a gym, and the long low building made of pink granite was where everyone on the mountain attended tutoring sessions.
Farther down the mountain, they passed through the Kyanos mists, and her eyes were wide. “It’s like the fog in San Francisco, except blue.”
“If people who aren’t Mephisto or Luminas come up this road, it dead ends and all they see is more forest and mountains.”
“What if they hiked farther up? Would they run into an invisible building?”
“No. It’s hard to explain, but it’s as if it’s not there to anyone but us.”
“Is that what Hell on Earth is like? Is that why no one knows it’s there, like scientists or people who drill oil wells?”
“Yes. Our home and Hell on Earth exist on another plane of reality that only a few can see. Heaven and Hell are in another dimension, one none of us sees until it’s time. I’ve never been to Hell, and I’ve never met Lucifer. M is our go-between.”
He parked the car in the school parking lot, killed the engine, and handed her an envelope. “This is your birth certificate. It shows that your mom is your natural parent, and that you were born in Moscow. There are also U.S. citizenship papers and a Social Security card. It’s all real, and recorded in the right files with the government.”
Feeling a huge weight lifted, she wanted to tell him this was awesomely romantic, but Brody was there, so she just smiled and said, “Thank you, Jax.”
THIRTEEN
SHE WAS SURPRISED TO SEE BRETT IN ENGLISH. SHE ASSUMED he’d stay at the hospital by Tim’s deathbed all day, not because he was sad, but because it was a good excuse to skip school. It wasn’t like Brett had any feelings for Tim. He was a lost soul, so grief was no longer part of his makeup.
He glared at her when she came into the room, and shot such a look of hatred at Jax that Sasha felt sick to her stomach. Amanda, she saw with a sinking feeling, was sitting next to Brett. She avoided looking at Sasha, staring down at her book instead, toying with her necklace, which Sasha could see was the amethyst drop Brett had stolen from her drawer.
She remembered when her dad had brought it home to her; he’d said he bought it from a yak herder in Siberia, which she knew was a made-up story, but she went along and wore
it every day for a whole year.
Seeing it now, hanging around Amanda’s neck, and knowing how she had gotten it, Sasha was mad and sad, all at once. Amanda didn’t know. She thought it was a gift from a boy she liked, a boy she now viewed as some sort of underdog.
After they sat down, she heard Brett telling East and Julianne about Tim, laying on worry and fear with a heavy hand. Sasha knew just how that must sound to Amanda. Glancing back at her, she saw that she had sympathy written all over her face.
All through class, while different people read from The Metamorphosis, Sasha tried to think of a new plan, a new way to keep Amanda from joining the Ravens.
But when the bell rang, she had nothing.
The day marched on, until it was lunch, and the same group who’d been at the coffeehouse sat together, with a few additions, including a guy on the ski team who used to be best buds with Scott the Molester.
Mason and Rachel were funny together—he was so big and she was so tiny. Sasha could only guess what had happened between Thomas and Erin last night, but something, for sure. They were so into each other, they didn’t talk much to anyone else.
After lunch, before fourth period began, while Jax went to find Brett, to show him the picture M had sent to his phone, and to tell him his options, Sasha hung around his locker and nervously waited for him to come back.
While she stood there biting her lip, Amanda walked up. Trying to play it low key, trying extra hard not to stare at her necklace, Sasha smiled and said, “Hey, Amanda. How’s it going?”
“I wanted you to know that Brett’s being supernice to me. I think he’s just really mixed up. Now, with his dad so sick, like he might even … die, I feel like I need to give him a chance.”