THE MEPHISTO COVENANT Page 15

  She stood there in a pair of jeans and nothing else.

  Nothing. Else.

  He stared. Reality was so much better than imagination, he was speechless with wonder. He saw her birthmark, just below her right breast.

  Crossing her arms over her lovely breasts, she glared at him. “You can’t be in here!” she whispered. “No guys allowed.”

  “No one can see me. I’m invisible.”

  “I can see you!”

  And so she could. The reminder of how she was changing made him anxious, so he looked once more at the swell of her beautiful breasts, then popped out. He regretted that. A lot. The image of her soft skin and perfect pink nipples was burned into his brain, making him all the more bummed that she couldn’t get past what he was and be with him.

  Finally, after another ten minutes of watching giggling girls and tired mothers wander through the racks, he was relieved when Sasha reappeared, several items in her arms. He went with her to the register and paid cash, bemused as they walked away and she was freaking about how much it cost. “It’s nothing, Sasha. We’re very rich, and this is like … nothing. Say thank you and stop talking about it.”

  “Thank you, Jax.”

  Jax didn’t take her back to Telluride until after dark. Before they were done, he’d bought her tons of new clothes, underwear, perfume—because a saleslady had accosted them and he decided she definitely needed to smell like what was on that little white card—a new sketchbook, a watercolor of the Golden Gate Bridge he bought from a woman on the street, and a top-of-the-line MacBook with a pink carry case. His generosity was huge, and when she protested, certain he’d regret dropping so much cash, he said, “You’re fun to buy stuff for because you get so excited about everything. Let me do this. Let me have some fun. Fun isn’t something I get to have much of.”

  He finally agreed to stop buying her things and they returned to Telluride, to her room, just after seven o’clock. He wanted to stay and help her clean up, but she said, “I’d rather do it myself. Thanks, but you go on home and get ready for school tomorrow.”

  “Will you be okay? What about Melanie?”

  “I’m going to avoid her as much as I can, but if she comes in here and hassles me, I’ll deal. Don’t worry about me.”

  “You might as well tell me to stop breathing.” He looked around at the mess and shook his head. “This blows, but I’m glad it was her, searching, and not a Skia, asking you questions.”

  “You’ll take good care of the painting, won’t you?”

  “It’ll be safe, no worries.”

  “Will you tell me what it is? My curiosity was killing me, but Mom said it was starting to flake, and I was afraid if I unrolled it, tons of paint would fall off.”

  “I’ll tell you. In fact, after Andres has had a chance to look it over, I’ll take you to see it.”

  “You’ll give it back, won’t you?”

  “Of course I will. Put it out of your mind.” He went to the desk and picked up the half of her broken laptop that contained the hard drive. “I’ll see if Brody can get the files off this, if you want.”

  “That’d be awesome. My college essay is on there. Applications are due in a week, so I kinda need to get on that.”

  He stood straight, and she knew he was about to disappear. She didn’t want him to. She wanted him to wrap his arms around her and kiss her again. In fact, she wasn’t sure she’d ever wanted anything so much. What was wrong with her? How could she want him like this, knowing what he was?

  Almost as if he could read her thoughts, he said quietly, “The ball’s always in your court. I’m here, and ready, if you ever change your mind. Good night, Sasha. Don’t forget to call the dog.” He faded away, and she was alone.

  “For a girl who hates you, Sasha sure hangs with you a lot.” Phoenix was in Jax’s room when Jax came home, playing Demon Slayer on the screen behind the Mephisto portrait. “Brody says

  you ran him off, and here you are, six hours later.”

  “She needed some clothes, so I took her shopping.”

  “Bummer, man. Hate shopping. And major bummer that her aunt isn’t just a lost soul, but a crazy-bitch lost soul. There’s something extra weird going on with that family.”

  “Sasha says there was bad blood between her father and Melanie, and she thinks her mother and Tim hate each other.”

  “Yeah, that’s a lot of hate and animosity for no apparent reason. There’s something more to the story.” Phoenix shut down the game and hit the remote that lowered the portrait over the screen before he got to his feet. “You need to see the painting, Jax.”

  “Okay.” Something in his brother’s expression forewarned him this wasn’t going to be good, so he was primed for the worst, that the painting really did depict the Mephisto Covenant.

  At least, he thought he was primed for the worst. He was wrong. Way wrong.

  In a document lab in the basement, a small room within a whole network of offices and workspaces, files and computer banks, Andres sat at a tilted table, a lighted magnifying glass between his face and the canvas. When Jax came in, Andres pushed the glass out of the way and rolled his stool back so Jax could see the picture.

  It was a portrait of a couple, standing atop a giant boulder in the middle of the mountains. Beneath them was Hell, Lucifer reaching up to touch the girl’s bare foot. Above them, God peeked through the clouds, surrounded by angels, extending his hand to touch the guy’s hair. She was blond, with blue eyes. He was dark-haired, with dark eyes. They stood together, facing the valley below, arms around each other while the wind blew the fabric of their long robes back, outlining their shapes, lifting their hair to wave behind them. In the far distance, a lone figure in black stood on the bank of a river, staring at the couple, his expression frustrated and angry, unable to cross because of the raging fury of the water.

  Eryx. The guy was Eryx, and he couldn’t reach the couple because they were together, united, with God and Lucifer protecting them. The Mephisto Covenant.

  Jax stared at it, the implications running through his mind, shaking him all the way to his bones. It wasn’t an anonymous couple standing on the boulder, which was exactly like the one on the northern slope of the Mephisto Mountain. It was he and Sasha.

  “The artist’s name is Andolini,” Andres said. “He was an apprentice to Leonardo who claimed to be visited by angels in his sleep, given visions by divinity. He was executed as a heretic in 1505.”

  The painting was over five hundred years old, yet the woman had Sasha’s face. It was her—there could be no mistake. Thank God she hadn’t unrolled the canvas. “If Kasamov saw the painting, and he must have, since he described it to Eryx, why didn’t he tell him about Sasha? He knew her, so he had to know this is her in the painting.”

  Andres pointed toward the woman’s face. “She was different before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before I cleaned the dried and flaking paint from her eyes and cheeks. Someone altered her face, so she looked different.” Andres looked up from the painting. “And there’s something else.” He rolled closer and pushed the magnifying glass over the section of the river where Eryx stood. “I noticed right away that the river runs in the wrong direction. You can see it’s our own brook, at the base of the northern slope, swollen with snowmelt. The water should flow to the west, this way, because we are to the west of the Continental Divide. But as you can see by how the water breaks against the rocks, it flows to the east. When I looked closer and discovered someone had painted over the original, I cleaned this part and found a number beneath. Very tiny, so you can’t see it without magnification. We think it’s identifying information for a deposit box in Switzerland.”

  No wonder Sasha’s mother was so adamant about keeping the painting safe. He told Andres about the lockbox, how Katya’s refusal to give the contents to Alex Kasamov ultimately led to her deportation. “That must be why she left the painting with Sasha, to keep the account information safe.”

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nbsp; Phoenix was staring at the tiny black dots that were numbers and letters. “She obviously showed this to Alex Kasamov, but why?”

  Andres turned his stool to face both of them, his French accent more pronounced. “She was in love with him, and a woman in love wants to share everything, will trust even when she shouldn’t. As Skia, Kasamov was a master manipulator. He seduced her, hoping to cajole the papers from her, as well as win her as a new follower for Eryx. When he began pressuring her, she saw he wasn’t real, that it was all lies, and she told him to go away, but by then, she had shown him her whole world, including Sasha. She trusted him, which is how he was able to steal into Sasha’s room and look for her birthmark.”

  Jax thought about yesterday, when Sasha told him all her secrets: about what frightened her, about her mother’s deportation, about her birthmark. She trusted him, without really knowing him, because she liked him. He hadn’t realized what it meant at the time. Now he did, but it made no difference. He’d blown it on the ski lift.

  He looked at Phoenix. “Did Jane tell you all her secrets?”

  He sighed and nodded, still staring at the painting, at the little black dots. “I think before Kasamov told Katya he was after the lockbox stuff, she showed him the painting because it’s a remarkable piece of art. She probably told him about the numbers hidden beneath the paint because it’s a clever thing to do, and she would’ve wanted him to know she can be clever.” He looked at Jax. “That’s why Eryx wants this painting so badly. It’s not the picture he’s interested in. It’s those tiny numbers. If what Katya said was true, there are all kinds of incriminating things in that lockbox about some important people. Eryx could use it to blackmail them into pledging. Heads of state, corporate directors, people who can make a big difference in the world.”

  A cloud of dread settled around Jax. “You’re right, which means he’s not going to give up. If Katya won’t give him what he wants, he’ll make her life a living hell.”

  “And if she still won’t cave, he’ll go after what’s important to her.”

  The cloud of dread zapped him with a lightning bolt. “He’ll come after Sasha.”

  The three of them stared at the painting, thinking. Jax focused on Sasha’s beautiful face, trying not to overthink why a painter five hundred years ago had envisioned them together. “The only thing to do is give the painting to Eryx, but we’ll give him a fake. Andres, do you think you could reproduce it, but change it so it doesn’t portray the Mephisto Covenant? Paint God touching her head, instead of mine. Also, paint Sasha’s face so it isn’t Sasha.”

  “Child’s play,” Andres said, smiling and looking eager. “And the numbers?”

  “Reproduce those, too. Eryx is after the code to the box, and Kasamov told him it’s on the painting, so we’ll give it to him. By the time he sends someone to collect the contents, we’ll already have Katya’s papers and pictures and whatever else is in there. We’ll replace them with other stuff her father and grandfather might have left to her, like jewelry and maybe some Russian icons. I’ll send Boris to Moscow to pick up some things from an antique dealer.”

  “Genius!” Andres exclaimed.

  Jax shoved his hands into his pockets so they wouldn’t see how badly he was shaking. “We’ll see how genius I am when Eryx gets the painting—if he buys that it’s authentic, if he never suspects the contents of the box have been switched.”

  “Maybe by then, Sasha will be here, with us, and out of danger.”

  Turning on his heel, Jax left the document room, unable to tell Andres that Sasha would never be with them.

  After Jax left, Sasha went downstairs to look for trash bags. Tim was asleep in his recliner and Chris was eating a bowl of cereal. “Where’ve you been?” he asked. “Mom was looking for you. She’s pissed that your room is such a mess.”

  Talk about adding insult to injury. What a bitch. “I’m about to clean it up. Where can I find some trash bags?”

  “In the laundry room.”

  When she’d found the bags, she went back upstairs and started stuffing them with her ruined clothes, Boo hopping around in the middle of things, thinking she was playing with him. Poor dog was as dim as he was homely. But he was sweet, which trumped dumb and ugly. A few minutes later, he dove under the bed when someone knocked and she said, “Yeah?”

  Chris opened her door and watched for a while before he asked, “Why are you throwing them away?”

  She held up what used to be her favorite sweater. It had two holes cut out, right where her breasts would be.

  “What happened?” After a minute, when she didn’t answer, he pushed off the doorframe and stood straight, frowning. “She did it, didn’t she?”

  It had to be rough having a mom like Melanie. Sasha didn’t have the heart to say what she really thought, so she just shrugged and continued stuffing the trash bag.

  “I don’t get why she hates you so much.”

  “She hated my dad and hates my mom, so I guess it’s hate by association.”

  “I’m sorry, Sasha. Did you tell my dad? He’ll buy you some new stuff.”

  “No, I didn’t tell him. It’s okay, Chris. I got some new things this afternoon.”

  “Do you want some help?”

  She shook her head. “Thanks anyway.”

  He said good night and went to his room. Seconds later she heard his video game.

  When she was done, she hauled the garbage bags outside, then went back to her room and put away her new clothes, thinking all over again how awesome it had been of Jax to take her shopping. She was anxious about starting at a new school tomorrow, but at least she wouldn’t be wearing the same clothes every day this week.

  She powered up the new MacBook and almost cried—it was so perfect. She checked her e-mail before logging onto Facebook, and nearly jumped for joy when she saw a message from her mom. Eagerly opening it, her happiness deflated as fast as it had arrived. Short and curt, all Mom said was, I am in St. Petersburg, looking for a place to stay, then find a job. Love you.

  She replied and told her mother all about Telluride, and skiing, not saying much about Tim and Chris, not mentioning Brett and Melanie at all. Why whine about it? Besides, it wasn’t like she could tell her about the Ravens. Mom wouldn’t understand. She’d think Sasha was making it up, then would tell her she needed to pray for their souls.

  Like that would do any good.

  EIGHT

  THE NEXT MORNING WAS MONDAY, HER FIRST DAY OF school at Telluride High. Sasha dressed in jeans, a red sweater, and the new black boots Jax had insisted on buying for her. She had a new black leather coat that wasn’t as long as his trench coat, but almost. Looking in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door, she thought she looked different, older maybe. She’d taken extra care with her hair, pulling part of it into a clip, instead of her usual ponytail. She wore a little more makeup, and she went ahead and used the perfume. Today, she needed all the help she could get. This was freaking her out way more than she thought possible. She shoved a twenty into her backpack and looked at Boo. “I’ll see you outside, buddy.” He wagged his tail and disappeared.

  Downstairs, Melanie was cooking breakfast. When Sasha walked into the kitchen, she turned hostile eyes toward her. “Where did you get those clothes?”

  “I found them at the Mountain Village Spa in the lost and found. Amazing what people leave behind at spas.”

  “Liar. You probably conned some dirty old man into buying them for you.”

  Was it any wonder there was bad blood between Melanie and Dad? Sasha strongly suspected she had always been like this, even before she gave her soul to Eryx.

  Melanie pointed toward the table. “There’s a muffin. Take it and get out.”

  The scent of bacon made her mouth water, but she obviously wasn’t getting any of it. Without a word, she took the muffin and left. Outside, the weekend’s heavy snow had moved out of the canyon, leaving behind a winter wonderland, blindingly bright in the morning sun, the sky so blue, it made h
er smile. Living with the Shrivers sucked, but Telluride was awesomely beautiful. Boots crunching in the snow, with Boo trotting along beside her, she walked to the end of the block, past other colorful Victorians, turned right, and passed a row of town houses, then some condominiums, until she was on Colorado.

  Traffic was light at seven thirty, but a lot of cars were parked along the curb outside some eatery to the east. If she had time, she’d go down there and order a humongous breakfast platter. Instead, she bit into the stale muffin and decided sawdust would taste about like this.

  The high school was at the far northeastern edge of Telluride, only a few blocks from the Shrivers’. Everything was only a few blocks from the Shrivers’. Telluride was very small.

  She reached the school grounds at quarter to eight. Crossing the wide expanse of snow that led to the building, she smiled at Boo, jumping along beside her, looking like a canine Santa Claus when the snow gathered in his beard. She looked ahead, toward the school—a beautiful, modern building—and was actually excited to get there, only because she’d see Jax again.

  She’d dreamed about him last night, and had woken up thinking about him. Her whole plan to stay away from him was going to be a lot harder if she couldn’t get thoughts of him out of her head. The anticipation she felt right now was also not a good sign. She shouldn’t be this excited to see a guy she planned to avoid.

  At the front doors, she took Boo off the leash and said goodbye, watching as he ran around the corner. She admitted she was glad to have him. If anything got weird today with Mr. Bruno, or the Ravens, it was comforting to know the dog would be there to help.

  But she hoped she wouldn’t need him.

  Taking a deep breath, she opened the door. The office was inside, just to the right. A young woman with spiky hair, the roots dark and the tips bleached white, looked up from where she sat behind a long counter. “Good morning. May I help you?”