The Unfortunate Story of Roddy Mayhem, Julie Steimle [i can read book club TXT] 📗

go through solid walls to escape. When he locked me in the room with the one desk, I stared at the boring blank walls.

I didn’t deserve this, I thought loudly to myself. But at the same time, the room was peacefully silent. One imp with me who looked incredibly bored until he suggested I call for the imps to raid the kitchen to bring me food. I considered it. I was sick and tired of playing nice.

The thing is, I had tried. I really had. To make it all work. I had been working so hard to blend in and take advantage of the opportunity they had given me. And yet here I was, less free than when I lived under the threat of Dervish and his Unseelie Gang. It was basically in prison.

Tom had meant well. I knew he did. So had Eve. But I realized while sitting there in my ‘cell’ that perhaps those two had been so indoctrinated that they really had no clue what real freedom was. They knew only four walls and constraints. They had lived in the world of laws and family. They thought that was normal. But I had lived in a wall-less world and by my wits alone—and the more I sat there, trapped in that room, the more I realized I wanted to go back to that. I was half-imp. Hardly human. My human mother had rejected me. This human world was rejecting me. I was done.

The door opened.

A Hispanic guy stepped in, his eyes fixing on me while his mouth twitched, resisting the urge to speak as if it was painfully difficult. He quickly averted his eyes to the walls, resisting the urge while his imps shouted for him to tell me how I would die. I pulled back from him. He nodded to himself with a short smile when he saw that.

He extended his hand. “Hello. I’m Carlos Mendez. I hear you are Roddy Mayhem.”

I didn’t want to take his hand. His creepy imps—though starved, were smirking at me as if they were finally going to have some fun.

“I’m not that kind of cursed,” he said, still extending his hand.

I gingerly put my hand into his grip.

Carlos shook my hand then let go.

Nothing happened. It was just a handshake.

He then said, “Mr. Wilderman wanted me to meet with you.”

“Why?” I asked.

Shrugging, Carlos said. “Risk assessment. I’m studying to become an insurance salesman.”

I stared.

“I am cursed with the ability to see how and when people die,” he said.

I stiffened.

He sadly shook his head as he painfully smirked at me. “You must understand, with all the dangerous ghoulies and at-risk kids at this school, he wants to know what he is up against. You understand.”

Unfortunately, I did understand. And I was scared.

“Most people don’t want to know how they die,” Carlos said. “And I have learned to control the impulse to tell everyone. But for the record, most deaths are not set in stone.”

I lifted my gaze, blinking at him.

“I can give people warnings,” Carlos explained, “So people can avoid early and unnecessary deaths.”

My mouth fell open. This… this was actually useful. I leaned nearer to him.

Nodding to me, Carlos smiled. “Good. You are in a better mind now. Now I think I can tell you.”

I nodded.

Then gravely, Carlos said, “Roddy, your safety is in this school.”

I moaned. That was not what I wanted to hear. I hated the school. In fact, it hit me hard how badly I hated the school and every kid in it—except my friends of course. The teachers were lousy. The classes were hard. Everything was so controlling and restricting. And I felt like the biggest idiot all the time. It was the worst.

“Listen carefully,” Carlos said. “If you give into your impulse and leave the school, you are likely to get killed. Death follows you.”

I stared. Then I looked around to see if there were any death angels hiding.

Carlos nodded. “You’ve seen them.”

I nodded, then ducking low, I whispered, “So you can see them? The death angels?”

Cringing, Carlos shook their head. “No. But I do see their shadows and the omens around them.”

I shuddered.

Carlos said again, “Roddy, my advice to you is to stay close to the school. I can see several future deaths for you—some far into the future, where you have lived a full life, if you listen to my advice. But one possible death I see very close. You have angered some demons—”

I felt sick.

“—There are those that blame you for… I am not sure, but ruining something important to them,” Carlos said gravely.

“Did Dervish escape the FBI?” I murmured.

Carlos shook his head. “I can’t see that. I can only see that you have upset some dangerous people.” He met my gaze. “Remember, you do have friends.”

I thought of Wispy, Spastic, and Piranha—my only friends.

“Listen to them,” Carlos said. “It could save your life.”

I nodded.

Then he leaned back with a painful wince. “You know, I was bullied at school too.”

I paled.

Carlos shook his head tiredly, his eyes drifting. “No one wants to know when they will die. And I had burned a lot of bridges with my impulsive speech.”

I stared, wondering if he was also a pyromaniac.

“Figuratively,” Carlos tagged on.

Oh. I noticed then that he seemed to understand how an imp mind worked.

“Tom Brown was a friend of mine,” Carlos added.

At this, I blinked. “Really?”

Carlos nodded, smiling fondly. “Yeah. Since the first day I came to this school.”

Shivers ran down my arms.

“I was suicidal at the time,” Carlos murmured. “He called me ‘Morty’.” Then he laughed. “And when I told him how he dies, he was hardly affected.”

I paled. “How does he die?”

“Old age.” Carlos smiled at me.

I stared. No way was that possible. Tom was CIA. That was the most dangerous job ever.

“But he dies blind,” Carlos said sadly, sighing.

I didn’t see how that made much of a difference. Old people generally lose their eyesight.

Carlos rose from where he was leaning. He nodded to me. “Heed my advice. Don’t let these punks rattle you. And trust your friends.”

He left the room.

Unfortunately I was not let out with him, locked in to think about what he had said. None of his imps were happy with the outcome of the conversation, starved from mischief after all.

That afternoon when I was finally let out, I dragged myself back to my room and stared at the mess that was still there. It was the in exactly same condition as we had been dragged from it. My comics were strewn everywhere, along with all our things from our blankets to our clothes. I collected all my Hellboy comic books and carried them with me to Valhalla where I deposited them for safe keeping. The shredded parts, I dumped into a pile on the floor in Valhalla where I intended to tape them back together when I had the time. Spastic was in there with Wispy and Piranha when I came back a second time with the remaining shreds. They all looked to me, rising.

“We’ve decided,” Piranha said, “We need to tag team against those that are bullying us.”

I blinked at her. “Tag team.”

Spastic hopped onto his feet, nodding. “Yeah. Instead us of getting back directly, we let each other do it for us.”

Nodding, I thought about it. “Ok.”

“We play nice to their faces,” Piranha explained with that shrewd look in her gaze. “But they still get it in the end.”

I could feel my horns itch. They wanted to grow. The idea of a full out war was tantalizing to my demon side—but I wondered if it was wise to entertain it.

Yet Carlos said to listen to my friends—so I did.

“Ok.”

We left Valhalla together, closing the closet door behind us. But I noticed as Wispy skipped off with Piranha, and Spastic had sunk through the floor, that someone was sneaking down the hall to where we had just exited. Wondering who it was, I held my breath and quietly lingered at the tail end of us, then went transparent. Creeping up against gravity the wall to the ceiling, I pressed against it. I went through and spied on those who had been spying on us as our haven had to be protected.

I didn’t recognize who it was, but it was two of them. Boys. And from the lower grades.

Quietly, I watched them climb into the closet, struggling to push on the wall as if it were some kind of secret door rather than a solid wall. When they were obviously unable to get into Valhalla, they climbed out of the closet past the brooms and buckets, looked around to see if they had been seen, and they rushed back into another hallway. It wasn’t toward the stairs though.

I followed them in the shadows. It was interesting, as these guys were quietly sneaky. Their imps were normal, yet silent without any suggestions for them.

The boys climbed out the window and down a fire escape to a lower window ledge two floors down. They climbed through the open gap there. I slid down the brick wall, gently swinging upside down so I could listen in at the window to see if it was just another entry point in a hallway or an actual room.

It was a bedroom. Inside were two older boys whom I did not know. Possibly seniors. I could hear their imps shouting all sorts of things, including for them to steal crowbars or something to that effect, to break into the room that was Valhalla. They also suggested getting climbing gear to break into the window access of Valhalla. They were even using the name we used—though I didn’t know how they had picked it up. Maybe a psychic had found it out. I could barely hear the boys’ conversation under the imp shouts.

“…in there. It’s not fair. Those devil kids have to be stopped. One Tom Brown was bad enough.”

“Tom wasn’t all bad,” one other said.

“Are you kidding?” the first guy snapped. “He used to give me wedgies all the time!”

“He only gave wedgies to people who were jerks to him,” a third boy said. “And none of those freaks have done that yet.”

“Yet being the key word here,” a new voice interjected. I recognized this one, but could not place it.

“They’re stupider than Tom,” the third boy said.

I clenched my teeth.

“I still don’t think Tom had a one-eighty IQ.”

“Shows what you know. He could have gone to West End Prep. And he still ended up joining the CIA anyway.”

“All we have to do is prove they are using that room for criminal activity, and Mr. Wilderman will have them expelled back to prison where they came from.”

I felt cold, hearing that. Is that where people thought we had come from? Was that the rumor? Technically the other three had been briefly in jail—but was that the source of their prejudice?

“And how do we prove it? We can’t even get in there. The fire escape ladder was removed.”

I smirked to myself. I had done that. The important thing about Valhalla was to make it inaccessible to others. The imps had chucked the ladders to and from the fire escape balcony in somebody’s yard down the street. I called it ‘gifting’. They had called the cops and complained… though none of I didn’t get caught.

“We just have to prove Roddy is hiding stolen stuff there—”

“HOW DO YOU PROVE SOMETHING LIKE THAT WHEN WE CAN’T GET IN THERE?”

That other guy sounded really agitated. His imps were shouting at him to punch the guy he was with. Wisely, he didn’t. I peeked in through the corner of the wall to see who they were. I recognized only the one really agitated guy. He was from my class. Someone called Tim. Tim Yeats, I think. A kid hiding from the mafia who I think had a crush on Leah. He had to be insane. The others I didn’t know.

“We get things put in there, idiot.”

“And HOW?” Tim bit out.

I pulled out through the wall and listened again from the