Scorch

by Gina Damico

  “Okay,” Driggs said with an expression that suggested he was trying very hard not to lose it. “That’s new.”

  A sob escaped Lex’s throat, the tears forming on her face ones of both joy and heartbreak. “What’s going on?”

  “I think—” His voice sounded the same, but different somehow—far away. He was flickering now, going from opaque to transparent like a staticky television station. “I’m dead?”

  Uncle Mort’s eyes were enormous. “Lex said you were ghosted.”

  “But only part of you!” Lex remembered now. Zara hadn’t finished Culling—some of his soul had made it into her hands, and some hadn’t. “So you’re—what, half ghost and half alive?”

  Uncle Mort shook his head. “That isn’t possible.”

  “Of course it is,” said Grotton. “He’s a Hybrid.”

  Uncle Mort glared at him. “I’ve never heard of that before.”

  “That,” said Grotton, “is because I just made it up.”

  “Hang on,” Driggs said. “Does this have anything to do with the fact that I can reverse the effects of Damning?”

  “Yes,” said Grotton. “You are a Damning Effect Reverser.”

  They stared at him.

  “I made that up as well.”

  Uncle Mort took a deep, patience-restoring breath and turned back to Driggs. “How did you know where to find us?”

  “I didn’t.” Driggs looked at Grotton. “You brought me here, didn’t you? I felt you pulling me.”

  “We ghosts need to stick together,” Grotton said. “Wallowing in eternal torment is much more bearable as a group activity.”

  Driggs looked sick.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Uncle Mort told Driggs. “You’re not a ghost, you’re—” He shook his head. “I don’t know yet. But we need to leave. Norwood is going to find the head of the path any second now, and I’m not sure how well the shield will hold up against that many people.”

  Lex was only half listening. She couldn’t take her eyes off Driggs, who was now staring at the candle’s flame. Through the palm of his hand.

  She went to his side. “I’m so sorry. I’ll fix you, I swear. This is all my fault. If I hadn’t attacked Zara—”

  “Less sorrys,” Uncle Mort interrupted, shouldering his bag. “More leaving.”

  Lex nodded. She’d basically be apologizing to Driggs for this for the rest of her life. It could wait a few hours. “Okay,” she told Uncle Mort. “What’s the plan?”

  “First we grab the other Juniors out of the hotel. Then we make a break for it.”

  “And go where?”

  He paused, seemingly for dramatic effect. “Necropolis.”

  Lex’s eyes bulged. “Seriously?”

  “We need to get to the president before Norwood does. If what you told me is true, Lex—if he really can Damn now—then he’s a far greater threat than Zara ever was.”

  “Because he’s in a position of influence.”

  “Right.”

  “Wait,” said Driggs. “Norwood can Damn now?”

  “Yeah,” Lex said. “Oh, and I started a war. A lot happened in the time it took you to float on over here.”

  “And none of which we have time to discuss,” said Uncle Mort, sticking a foot into the tunnel. “Let’s go.”

  “No.”

  Driggs was shaking his head. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell us why,” he said, the solidness of his body coming and going in waves. “Why for months we’ve been operating under this secret agenda that you can never seem to talk about. Why you had that Loophole all ready to go for us. Why you dragged us back here to Croak only to get us arrested and tortured. Why we’re in this cabin. Why we’re in a war. And why starting it was worth my life.”

  Uncle Mort slowly turned around. He looked in the direction of the growing din of the townspeople, then at Lex, then Driggs, his eyes red and downcast. When he spoke, his voice was quiet.

  “Simply put, the Afterlife is eroding,” he said. “All this human intervention—the Damning, the Loopholes, the Crashing—it’s taking a toll on the fabric that holds the Afterlife together. The signs have become more pronounced in just the past few months alone—those vortexes popping up all over the place, and memory deletions, like what happened with Kloo.”

  “The past few months,” Lex said. “You mean, once I got here?”

  Uncle Mort neither confirmed nor denied this. “Grims were supposed to be middlemen,” he went on. “They were never meant to change the rules or tinker with the constants of the universe. But they have, and they’ve been doing it for centuries.” He shot a pointed look at Grotton. “It’s finally come to a head, and if we don’t do something about it soon, the Afterlife will—in a word—die.”

  They were silent. Lex instantly thought of Cordy. What would happen to her? And Edgar and Kloo, and all those billions of souls. Would they just . . . disappear?

  “Of course, things never would have gotten this bad if not for that nonsense you pulled with Zara,” Uncle Mort shot at Grotton. “Since when are you in the business of training protégées?”

  Grotton let out a proper British sniff. “I got bored. Sue me.”

  “Bored?” Lex butted in, angry. “You taught Zara how to Crash, how to murder people, how to steal my Damning power—you got my sister killed—because you were bored?”

  Grotton gave her an innocent look. “You try being cooped up for centuries in a little box of a room. One gets a bit punchy.”

  “Punchy, my ass,” said Uncle Mort. “You were trying to finish it off. If you can’t have an afterlife, then no one can.”

  Grotton’s face darkened. He spoke after a moment in a low, calculating voice. “Why should they? No one truly deserves it.”

  Uncle Mort clenched his hands into fists, then shook his head and turned away. “Grab the Wrong Book, Lex. He’s bound to it; wherever it goes, he goes.”

  Lex just stood there, her brain reeling with all the people who had suffered because of this man. This thing. “He’s really coming with us? You trust him?”

  “Of course not. But we need him.”

  “Why?”

  Uncle Mort sighed. “Because the only way to fix this mess is to destroy the one who made it in the first place.”

  Lex glanced at Grotton, who didn’t even look fazed by this statement. Almost as if he’d been expecting it.

  Or hoping for it.

  “How do we destroy him?” she asked.

  “Not we,” Uncle Mort said, his voice low. “You.”

  Lex swallowed, once again getting that strange feeling of expanding, of growing out into something much larger than herself. This time it seemed astronomical.

  Grotton gave Lex a devious smile, his teeth cracked and yellow. “Looks like you’re stuck with me, love.”

  A yell rang out from somewhere outside the cabin. “They’re almost here,” Uncle Mort said. “Seriously, we have to leave. Now.” He dropped to the floor and started crawling through the narrow tunnel.

  Driggs walked directly through a wall, then stuck his head back in. “Well, that’s a perk.”

  “Enjoy it while you can,” Grotton said. “It gets old rather quickly.”

  Driggs came back into the cabin and eyed him. “Do you know why I can unDamn?”

  “I do.”

  “And what about me?” said Lex. “Am I the Last?”

  Grotton looked between the two of them, then let out a nasty, mischievous chuckle. “What fun we’re all going to have together,” he said, passing through the wall to the outside. “What fun!”

  That left Lex and Driggs alone in the small room. The candle was about to run out of wick and the light had diminished considerably; darker shadows flung themselves up the walls, trying to escape.

  Driggs looked at Lex. “This is fucked up.”

  “To put it mildly.”

  “We’re in a war.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why,” he asked, “are you smiling?”
/>   Because Uncle Mort had her back, and always would. Because Grotton was real, and would soon pay for his crimes. Because Driggs was broken, but she was going to fix him. She was going to fix everything.

  Lex grabbed the Wrong Book with one hand, her scythe with the other, and stepped toward the tunnel, still grinning.

  “Because we’re going to win it.”

  Visit www.hmhbooks.com to find all of the books in this series.

  Prologue

  Grotton wondered, for a brief moment, if there were a special circle of hell reserved for someone like him—or if Dante would have to cobble together an entirely new one.

  “Please,” the farmer at his feet moaned. “Please.”

  Other than delivering a small kick to shut the man up, Grotton ignored him and went back to his task. He had to keep his wits about him, or this would never work.

  The heavy smoke had darkened the thatched roof of the farmer’s hut, but some small bits of light had begun to edge back in. Grotton picked up his scythe—a heavy stone made from lead, forged by his own two hands. The best blacksmith in the village, they’d called him, back before the rumors started.

  He smiled at the irony, how the only people who were able to confirm that the rumors were true never lived long enough to tell anyone.

  Case in point: the cowering, dirty wretch on the ground, worlds away from the puffed-up, righteous man he’d been up until a few moments before, as if someone had pricked him and let all the air out. Every few moments his gaze would dart to the two still lumps beside him, but he’d quickly squeeze his eyes shut and let out another whimper.

  “I was only protecting our village,” he moaned. “With a demon in our midst—”

  “I’m not a demon.” Grotton knew better than to engage in conversation with the brute, but the words came regardless. “I hurt no one.”

  The farmer looked up at him, a swath of greasy hair falling over his eyes. “A demon,” he insisted. “Stalking through the night, taking the souls of—”

  “Of people who are already dead.”

  Dead and cold and filling with mold, his students liked to say. There’d certainly been no shortage of test subjects for them—the Great Plague had made sure of that. They’d called themselves reapers, which Grotton had found amusing at first—and, as their experiments continued with increased success, oddly appropriate. He was glad his students had not been identified; perhaps they’d be able to rejoin him after he fled the village.

  After he’d taken care of this one loose end.

  “You hurt no one?” the farmer growled. Perhaps he knew what awaited him; but then again, even Grotton did not know. They were breaking fresh ground today, the two of them—the scientist and his lab rat. “How can you say that?”

  “You mistake my words,” said Grotton. “I hurt no one—until today.”

  To illustrate this, he administered another kick, this time to one of the little lumps lying next to the man. That did it—whatever small amounts of bravado the man had conjured now melted away. He dissolved into sobs, putting his thick hands over his eyes to block the view of the blood seeping out of his children’s skulls in thin rivulets, draining to the sunken center of the floor.

  “Please,” he said again. “Mercy.”

  “Mercy?” Grotton almost laughed. “Like the kind you showed my family?” He knelt down to look the man in the eye and spoke calmly and evenly. “Setting fire to a man’s home, roasting his wife and children alive—that sort of mercy?”

  “I thought you were with them . . . We needed to be rid of you, all of you, demons—”

  Grotton slapped him across the face. The man went quiet.

  Grotton stood back up and wiped his red-stained hands on a towel. “I already have shown you mercy.”

  The man made a noise of disbelief. “How?”

  “Your children,” Grotton explained in a measured voice, “are merely dead.” He walked over to another heap on the ground, this one charred and black. “Your wife did not fare as well; she is Damned, her soul in unbearable pain as we speak.”

  The farmer cried out, no doubt replaying in his mind the way Grotton’s hands had squeezed her skin and set her on fire, black smoke bursting out of her body and filling the room.

  “Yet neither of those fates,” Grotton finished, “are as odious as yours will be.”

  By now the man could barely speak. “I—I—”

  “You set the fire,” Grotton said, his voice growing thick, the taste of revenge on his tongue. “You made your choice.”

  “No, please—”

  The scythe in Grotton’s hand was already black, but now an even denser shadow seemed to burst out of it, surrounding his hand—as if it were glowing, but with darkness instead of light. He raised it above his head, allowed himself one last look at the man’s terrified eyes, brought the blade down into his chest—

  And the room went dark.

  “So all that really happened? What you did to the farmer, all those years ago?”

  Grotton nodded. “More or less.”

  A pause. “Think you can do it one more time?”

  “If you brought what I asked for.”

  His guest emptied the requested items onto the table. They clinked and bounced, producing a sound like wind chimes. “Here.”

  Grotton leaned forward, his face aglow in the light of the burning candle. “Then I believe we have a deal.”

  1

  Driggs’s hair was still wet.

  That’s the odd thought that popped into Lex’s head as they ran. She and Driggs and Uncle Mort were fleeing a mob of angry villagers—in the middle of the night, through a thick forest, and in a blizzard, no less—so it wasn’t as if there weren’t other things to focus on.

  Yet she couldn’t take her eyes off his hair, which had been that way since he’d died of hypothermia a few hours before. Shouldn’t it have dried a little by now? They’d stopped in Grotton’s relatively warm cabin long enough for at least some of it to have evaporated. But he still looked soaked, making his dark brown hair spikier and more chaotic than it usually was.

  Appropriate, Lex thought bitterly. Drowned hair, drowned life. Just when she thought she’d stumbled upon some evidence that proved Driggs hadn’t just been turned into a ghost—those fleeting moments when he went solid, his fingers physically brushing up against hers as they ran—here was this hair thing, slapping her in the face.

  Determined, Lex reached out for Driggs’s hand but grabbed only air—not because her aim was off, but because air was what his hand was made of at the moment. She slowed her sprinting pace to a jog and tried to look straight into his eyes, but the way his head was fading in and out of existence made it somewhat difficult to figure out where his eyes actually were.

  But she soon caught them—the blue one first, then the brown one. He forced a grin onto his face. “Working on it,” he said, panting as he ran.

  Lex swallowed and tried to look at the situation with a glass-half-full mentality. Except when your boyfriend has been turned into some type of weird part-ghost, part-human hybrid and it’s all your fault, the power of positive thinking becomes a bit of a challenge. “It’s really not that bad,” she lied through her teeth, contorting her face into something that resembled human happiness. She would be strong. She would not lose it, no matter how many creepy clown smiles she had to make. “It’s not.”

  “I know,” he lied right back. Just then, he popped into tangibility, shoving his hand into Lex’s and letting out a breath. “There. Easy.”

  “Easy?”

  “If the definition of easy has been changed to ‘extraordinarily strenuous,’ then yes.” He gave her another one of those awful grins. “Easy.”

  And Lex’s heart broke all over again, into a million pieces, probably tearing up all her other organs in the process.

  “Hurry up, you two,” Uncle Mort shouted from up ahead. “There’ll be plenty of time later for agonizing assessments of our cruel, cruel fate. That is, if we survive.” H
e turned back to glare at them as he ran. “Which, judging by your glacial pace, seems like something that I’m the only one trying to do.”

  The spectral white figure floating just behind Uncle Mort held up a single bony finger. “Actually, if we’re to be precise, I cannot technically survive if I am already—”

  “Dead?” Uncle Mort finished for him, shooting Grotton a rude sneer before surging on ahead. “Yes, we know.”

  The centuries-old ghost gave him a thorny smile. “Just pointing it out.”

  Lex and Driggs doubled their pace, winding through the dark trees that made up the woods surrounding Croak. Still, the mob of bloodthirsty townspeople wasn’t that far behind—Lex could hear their shouts echoing through the snow-laden trees into the cloudy night sky.

  “Keep going,” Uncle Mort yelled. “We’re almost out of the—”

  He stopped running so abruptly that Lex slammed into his back. Driggs’s hand was wrenched out of hers, and he instantly went transparent again, floating right past them. Grotton, meanwhile, chuckled to himself and drifted above everyone’s heads, crossing one leg over another as if patiently waiting for a train.

  Lex began to rub her nose from where it had smooshed against her uncle, but she stopped as soon as she saw why he had halted. “Oh, shitballs,” she whispered.

  Apparently only half of the townspeople had been pursuing them from behind. The other half had split off some time before, circled around, and were now coming at them from the other side, weapons drawn and at the ready. Norwood, the mutinous mayor, was at the front. His face was slick with sweat and loathing—unsurprising, given the fact that Lex had Damned his wife an hour prior. Standing beside him was Trumbull—the butcher who at one time had employed Zara but was now Norwood’s head goon—and Riley, she of the giant sunglasses and über-bitchery.

  Uncle Mort bristled. “Shitballs is right.”

  “Can we Crash yet?” Lex asked. Instantly scything out of there would be the best option, but she wasn’t sure it would work. “Are we out of range?”