by Anne Ursu
“Oh,” he said, shaking his head. “No reason.”
“Fine, Zee,” Charlotte spat. “Fine. Just…whatever happened to you, can you get back to normal by the time I come back? Okay?” And then she gave him her most disgusted look, turned on her heel, and stalked off in all the fury she could muster.
That night, as Charlotte laid out her things for the cruise, she could not get her mind off her cousin. What had happened to him? If it wasn’t a head injury, what else could it be? Do people really change overnight? Was it hormones? Did something happen at soccer to make him…weird? Or had he just decided to make a move with Maddy and then everything spun out of control after that? Was the nice Zee she knew just a product of everything he’d gone through in the summer and fall, and underneath it all was a jerk just waiting to come out?
Charlotte didn’t believe it, not really. She didn’t believe any of it. But, as she would eventually come very much to regret, she could think of no other explanation.
PART TWO
FISHY
CHAPTER 7
No Way to Treat a Hero II
IN THE IMMENSE SPRAWL OF SUBURBS SURROUNDING the town where Charlotte and Zee lived, there was an enormous mall. This mall—better known as the Mall—was the biggest mall in all of the United States. And if you were from London and were not used to malls at all, let alone malls the size of small towns, you would be properly horrified by the place. And if you had recently been led to the Underworld through a door in this particular mall, you would do everything in your power to avoid ever going there again as long as you lived.
Which is exactly what Zachary “Zee” Miller had been doing for months. Every time his friends suggested they go, he came up with something else to do that day—soccer game, dinner with family, disfiguring rash.
But on this Saturday afternoon, exactly two weeks before the Mielswetzskis were scheduled to leave on their odyssey through America’s past, Zee found himself walking through the doors of this very same Mall. It wasn’t supposed to happen; Dov’s mom was going to pick them up and he, Dov, and Sam were all going to see a movie at a nice normal-size suburban mall that had no doors to the Underworld at all (as far as Zee knew, anyway). But when he got into the car, Dov told him, “Change of plans. We’re going to the Mall.” And before Zee could open the car door and flee in the opposite direction, Dov’s mom hit the gas and they were off.
It was silly, of course. Ridiculous. Normal boys aren’t afraid of shopping malls. Normal boys go out with their friends and have fun and talk about sports and girls and music and video games and don’t worry about whether a half-demon/half-god freak is stalking them. But normal boys just don’t have Zee’s fabulous luck.
As they parked in one of the mammoth parking structures that lined the Mall, Zee steeled himself to pretend it was an ordinary place and he was an ordinary boy and nothing at all extraordinary had ever happened to him there. He could do that. Zee had a lot of practice pretending his problems didn’t exist—though, of course, his problems used to be a lot less weird. If he had only known what was to come when he was dwelling on his freakish inability to speak to some girl or another back in the good ol’ days, he really would have taken time out to appreciate how lucky he was.
Sometimes he felt as if there were two Zees—Outside Zee, who was your typical teenage boy who hung out with his friends and played a lot of soccer and had a big music collection, and Real Zee, who missed his grandmother, who was harrowed by the Dead, who had almost caused the eternal suffering of the entire human race.
On this afternoon as they entered the Mall, while Real Zee’s stomach was turning in a way it was not meant to turn, Outside Zee looked as if he was a normal boy out with his friends. If you looked at him, you would say, “There is a normal teenage boy out with his normal friends having an excellent time on a most excellent Saturday afternoon,” not, “There is a teenage boy who needs immediate medical attention.” Zee and his friends went to a movie (about some guy who hunts aliens even though he’s part alien himself), ate some food court food (pizza), and then met up with Dov’s mom outside one of the department stores to go home.
And Outside Zee patted Real Zee on the back—Way to go, guy! You did it. You survived. No one suspected a thing. And Real Zee relaxed a little and thought only of the bright blue sky outside. And as they made their way through one of the Mall’s long aisles toward the parking lot, for one moment Real Zee’s heart was at ease.
Now, this was only the second time Zee had ever been to the Mall, and the first time he and Charlotte had come from the other direction, and he hadn’t exactly been looking at the neighboring shops at the time, and besides the Mall is really quite enormous and people who’ve been going there for years don’t know their way around, so there was no way for Zee to know that on the way out of the Mall they would pass the small nondescript hallway that led to the door that led to the interminable cold, dark passageway to the Underworld.
And then, there they were.
Zee could never forget it, never mistake it for some other dark corridor, some other door. He froze in his tracks and stared down the long dark nondescript hallway. In his mind, he was at the end of it—reaching for the handle, turning it slowly, feeling the cold rush of damp air as the door creaked open, plunging him into the absolute darkness.
Around him, shoppers strolled gaily by. No one else knew about this door, of course. None of the Mall employees had ever tried to open it; everyone assumed it was for someone else’s department and left it alone. And the Mall customers never got close enough to it to look, for whenever they passed it they were always immediately possessed with a strange incuriousness and struck with a sudden urge to go somewhere else entirely.
But not Zee. For a moment he imagined running down the corridor, yanking the door open, and hurling himself down to the Underworld, back to the Dead, where he could free them all, where he could find his grandmother—who was the only person in the world who knew how to make the two Zees one again.
It was ridiculous, of course. There was no getting through the door this time. And even if he could, he was not exactly welcome in the Underworld. And even if he were, he would never find Grandmother Winter, who had died the previous summer. And even if he could, she couldn’t help him now.
“What’s wrong?” Dov asked.
“Nothing,” Zee muttered. “I just…thought of something.”
“I’m hungry,” Dov’s mom said suddenly.
“Yeah, me too,” said Sam. “I really want a soft pretzel.”
“That sounds perfect,” said Dov’s mom.
“Yeah,” Zee said, casting a long look down the corridor. “Let’s get out of here.”
And then it happened. The voice. A breath, a puff of wind, a whisper. It echoed through his body, as if it were coursing through his veins. “Ze-rooooo.”
Philonecron.
It had been happening almost every day for a month now. Zee knew the voice as well as he knew his own. Back in the Underworld, Philonecron had claimed he could control Zee because he’d spent so much time with his blood. And it was true. Philonecron could make Zee do whatever he wanted. He would speak, Zee’s brain would soften, and Zee became entirely helpless in the god’s hands—and if it hadn’t been for Charlotte, Zee would still be down there doing Philonecron’s bidding.
But they defeated Philonecron, got out alive, and Zee thought it was over, thought he’d never have that horrible voice inhabit his brain again, until one night, very late, he heard it echoing in his head.
“Ze-roooo.”
That’s what Philonecron had called him. Zero, as in Patient Zero, as in Your Blood Is the Key to My Evil Plan. And it was all the voice ever said. Just that name, over and over again. Was it just an echo? Some sort of trick of his mind? Or was Philonecron out there, somewhere, calling to him? And why was it that still, upon hearing the voice, his brain would soften, his body would ready itself to do whatever his enemy asked?
He’d wanted to tell Charlotte—he
just couldn’t find the words. It felt wrong somehow. Like his own failure. Charlotte was ready to go off and free the Dead—but Zee still hadn’t won the first battle. Philonecron had taken his blood, made his friends sick, used him to enchant the shadow army, controlled him. Philonecron had been defeated, yes, but not truly vanquished—and now he was wandering around the Upperworld, free, and his voice whispered inside Zee’s head.
Like Charlotte, Zee wanted desperately to hear from Mr. Metos, but unlike Charlotte, it was because Mr. Metos was the only person who might know where Philonecron had gone. It wasn’t that Zee didn’t want what Charlotte did—he wanted to help the Dead, yes; he wanted to work with the Prometheans, yes. But first, before he did anything else, he wanted to find Philonecron and put an end to this once and for all.
Though he didn’t exactly have a plan for that part.
When Dov’s mom dropped him off at his house that evening, Zee opened the front door as quietly as he could and tried to sneak up to his room. He had in mind a night of lying on his bed with his headphones on, music turned up so high that if anyone were to be whispering inside his head, they’d have to be really loud about it if they wanted to be heard.
But as Zee crept up the stairs, he heard his father’s voice call to him from the kitchen. With a sigh, he headed back down to answer his summons.
“You’re being awfully quiet,” Mr. Miller said from his post at the computer as Zee entered the kitchen.
“Didn’t want to disturb you,” Zee mumbled. “Where’s Mum?”
“Having a soak in the tub. Did you have fun tonight?” Mr. Miller turned his chair around to study his son.
“Yeah,” Zee said noncommittally.
“Dov and Sam, right?”
“Yeah.”
“A movie and dinner?”
Zee shrugged in agreement. In England his parents had subscribed strictly to the hands-off style of parenting, but since they came to America they had clearly decided Zee needed them to be more involved in his life. Not that they’d asked him his opinion. Where the Mielswetzskis had responded to the whole gone-all-night incident by grounding Charlotte for the rest of her life, Zee’s parents reacted by inserting him inside a giant fishbowl. They’d already worried about him, what with his grandmother’s death and his strange fear that the mysterious illness sweeping over Britain had something to do with him (which, of course, it did, but Zee wasn’t exactly going to explain that to them. See, Mum, I wasn’t barmy, it was just weird clay Underworld men were following me!). So now, if his mother wasn’t knocking on his bedroom door to find out how he was feeling at that particular moment, his father was grilling him to make sure his new friends weren’t going to turn him into a delinquent. It was a little trying.
“Can I get you a snack or something?” Mr. Miller asked, standing up.
Plus they seemed to think he was five.
“No, Dad, thanks. Well”—he turned and started to head back out the door—“I’ll see you later.”
“Wait, Zee. I want to talk to you. Come here and have a seat,” Mr. Miller said, pulling out a chair from the kitchen table.
Zee groaned inwardly, but there was no escape. With heavy steps, he shuffled over to the chair and sat down. His father sat down opposite him.
“Zachary,” he said, folding his hands and placing them on the table, “your mother and I are concerned about you. We just wanted to make sure everything’s all right.”
“Yeah, Dad, everything’s fine.”
“Because you’ve just…seemed really preoccupied lately. You’ve been through a lot this year, so many really major things have happened to you, and it’s perfectly understandable. It seems like there’s a lot going on inside that head of yours.”
If only he knew.
“It might really help to talk about it. If you can’t talk to us, maybe we can get you a counselor? Charlotte’s been seeing one and your aunt highly recommends her.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t really think I need that.” Zee wondered what his aunt would think of the therapist if she knew that Charlotte made up most everything she said during the sessions.
“It can be very helpful,” Mr. Miller added. “It’s not just for people who hear voices, you know.”
“Right,” Zee said, his voice cracking. “Okay. Thanks, Dad. Well, I’d better go. Want to get a start on my homework!” And with that, he burst from his chair and fled the room.
Last October, after Zee and Charlotte had returned from their sojourn and all the kids had started getting better, his parents called and had a Talk with him. His father’s transfer to the States was already planned for December, they’d said; he’d worked very hard to get it, and they’d found someone to fill his job in London. So it would be very difficult for them to cancel the move now, but if Zee wanted, if he really wanted to move back to London, they would see what they could do.
“No, that’s all right,” he’d said. “I don’t mind.”
The truth was, Zee didn’t feel any more out of place at the very American Hartnett Middle School than he had at London’s prestigious Feldwop and Egfred. Maybe less so. Charlotte thought the kids at Hartnett were snobbish, but she didn’t know the half of it; Ashley O’Brien’s parents might own a multinational corporation, but they hadn’t ever lunched with the Queen. It made all the difference.
Not that he felt hugely in place either. There weren’t many more black kids at Hartnett than there were at F&E (though when you’re dealing with such small numbers, every little bit helps). He got a little tired of being asked if he was adopted when people found out he was Charlotte’s cousin. He started keeping a picture of his black British mom and white American dad in his locker for a visual aid. And, of course, he talked funny and didn’t have the right clothes and did everything wrong. He had finally stopped saying things like “knackered” and “bril” and had learned to say, “What’s up?” instead of “All right?” and “soccer” instead of “football”—at least most of the time, though to tell the truth, he still felt funny about it.
But none of that mattered, because in America there was Charlotte, and in England there was not. They were alone together. She had been through what he had, she knew what he did, and without her Real Zee would have lost his mind long ago.
The only other thing that kept him from going completely barmy was soccer. He’d been playing in a winter league at an indoor sports complex, and it was a great solace from the burdens he carried with him. Sometimes that made him feel guilty, too—the Dead were suffering and he got comfort by strapping on a pair of cleats and running back and forth on plastic grass?
But most of the time it didn’t, because he was too busy strapping on cleats and running back and forth on plastic grass. Not that Philonecron was totally gone from him when he played; sometimes when Zee needed to land a particularly hard kick, he imagined the ball was his nemesis’s head.
When he got to the sports complex after school on Wednesday, he went to his locker and got dressed quietly. The boys on the team were all right, but he didn’t have a lot to say to them, really, and when they all went to the pizza place across the street after the games, Zee stayed pretty quiet. On the first day of practice, when he walked onto the field he was very conscious of being new, of being a head taller than anyone else, of being many shades darker than anyone else, of being from a different country, of talking funny. But by the end of the day, the whole team was acting like he was the coolest guy they’d ever seen, and Zee was under no illusion that it was because of his sparkling personality.
The new boy, though, Jason Hart, was a little different. He’d been nice to Zee from the moment he’d shown up at practice the previous Sunday—asking him tons of questions and just seeming really interested in him, well before he’d seen Zee play. The other boys took to Jason right away too—and since he was a terrible soccer player, Zee was sure that they did like him for his personality.
That night’s game was against the Bears, the only team that had beaten them so far this year
. (Zee’s team, the Rockets, had been 8-12 the year before and were now, thanks to Zee, 13-1.) The Bears had won the league last year, and after playing against them, Zee determined their success was based on two players. The first was Mike Blum, a forward. In the last game, Blum had run circles around the Rockets’ fullbacks and scored four times against their poor goalie Kyle, who seemed quite unable to speak after the game. The second was the Bears’ goalie, John Sommers, who was over six feet tall, incredibly thin, and had arms that seemed to stretch out across the entire width of the goal. In the last game Zee had tried to score nine times, and Sommers blocked every single attempt. It was the only game that season Zee hadn’t scored, and he had taken it very personally.
But this time, he had a plan.
When he was dressed, he ran into the stadium to find the coach. “Listen, um, I was wondering,” Zee told him. “I’d really like to play defensive midfielder today. Do you think I might?”
Coach Johnson squinted at him. “What’s this about, Zee?”
“Well,” Zee said carefully, “I was thinking. That forward’s pretty good, and—”
“And you thought you might be the only one who could stop him.”
Zee winced slightly. That was exactly what he was thinking, but it sounded awfully arrogant. Yes, Zee knew he was the best in the league—but it was only because he actually was. He didn’t take any pride in it, and he certainly didn’t boast. It was just that Zee’d been playing all his life and working very hard in a country where the sport was much more important than it was here. Anyway, if you asked Zee, soccer was the only thing he was good at—and as it meant quite a bit less in his new home, it was hardly something to brag about.
“Well,” the coach said, “you’re right. Let’s do it.”
When Coach Johnson told the team of the change, the players seemed to think he was quite mad—no one saw the point of moving their best scorer to defense against such a good team, but people didn’t always think these things through. Or, as the coach said, “This is the way it’s going to be, so shut up and play!”
