Thieves of Weirdwood

by Christian McKay Heidicker

  More silence. Arthur waited, heart pounding in his head.

  “Well now,” the man finally said. “That is intriguing.”

  Arthur parted the leaves. Wind whistled through the plates of glass, ruffling the pages on a small desk. The desk was nearly empty. No leftover plates of food. No tea. Nothing but pen and paper and the flickering candle.

  And there was the man. Alfred Moore. The author’s face looked ravaged by sleepless nights. His eyes were puffy, and his nose was filled with broken blood vessels. Gray streaked his thinning hair. His fingernails had not been trimmed in ages, and his fingers were stained with blood. This was not how Arthur had imagined his favorite author.

  Moore studied Arthur and grew more relaxed. “Why, you’re only a boy! And you sound as if you’ve read more than a few adventure stories, hm?”

  Arthur smiled. “Devoured every one in sight.”

  In Moore’s hand was the Quill. As Wally had said, it was gnarled and black as night, with red veins as bright as starlight. Arthur eyed it warily, imagining all of the terrible things it could do to him.

  “How much is this ink of yours, then?” Moore said.

  “F-for a dedicated writer such as yourself?” Arthur said, trying not to stumble as he held up Huamei’s paint bottle. “We’re, um, running a deal.” He said the first number that came to mind.

  He expected Moore to use the Quill to write gold into the room. But instead the author patted his pockets and searched his desk drawer for coins. It was as if the Mirror author didn’t know the power the Quill held …

  Moore looked disappointed. “I’ve nothing to pay.”

  “That’s all right,” Arthur said, taking a step forward. “I’ll give you this free sample. That way when your books start flying off the shelves, you’ll be a return customer.”

  Moore unscrewed the bottle’s cap and dipped his Quill. He wrote a sentence, dark blue beside the bloodred letters. Arthur tried not to wince. Every word Moore wrote was another potential death in Kingsport.

  Arthur leaned in, trying to steal a peek at the page. He noticed a piece of paper on the corner of the table that read the tentacles slurped back into the sewer, dragging the precious manuscript and the whereabouts of the author’s hiding place with them.

  Moore thought his enemies had been diverted.

  Arthur turned his attention to Moore’s current work. “What are you writing? If I may ask?”

  Moore smiled. “Recently, I’ve been dreaming up something quite fiendish! Imagine if the brains of the dead grew ivy like pumpkins, dragging the bodies out of the Kingsport Graveyard and into the city!” He started to scribble again. “That’s sure to put me back on the bestseller list!”

  Arthur paled. His mom was in that graveyard. He couldn’t let Moore write one more word. He tried to think of how Garnett would handle this situation, but all he could think of was the Gentleman Thief tapping the top of his own head, which was no help at all. For all of Arthur’s talk about protecting the poor and being a hero, he was never able to pull it off. He’d spent the last few years trying to score enough money so he could start acting like Garnett. But his methods had been anything but gentlemanly.

  Arthur removed his hat. “Sir, I came here under false pretenses.”

  Moore stopped writing, the Quill hovering over an unfinished sentence.

  Arthur swallowed. “I’ve been a fan of yours since I was eight years old. Your Garnett Lacroix stories inspired me to become the person I am today. To stand up for the poor. To respect the human spirit more than money. To be a hero in the face of adversity.”

  Moore chuckled and pointed. “You’ve even re-created the Gentleman Thief’s hat!”

  Arthur looked at the hat and noticed the daffodil was in full bloom. He didn’t know what to make of it.

  Moore sighed a lonely sigh. “I don’t get out much, and so never meet my adoring fans. You’re actually the first.”

  Arthur glanced around the plants. He had always imagined Moore locked away, scribbling away the hours. The author had probably never stepped outside this greenhouse. He didn’t even know that his own Gentleman Thief was wasting away in the sewers below this building.

  Arthur studied the man’s upside-down handwriting. “Why did you stop writing adventure stories? Why turn to horror?”

  A shadow passed behind Moore’s eyes. “I hadn’t been feeling like myself. I was exhausted. I lost my hair and appetite. I felt as if I was disintegrating—like an old scarecrow left to rot in the rain.” He held up the Quill and brightened. “But then a stranger showed up and gave me this fine instrument.”

  The Jangling Man, Arthur thought.

  Huamei suspected this was the Fallen Warden—the man trying to bring down the Veil.

  Moore continued. “He told me that a witch named Valerie Lucas had put a curse on me—a curse that would slowly but surely make me disappear. If I wanted to reverse it, all I had to do was use this Quill to cast a spell—to write her out of the equation.”

  By pulling Miss Lucas apart with tentacles, Arthur thought, trying not to let the disgust show on his face.

  Moore took a deep breath, brightening. “Now that the witch is dead and buried, I’ve started to feel more myself.” He tapped the page with his Quill. “So I’ve continued down this wonderfully haunted path. If I’d known how enthralling horror stories were, I’d have started a long time ago. Gives one a chill in the bone marrow.”

  Arthur realized that the real reason Moore couldn’t write Garnett Lacroix was because Valerie Lucas had retired, drying up the Mirror author’s imagination. Now that Lucas was dead, Moore would never write another word about the Gentleman Thief. He could only repeat gruesome versions of the old adventures. His mind was as twisted as Parasite Lane was to Paradise Lane.

  Arthur hesitated, wondering how to proceed. “Readers also need comfort and heroes to look up to. Things have grown bad in Kingsport, what with the gangs and the starvation. The Pox left a scar that won’t heal any time soon.”

  Something shrieked above, like a claw scraping glass, and Moore’s gaze leapt to the greenhouse’s ceiling where the shadow of Huamei’s whisker just managed to whip out of sight.

  Moore flinched, then frowned at Arthur. “Are you hiding something, son?”

  “Not at all, sir,” Arthur said, forcing his quivering lips into a smile. “Unless you’re talking about my hope to get an autograph.”

  Moore turned his scowl back to the glass ceiling.

  Arthur tapped the bottle of paint, trying to draw the author’s attention away from the window. “When was the last time you wrote about something nice?”

  Moore gave the page a blank stare, as if he wouldn’t know where to start.

  “May I?” Arthur asked, reaching for the Quill.

  Moore pulled away. “I’d rather hold on to this.”

  Arthur smiled. “I’ll dictate, then.”

  Moore dipped the Quill in the paint and gave Arthur an expectant look.

  “What Kingsport could use,” Arthur said, “is a vacation. I’m thinking of a field, speckled with dandelions. A softly gleaming sun. A brook trickling somewhere nearby.”

  Moore wrote the words … and his expression started to change. He breathed as if smelling a soft rain. Candlelight sparkled in his eyes like morning dew. The author even wiggled his feet, like his toes were tickled by grasses.

  Moore smiled. “This ink of yours is quite smooth.”

  “I’d never hock a bad product,” Arthur said. “What nice things can you come up with?”

  Moore tapped the paper with the Quill, thinking. But when it came to pleasant things, the Mirror author was at a loss.

  “How about…” Arthur said. “A new suit on Lacey Lane?”

  Moore raised his eyebrows. “People do like new suits.”

  He dipped the Quill into the paint and began to write. Arthur breathed a quiet sigh of relief. He wished Sekhmet was there to see what he’d accomplished. All it took was a little explaining. No floods or e
xplosions or violence required.

  Moore continued to write. “It’d be charcoal gray with purple piping…” He dipped the Quill and got a wicked expression. “And when men try it on, the collar will strangle them.”

  “No!” Arthur said.

  Moore stopped, confused. He slashed a line through the sentence. Somewhere on Lacey Lane, Arthur imagined, a man clutched at his throat, breathing with relief.

  “We’re trying to lead away from horror,” Arthur said.

  Moore frowned. “And vanish again? No. The Jangling Man told me I had to keep writing successful stories, otherwise I’d fade like that witch intended. The things you’re describing are pleasant but boring. They’ll never sell.”

  Arthur bit his lip. He would have to take a new track. A more honest track.

  “The Jangling Man deceived you,” Arthur said. “That Quill you’re holding can do more than reverse a witch’s curse. It’s way more dangerous and powerful than he led you to believe.”

  Moore listened. Arthur smelled flowers once again. Almost like his words had activated the scent.

  “In fact,” he continued, “the monsters you’ve been dreaming up have come to life in my city, turning people into porcelain and dropping them from great heights and pulling them apart. Not just characters. People. With families.”

  Arthur picked up a blood-inked page from the desk and showed it to Moore.

  “That witch you were talking about was a normal woman named Valerie Lucas,” Arthur said. “She was an author. She created you. And yes, when she stopped writing about you, you became a shell of your former self. But she didn’t deserve to die for that.”

  A shadow crept across Moore’s brow. “What evidence do you have for this?”

  Arthur pulled out the page he’d taken from Lucas’s house and handed it to Moore.

  Moore read it in silence, brow furrowed. “How do I know you didn’t just copy this from my first book?”

  “My handwriting’s not that nice,” Arthur said.

  He did his best to explain everything. The Fae. The Real. The Veil that separates them. The Quill made of dragon bone. He told Moore that he was a backward author. Just as Valerie Lucas wrote words that created him in the Fae, Moore was writing words that created monsters in the Real.

  Moore looked suddenly lost, and Arthur knew he had to tread lightly.

  “I know what it’s like to be mistreated by your creator,” Arthur said. “My dad uses me to make money, just like Valerie Lucas accidentally did with you … That doesn’t mean we have to follow in their footsteps.”

  Moore stared at his work. “Are you telling me I don’t exist?”

  Arthur swayed on his feet. “I, um, guess so … yeah.”

  Moore looked at the Quill. “But this instrument creates whatever I want it to?”

  “Yes. But that’s why you should really only be writing about things like meadows. And suits. Only ones that don’t strangle. We want to help the people of Kingsport. Not hurt them.”

  But Moore was no longer listening. His eyes were fixed over Arthur’s shoulder, growing wide with horror. Arthur followed his gaze. A giant sea foam eye filled the glass wall.

  “Get back!” Arthur yelled at the dragon. “I didn’t give the signal!”

  “The man who gave me this Quill warned me about you,” Moore whispered. “You’re from that Manor, aren’t you? You’ve come to kill me.”

  Arthur turned. “That dragon isn’t with me. I mean, he’s nice. He’s—” The scent of flowers snuffed out.

  Before Arthur could explain, Moore began to write, mumbling to himself. “If what you say is true—that Valerie Lucas stopped writing and I started dying—then I regret nothing. I choose life over death. At any cost.”

  Arthur’s heart pounded. “Wait! We can find another way!”

  But Moore only wrote with more ferocity. “I need somewhere safe. Somewhere my work won’t be interrupted.”

  Huamei’s beak smashed through the glass wall. He tried to squeeze his massive head through the frame, but it wouldn’t fit. His beak thrashed and snipped a foot away from Moore’s arm, but it couldn’t reach.

  This was up to Arthur.

  He lunged to snatch away the Quill, but Moore drove it clean through his hand before pulling it back out. Arthur screamed and stumbled backward, pressing into the bleeding wound.

  The author continued to write, and a monstrous roar reverberated from the port. Something enormous tromped down the streets.

  “Please,” Arthur said, bleeding on the floor. “We’re here to help.”

  Alfred Moore looked at him with madness in his eyes. “You can help me by dying.” He stabbed the Quill down, placing a period at the end of a sentence.

  A shadow darkened the greenhouse’s glass ceiling. It wrapped a wrought iron claw around Huamei, tearing him from the building. The Fae beast was made of stone and had a rattling portcullis for a mouth. It seized the entire greenhouse with its claws. The glass cracked, the frame buckled, and the floor heaved upward. Arthur tumbled at breakneck speed through the plants. He saw one last look of victory on Moore’s face before the author vanished in the leaves.

  Arthur struck the front entrance so hard it burst open, spilling him onto the street. He leapt to his feet as the greenhouse was ripped from its foundation, leaves and glass shards raining into the street. It was being devoured by another building, wrought iron claws feeding the glass into its portcullis mouth.

  Alfred Moore had used the Quill to transform Mirror Greyridge into a monster.

  Arthur watched as the author leapt from the greenhouse into the hospital. The building shrieked with the screams of its patients as giant bat wings unfurled from its sides. With three great swoops, Monster Greyridge took flight over the roofs of the Mirror City.

  Huamei flew after it, coiling and thrashing, his seashell fangs helpless against the stone.

  Arthur removed his hat and watched the battle in the sky. What had he done? He’d tried to solve the problem with peace, but instead he’d brought disaster. By telling Moore about the power of the Quill, Arthur had given the author control over his own destiny.

  Alfred Moore was writing his own story now.

  Huamei turned his fangs to the monster hospital’s giant wing. The hospital didn’t like this at all, so it swung itself like a stone club, cracking the dragon in the head with the weight of a thousand stones. Huamei’s body went limp, and the dragon fell, unspooling through the air before crunching through a nearby roof.

  Arthur expected the bat-winged Greyridge to fly away now that its enemy was unconscious. But instead it crashed down like a giant hammer, landing right on top of the dragon’s unconscious body.

  “Huamei!” Arthur sprinted toward him, mumbling to himself. “Please be okay. Please be okay. Please be okay.”

  Dragons were powerful, Arthur assured himself. Huamei had said so himself. He’d be fine. Just fine.

  With a great swoop of its wings the monster hospital flapped away. Arthur crawled into the wreckage and found the dragon. He stared at the wounds in the scales. Like cracks through porcelain.

  Huamei was dead.

  20

  THE DRAGON’S WAKE

  Wally ran into Sekhmet on his way back.

  “Huamei’s in trouble!” he yelled before she could draw her swords.

  He ran past her, and she followed. By the time they got back to the greenhouse, it was too late. The dragon’s eyes were open. Blood pooled from his beak.

  On the ground beside the body, a goblin mouth doorway led into the warm glow of the Manor’s War Room. With his last breath it seemed Huamei had used his claw to scratch a portal back to Weirdwood.

  Sekhmet’s eyes burned bright with tears. Then she drew her swords, and with a great gust of air, lifted the dragon’s body. Wally bent and picked up Arthur’s garish hat. The daffodil in the brim had wilted completely.

  * * *

  Wally found Arthur in the Healing Room, which was white and billowy and quiet. Ludwig and
Pyra lay in two of the beds, healing from the battle with the Corvidians. Little paper animals stitched up Ludwig’s leg wound, while Pyra had a slab of beef resting on her face, her skin still blue from the explosion. Neither looked up when Wally passed. They were grieving.

  Arthur lay in a corner bed, as still as the blankets that covered him. His face was turned toward the wall, his right hand wrapped with bloody bandages.

  “Hey, Arthur,” Wally said, hanging the hat on the bed’s poster. “How you holding up?”

  Arthur didn’t budge. “It was my fault.”

  “No,” Wally said, remembering Graham’s words, “it wasn’t.”

  Arthur covered his face with his good hand. “You weren’t there.”

  Wally sighed. What was he supposed to say? Actually, my brother told me he can see into the future, and it seems everything that happens is more out of our control than we’d like to believe. We’re all just puppets.

  Wally sat on the foot of the bed and looked around the hospital room. “This place reminds me of the day we met.”

  Arthur only sniffed.

  It had been after the great Battle of the Barrows between Kingsport’s rival gangs. The fight that would ultimately make the Rook the underground leader of the city. The gangs had fought with brickbats, steel bars, and broken bottles, so the hospitals were packed with people, bloodied and broken.

  Wally and Arthur were the only kids in their ward who received no visitors. Wally’s parents and Arthur’s mom were buried in the graveyard from the Pox, while Harry had been noticeably absent.

  While Wally healed, Arthur made up a story about an afterlife called the Great Elsewhere where they would be able to walk in, rescue their parents, and bring them back to the land of the living. It had brought Wally a little comfort, and he had thought this was the beginning of a long friendship. But then he had gotten to know Arthur and his ego. And he’d decided it was wise to keep the kid at a distance. Now, after everything they’d been through, Wally wasn’t sure how he felt about Arthur Benton.