Bizzy, who had been unusually quiet, her eyes on me, chimed in for the first time. “I’m sorry, ladies,” Bizzy said. “I hate to break it to ya both, but you’ve been gone a while and we don’t really have many kings anymore.”
“Perhaps a different name is used today,” Fial said, “but so long as the world turns, there will always be kings or leaders—the most righteous of which, like Drake, possess a perfect balance of logic and feeling. He will assemble the Round Table and defeat Vivienne le Mort.”
“I’m not sure I get it,” I said. “What exactly do you think is going to happen? Are you two going to equip Drake with the Excaliber, give the water polo team some spear guns, and let them have at it?”
“Foolish child, of course not!” Morgan said. “The sword never makes the man. It is the man who makes the sword. The Excaliber was only a powerful tool because Arthur possessed the judgment necessary to make it most effective.”
“Well, does Drake know any of your big plans for him?” I asked.
“Of course not.” Morgan frowned. “It is not time for him to know and you must not tell him. For now, he must just stay alive.”
“Agatha only granted us leave to spend a few minutes here and I am afraid our time is running out, Morgie,” Fial said, wearing her concern on her unlined face. “You best get to it.”
“The true purpose of our trip here is to warn you about Vivienne. As you may know, our sister does not want to restore fate to its proper balance. Once Arthur’s last descendant dies, there will be no one left to stop her. When she has an army of evil souls to do her bidding, she will be the most powerful of all the sisters. Thus, if you do not save the boy, nothing else will matter, because the earth will be on a course for Doomsday, I assure you.”
“You have to excuse Morgie. Sometimes she plays up the fire-and-brimstone aspect of all this a bit much,” Fial said. “We honestly came to warn you. We believe that Vivienne now knows you Hands of Fate exist,” she said as she looked knowingly at me, “which is why Agatha allowed us to leave Avalon and come here.”
“If Drake’s death is that important, why doesn’t Vivienne just kill him now?” I asked, fearful that Drake might be in immediate danger as I spoke the words. “Why hasn’t she killed him already? Why wait?”
“Mortals always have a tendency to see the world as a series of discrete incidents,” Morgan said, sounding impatient. “But destiny is a most delicate pyramid of the smallest of circumstances.” My eyes connected directly with those of my distant great-grandmother, for the first time. Her expression wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t cold, either. “You see, Vivienne is, and will always be, beholden to fate. She cannot be sure cutting a thread before its time will not alter fate once again—and perhaps send the world on a different course entirely.”
I may have suspended my disbelief for a little while, but it was back. I didn’t care if Morgan le Faye was two thousand years old or whatever, she was talking absolute nonsense. Drake Westfall of one-thousand-year-old Crabapple, California … the key to the world’s future? And me, Lizzy Mortimer, high school freshman, the one responsible for his well-being? The whole thing was suddenly hard to stomach.
Bizzy, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be sharing my doubts any longer.
“So if the Westfall boy dies unnaturally when he’s scheduled to, we can kiss our messy ole world good-bye?” she asked.
“I am afraid so. Which is why we came to tell you that Vivienne is sure to be tracking Drake Westfall right now. Watching his every move very carefully,” Morgan le Faye said, looking directly at me. “If she finds out you two are the ones trying to prevent his death, she will find a way to destroy you.”
Morgan le Faye stopped in front of me and paused.
“So, are you gals goin’ to help us save Drake, then?” Bizzy asked.
“I strayed once from Avalon’s rules and caused pain and a great rift among my sisters. I will never do so again,” Morgan le Faye said. “We cannot violate the Great Truce. You already possess all that you need to save Drake Westfall.”
“I hate to say this, Morgie,” Fial said, her eyes shifting around the room, “but we have really already been here too long for anyone’s well-being.” Fial got up and put her yellow hood over the pile of blond hair on top of her head.
“You are correct, Fial. Our presence here only serves to put you both in more danger. Agatha has only allowed us to warn you because she believes the epic contest must be fair. Avoid Vivienne at all costs.” Morgan le Faye began moving her right hand in a circle, at first slowly and then gathering speed. She closed her eyes. Red haze surrounded her, as if her moving hand conjured it. Fial produced her own cloud of yellow smoke. Morgan le Faye’s voice thundered out of the thicket of red and yellow, sounding as if it was coming from all sides like some giant surround sound.
“May fate be on your side. And if it is not, may you make it so!”
As if it were being sucked from Bizzy’s room with a vacuum, the vapor disappeared out Bizzy’s open window in one single whoosh.
When the colorful haze was gone, only Bizzy and I remained, sitting across from one another in her bedroom, growing more certain by the minute that unless we found a way to stop fate and Vivienne le Mort, Drake Westfall had less than forty-eight hours to live.
Revision
Look, I know it’s important, Mrs. Tweedy, but rewriting something after you’ve already finished it is not the easiest task. Writing can be a painful process. Sometimes revising feels like using an already-sore muscle.
After Morgan le Faye and Fial visited, I began to realize that life is one big revision. We are constantly rewriting the stories we tell others about ourselves. Even the Death Catcher part of me keeps changing and morphing. Maybe the only difference between language arts and life is that when you revise an assignment, it’s supposed to improve it, right? But when life gets revised, there are no guarantees it will. In fact, sometimes it gets a whole lot worse.
When I found out that Drake’s death didn’t just affect his life and my life, but according to Morgan le Faye, the entire world, I wished I could edit the knowledge out of my brain. If I could hit the delete key, I thought, the information would be gone and I could adjust to being a Death Catcher first, before I dealt with things like being the Keeper, Doomsday, and the Doomsday maniac, Vivienne le Mort. Yet, I knew, there was no way to separate any of it—one thing bled into another.
Fortunately, there wasn’t much time to dwell on it with Drake’s life hanging in the balance and with our supposedly united destinies. Bizzy and I discussed the details of our plan that night. Monday arrived on schedule. Drake’s body would be discovered in the cannery on Tuesday.
I thought the school day would pass slowly, but first and second period flew by. As soon as recess rolled around, I tried to get a visual on Drake. He was at the picnic tables, hanging out with his teammates.
Jodi met me by our planter. She was wearing a large polkadotted headband, a homemade feather earring in her right ear, and braided sandals.
“What’s the plan for tonight?” Jodi said, watching me watch Drake.
“Bizzy is planning some kind of stakeout,” I said without taking my eyes off Drake.
Jodi and I both jumped up from the planter as the word “FFFIIIIIGHT!” echoed across the quad.
A crowd had gathered by the picnic tables.
“Over there!” Jodi pointed. Instead of running toward the group, Jodi hopped back onto the brick planter. I joined her. From our bird’s-eye view, we could see the entire scene.
In the middle of the mob, two students were tearing at each other in one huddled mass of clothing and flailing arms. I spotted Garrett Edmonds first. He was bobbing and weaving, crouched close to the ground, holding someone in a headlock. Drake’s head appeared as he freed himself from the headlock.
Simultaneously taking a step back and winding up, Drake took a massive swing at Garrett’s face. His fist connected with Garrett’s jaw, followed by a loud pop. The crowd murm
ured and lurched backward, creating space for Garrett to topple over onto the concrete. His groan echoed through the crowd. Garrett thrashed on the ground. I stood on my tiptoes to get a better look at Drake. He was bleeding from his lip and his T-shirt was torn.
Soon, Mr. Thompson, the assistant principal and football coach, was pushing students out of the way, trying to disperse the crowd so he could get to Drake and Garrett. He blew his whistle repeatedly. Finally, he had a direct path to the boys. By that time, most of Crabapple High had assembled around the fight area.
Mr. Thompson reached out and collared Drake.
“Step back!” he yelled at the crowd, waving his free arm at the students. After a few seconds, Mrs. Rios, the theater arts teacher, reached Garrett. She kneeled next to him, asking if he was okay. Garrett hopped up defiantly, still clutching his jaw. Suddenly, he lunged at Drake in a rage. The murmur of the crowd spiked once again. Mr. Thompson stepped between the boys, pushing against Drake, forcing him out of Garrett’s reach.
After another minute, the commotion ended. Mrs. Rios led Garrett to the office while Mr. Thompson ushered Drake from the scene. The quad was alive with the leftover buzz from the fight.
Jodi and I looked at each other, speechless, from our perch on top of the planter. We watched students cluster together, reenacting and recounting portions of the fight. The noise grew. Jodi was the first to notice a group staring at us. She nudged me. Some students pointed at us and then resumed talking. Soon other groups did the same.
“Are they looking at us?” I asked with disbelief.
“No, they’re looking at you,” Jodi said. The ringing of the bell sent students scattering, though dozens of pairs of eyes still followed me as I walked across the quad.
I waited impatiently for two more periods to pass so that I could meet with Jodi again. I was sure she’d have more information for me. She did.
“Looks like I was right,” Jodi said confidently.
“Right about what?”
“People were staring at you after the fight.” Jodi took her cherry ChapStick out of her burlap shoulder bag and coated her lips.
“They were?” I said, dismayed.
“Uh-huh. Apparently Garrett and Drake were fighting over you.”
I had to stop myself from toppling over into the planter. There was just no way it was true. I said as much to Jodi.
“I’ve heard it from multiple sources. Garrett said something to Drake about how Garrett invited you over for dinner … Garrett started teasing Drake about stealing Drake’s girlfriend. Which, I guess, is you. Drake exploded or something. Word is he kinda went agro on Garrett.”
“He did?” I asked in disbelief. “That’s awful.”
“Um, that’s one way of looking at it,” Jodi said, extending her hand and patting my shoulder.
“What do you mean?”
“If Drake was defending your honor, or whatever, I’d take it as a very positive sign that he doesn’t hate you. I think it means the opposite.” Jodi smirked at me. “It looks like you guys can’t seem to escape one another.”
“Maybe Drake fought Garrett because he was upset that Garrett was associating me with him,” I said. Could Drake really have been defending me? Though I tried not to, I thought about Merlin’s words about Drake’s and my intertwined destinies.
“Gee, Lizster. And maybe we’ll all die in an atomic bomb blast tomorrow. But I prefer to think positive.”
I almost laughed at Jodi. She was closer to the truth than she knew. None of this would matter if Drake wound up inside the cannery tomorrow morning.
“Anyways, I’m sure Drake will be suspended, so you’ll have a few days to think of something to say to him when you see him next,” Jodi said, taking a bite out of an apple she pulled from her bag.
“How do you know I want to say something to him?”
“Don’t you want to talk to him again?” More than anything, I’d wanted to respond. My feelings about Drake were a muddled mess. Between the combination of the death-specter, his behavior at school, his name engraved on my hand, and my new role as his Keeper, I had no idea how I felt, just that I wanted to spend more time with him.
I had to focus on the most immediate of the concerns. I considered Drake’s possible suspension. Would he still be able to play in the last couple of water polo games? If not, Mr. Westfall would be furious. Furious enough to lose his temper and do something destructive? Was that what Drake was trying to tell me pre-kiss in the pool house?
When the dismissal bell rang, I headed straight for my bike. Jodi split off, promising she’d meet me at Cedar Tree Park at midnight. If she was nervous, she didn’t show it.
I don’t think I’ve ever pedaled as fast as I did the rest of the way home that afternoon. I knew Bizzy would be waiting anxiously for me when I got there.
Onomatopoeia
You’re always encouraging us to use onomatopoeia—words that sound like what they describe—to make our writing “sing.” Most of them are fun words like buzz and growl, but there’s one onomatopoeia I will remember above all others: rumble. It wasn’t until Bizzy and I heard the low rumble that we figured out how Drake was going to die.
I should explain.
Bizzy’s last trip to the cannery shaped the final part of our plan. The reason she’d traveled all the way to Cedar Tree Park was that, at one hundred feet above and two blocks away from the cannery, the park provided the perfect lookout point.
Since Bizzy and I still hadn’t figured out why Drake was going to be at the cannery on Tuesday morning, we’d decided we would sneak out and spend Monday night camped out under the cedars at the park. From there, we’d be able to see someone approaching the cannery. There was a clear view of Mission and Ocean avenues, as well as the streets in the surrounding area. From the park, we could intercept Drake before he even got close to the cannery. While Bizzy watched from the hill, Jodi and I would monitor the storm drain entrance and the Westfall house.
I wasn’t supremely confident in our plan the way Bizzy was. Then again, Bizzy had been in the death-catching business for sixty years. I hadn’t even been doing it for sixty days.
Regardless, the moment to put our plan into action had arrived.
While I was at school, Bizzy had been living up to her name. She’d gathered the camping equipment we would need from the garage, hidden it underneath a patch of bushes at Cedar Tree Park, and tracked down a blueprint of Crabapple’s storm drain system.
“How did you get to the park and back by yourself?”
“I drove,” Bizzy said. Since her first accident with Dixie, Bizzy’s old Buick Roadmaster station wagon (complete with wood paneling on the sides) sat in the driveway unused. The doctor had warned that it would be impossible for Bizzy to drive with her leg straight out in a cast. But by extending her leg into the passenger’s foot well she’d figured out how to do it.
“Did the doctor clear you to do that?”
“I cleared my doggone self!” Bizzy said. “I’ll just need help with my chair.” I looked on Bizzy’s bed. She’d started collecting another pile of supplies. There were two headlamps, three thermoses, a large Maglite, two blankets, a map of Crabapple, a bag of groceries, handcuffs, and a compass.
Bizzy pointed to the brainstorming wall. The covering photos were pulled back.
“Take a good last look, Sweet Pea—you may need every scrap of information—no predictin’ what might happen out there tonight.”
I leaned against the bottom of the bed and started at the top of the wall. Drake Westfall. Followed by tomorrow’s date. It was hard to believe it was almost here. My eyes followed the lines from Drake’s name to the cannery, to foul play?, to art, to Mr. Westfall’s temper, to Damon, to robbery, to Miss Mora’s Market, to basement, to storm drains.
I thought of all the things that weren’t listed on the wall that were so intimately related to those that were there: Morgan le Faye, Vivienne le Mort, the Great Truce, Old Arthur, and The Last Descendant.
We’
d learned a lot in the past few weeks. But it still hadn’t been enough to figure out what would cause Drake’s appearance at the cannery.
“How are we going to sneak out?” I asked. Bizzy wheeled up next to me.
“Honeychile, ya tellin’ me you never snuck out of here at night, not once?”
“Well … no … I mean,” I stammered. Bizzy cut me off with a laugh. Leave it to Beatrice Mildred Mortimer, my seventy-four-year-old grandma, to make me feel completely lame.
“It’s simple. Your parents fall asleep ’round ten. Meet me out back at eleven sharp. Wear dark clothes and dress warm. Yur first stakeout’s always yur longest.” For dinner, Mom had made beef stew, which was my favorite and one of her few edible dishes. We hadn’t really talked since our conversation on the beach the day before. I knew she’d be watching me, so I forced myself to down a small bowl of stew, even though I felt queasier with every spoonful. When I asked to be excused early, Mom looked anxiously over her glasses at me.
I spent the rest of the evening pacing, mostly, back and forth in my room, and trying on different shades of black clothing. I settled on a black fleece and Dad’s old ski pants that I sometimes wore when I rode my bike in the cold. When it was ten minutes to eleven, I checked my room for anything else I thought I would need. Sheriff Schmidt’s business card was sitting on my desk. I grabbed it and slid it into my pocket along with my cell phone. Although reception was poor around Crabapple, it did get better at night.
When I got out to the driveway, Bizzy was waiting in the Roadmaster. I loaded the rest of the supplies in the back, including my bike. As soon as I was buckled in, carefully avoiding her leg—which was extended into my foot space, Bizzy put the car in neutral. The Roadmaster coasted out of the driveway and into the street.
The Death Catchers Page 21
