by Gina Damico
“Would you rather me wallow in the sad fact that my soul will outlive all of yours and I’ll get to watch all of you die yet never be allowed into the Afterlife myself?”
Lex did a cursory search of the car for a bag to vomit in. Uncle Mort went similarly pale. “We don’t know that for sure.”
“Well, until we do, I’m going to try to focus on the positive of this here unbearably terrible thing that has happened to me. That okay with everyone?”
The rest of them nodded, mute.
“Thank you.” He went to remove his hand from the seatback, but he had returned to solid mode and it wasn’t coming out. “Hmm.” He pulled a little harder, but it wasn’t budging. “Well. This is an interesting development.”
After about twenty more minutes, the sun began to rise. Lex stared blearily out the car window at the lightening sky. Was it morning already? She hadn’t even known what time it was when Zara broke her out of the prison in the Bank’s basement.
Was that only a few hours ago? Lex thought. So much had changed. Zara dead, Driggs half dead, Norwood Damned, Grotton alive (sort of), war started. Her world had been put into a food processor and set on purée, and all before the sun came up.
She cracked her knuckles and looked at her hands, marveling at the things they could do. They could Damn a person with a single touch. Just last night they’d wrapped around Zara’s neck and squeezed the life right out of her.
A shot of bile rose up Lex’s throat, stinging her insides as it went. She’d killed Zara. Really killed her, and it had taken effort. It wasn’t like Killing or Damning, both of which required only a quick grace of the finger against the skin. Murdering Zara—because that’s what it was, murder—had taken a full, agonizing minute. Lex could have stopped at any time. Every second that ticked by was another chance to let Zara live. But she hadn’t stopped.
She had kept on squeezing.
Lex folded her hands away and told herself not to obsess over it. Zara used to be her friend, true, but then she’d lost her damn mind. She’d slaughtered a whole bunch of people. And now she was dead. These things happen.
But you’ve slaughtered a whole bunch of people too, Lex’s nagging conscience reminded her.
She swallowed and glanced up as Pandora turned off the main road toward the hotel where her friends were staying.
And eventually, everyone’s going to find out.
A jaunty wooden sign greeted them a few yards down the gravelly road. THE HAPPY SPRUCE INN, it said. Cartoon trees with googly eyes and idiotically smiling faces grinned down at the Stiff as it pulled into the driveway of a large, boxy building with all the charm of a haunted mental institution.
“What a lovely setting,” Driggs said. “For murder.”
“Okay, Lex,” Uncle Mort said as Pandora put the car into park some distance away from the front door. “You’re going in. Now—”
“Wait, I’m going in? Why not you?”
“Because I’m deriving far too much enjoyment from the Stiff’s leaky fumes. Now just go in, tell the person at the front desk your Uncle Mort sent you, and find the rest of the Juniors. It shouldn’t be hard. You seem to have a knack for attracting large groups of angry people.”
She cringed. “You think they’ll be angry?”
“No time like the present to find out. Now go.”
“By myself? What about—” She looked at her other choices. Pandora was picking her teeth in the rearview mirror. Grotton was Grotton. And Driggs’s hand was still stuck.
“Sorry,” he said to her, giving his wrist another futile tug. “The old arm-in-the-seat dilemma.”
Lex haughtily unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car. “You are the worst band of fugitives ever,” she said, slamming the door.
The cold, stark lobby was just as disturbing as the sign out front. Kilda could do wonders with this place, with her lavish rugs and beloved potpourri bowls.
If Kilda was still alive. Lex had no idea.
She made her way to the front desk to find a corpulent, angry-looking woman simmering in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke and wearing, in an ironic twist, a shirt commemorating last summer’s Lung Cancer Fun Run.
“Help you?” the woman barked, hacking up a wet cough.
“Um—” Lex vaguely gestured down the hallway where she thought the rooms might be. “I’m looking for my friends.” They were probably the only ones staying there, by the looks of the place. “My uncle—”
“Eh?” The woman leaned closer.
“My uncle sent me,” Lex said, pronouncing every syllable.
She snorted. “Who’s your uncle?”
Lex gritted her teeth. Even though this war had barely begun, she had already grown quite impatient with it. “Mort.”
The woman froze. The cigarette fell out of her mouth but caught at the last second, so that it dangled from the very tip of her lip. “Mort, you say?” she said, the cigarette dancing as she spoke.
“That is what I said.”
The woman’s eyes darted off to the left. Lex tried to follow what she was looking at, but then she started hacking up another lung. “Mort?” she choked between coughs.
“Yeah, I—”
“Mort?” she was shouting. “You were sent by Mort?”
Lex was just about to face plant the woman’s head into the ashtray when it dawned on her: she’d heard Lex perfectly fine. She was yelling to get someone’s attention. Someone who’d been waiting specifically for Lex.
And it was at that moment that she heard something that sounded a hell of a lot like the cocking of a gun.
“Ah, crapspackle,” Lex said.
She backed away from the desk and toward the hallway just as Norwood emerged from the back office and fired off two wide shots.
Whoa! Lex screamed inside her head. How’d he get here so fast?
But she answered herself immediately: he Crashed. When she’d transferred to him her ability to Damn, the ability to Crash had gone right along with it, a package deal.
“I’m just the gift that keeps on giving, aren’t I?” she muttered.
Lex ran down the hallway and started banging on all the doors, but none opened. A stairwell door lay at the end of the hall, so she grabbed for the handle and quickly glanced back. Norwood was on top of her—
Until someone burst out of one of the rooms and tackled him in a flash of metal and bleached-blond hair.
“Lazlo!” she shouted.
“Go!” He’d knocked the gun down the hallway, but Norwood was now reaching to get a grip on his skin, trying to Damn him. “Get the others and go!”
This was the second time Lazlo had saved her ass and the collective asses of her friends, and as much as she wanted to stick around and pelt him with thank-yous, she did as he asked. At the top of the stairs, she nearly cracked skulls with Ferbus, Elysia, Pip, and Bang, all waiting for her with bags in hand, ready to flee.
“Lex!” Elysia exclaimed, going in for the Hug.
“No time,” said Ferbus, dragging them both down the hall in the opposite direction. “Mort waiting for us?”
“Yeah,” Lex answered breathlessly.
“What happened back in Croak?” asked Pip. “What’s going on? Is everyone okay?”
“Everyone’s . . . fine.” Lex glanced at Ferbus’s anxious face, then looked away. He’d kill her soon; no need to bring up the Driggs fiasco prematurely. “How did you know I was here?”
Elysia gave her a grin as they ran. “Lazlo and Wicket have been sort of like our bodyguards, staying here with us for the past few days. When Mort left last night to try to break you and Driggs out, he said he’d be back soon, hopefully with you two in tow. Actually, I believe his exact words were, ‘Pack your bags and be ready to go as soon as you hear gunshots.’ ”
Lex set her jaw. “The cool detachment with which my uncle treats my life continues to astound me.”
Bang let out a laugh—though it was silent, as always. “It worked, didn’t it?” she signed.
&n
bsp; They kept running to the other end of the hallway, where an exit door led to another set of stairs. “Into the car,” Lex told them as they pounded down the steps. “The big scary black one.” She spotted a barely visible Grotton sitting on the roof—presumably because Uncle Mort had banished him up there so as not to upset the Juniors right off the bat. And it worked; they didn’t even notice him as they piled in through the back doors.
“Hurry up!” Dora yelled. She threw the car into gear and gunned it out of there, nearly taking out the demonic tree sign as they drove away. The Juniors sat facing one another in the Clearly-There-Should-Be-A-Coffin-Here Area, backs against the side windows of the car and legs all jumbled together in the middle.
All eyes flew to the back window to watch Lazlo emerge from the building and run to a car hidden in a patch of trees. “He made it!” Elysia said, straining to see. “And Wicket’s driving—they both made it!”
The two cars sped off—the Stiff in front, Wicket and Lazlo following—leaving a flustered Norwood in their wake. He let out a feral, defeated yell, then drew his scythe through the air and Crashed off to destinations unknown.
Elysia took a quick head count once she’d recovered her bearings. “Oh, thank God, you’re all okay! Dora, Mort, Driggs—”
“Ha!” Driggs shouted, finally yanking his arm out of the seat by turning himself transparent at the worst possible moment. “Take that, evil . . . car . . . seat . . .”
Everyone was staring at him. Lex’s stomach roiled so forcefully she thought it might erupt right there in front of everyone, a volcano splattering half-digested whipped cream all over the windows.
Elysia, Pip, and Bang all looked as if they were seeing a ghost, which, to be fair, they were. And Ferbus—
Ferbus was swallowing over and over, as if he were trying to work a chicken bone down his throat. Lex could see his hands shaking, his lips twitching as he stared at the transcendent being that used to be his very-much-alive best friend. “What happened?”
Driggs seemed as if he didn’t know whether to burst into tears because of the way they were all looking at him, or console them because they needed the comfort more than he did. He chose the latter. “I’m okay,” he said in a pointedly calm voice. “More or less. I’m just a little . . . deader than I used to be. Zara—” He looked at Lex. “You want to field this one?”
Lex shook her head. She didn’t trust herself to open her mouth because: whipped cream volcano.
So Driggs launched into the grisly tale of everything that had happened the night before, starting with Zara kidnapping him and leaving him at the top of Greycliff to die, through the part with Lex strangling her and how he’d been half-ghosted, and ending with what little Grotton had told him about the Hybrid situation, all to a chorus of small sobs and gasps. Lex couldn’t tell who was making what noise, since her eyes were shut tight the entire time.
“I don’t know for sure if it’s permanent, anyway,” he finished, grasping for something optimistic to say. “So for the moment, I’m just not going to worry about it too much. If there’s a way to fix it, we’ll figure it out. And if not . . .”
“We’ll fix it,” said Uncle Mort, as if Driggs were merely a flat tire to be patched. “Luckily, to distract us from such unpleasantness, we’ve got plenty of other things to worry about at the moment. Like what our next steps are.”
“Necropolis, right?” asked Pip. “Wicket said it’s built like a fortress! And they have snipers! And their snipers have snipers, and—”
Elysia jumped in with more questions, as did Bang, her hands flying as she signed. But Ferbus said nothing. Staring straight ahead, he opened his mouth just a crack and spoke quietly to Lex.
“Is this your fault?” he asked, referring to Driggs.
Lex wanted to deny it. She didn’t want it to be true. She’d rather have blamed Zara, Norwood, anyone other than herself, because to be the one responsible for such a thing was more than she thought she could bear.
But she’d be lying.
“Yes,” she answered.
Ferbus nodded his head slightly, still staring ahead, and said nothing. Which in many ways was even worse than getting punched or bitched out. Lex saw something pass through his eyes, and though she couldn’t quite tell what it was, it disturbed her more than any of the other Ferbus-reaction scenarios she’d been conjuring in her mind. At least those had ended in blood, and blood she knew how to handle.
So as Uncle Mort started to outline his unthinkable portal-destroying plan for the rest of the Juniors, she stared out the window and decided to engage in the healthy task of beating herself up over it for a little while. She wished she were sitting next to Driggs, but then the thought of his misty hand brushing up against her skin made her shudder, and then that thought made her feel like crying.
How could she have let this happen? How could he ever forgive her? She wanted to kick her own head off.
Maybe he’s not a ghost at all, she thought, once again ignoring the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But even she had to admit she was in denial. She’d seen with her own eyes that part of his soul had flown off into the night air, escaped into the universe rather than the Afterlife, which was precisely how ghosts were made. Plus, Grotton had said it himself—they were both Hybrids. And although Lex certainly didn’t trust most of the things that came out of Grotton’s stupid old British mouth, she was inclined to believe this one. He and Driggs looked the same; their weird, half-tangible bodies behaved the same way. If only there were a way to tell for sure—
With a jolt, she realized that there was. “Sparks!”
Uncle Mort paused midsentence to look at her. “I’m kind of explaining our plans here, Lex. Just because you’ve heard them already doesn’t mean you can rudely launch into a conversation with yourself.”
“I know. Just open your bag for a sec. I want to see what Driggs’s Spark looks like now.”
Uncle Mort paused. “That’s . . . actually a good idea,” he said, lifting his bag from its spot near his feet. He unzipped it, then tilted it toward the Juniors so that everyone could see.
Seven Sparks were inside—one for each of the Juniors, plus Uncle Mort. The smooth glass balls made tinkly noises as they clinked against one another, their whizzing, sparkly embers lighting up the bag like a disco ball, indicating that the people they represented were alive.
Except for one. Uncle Mort picked it out of the bag and held it up. Some of the flecks inside were still dancing around—
And some had come to a dead stop. Suspended in midair, immobile.
“Well, there’s your answer,” Uncle Mort said. “Half and half.”
Lex tried not to be devastated all over again. She reached into her own bag and pulled out Cordy’s Spark, steadily glowing like a light bulb. “But Driggs’s isn’t glowing, like Cordy’s is,” she said. “So maybe he’s not dead!”
“That just means he hasn’t gotten to the Afterlife,” Uncle Mort continued through clenched teeth, irritated with Lex for making him state all of this appalling stuff out loud in front of Driggs. “Not even the dead half of him. Look, moving sparks mean alive. Stationary sparks mean ghost. This one has both, so—”
“So I’m a Hybrid,” said Driggs. “Which we’ve already established and beaten deader than a dead horse at a dead-horse-beating festival.” He gestured to Uncle Mort. “Carry on with the plan.”
Lex sank back against the side of the Stiff as Uncle Mort resumed his speech. She couldn’t lie to herself any longer. Driggs was a ghost, which meant he’d never be able to cross over into the Afterlife. They’d be together for the rest of their lives, which would be nice, but when she grew old and died, he’d be left on earth forever, stuck. She’d never see him again, and he’d be sentenced to a never-ending, miserable existence. How could she ever live with that?
She couldn’t. So fix him, she told herself. It’s as simple as that.
Except she didn’t have the slightest clue how.
“—up to the vault,
” Uncle Mort was saying, “destroy the portal, then split. Next, we inform the other mayors—”
“Wait, mayors plural?” Ferbus said. “Like LeRoy and—who else?”
Uncle Mort sucked in a gust of air, as if unable to believe the scope of this himself. “All of them. The other Grimsphere mayors around the world. What we do to the portal in Necropolis—if we can really manage to pull it off—is to be duplicated in Grimsphere cities everywhere, once it’s proven to work.”
The Juniors were staring at him, their mouths agape. “I told you, this has been in the works for a long time now,” Uncle Mort said, fiddling with his scythe. “Years of planning, calculations. This is everything I’ve been working for.”
“You got every single Grimsphere mayor in the world onboard for this?” Ferbus asked.
“A good percentage of them. And in the cities where the mayors are resistant—the ones who sympathize more with Norwood’s side, with maintaining the status quo—other rebels have stepped up, volunteered to destroy the portals in secret.”
“Won’t be a secret once they’re destroyed,” Driggs said.
Ferbus interrupted. “If this is such a big deal of a plan, wouldn’t it be easier and faster for us to Crash to Necropolis?”
“Crashing is just another kind of violation, and violations are what’s damaging the Afterlife,” Uncle Mort replied. “It’s messed up enough as it is right now. I don’t want to push it any more than we absolutely have to. Plus, Dora can’t Crash, and we can’t very well leave her behind.”
“Why not?” said Ferbus. “I mean, no offense, but the old gray mare ain’t what she used to be.”
“Bullcrap!” Dora shouted. “The old gray mare is exactly what she used to be! And more!”
The mention of Crashing sparked something in Lex’s head. “Hang on. If Norwood can Crash now, why did he just stand there when we drove away? Why didn’t he Crash directly into our car?”
“Norwood’s primary objective,” said Uncle Mort, “is to beat us to Necropolis. Guaranteed. The president leans much closer to his side than to ours, I’m afraid, and he’s going to exploit that as best he can. He knows what we’re up to—”
