My So-Called Death

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  "No, they didn't deserve to live on after death."

  Mr. Cork--um, Mrs. Cork--sounded very at peace with her decision. She obviously had no issues with killing Trish and the other girls and intended to carry on with her very bad self. Argh! We had to do something, had to find some way to call for help. Maybe if we just screamed bloody murder for long enough, someone would hear. We were quite a distance from Samedi's office, but there had to be guards wandering the halls.

  Reading my thoughts, Cork turned and swiped a hand toward the open door behind her, sealing us inside the lab. She whispered a few words under her breath before turning back to Gavin and me. "There now, we won't be disturbed."

  "Listen, there has to be another way to work this out," Gavin said, foolishly trying to reason with the insane person in front of us. Didn't he realize you can't reason with crazy people? That's why they called them crazy. "Trish and Kendra and Penelope are good people. They've never--"

  "They are bodies, nothing more, and should have been returned to the earth as soon as the black magic animating them was terminated." Cork waved a dismissive hand in the air, scattering little spots of blood across the table in front of her. "My sister is the one who committed an unforgivable offense against those poor girls. It's an abomination, really, the way she plays with innocent lives."

  "You mean Principal Samedi?" Gavin asked, catching on way faster than I would have. Suffice it to say there was

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  no family resemblance between this thing and our principal, but the connection was confirmed when Cork nodded sadly and sniffed another piece of her brain back into her head.

  Ew. Gag. Blechk. I couldn't think about that anymore or I really would yack.

  "Theresa has turned her back on everything our coven used to stand for. She shouldn't be allowed to practice magic, just like those girls should never have lived on after--"

  "Who are you to decide who should or shouldn't be alive? Or Undead, or whatever?" I asked, finally getting that this was a Deprogrammed thing. Cork was cool with killing Trish because she wasn't naturally Death Challenged, and that just sucked. It was nothing more than a convenient excuse to kill.

  "You misunderstand, Miss Vera. I decided nothing. The Great Mother is the one who decides. Or should be allowed to decide. Theresa must be taught a lesson." Cork moved closer, and I could feel Gavin's urge to run in the way he gripped my fingers so tightly our bones rubbed together.

  Under other circumstances, the feel of his hand in mine would have been enough to make me have a crush-induced spaz attack of major proportions, but I was beyond the point of boy-girl feelings. And that made me sad... and angry. Who was Cork to wreak havoc on the school and kill people and traumatize me and everyone else?

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  "I am one of the first, child. One of the very first." Closer and closer she shuffled, the hand she trailed across the lab tables leaving a trail of crimson on white. "I walked the earth long, long before your parents' parents were born, and I will remain when you are truly dead and gone."

  "Karen isn't Deprogrammed, Cork--"

  "Please, call me Amisi."

  Gavin pushed on, ignoring the walking skeleton's attempt at an introduction. "If you kill Karen, you're violating everything you just said you believed in. If the Great Mother made Karen Death Challenged, who are you to take that right away?"

  "It is not a right," she spat, anger flashing in the mad depths of her eyes. "It is a privilege, one that Karen has scarcely earned. And of course you, little sir, are as much an abomination as the rest." Her hand rose and her bony fingers curled. "Now come here to me, children. Let us end this before you are forced to suffer any further."

  "I'm not suffering. I'm cool." My eyes searched the area around us, looking for some sort of weapon. I did my best not to think about what I was doing so that Cork wouldn't catch on.

  "There is no weapon that can wound me," she said, still moving inexorably closer, like a run in your tights you just know won't be stopped by massive amounts of clear nail polish. "At least none that you could wield."

  Argh! The mind reading thing was really annoying.

  "It will be over soon enough, when you no longer possess

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  a mind to--" Her words ended in a howl as Gavin grabbed a beaker from the shelf behind him and hurled it into her face.

  It was just a normal glass beaker, not filled with acid or anything cool like that. But apparently the shards-of-glass-stuck-in-tender-flesh factor was still plenty painful, because Cork screeched like a banshee. Gavin and I darted around her and hustled toward the door. Thankfully, my ankle was feeling much better than it had post-maggot jump so I had no trouble hauling tail. I reached the door at the same time as Gavin. We both pounced on the handle, tugging and pulling, but it wouldn't open.

  "She must have put a spell on it or something." I spun around to see one very hacked-off skeleton lady lurching toward us. "Hurry! We have to--"

  "I can't get it open. She's right, I don't have that kind of power. I'm all tapped out from making the other door appear." He tugged at the handle a few more times, then turned around with a wild look. "The brains! They've got to be somewhere in here. We have to find them."

  "They are? We do?" Okay, I was lost, but Gavin seemed like he had an idea, which was better than anything I had, which was... nothing, other than a vague plan to scream and maybe jab Ms. Cork or whatever her name was in the eyeballs a few times while she ripped my brain from my skull.

  I figured mauling her as I died was the very least I could do.

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  "Why else would she be here?" Gavin asked, darting across the room toward the giant walk-in refrigerator near the teacher's desk. I tailed him, shrieking as Cork flung some sort of blue light at our heads. We ducked just in time to save our skulls, but the projector screen behind us wasn't so lucky. The entire thing caught fire and burned to white ash within the space of a few seconds.

  "Oh crap, oh crap," I whispered under my breath, even as my mind began making mad bargains with god.

  If he/she/it would just let us live, I promised not to give him/her/it a hard time about girl hormones or anything else when I got to the afterlife. By the time we reached the fridge, I'd thrown in a few other promises involving a free pass on the world hunger issue and a bunch of other stuff that I normally wouldn't have budged on.

  But I just really didn't want to check out. Not here, not now, not when we had survived so much.

  "Hurry, get inside." Gavin wrenched open the door to the walk-in fridge and shoved me in just as another burst of blue light exploded right next to us.

  "But we'll suffocate, or get hypothermia or--"

  "Or live for a few more minutes. She won't be able to cast magic through stainless steel," he said, slamming the door closed and flipping the lock, shutting us in the walk-in fridge with all the baby pig corpses and bovine lung tissue like so much dead meat. "Besides, we're dead. We don't have to worry about hypothermia."

  "Oh yeah," I said, teeth chattering regardless.

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  Maybe it was a mental thing, or just a side effect of all the unadulterated fear. There was certainly plenty of that to go around. Ms. Cork was pounding on the door like the mad hatter she was, leaving dents the size of baseballs in the metal. She was amazingly strong for a skeleton. It would only be a matter of time before she smashed her way in.

  "Come on, help me look for the brains." Gavin rummaged through the drawers on the far side of the fridge. I turned to help him, squealing as Cork smashed another fist into the door.

  "She looks so weak. I mean, she can barely walk--how is she--"

  "It's the brains. They have to be close by." Gavin stopped trying to be neat and started tearing drawers from the wall. "If she's eaten part of them, she'll have established a connection. She'll be able to draw strength from them when she needs it, like batteries. But if we can find them and--"

  Another mighty crash rocked the room, and even the fro
zen air around us seemed to rattle.

  "Oh god." I scrambled back from the cabinet I'd just opened. "I think I've found them."

  Gavin rushed to my side, only to sigh and turn away again. "Those are pig brains."

  "Look again." I grabbed Gavin's sleeve and pulled him back to the cabinet. "Look at the reflection in the mirror behind the jars. It doesn't match."

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  He froze, blue eyes squinting into the "reflective" back of the cabinet.

  "And, do you see us in that mirror anywhere?"

  "You're right. It's not a mirror. I didn't even notice." Amid much smashing and crashing from outside, Gavin pulled down the jars of pig brains concealing the jars of girl brains behind the glass. "Sorry."

  "Don't worry about it." Secretly, however, I really liked the fact that Gavin had no problem admitting when he was wrong. A lot of boys are weird about that, like the fact that they have boy parts makes them incapable of making a mistake or something.

  "We've got to find something to break through the glass."

  "It doesn't slide open?" I asked, running my fingers along the outer edge of the cabinet. "There isn't a latch or--"

  "We don't have time to find out." Mrs. Cork punctuated Gavin's words with a particularly brutal one-two punch. "Here, this should do it." Gavin grabbed a frozen pork loin from one of the back shelves (looked like Miss Newhouse, the chemistry professor, kept her snacks as well as her class supplies in her fridge) and brandished it like a baseball bat. "Stand back."

  "Be careful, don't shatter the jars the brains are in or it might--"

  "I won't," he said. "Move back."

  "For real, Gavin. If they're damaged, we don't know if--"

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  "Karen, please!" He turned to glare at me over his shoulder and in that split second I could see our entire future stretching out ahead of us. Hundreds of years of blissful yet argument-filled coupledom in which he would probably yell my name in that exact tone of voice no less than a gazillion times.

  It would have made me smile, if Ms. Cork's fingers hadn't broken through the door at that very second.

  "Hurry!" I screamed, grabbing another pork loin from the shelf and running to the door, where I proceeded to whack Cork's bony hand as she did her best to grab hold of the latch. Hopefully her blue magic didn't work when she was being beaten with frozen meat, or Gavin and I were both toast.

  "I'm hurrying," Gavin yelled. ""Watch yourself, don't let her touch you."

  "Right!" As if that needed to be said. No way was I letting Cork any closer, not as long as my muscles were functioning.

  The sound of glass breaking behind me made me jump, but I didn't stop pummeling for a second, not even when I realized I had no idea what Gavin planned to do with the girls' brains. I mean, we had to get them back to their owners, of course, but he'd acted like finding them would save our skins as well as the harvested victims'.

  "I've got them!" Gavins words were followed by a little squishing sound and then a wail from outside the door.

  "No! You worthless little bastard!" Cork pulled her

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  hand back with a scream of pure agony. Whatever Gavin had done, it certainly seemed to have worked.

  I spun around, ready to congratulate him, but all my happy shiny words shriveled and died in my mouth. Turns out I was not capable of speech while watching the boy I was almost certain I was in love with chew a huge mouthful of brains.

  People brains. Because Trish and Penelope and Kendra were people. People Gavin knew and allegedly liked. Even Trish had been growing on him, I could tell.

  But, like them or not, he was still eating them. Eating them.

  In that moment, I was more grateful than I would have thought possible that I'd never kissed those slimy, gray-matter-smeared lips or the criminal attached to them.

  "Karen, wait," he said, though it sounded more like "Krr, wrrt" since his mouth was so obscenely full.

  But I didn't wait. I ran. Out of the refrigerator, past the spasming body of Cork on the floor outside, and out the now-able-to-be-opened classroom door, determined not to stop until I was as far from all of this madness as a girl could get.

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  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Put your right hand inside the circle you have created using a piece of yarn or string and chant the words of the illusion spell three times. Then, wrap the yarn or string around your wrist or ankle and secure with a firm knot.

  The string should be left in place until such time as the caster wishes the illusion spell to fade. Should the string fall off or be lost or destroyed, the caster will have between two and four hours to recast, or the illusion will be lost and the caster's true identity revealed to the human world.

  --Basic Illusion Spells and Traveling Protections

  After a brief seminar refreshing the student body on the proper casting and maintenance of illusion spells, each student will be granted a three-day pass to visit friends and family. Classes will resume on Monday.

  --Friday morning announcement, DEAD High

  Friday afternoon, six days later...

  "I don't see how you could have ever left them in the first place. They're adorable!" Trish was so grossly in love with my little sister and brothers that I was actually starting

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  to get jealous. We'd been down in the trips' basement playroom for hours.

  I mean, I love the trips and all, but they aren't that great. No one who spits up on other people as often as Kimmy, Keith, and Kyle do deserves to be more adored than yours truly. Especially since / was the one responsible for saving Trish's life.

  If I hadn't found Principal Samedi and tipped her off to where to locate her psycho skeleton sister and the hot junior boy chowing down on illegal brain food, who knows if there would have been enough of Trish's brain left to successfully reanimate her body?

  Hmm... maybe that's why she was so gaga over the trips. Maybe Gavin or Ms. Cork had consumed the part of her brain that was necessary for understanding that small, wriggly people who smell funny are really not all that cool.

  "But I'm so glad you're coming back to school," Trish added, smiling at me for a second before turning her attention back to Keith. "It's just not the same without you." Keith was playing some baby game that involved slamming his head into Trish's knee and giggling like a maniac. Trish was giggling too, but even Kimmy was shooting them "give me a break" looks from where she was making a pretend pickle sandwich over at the Little Tykes kitchen. Maybe it was a boy and brain-damaged person thing.

  "It's only been a week," I said, though I was secretly pleased to hear how desperately I'd been missed.

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  "It seems like forever. I was so pysched when I heard we were all getting a three-day pass this morning. "We should have gotten one on Monday. School was pointless this week. The entire ground floor was blocked off because of the investigation, and the Science and English classes had to be held in the library."

  "All at the same time?"

  "Yes! It was so crowded it was impossible to concentrate, even though the guy who replaced Mr. Cork, Mr. Eden, is pretty cute for an old guy." Trish heaved a put-upon sigh. "After a couple days, the teachers all gave up trying to educate us and made us read the school handbook instead. It was so boring I almost wished my brain was still missing."

  "Ugh, not funny," I said, but we both laughed a little.

  "No. But I did wish you were there. It would have made the torture much more bearable."

  "Even though you've got a ton of new BFFs?" I asked.

  From what I'd heard, Trish, Kendra, and Penelope were the new celebrities at school. Turns out having your brain snatched and then being reanimated several days later is a recipe for instant popularity. Trish's sketchy past had been all but forgotten--as it should have been a long time ago.

  We'd chatted on the phone earlier in the week and Trish had told me all about what went down with her first roommate. The poor girl had gone on an ice cream bender, thinking th
e worst she'd have to deal with was a

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  little gastric discomfort. Unfortunately, however, she'd been one of the one-in-one-hundred Undead with a severe milk allergy. She'd gone into toxic shock and never recovered. Principal Samedi had known Trish wasn't to blame and the investigation had been a formality, nothing more. But in the true tradition of teenagers everywhere, the gossips had gotten hold of the story and twisted it until Trish was a murderer.

  It stunk that she'd nearly had to be murdered herself to remove the stain on her rep, but no one ever said high school was a nice place. What was nice, however, was that Trish had finally started to change her view on the entire DC vs. DP controversy.

  Yes, she still thought it sucked that the groups were treated differently, but she was starting to see that a lot of her rage against the machine might have just been rage against being unfairly judged. Between her juvie past and the unfortunate business with her first roommate, she'd had a hard time fitting in, and that was bound to color one's point of view.

  Now she was getting a fresh start, and I was too.

  Principal Samedi had told everyone about the hex spell and allegedly most people felt pretty bad about the way they'd treated me. I still wasn't expecting to be Miss Popularity when I returned to school--since my part in solving the mystery of the missing brains was being kept strictly under wraps so as not to encourage any other students to get their Scooby Doo on--but I'd probably have

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  a few options when it came to finding a seat in the cafeteria. I mean, at the very least I could ride the wave of Trish's newfound stardom.

  "Darling," Trish drawled, rolling her eyes, "they are not BFFs. There is only one BFF."