And why did any of it matter to her, even now?
It turned out, they did not care. The broad wings of their obvious leader passed overhead with little more than a distant rumble of meteorological irritation, and the ghostly shapes of thousands of small, winged lizards weaved through the birch and oak as if their haunted forms knew every branch and bush on the riverside.
“Skip will have his hands full,” Eddie muttered. Andi knew he was weighing whether he ought to join the invasion force. Plainly, she was no threat to him. Why escort her?
As if in answer, she lost her footing and stumbled away from him. Her head slammed the earth, less than a foot from a moss-covered rock. Dizziness overwhelmed her, and she spat bile.
“Geez, Andi. Here.” He knelt and lifted her again.
“I’ll be all right once I get off my feet,” she mumbled.
“You are off your feet, Andi.” His determination to aid her overpowered her desire to support herself, and she let her body melt into his arms. He carried her, one long arm behind her shoulders and the other under her knees. Though her head lolled back, she could still take in his serious, sparrowlike features.
“You smell like you could use a shower,” she observed.
“Yeah, well, you stink like blood.”
That got her laughing and coughing. “I can see what Jennifer likes about you.”
He did not respond. She found the travel jarring since the way was steep, and he was descending quickly. Beyond his head, she could see the mist lift. In its place, at least three dozen large dragons were in half-V formations.
“Xavier Longtail,” she slurred to no one in particular.
“How much time do they have?”
“I dunno. The Poison Moon—I didn’t even think it would work . . .”
“He’s come a long way since he coldcocked me in the Mall of America parking lot.”
“So have you.” She thought of the arrows he’d been placing near them for months. “Tell the truth—you could have killed us long ago. Right?”
She felt the lift of his shrug. “I guess. I’m not a killer, Andi. I wanted you guys to feel a slice of the fear Jennifer and the others are coping with, every day. I didn’t want you to get comfortable. I wanted you to think. To listen.”
“I should have listened better.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I should have shot better. When I was aiming at him,” he hastened to add.
“It’s okay,” she groggily reassured him. “Not mad.”
They reached the highway, and the aging arch of the bridge loomed to the west. Now that they were out of the trees, they had a clearer view of the dragons that were closing in on the root of the sorcery. The Cliffside Restaurant and other nearby buildings were out of view, and Andi imagined Skip sitting on the roof as he sometimes did. Would he stay out in the open, to watch his sorcery progress? Would he fear the dragons at all?
How powerful was he?
Missiles of fire began to rain down to the east—Xavier’s dragons had begun their attack. Eddie paused and turned to watch, and Andi signaled that he could let her down.
“You can walk into town from here?”
“Eddie.” She held his arm. “Don’t go up there. I don’t think—”
“You’re right, Andi. I could have stopped this. I didn’t realize how dangerous Skip was. I should have had the killer instinct.”
Poor boy, she thought. What he means is, he should have been more like Skip. Poor, poor boy.
“I should have been a beaststalker, like my dad always wanted me to be.”
“Your mom wouldn’t want you up there. It’s suicide.”
He didn’t chastise her this time for bringing up his mother. Nor did he show any sign that she had convinced him. “I’m going up there. The sentries can see us. With Dad dead, they’ll be taking orders from Dr. Georges-Scales. They won’t let a girl die. They’ll know you need a hospital.”
“Carry me farther. I’m getting faint again. It’s so far away.”
“Nice try. I’m—”
A piercing shriek blasted the atmosphere, knocking them both to the ground. When Andi looked back up, the enormous spider was no longer there. Instead, where there was once an uninterrupted expanse of afternoon blue, now appeared a dim, smoldering disc of jade.
“I thought it was a new moon,” Eddie observed.
“It is.” She could barely hear herself, she was so afraid to speak.
“So why can we see it?”
“Because we’ll always see it, for as long as we last. Even the dark side.”
“What does it mean?”
Up the highway, over the hill where the Cliffside would be, a collective roar went up. Thousands of streaks of vapor retreated from the fray, pulled away from the earth and toward the moon. Once they were high above the treetops, the gases turned ugly green and dissipated completely. The massive cloud that was Sonakshi collapsed into a chaotic emerald whorl, which came screaming down the road at them.
Eddie pushed her into the ditch and fell on top of her. Moments later, the Sonakshi-twister blasted by, cut a path down the eastern bank, and splashed with an unmistakable death rattle into the chilled river.
Immediately, the waters of the Mississippi began running green, as if sweeping away the corrupted spirit that had inexplicably drowned there.
A few seconds later, winged forms began dropping from the sky. Most crashed into trees, groaning. It was an awful, screaming, thumping hail.
A few yards away from Andi and Eddie, the enormous shape of Xavier Longtail slammed into the pavement with a sickening crack. His golden eyes stared blankly at them from beneath a bleeding skull, and poisoned vapors trailed from his black nostrils.
CHAPTER 37
Susan
“Susan! Open this door or I’ll boot it off the hinges!”
Nothing. Susan’s new digs were still weird, still isolated, and still had that view of the big dumb willow tree under which she and Gautierre had had that stupid picnic.
“Susan! I know you’re in there! You’re always in there!” And why, Jennifer wondered, am I knocking? What’s she going to do, call a cop? What’s a little breaking and entering to my reputation?
“The neighborhood,” her friend observed, opening the door, “is really going to hell.”
“Tell me.” Jennifer pushed past her and walked into the boo-hoo-Gautierre’s-dead digs. The scene was almost exactly as it was the last time.
Same stale smell. Same stupid sleeping bag. Same battered backpack. No toilet-paper rolls, but two Kleenex boxes.
“Gah, it smells like a wolverine’s butt in here.”
“That’s nice,” Susan replied. “Who’s dead now?”
Jennifer paused, and Susan bit the inside of her cheek. Shit. Maybe her mom. “Well. Um. Nobody you were close to, anyway.”
Good. Not her mom. Susan let the resentment swell back up.
“Listen, I—”
“Need my help.”
“Yeah. Because I—”
“Don’t remember a single thing about the last conversation we had in this room.”
“That’s not—”
“Going to change a thing. Nothing has changed, Jenn. Except I’m in dire need of highlights. But who cares? It’s not like there’s anyone to look pretty for.” She paused. “Did I tell you I lost a tooth? Woke up and found it in the sleeping bag, like I was seven again, and hoping to get a buck from the Tooth Fairy. I’m getting scurvy. Isn’t that hilarious?”
“Hilarious isn’t the first word springing to mind.” Susan looked as bad as Jennifer had ever seen her, except maybe the circles under her eyes were bigger and darker. And scurvy? Losing teeth? Ye gods. For the first time, she hoped her friend was just in a funk and not losing her sanity.
How much more can she take? Jennifer wondered. Who’s dead now . . . ? That was getting to be the question of the day. Fight and get stomped, or just get stomped, but sometimes it was hard, really very hard, and maybe getting stomped wasn’t so ba
d.
At least, she could understand why Susan would find that a less awful alternative, even if she couldn’t let her friend give in to it, not for one more day or one more hour. “Why didn’t you come see my mom, dumb-ass? She—”
“Is overworked and saving lives on about forty seconds of sleep a night.”
“Yes, but for you—”
“She’d drop everything, and another life would be endangered, and for what? To tell me I need to eat grapefruit? I’m aware, Jenn.”
“Susan, I’m not going to argue with you. I am in full agreement: everything sucks, all the time. But we have to pull together on this.”
“As opposed to everything we’ve done for months? In case you haven’t noticed, Jenn, none of it worked. Nothing at all works. We. Are going. To die. In here. And it would be really great if you would go away and let me rot in peace. Go away, Jenn. And take your bad news with you.”
“Susan. I so don’t have time for this.”
“Run along, then. You—hey. Hey!”
Her oldest friend, her finest friend, her very best friend, had taken her by the shoulders and lifted her until they were eye to eye and nose to nose. “You are going to help me, Susan, if I have to yank out all your other teeth to get you to do it. Pull your head out of your ass, stop sniveling about a boy—”
“Hey!”
“—and look at the goddamned moon! Skip is going to kill everybody, is that penetrating through that thick self-involved selfish pissing and moaning sniveling poor me poor me crybaby skull of yours?”
“Your shrill penetrating voice is the only thing getting through my thick skull.”
“I need you, dumb-ass! Get your thumb out of your rear and help me.”
There was a long silence as the two friends eyeballed each other.
“Your breath,” Susan said at last, “is unbelievably bad.”
“Toothpaste is gone. Mouthwash is reserved for certain medicinal purposes.”
Both girls almost started to laugh, remembered they were furious at each other, and deepened their frowns instead.
“This is about Skip, then.”
Jennifer nodded. “Dianna told my mom and me. It’s this completely horrible thing called the Poison Moon.”
“Why is it always something like the ‘poison moon’? Why not ever the Kitten-and-Ball-o-Yarn Moon, or the Cotton-Candy-Sprinkled-with-Marshmallow-Bits Murder Plot?”
“Seriously.” Jennifer explained what Dianna had told all of them.
“So come on. I need you.”
“All right. Unclench your hands from my fragile shoulders before you snap me in half like a damn wishbone.”
Jennifer felt blood rush to her face. The entire time she’d been running down Poison Moon 101 for Susan, they’d been nose to nose as Jennifer clutched her shoulders like they were anchors. “Uh. Sorry.”
“I’ll admit you have a point—that green moon is a total bummer.” Susan rubbed her shoulders. “But why do a broadcast on it? Surely, the world has seen it. It’s, uh, the moon.”
“They don’t know why it’s green. They don’t know that the cause is lurking out there . . . where they can reach him. They don’t know what it all means.”
“Huh. Okay. That, I’ll tell the world about. Why should I be the only one hideously depressed and waiting for death’s sweet embrace.” She paused, her eyes narrowing. “Skip deserves to have his ass kicked for choosing green. Also, I’ve decided, someone should do something nice for you. Since. You know.”
“Okay.”
“He told Gautierre to look after me. Even before the night Big Blue went up. I guess your dad saw something there, even before either of us did.”
Jennifer told herself she would not cry, she would not. But she blessed and loved Susan, and would forever, if only because Susan, too, had loved the man Jennifer loved best. “I, um, I forgot about your thing with green.”
Susan had worn a grass green jumper to school on the first day of fourth grade, had earned the name Grass Ass, and had been unable to shake said nickname for years. This resulted in a poisonous hatred of all things green, even salad, or twenty-dollar bills. Or poison moons.
“I’m glad you’re talking like an actual person instead of a weird scurvy robot.”
“Says the girl who shook me like a damn maraca to get her way. And if you go near my backpack again, I’ll tell your mom about the time you ate all the raspberries off the neighbor’s bushes and blamed my parakeets.”
“Don’t talk about those parakeets. I loathed them. Do you know how many times they pooped on me?”
“Not enough times, is how many. And I’ll talk about them, Ms. Ancient Furnace. And you’ll listen. That’s my price for broadcasting source information about la luna verde.”
“And don’t be showing off with Spanish all the time. I could have taken Spanish. I could have! I just had this dumb Ancient Furnace thing to do instead.”
“Buenos dias, los Estados Unidos! Me llamo Susan Elmsmith, y me amiga Jennifer es un estupida puta . . .”
CHAPTER 38
Susan
Welcome to day eight zillion in Under Big Blue, where things seem to get suckier and suckier.
Susan had found it was comforting to write web logs in her head. And the weirder things got, the more she wrote.
So she was writing a lot.
It was weird being back in the hospital. Actually, it was weird to be on the hospital roof—Jennifer seemed to like lurking up there, and Susan liked being able to see all around. It should have been nerve-wracking, all that space, but it was comforting instead.
“You would not even believe the ridiculous conversations that have taken place at this hospital lately,” Jennifer was saying, resting on her forearms and looking over the parking lot. “Slapping, whore-insulting, sex comparisons, dragon-slugging . . .”
“Sounds like I came back just in time.”
Without looking around, Jennifer reached out and squeezed Susan’s hand. “You did.”
Susan smiled. “I guess I didn’t handle Gautierre’s death very well.”
Jennifer turned to look at her. Her eyes were very big. “Who said you were s’posed to? He was one of the few nice things about being stuck in here; think I can’t relate to that? I’d give anything to be stuck under this shitheap with Eddie.” She paused. “When Gautierre died, holing up across town by yourself seemed pretty sane to me. It’s just, everyone needed you, is all. I needed you to know that.” A short pause, then she added, in a tear-choked voice unlike any Susan had heard from this, her oldest and dearest friend, “I needed you so bad.”
Susan said nothing. Another nice thing about friendship: often, you didn’t have to.
She rubbed her friend’s back, and they both pretended Jennifer wasn’t crying bitter, angry tears.
CHAPTER 39
Susan
“Okay, well, that was embarrassing and pointless.”
“Feel better, though, doncha?”
“Irrelevant!” the Ancient Furnace proclaimed, furtively wiping her wet cheeks on the sleeve of her denim jacket. “Also, I had something in my eye.”
“Yeah, like tear ducts pulling overtime.”
“I loathe everything about you,” said the Ancient Furnace, “so much. In fact—whoa.”
“Hmmm?” Susan raised her head. Jennifer was staring, almost leaning, forward. She looked like an English setter on point, eyeing a flock of delicious grouse. “What?”
“Something nutty-nut-flavored this way comes.”
It was Evangelina flying—more like lurching—toward the roof. When she got close enough, she simply gave up and crashed.
“Dr. Georges-Scales!” Susan screamed, running toward the exit door. She yanked it open and screamed into the cement throat of the stairway, “Dr. Georges- Scales, come quick, come quick, get up here now!”
She ran back to help, knowing there wasn’t a damn thing she could do—she had zero medical skills.
“Aw, geez, Evangelina, you’re all—??
? Jennifer was covered in her sister’s blood. “Lie still, you’re being all thrashy.”
Got them dead they’re dead almost all of them so hungry almost all full so dead so very dead
“Tell your story later,” Jennifer snapped. She seemed to be looking for the right wound to apply pressure to. There was a depressing array to choose from. “Preferably outside my head.”
Stop trying to save me.
“Mom! Mom, get up here!”
She can’t help almost dead almost full almost all of them are gone now and you can do the rest sister you could finish the job if you’re hungry enough yes you can
“Mom!”
I needed to feed needed to feed Mother let me go so I could feed
“So that’s where you’ve been—feeding off Ember’s gang? Helpful, I suppose. But Mom’s going to be pissed at you. And her.”
Owww that hurts.
“I have to apply pressure, or you’ll bleed to death before the angry surgeon gets here.”
You are kind. Stupid, but kind.
“High praise,” Jennifer muttered, trying to hold her sister’s guts in one place.
It will be the death of you.
“Thanks for the tender moment. Susan, see if you can stop that spurting over there.” Rubbing her hands over the black, gleaming scales, Susan found a spouting wound, clapped both hands over it, and leaned with all of her 137 pounds. A year ago, she would have been holding her vomit down. Now it was all too normal, save the creature herself.
Your friend is proud that she doesn’t have to vomit.
“We’re all proud of her for that. Stop squirming. Also, stay out of our heads.”
Susan shared Jennfier’s view on telepathy: it was so creepy to hear someone else in your brain.
You. Sister’s friend. You mourned the boy I saw the boy alive they hurt him but not after I killed them all almost all of them dead but a few alive the boy you mourn.
The rush of words confused Susan, but she heard boy and alive just fine.