Scorch

  A faint, weak cough.

  “Hello?” she said, breaking into a run toward the obelisk. She could have sworn the sound came from the center of the plaza, but no one was there. A sinking, horrible feeling began to creep into her stomach as she circled the fountain, still finding nothing. But it wasn’t until she peered over the fountain’s ledge, directly at the rapidly hemorrhaging gash across Driggs’s chest, that she started to scream.

  6

  After that, the world fell silent. Half the town came pouring out of Corpp’s to watch the scene unfold, Uncle Mort and Norwood pushing each other over to get to the fountain first, but Lex barely noticed. The townspeople’s shouts of fear, Driggs’s choked utterances of something that sounded like “She’s here,” Ferbus’s cries for a doctor, Uncle Mort shouting at Lex to back away right now—all fell on deaf ears as Lex instinctively grabbed Driggs’s arms, lifted him up with an adrenaline-fueled strength, and tore her scythe through the air.

  When they emerged from the ether a few moments later, Lex thought she was dead. Blinding white light, like the atrium of the Afterlife, flooded her vision and nearly threw her off balance. But she held on tight to Driggs’s shuddering body, summoning every last ounce of her strength to yell for help down the brightly lit, chaotic hallway.

  ***

  Lex was dreaming, but at least she was aware of it. She knew nothing was real—not the towering figure of Norwood, nor the tidal wave of blood á la The Shining, nor the biting stab wound in her rib cage—

  Actually, the stabbing pain was very real; a hard plastic armrest had wedged itself into her side. With a jolt, Lex sat up and opened her eyes, only to find a middle-aged, heavyset woman clad all in blue staring back at her.

  “Stay right there,” the woman said, nervous. She reached over to adjust an IV tube, a confusing image for Lex until she realized that it was connected to Driggs’s arm. They were in an emergency room. Driggs lay unconscious on the bed, a large white bandage across his chest, his jeans stained a dark red.

  “Is he okay?” Lex asked.

  “He lost a lot of blood, but he’ll be fine,” the woman said, backing toward the curtain. “Don’t you move now. The officer just wants to ask you a few questions.”

  “What?” Lex jumped out of the chair. “What officer?”

  The nurse let out a squeak. “Please don’t hurt me!”

  “I won’t,” Lex said, for the first time realizing how bad this must look. She patted her pocket. Her scythe was gone.

  “Looking for this?” A tall cop waltzed through the curtain, nodding at the nurse as she sped away. He held up a Ziploc bag containing Lex’s scythe.

  “I didn’t do this.” Lex swallowed. “I need—I have to call—”

  “Calm down,” he said with a smile. “Your buddy’s going to be just fine.”

  “We can’t stay here. We have to go.”

  “Now, hold on a second, missy.” His smile waned. “You materialize out of thin air with this poor boy all carved up, both of you covered in blood—no IDs, no cell phones, and no way to contact your parents—and you think I’m just going to let you go, no questions asked?”

  Lex looked at her scythe in his hand, then at Driggs. She backed up against the wall. Now what? She was sure she could wriggle past the officer by herself, but there was no way she’d be able to escape with Driggs too. The more the impossibility of the situation weighed on her, the angrier she got. And the hard look on the police officer’s face just added fuel to the flame in her chest and tingling hands. It would be so easy to take him down, so easy for her to Damn him right where he stood—

  A commotion outside the curtain snapped Lex back to her senses. Smoke was now drifting in across the floor. “What the hell was that?” the officer said. He pointed at Lex. “Stay here.”

  As soon as he left, Lex closed the curtain back up, flung herself at the bed, and shook Driggs. “Wake up!” she half yelled, half whispered. “Driggs!”

  His eyes fluttered. “Wha? Where are we?”

  “Hospital.” Lex started unplugging the tubes in his arm. “I summoned it into existence, or I opened up a wormhole, or maybe a giant goddamn eagle showed up to fly us here and save the day—I don’t know! But we have to leave. Now.”

  Driggs looked down at his chest. “I’ve got like fifty stitches here.”

  “Your courage in the face of adversity is an inspiration to us all.” She pulled at his shoulders. “Now GET UP.”

  The sound of hurried footsteps pounded through the smoke. Lex held her breath as the curtain swooshed open.

  “She’s right,” Uncle Mort said to Driggs. “We gotta go.”

  Driggs nearly fell out of the bed as Lex dropped him to go hug her uncle. “Where have you been?” she asked him.

  “Where have I been?” Uncle Mort looked incredulous. “You never cease to amaze, kiddo.”

  “Ow!” Driggs was doubled over. “Little help here?”

  Lex ran back to his side. “Sorry.” She grabbed his torn-up hoodie from the chair, put her shoulder under his arm, and looked at Uncle Mort. “Now what?”

  He nodded toward the exit. “We leave.”

  “What about the police?” Lex said, lugging Driggs down the hall. “And the nurses and doctors and everyone under the sun who saw us get here?”

  “Amnesia smoke bombs,” he replied as they wove their way through the emergency room, dodging coughing patients and hospital staff. “Been itching to try them out for a while now. We’re immune, but the Amnesia wipes everyone else’s recent memory, allowing us to disappear in a puff of smoke like the ninjas that we are.”

  Lex squinted through the haze, her eyes unable to focus. Everything was loud and moving and chaotic, except for—

  Through the smoke, leaning against a wall and staring directly at her, was a man in a white tuxedo.

  She couldn’t make out his face, but she felt his eyes on her all the same. He didn’t move. He didn’t seem to notice the smoke or the pandemonium surrounding it. He just stared at Lex, following her eyes as she made her way toward the door.

  Out of nowhere, that same memory of the woods surfaced. Lex was back in Croak, at the beginning of the summer, inching through the darkened forest, following Driggs down to the lake in what was to be her water balloon fight initiation. Driggs had just disappeared from view, and the woods were swallowing her up in their shadows—until she registered that faint, white figure in the distance. It hadn’t come any closer, but it had definitely been moving. Watching her, almost.

  Watching her like the man in the tuxedo.

  But then Uncle Mort made a sharp left and the man disappeared from view. Lex snapped back to the situation at hand, shifting Driggs’s weight.

  “At some point on the tour, I’d really love an explanation of all this,” Driggs piped up.

  “Only if you promise not to bleed all over my car,” Uncle Mort said as he walked through the automatic doors to freedom, yanking Lex’s scythe out of the distracted police officer’s hand on the way.

  Uncle Mort’s yellow car glowed under the lights of the parking lot like a golden hunk of Velveeta. Lex laid Driggs across the back seat, then hopped into the front.

  “You okay back there?” Uncle Mort asked Driggs once they were on the road.

  Driggs made a thumbs-up with some effort, then dropped his hand to the floor and moaned. “Did you catch her?” he asked, his eyes squeezed shut in pain.

  Lex turned around in her seat and looked at him. “Catch who?”

  He opened one eye. “Didn’t anyone see her? Zara!”

  Uncle Mort stared at him in the rearview mirror. “Tell me what happened.”

  Driggs drew a heavy breath. “I was waiting for Lex to come home, but she never did, so I left to see if she was at Corpp’s. When I passed the Bank, Zara grabbed me from behind and held her scythe to my throat. She whispered something—I couldn’t hear it too well, but it sounded like, ‘It’s mine. Pass it on.’ Then she slashed and pushed me in the fountain.”
>
  “‘It’s mine?’” Lex asked. “What was she talking about?”

  “How should I know?”

  Uncle Mort’s gaze was going back and forth between the mirror and the road. “What color was her scythe?”

  “Sadly, I wasn’t able to take the time to appreciate its subtle hues as it tore through my skin.” Driggs winced in pain. “Wasn’t silver like her old one, though, I can tell you that much.”

  “What difference does the color make?” Lex asked.

  “Could indicate who gave it to her,” Uncle Mort said. “Only a few Grims on earth make replacement scythes. They’re wildly illegal.”

  “But how did she Crash in without anyone noticing?” Lex asked.

  Uncle Mort looked bitter. “Someone hacked into the security system and disabled it. Either Zara or someone she’s hired.”

  Lex just blinked. “I don’t get it. Why go through all that trouble just to slash him and leave? Why didn’t she”—she couldn’t say it—“do something worse?”

  “Leverage, probably,” Uncle Mort said. “She knows she can get you to do whatever she wants if she can use his life as a bargaining chip. Trust me, Driggs is worth way more to her alive than dead.”

  Driggs cleared his throat. “You know I can hear you, right?”

  “Still, you’re right, Lex,” Uncle Mort said. “It’s odd for her to just show up without a purpose. What did she say again, Driggs? ‘It’s mine’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s hers? What was she looking for?”

  Lex inhaled sharply, a sudden thought smacking into her brain. “The book!” she shouted. She looked at Driggs, then her uncle. “The Wrong Book!”

  The car was silent for a few seconds as Lex dug into her hoodie pocket.

  “Lex,” Uncle Mort said, “would you like me to turn this car right around and bring you back to the psych ward?”

  “Hang on,” Driggs said as Lex pulled out Bone’s note. “She might be right.”

  Lex gave him a look. “You don’t have to sound so shocked about it.”

  “But it happens so rarely. Like an eclipse.”

  “Give me that,” Uncle Mort said, snatching the scrap of paper from Lex’s hand. He read it over, then looked at her. “Where did you find this?”

  Lex hesitated. She hadn’t yet told her uncle anything about Bone’s note or what she’d discovered in the library after the attacks. She kept telling herself this was because she didn’t want to bother him with silly fantasies—

  But that was before Driggs had almost gotten gutted like a fish.

  So she spilled everything. “And there was an empty space at the end of the shelf, where a book had been,” she finished. “I bet Zara took it because there was another copy of this note in there! She’s looking for the key to the dead and the Wrong Book too!”

  Uncle Mort thought for a moment. “You might be right.”

  “Again with the shock. Thanks a lot, asshats.”

  “Ever hear anything about this stuff, Mort?” Driggs asked. “Bone, key to the dead, Wrong Book?”

  “Bone, no,” he replied. “Wrong Book? Yeah, every Grim has heard of that. Grotton’s recipe collection of horrors.”

  “It disappeared centuries ago, though, right?” Driggs said.

  Uncle Mort squinted down the road, then adjusted the side-view mirrors. “Hmm?”

  Lex studied him. “Uncle Mort,” she said, “is there something you’re not telling us?”

  He stared straight ahead and said nothing.

  She leaned in closer. “Is the Wrong Book in Croak? In your basement? In the trunk of this car?”

  “The Wrong Book is in a safe place,” he said matter-of-factly. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  “In the cabin beyond the Sticks?”

  Uncle Mort jerked the wheel so sharply Lex had to grab the door handle to keep her head from hitting the window.

  “Where did you hear that?” he shouted over Driggs’s cries of pain from the back seat.

  “Driggs told me,” she quickly answered.

  “Thanks, pumpkin,” Driggs groaned. “Love you too.”

  Uncle Mort scowled. “What do you know about the cabin?”

  “What do you know about the cabin?” Lex countered. “The signature on the note—it can be rearranged to spell out ‘the cabin beyond the Sticks.’ So it must mean something. Is that where the Wrong Book is?”

  He gave up. “Yes. But,” he added before Lex could start freaking out, “I don’t know where the key is. No one does. And even if we did have the key, I don’t know how to get past the protective shield. That was put into place long before I was a twinkle in my father’s eye, and they didn’t exactly leave a user’s manual.” When no one said anything, he rolled his eyes. “That’s all I know, Officer. I swear.”

  “You’ve known this the whole time and you never told us?”

  “I wasn’t aware that you were in the market for forbidden atrocities of lore. Besides, it’s my job to keep classified information classified. I’m the goddamned mayor, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  He had her there.

  After a mile or two of silence Driggs asked, “How long was I out? I don’t even remember the ride to the hospital.”

  “There was no ride,” said Uncle Mort.

  “Huh? Then how did I get there?”

  “Yeah, I’d like to hear this myself,” said Uncle Mort. “Care to share, Lex?”

  Lex’s throat went dry. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I—I saw him lying there all bloody, and without thinking, my hand just flew to my scythe and I tore us out of there. I swear, there wasn’t a thought in my head other than keeping him alive—”

  “You scythed at will?” Driggs said. “With direction? How in the hell—” He was overcome by a fit of coughing.

  Lex looked at Uncle Mort. “I really don’t know.”

  Uncle Mort sighed. “I guess when Zara Culled your power to Damn, you absorbed her ability to Crash. An even trade.”

  The Ziploc bag containing Lex’s scythe sat on the dashboard. She picked it up and removed its contents, weighing her treasured weapon in her hand. It shone ominously in the lights of the highway, its darkness absolute. No wonder the townspeople feared her.

  “But I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. “Or where to go.”

  “We passed by the hospital on the way back from the rookie trip,” Uncle Mort said. “It must have found its way into your subconscious.”

  “But how did you know where to find us?”

  “As soon as you disappeared, I ran home and activated the CuffLink, a little project I’ve been working on ever since Zara kidnapped you. Can pinpoint and track the exact location of any Grim, as long as their Cuff is switched on.”

  Lex slumped in her seat. “I risked exposing us.”

  “It’s a good thing you did,” said Uncle Mort. “The cut wasn’t too deep, but it was long, and he was losing a lot of blood. I’m not sure even our best medics would have been able to fix him in time.”

  “Uh, maybe we need better medics,” said Driggs.

  “Yeah, well, we’ve never needed them before. The Grimsphere hasn’t seen violence like this in years. But you’re right—we should stock up on more medical supplies, beef up security—”

  “And next time we’ll be ready for her,” Lex said.

  Uncle Mort let out a bitter laugh. “You better hope there’s not a next time, kiddo. Half the town witnessed you Crashing out of there with a bloody, half-dead Driggs in your arms. What kind of a welcome-back party do you think you’re going to get?”

  There was nothing more to say after that. Driggs soon fell asleep, Uncle Mort fixed his eyes on the road, and Lex restlessly gazed out the window, seeing only her reflection in the glass as the black, limitless night blurred by.

  ***

  By the time they reached Dead End, it was nearly midnight. Uncle Mort tried to zip through town before anyone saw them, but the instant they got to the fountain, Norwoo
d and Heloise barged out of Corpp’s and stood in front of the car. A handful of townspeople trickled out behind them to watch.

  “Get out, Mort.”

  Uncle Mort rolled down the window. “Hey, Woody. I’ll have a quarter pounder with cheese, hold the mustard.”

  Heloise opened the passenger door and pulled Lex out of the car by her hood. “Here she is,” she said with a triumphant smile, presenting Lex to the crowd as if she were a prizewinning trout. She glanced at the back seat. “The boy is in there too.”

  “And he’s alive, I’d like to point out,” Uncle Mort said as he exited the car. “Which, in the end, is all that matters.”

  “Oh, well, thank heavens,” Norwood said in a mocking tone. “As long as he’s alive, there’s no need to ask what happened to him, or why he was attacked in the first place, or how in bloody hell she managed to Crash out of here on her own!”

  “Look—”

  “What’s it going to take, Mort?” Norwood was seething. “How many more attacks need to happen before you admit that you can’t protect us? Who stabbed you?” he yelled into the car. “Huh? Who was it, Driggs?”

  Driggs shakily sat up and poked his head out the door. “Zara. But—”

  “Zara!” Norwood turned to the crowd. “She was here, not ten feet away from the bar! I don’t even want to think of how easy it would have been for her to barge in and Damn everyone in the place. We’d never even know what hit us!”

  Uncle Mort looked amused. “And what would you have done to prevent this, Norwood?”

  “A hell of a lot more than you have, that’s for sure.”

  Uncle Mort’s smile did not falter. “Could we have some specifics? Come on, let’s hear your master plan.”

  A single bead of sweat appeared on Norwood’s forehead. “Patrols around the perimeter—”

  “Would be useless, since Zara is able to Crash inside to specific locations. The population monitoring system is our most effective security measure, fully capable of detecting people as they enter and exit Croak no matter where they’re coming from—or it would be, if Zara hadn’t hacked in and disabled it.”

  “What about a warning system?” Heloise said.