“Who is this?” he demanded, his face getting hard.
“G’day, Croakers!” Broomie’s voice sang, clear and bouncy. “On the road again?”
“Broomie!” the Juniors shouted, thrilled to hear from their friend from DeMyse.
“Ask about Riqo!” Pip told Uncle Mort. Along with Broomie, Riqo had teamed up with them in DeMyse, then distracted Zara so that they could escape. Last time they had seen him, his blood was seeping into the hotel carpet as they Crashed out of DeMyse.
But Uncle Mort didn’t seem to hear Pip. Agitated, he cupped his hand over the Cuff. “Cuffs can hardly be considered secure lines, Broomie. What are you doing?”
“I know, sorry about that, mate. But I figured this was too important not to pass on, no matter the risk: You’ve got some allies.”
Smiles broke out around the car. “How’s that?” Uncle Mort said.
“Kilda showed your video around, and—”
“Kilda’s alive?” Lex exclaimed.
“Alive and chatty as ever. She told me that a small group of Croakers decided to up and follow you, just in case you ran into trouble. Sort of like extra backup for Wicket. So if you see anyone on your tail, don’t just fire off a few rounds for the hell of it. Check to see if they’re friendly first.”
“Okay,” said Uncle Mort. “Got it.”
“Mort!” Pip insisted. “Ask about Riqo!”
“How’s LeRoy?” Uncle Mort said into the Cuff.
“Don’t worry, he hasn’t changed his mind,” Broomie answered. “He’s solid, trust me. Plus, he knows I’ll personally neuter him if he bails.”
“Sounds terrifying. Thanks for the heads-up, Broomie.”
“No worries! Good luck!”
Uncle Mort hung up, prompting a loud sigh from Pip. Lex, however, was frowning. “What is it that LeRoy might change his mind about?”
“Oh, his wallpaper patterns, I’m sure.”
Lex rolled her eyes but didn’t press further. Her record of successfully getting information out of Uncle Mort when he didn’t want to volunteer it was abysmal.
“Mort,” Driggs said, thinking, “if you’ve known for years that interacting with the portals was bad for the Grimsphere, why didn’t you ban Grims from going in there and socializing with the souls? And why did you give us the ability to Crash?”
“Crashing was a necessary evil. Norwood was closing in on us, and I didn’t see any other way to provide an escape for all of you. As for the portals, I couldn’t let on that I still had a problem with them once I became mayor. Didn’t want to tip anyone off, so it had to be business as usual.”
“So you’ve known all along that mingling with souls and Crashing were both harming the Afterlife?” Lex said. “And you never told anyone?”
Uncle Mort glared at her. “You try juggling the governance of a town and the preservation of the Afterlife and the safety of a bunch of kids entrusted to your care,” he said. “Pretty hard to pull all those off at the same time without a bit of deception.”
“Hear, hear,” Grotton piped up, having swooped in just in time to catch the end of their conversation. He looked pointedly at Lex. “We all need our secrets, don’t we, love?”
Lex flinched, feeling cold all over.
He knows, she realized.
Grotton knew about all those Damnings she’d done in secret. Of course he knew. He’d been following her ever since she got to Croak.
Her eyes stayed glued to his, those colorless, lifeless orbs hanging lazily in the stuffy car air. It took every bit of self-control to keep from visibly reacting, tipping off the Juniors that something was wrong. “Yeah,” she said through a dry mouth. “We do.”
Luckily, no one seemed to read anything into their frosty exchange. “Get out of here,” said Driggs, shooing Grotton away as if he were a bothersome housefly. “Go read your precious Wrong Book.”
“Oh, no need to read it,” Grotton said with a malicious grin. “I wrote the thing, after all. I know it down to the last letter.”
Lex didn’t dare look away. She was holding the gaze of the man who had been responsible for training Zara, who in turn had killed Cordy. She knew she was going to kill him, for good this time. And yet something was passing between them—almost an understanding. They’d both Damned a whole mess of people. The only difference was that Grotton’s Damning was legendary, whereas Lex’s was still a secret.
Carefully, as if the slightest motion might cause Grotton to launch into a proclamation right there in front of everyone, she turned away, looked out the window, and swallowed as the snow-covered trees flew by.
***
Some time later, Lex woke up and swept her gaze around the car. All the Juniors were conked out, even Driggs, his head flopped down on her shoulder. Carefully, she shifted him to Ferbus’s shoulder instead, not wanting to rouse him awake—or worse, to his ghostly form.
As she moved, her foot hit something on the floor.
She reached for the bulky object. The Wrong Book’s gold letters glistened in the light of the setting sun. She snuck a glance at Pandora, who was squinting intently at the road and not paying a lick of attention to her passengers. Uncle Mort was going over some papers he’d taken from the basement—Lex caught a glimpse of something that looked like a schematic of a tall, tapering building, like a lighthouse. She didn’t know what that could possibly be for, but Uncle Mort often didn’t make a lot of sense.
Yet he’d been pretty clear about not using the Wrong Book for their own needs, saying that it was far too evil and unpredictable. But how bad could it be?
She opened the cover of the book. There was no title page, no introduction.
She flipped to the next page. Nothing there either.
The rest of the pages fanned through her fingers, each one blank. Her hands began to get clammy and stick to the paper as panic set in.
They’d risked everything for this? An empty book?
“There’s a trick to it,” a voice whispered in her ear.
Lex jumped in her seat, then held still to make sure she hadn’t woken anyone else. Bang’s eyes fluttered open but closed just as quickly.
Lex turned her head to find Grotton’s beside hers; he’d stuck it down from atop the roof to read over her shoulder.
“Don’t do that,” she hissed.
“Sincerest apologizes, love, but that’s what ghosts do, I’m afraid.” He grinned. “We spook.”
Lex tried to make her voice as even as possible. “What is this?” she asked, jabbing her finger onto one of the empty pages. “A joke?”
“Elixir ink,” he said. “Can only be read or revealed—”
“By the person who wrote it,” Lex said with a groan, remembering what Uncle Mort had said back in the basement. “So it’s useless to everyone but your dickish self?”
“Yes,” he said. “Unless I’m feeling particularly charitable.”
“Are you feeling particularly charitable right now?”
“Not so much after that rude comment, but—” He beamed maliciously. “Perhaps a sneak peek.”
He passed his translucent hand over the page. As he did, the words became visible wherever he touched, as if he were a human magnifying glass. Lex was able to read a heading that said THE PROJECTION before he yanked his hand away, turning the page blank once again.
“What was that?” she asked.
“The projection process. How to briefly and temporarily project my visage away from the Wrong Book when an occasion calls for it—to drop off a note, for instance, or pop in to say hello to a new friend.”
Lex knew what he was getting at. The clues he’d left for her to find at the library, the times he’d shown up in a white tuxedo to stare at her from afar—
And, of course, when he’d appeared to Zara, to train her.
“You bastard,” she spat. Bang was definitely awake now and staring at her with big eyes, but Lex couldn’t stop herself. “Zara never would have stolen my Damning power, never killed my sister, never ful
ly turned into a monster without you goading her on and telling her precisely what to do. This is all your fault.”
Grotton turned thoughtful. “The way I saw it, there were two options: fix the Afterlife, or put it out of its misery by hastening its destruction. I merely chose the latter. Zara turned out to be quite the violation factory, if I do say so myself.”
Lex’s pulse was still raging, but she kept her cool. She needed Grotton. She hated that she needed him, but as long as she still got him in the end, that was all that mattered. “I cannot wait to kill you.”
“Try to kill me,” he corrected her. “And I’m looking forward to it as well. Should be quite a laugh.”
“I don’t understand,” Lex said, ignoring that last bit. “Why not fix the Afterlife?”
He shrugged. “Petty jealousy, I suppose.”
Lex remembered something her uncle had said back in the cabin in Croak—Grotton thought that if he couldn’t have an afterlife, then no one should. Her hands clenched. “Again, really can’t wait for the killing.”
“Oh, but you’re not going to merely ‘kill’ me.” He smiled again. “What you will do—I’m sorry, attempt to do—is much, much worse than killing.”
Lex’s breath caught. “Damning?”
He smiled harder. “Worse.”
When all she could do was stare, he gave her a mischievous wink. “Flip ahead seven pages.”
Lex did so. His hand danced across the page for a brief moment, allowing her to glimpse the title: THE RESET.
“A clean slate,” he told her. “For any souls who were altered in some way—ghosted, trapped, Damned.” He raised his eyebrow. “Restores them to their original condition and sends them straight to the Afterlife.”
Lex inhaled so hard, her lungs nearly popped.
All those people I Damned. And Driggs would get to go to the Afterlife after all! Or maybe—the thought briefly flitted through her mind, not wanting to stick and get her hopes up—maybe since he’s half and half, he’ll become human again!
“This would fix everything!” Lex said, forgetting all about volume control. “This is what we need to do!”
The rest of the Juniors jolted awake at the sharp outburst.
“Yelling?” Ferbus asked, squinting in the orange sunlight. “Yelling is what we need to do?”
Lex pointed at the Wrong Book—though without Grotton’s hand in front of it, all it displayed was a blank page. “There’s a way to restore all souls to the Afterlife—all of them. Trapped, Damned—” She turned to Driggs. “Even ghosted!”
He frowned, then smiled, then frowned again, as if he were unable to decide whether it was worth it to believe her.
But his spazzy face only made Lex more antsy. “So how do we do it?” She tried to shove the book back under Grotton’s floating form so she could read more, but Grotton jerked away, snickering.
“How do you do it,” Uncle Mort spoke up. “And it’s not time yet.”
Lex was so flabbergasted that Uncle Mort had entered the conversation—and, even more baffling, that he knew what they were talking about—that all she could do for a moment was sputter out a series of demented questions. “Me? Do what? When? Why isn’t it?”
Uncle Mort shot a look at the Wrong Book, then spoke slowly and deliberately. “When you destroy Grotton, a reset will be triggered. That much is true. All souls, however damaged, will be restored and sent directly to the Afterlife. But before you try to chop his head off—”
Lex was well on her way to trying to chop his head off. She grabbed her scythe with one hand and tried to grab Grotton’s floating form with the other—but he wasn’t solid, and he certainly didn’t look as if he planned on becoming so anytime soon.
“You’ll have to do better than that, love,” he said.
“He’s right, Lex,” Uncle Mort said. “Simply killing him won’t work. Damning won’t either.”
Lex thought for a second. “I know!” She dug around in her pocket, pulled out her plastic skull-and-crossbones lighter, and held it to the pages of the Wrong Book. “You’re attached at the hip to this thing, right? So if it goes, you go.”
“No, don’t!” Uncle Mort shouted. Lex stopped. Grotton looked disappointed. “His soul is bound to the book,” Uncle Mort explained, “but it’s not a part of it. You destroy the book, it’s only going to break the bond and set him free, and then you won’t be able to keep him around long enough to reset anything.”
With an irritated sigh Lex lowered the book and the lighter. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Then how am I supposed to do it?”
Grotton flashed a taunting smile around the car as he floated upward. “You’re the Last,” he said, leaving through the roof. “You figure it out.”
Everyone stared up at the ceiling for a few moments, then back at one another. But Lex was looking only at her uncle. “Really? Fresh out of ideas on the whole Grotton-destroying front?”
Uncle Mort was visibly frustrated. He looked at the Wrong Book. “Last time I got a look at that book—twenty years ago, when LeRoy and I first trapped Grotton in that cabin—we only got a glimpse of the reset page before Grotton realized what we were trying to do. So I know that it can be done, and only by an extremely powerful Grim—that’s you, Lex—but I don’t know how.” He looked around at the other Juniors and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Which is where you guys come in. Grotton’s onto my tricks, but he doesn’t know the rest of you very well. You need to figure out a way to get him to reveal the rest of that page.”
Bang’s eyes lit up, her hand automatically snatching the Wrong Book out of Lex’s. She pulled it into her lap and began paging through it. She signed something to Pip, who eagerly nodded and looked up at the top of the car, where Grotton lurked, unaware of their plans.
“We have a little bit of time,” Uncle Mort continued. “I want to make sure the Afterlife is all sealed off and safe before we start sending damaged souls back into it, since a reset will cause more kickback than the effect of all the portals sealing, combined. Once they’re all closed up, though, we have to at least attempt this.”
“But what if it’s dangerous?” said Driggs, shooting Lex a look. “For Lex, I mean?”
“Who cares?” she shot back. “I’ll do whatever it takes. I said I’d fix you, and I will.”
“We’ll reassess once we figure out what it entails,” said Uncle Mort. “All I know is this: Sealing the portals will stop the damage and prevent anything else from happening to the Afterlife. But resetting will reverse the damage completely—something that I’m sure Kloo and anyone else who lost their memory would certainly appreciate.”
Lex thought of Cordy. She hadn’t seen her since DeMyse, a month ago. What if she’d lost her memory since then? What if she didn’t remember Lex anymore?
“I’ll do it,” Lex said. “I promise.”
Yet she couldn’t get Grotton’s smiling face out of her head. He’d willingly shown her the reset page, as if he were trying to help—
But he’d “helped” Zara, too.
And look how many people she’d killed.
***
A few hours later they pulled into a gas station and Pandora got out to fill up the tank. Bang was still flipping through the blank pages of the Wrong Book, nudging Pip with ideas.
Uncle Mort and Lex headed into the store to load up on more snacks—but when they got to the door, Uncle Mort swerved her away from it, leading her instead around the side of the building.
She frowned. “Um, the Doritos are this way . . .”
“The Doritos can wait.”
“Excuse me?”
Her dread increased when she realized where he was shoving her. “Oh no. No no no.”
He dug around in his pocket for quarters and stuffed a couple into the pay phone slot. “It’s been months—they must be worried out of their minds.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But what?”
Lex pinched her lips together, unable to come up with a reasonable excuse. r />
He moved in a little closer. “You think Norwood won’t be able to find them if he needs to, Lex?”
With that, a cold sweat broke out against her skin. Zara had used Lex’s parents for leverage; why wouldn’t Norwood do the same thing?
She grabbed the receiver.
“They’re not going to buy the usual excuses that nothing’s wrong,” she said as she dialed. “They’ll know I’m lying.”
Uncle Mort shrugged. “Then don’t lie.”
The tone sounded three times before her mother’s voice came through on the other line. “Hello?” she said, though it came out as more of a sigh.
Lex swallowed. “Mom? It’s me.”
Silence, then: “Lex! Where have you been?”
Her father picked up on another phone. “Lex? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m—”
She shut her eyes to think. She had to protect them somehow. And there was no way to do that without just coming out with it.
“I’m in a little bit of trouble,” she said. “I mean, I’m safe—I’m with Uncle Mort, but—”
“Put him on!” her father demanded.
She looked at Uncle Mort. He shook his head, and she couldn’t blame him. Better to contain the blast radius of outrage. “He’s . . . not here right now. Listen—”
“No, you listen!” her mother shouted. “You go months without calling—and then you think you can just give us a ring and tell us what to do? Jesus, we thought you were dead!”
“Calm down, Gail,” her father interrupted.
“I will not calm down! What were we supposed to think, Lex? Especially after what happened to your sister—of course we’re going to assume the worst!”
“Where are you?” her dad asked. “We’ll come pick you up. I’ll run Mort over with my car if I have to.”
“No, Dad—” Lex grabbed the phone with her other hand to steady it. “I’m not coming home. There are some things I have to do. They’re kind of important.”
“What could possibly be more important than your own safety?”
Saving the goddamn Afterlife! she wanted to shout. Saving your dead daughter’s soul!
Instead, she tried to take a calming breath. “Listen to me. There is a slight chance that you guys might be in danger. Go—”