Over My Head (Wildlings) (33 page)

"Josh, no!" I cry.

I race from Theo's side and throw myself at the disappearing passageway. But fast as I can move, I'm still too late. The passageway vanishes and I skid right to the edge of the headland. Rocks and rubble roll down from the rim, bouncing off the cliff face to the waves below. My balance is all wrong and I'm about to fall over myself, except Auntie Min grabs me by the scruff of my shirt and hauls me back.

I sit there at the edge when she lets me go, unable to trust my legs. For a long moment, I stare out across the darkening ocean. I can't believe it all went bad so fast. Finally I turn around to look at Auntie Min.

"We have to go after him," I say.

I think of how easily Vincenzo handled Theo—Theo!—and the others. What chance does Josh have on his own?

Auntie Min shakes her head. "Josh has made his decision and we should respect it. We have enough to deal with here."

"But—"

"Either the Thunders have given him the strength to deal with Vincenzo, or they haven't. Our being there with him will not make a difference either way." She lays a hand on my head, fingers smoothing my hair. "See to Theo, little otter. He is the one you can help today. I will go to Cory."

Huge moth wings unfold from her back with a sudden snap. She steps off the edge of the headland and glides downward, out of sight.

I turn back to where Theo's lying. Des is still crouched beside him, but he's staring open-mouthed at where Auntie Min was standing. When he sees me looking at him, he gives a little shake of his head as though to clear it, then returns his attention to Theo. I hurry over.

"You're not supposed to move somebody with a back injury!" I tell him when I see what he's doing.

He's shaking Theo's shoulder, trying to rouse him.

I push him away and take out my phone. "We need to get him to a hospital."

"No," Des says, "we need to get him to wake up so that he can pull that trick of Josh's."

"He's not dead," I say.

At least, not yet. Please, not ever. But everything's gone so horribly wrong. It's all I can do to keep a lid on my feelings and not dissolve into panic.

"And I don't think that trick works for everyone," I add. "If it did, Tomás would already be up and about."

"That dude is dead. I'm not talking about resurrection. I'm talking about the healing factor you Wildlings have. Remember how beat-up Josh was? Or how about the guy who was with him in the ValentiCorp lab?"

"You mean Rico."

Des nods. "They cut off his leg, right? But he switched to his animal shape and when he returned to his human shape, that leg was back like he'd never lost it."

Now I understand and put my phone away.

"Except you have to be awake to do it," I say.

It all feels so hopeless. Josh is gone. Tomás is dead. Cory's probably dead. And Theo …

I can't get it out of my head, the horrible cracking sound of him hitting the rock. It makes me sick just thinking about it.

Auntie Min comes back, those big wings carrying her up from the rocks below. I get a shiver looking at her, remembering the stories Mamá used to tell Ampora and me about
Mariposa de le Muerte
. At this moment, Auntie Min looks just like some harbinger of death.

She lands lightly on the rock. Her wings disappear when her feet touch the stone.

"Cory's making his way back up," she says. "He managed to hit the water." Her gaze goes to Tomás, then Theo. "At least your Theo's still breathing."

"Except we can't rouse him so that he can heal himself."

"Just keep trying."

"Why didn't you do anything?" I ask. "When the others attacked Vincenzo."

"None of us should have done anything," she says. "It was obvious at that moment that he was too strong for any of us. What we should have done was let him go so that we could use the new information he gave us to plan a better course of action."

"Except Vincenzo was going to kill Theo's grandmother," I say.

Auntie Min nods. "I still can barely believe that he's doing any of this."

"Believe it," Cory says from below.

I look up to see him approaching through the grass. He doesn't look any worse for wear—he's not even wet—but one look in his eyes and I'm glad it's not me he's mad at.

"Next time I see him," Cory goes on, "I'm taking him down with a Taser and we'll really give him a reason to hate humans."

"We need to confer with some of the other elders," Auntie Min says.

Cory stops by Tomás's body.

"I'm done with talk," he says, looking down at the dead cousin. "We tried it your way, Señora, and it didn't work. What we're going to do is find Vincenzo and remove him from the equation before he does any more damage."

"Violence isn't always the answer," Auntie Min begins.

Cory cuts her off. "It is this time."

His gaze settles on me. "How's Chaingang?"

"Alive," I tell him, "but unconscious. I'm not sure, but it sounded like his back … broke."

I realize I'm in shock, otherwise I'd be too messed up to even speak, but I feel the shakes threatening to come on. I need to hold it together for as long as it takes to help Theo.

Cory nods. His gaze goes to Des, who looks paler than I've ever seen him, then he looks around the headland.

"Where's Josh?"

"He went after Vincenzo," I manage. "Into the otherworld."

"And no one stopped him?"

"Dude," Des says, "it all happened so fast. They were both gone before we even knew what was happening."

"Why would he do something so stupid?"

"Vincenzo threatened to kill Elzie," Des tells him. "Along with everybody else Josh cares about. Unless Josh kills Congressman Householder."

Cory shakes his head. "That doesn't even begin to make sense."

Des tells him everything else Vincenzo said.

Cory rubs at his face. "Crap. This is worse than I thought." He looks to Auntie Min. "You have any thoughts on who else is behind this?"

She shakes her head.

"Okay," he says. "We've got our work cut out for us. We need to clean this place up as though we were never here."

I know he means we have to do something with Tomás's body, but I don't know what it means for Theo.

"You should know," Des says, "that The Wild Surf are waiting for Tomás in the parking lot below—along with their driver."

Cory nods. "But first things first. Let's get Chaingang fixed up."

"What are you going to do?" Auntie Min asks as he leaves Tomás's side and walks over to where Des and I are with Theo.

There's a worried tone in her voice, which makes me wonder if I should be feeling even more freaked out than I already am.

"Relax," he tells us. "I'm Coyote Clan. We've got lots of tricks up our sleeve."

"I know," Auntie Min says. "
That's
what worries me."

He waves her off with a casual motion of his hand. "I've done this a thousand times."

"Done what?"

He grins at me. "Taken a walk into somebody else's head."

"Oh, come on, seriously, dude?" Des says. "You expect us to believe you're going to just walk into Chaingang's brain?"

"After all you've seen,
this
you can't accept?"

"So anything can happen?" Des says. "Is that what I'm supposed to believe?"

"I don't go inside him physically," Cory explains. "We call it dreamwalking, which means I can visit his spirit in the place he goes when his body's asleep. The dreamlands are part of the otherworld, and everybody goes there at some point or another. You just don't usually remember your visits. Time spent there gets all messed up with the actual dreams you have. But when a cousin like me is a character in one of your dreams, you're usually not dreaming. You're in the shifting part of the otherworld, where anything can happen, and you're actually talking to a cousin."

I guess the fact that neither Des nor I look like we really get it makes him continue.

"Okay, it's like with your friend Erik. You don't think I
really
took him into the otherworld, do you?"

"Didn't you?" I say.

"Of course not. I took him into a dream of the otherworld. He only thought he was having all those experiences."

"But he was all messed up when I saw him in school—caked in dust, his clothes all dirty and torn."

Cory gives that coyote grin of his. "Oh, that. I just had him roll around in the service lane behind his place until I thought he looked like somebody who'd been having a rough time out in the mountains. The whole time he was rolling around out there, he was dreaming that he was scrabbling around in the mountain dirt and rocks."

"Theo's not going to get hurt," I start.

"Of course not," Cory breaks in. "He's one of us. I'd never treat him like that. I'm just going into his head to have a conversation with him. Tell him it's time to wake up so we can get this show on the road."

"You be careful," Auntie Min warns as Cory kneels down beside Des and me.

"Careful's my middle name," Cory says.

He winks at me as he reaches out with a finger to touch the spot between Theo's eyebrows. Maybe it's my imagination, but I swear there's a little spark of light when the pad of his finger makes contact. Then Cory's eyes roll up in his head, showing their whites.

I'm thinking his wide-open blank gaze is pretty much the creepisest thing I've ever seen when the coyote head takes the place of his human features and he vanishes from sight.

"Dude," Des breathes from beside me.

I look to Auntie Min. "This is safe, right? Nobody's going to get hurt?"

"It should be fine," she says, but she doesn't look entirely convinced.

Josh

I land on Vincenzo's back when I come out of the passageway into the otherworld, ready to tear him to shreds. But he shrugs me off before my claws can dig in, flipping me over his head like I'm still a kid, not a hundred and eighty pounds of mountain lion. There's no grass to land on. There's just the empty space on the other side of the cliff edge. The waves pounding on the rocks below.

Vincenzo snatches me out of the air, one hand grabbing me by the nape of the neck, the other backhanding me along the side of my head. He's so strong that my ears ring from the blow. My gaze fills with stars and I can't think. I can't do much of anything, except hang limp in his iron grip.

"Didn't think you'd have the balls, kid," he says. "Not that you ever had a chance."

I'm still stunned, but the mountain lion has me growling deep in my chest as I start to recover from the blow.

Vincenzo gives me a shake. It feels like my brain is being rattled around in my skull, bouncing off the bone. When he's done I hang limp once more, dangling from his hand. The mountain lion takes a weak swipe at him. He gives me another hard shake.

"You see?" he says. "You're nothing special. The Thunders never sent you—I don't care what anybody says. All you are is some freak of nature."

He's right. It's what I've been trying to tell anyone who'll listen, ever since all of this began.

"I can see in your eyes that you agree." He gives me another shake when he doesn't get a response. "Don't you?"

It's hard with his hand holding me up over the edge of the cliff by the scruff of my neck, but I give him an awkward nod.

"I thought I could use your death to send a message," Vincenzo says, "but you're not even useful for that, are you?"

I move my head to let him know I'm listening before he gives me another rattling shake.

This seriously sucks, but I've no one to blame but myself.

What the hell was I thinking?

Chaingang couldn't take him. Cory and Tomás couldn't do it together. Sure, I have the benefit of a more powerful Wildling shape than any of them, but that's turning out to not be so much of an advantage.

I'm such an idiot. All I was trying to do was stop him from hurting Elzie and Mom. Instead I just threw away any chance I might have had to stop him. Vincenzo's had me so outclassed from the beginning, it's pathetic. My going after him was like a heavyweight being attacked by a lightweight. David going hand-to-hand with Goliath instead of doing the smart thing and taking the giant out from a distance with his trusty slingshot.

I blew it and now everybody's going to die, starting with me.

Chaingang

There weren't a lot of things Grandma could afford, but one bill she always paid right smack on time was the cable bill. She had her favourites, but there was plenty of time between soaps and game shows for J-Dog and me to watch the stuff we liked. The pair of us grew up watching a lot of TV—old and new.

One of our favourites was
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
—back when Will Smith was still an up-and-comer and hadn't yet made any movies or albums. The idea that some black kid from the 'hood could end up living in a Beverly Hills mansion was a real kick to me and my brother, considering how we had to make do growing up in the Orchards with our grandma. Her place was a long way from the crack house that we'd be stuck in if our mother were still alive, but it couldn't hold a candle to the Fresh Prince's crib.

The thing that's got me thinking about all of this is that I'm standing in the vast marbled foyer of a mansion. I swear the ceiling goes up thirty feet. Suspended from it is a huge chandelier made up of thousands of sparkling crystals. A big stairway comes curving down to meet the marble. Everything smells fresh and clean, like somebody just washed the floor.

I've no idea what I'm doing here, how I got here or who this place belongs to. I glance behind me at a pair of tall oak doors, which I guess I must have walked through to get inside.

Any minute, somebody's going to come along and throw me out.

Or call the cops.

Or both.

But the place is silent except for the ticking of a big wooden grandfather clock standing against the wall to my right. There's a small table beside it with envelopes scattered across its polished surface.

The owner's mail, I guess.

I walk over and pick up an envelope. It's addressed to Mr. & Mrs. T.Washington.

I stare at it for a long moment before I pick up the next one. This one's a bill, and it's addressed to Theodore Washington.