Rogue (12 page)

Dazed, she looked at her hand. It held her scythe, and nothing more. The shadow had disappeared.

She looked up into Grotton’s pointy face, barely able to grasp the fact that he’d become solid, picked her up, and flown her out of the way. “Close call,” he said, his eyes inscrutable.

Lex held on to his arm for dear life. She was so out of breath she was panting. “What just happened?”

She didn’t get an answer, as the car door opened and one of the Juniors quickly pulled her—and, since she still hadn’t let go of him, Grotton—into the back. Uncle Mort was in the front seat, yelling something—yelling at Driggs—“Leave her!”

Driggs was hovering over Wicket’s body, trying desperately to become solid.

So that he can unDamn her
, Lex realized.

But he wasn’t doing it fast enough. “Come on!” Uncle Mort yelled again, and with a furious grunt Driggs tore himself away and flew to the car.

Lex struggled to look out the window as Pandora sped off down the dirt road, leaving the rest of the Seniors to finish killing one another. In the light of the rising sun she managed to catch one last glimpse of Norwood, who gave the departing Stiff a friendly wave and Crashed away, still unaware that he was harming the Afterlife by doing so. Either that, or he didn’t care.

For a minute, no one spoke. They’d all made it back to the car, a little roughed up but none seriously hurt. Ferbus and Lex both had bloody knuckles, Uncle Mort suffered a cut across his forehead, and Elysia was crying.

“Calm down, Lys,” Uncle Mort said.

“Calm down? He Damned Wicket!” she whimpered. “He didn’t just kill her, he
Damned
her.”

“Lex Damned people too,” Ferbus said.

“Yeah, but—those guys weren’t—”

“What, people just like us?” he shot back. “You think they deserve eternal torment any more than Wicket, just because of the side they happen to be on?”

“Ferb,” Uncle Mort said in a tired voice, “let’s save the ethics debate for another time. It’s a long drive to Necropolis.”

Lex appreciated her uncle’s stepping in—especially to stop the sort of lecture that he’d usually be the one to deliver—but Ferbus wasn’t finished. “Seriously, way to Hulk out back there, Lex. That’ll definitely be branded into our nightmares forever, all those bodies bursting into flame like popcorn. And what the hell was that at the end, with your hand?”

“I don’t know,” Lex said.

“You don’t know?”

“No.” She stared at the scythe in her hand. Her voice got quieter. “I have no idea.”

“Let
go
of me,” Grotton hissed.

Lex looked at her other hand, surprised to find Grotton at the end of it; she hadn’t even realized she was still clutching his wrist. She looked from her rigid fingers up to his face. He was uncharacteristically frustrated, upset.

He stays solid when I touch him
, she realized.
Just like Driggs
.

She squeezed him tighter. “What happened back there?” she snarled. Everyone was listening now. “What was that stuff around my hand? And why did you tackle me?” Grotton squirmed like a snake, trying to jerk away, but his wrist was thin and Lex was pissed. “Tell me!”

Grotton narrowed his eyes. “I’m not telling you anything.”

His stubbornness was what tipped her off. “It’s the thing that triggers the reset, isn’t it? What I’ll have to do to destroy you?”

Grotton’s eyes widened just for a second. Enough for Lex to know that she’d hit pay dirt.

She dug her nails into hi cnaittons papery skin. “Very well! There is a fate worse than death, it’s true,” he said. “A fate worse than the Hole. Even worse than Damning.”

Out of the corner of her eye Lex noticed that Bang was signing something to her: “Keep holding on to him.” Then she nudged Pip, who nodded and took his scythe out of his pocket.

Grotton donned an oily smile. “Pity you won’t know what it is until it blows up in your face,” he told Lex, taunting her. “That’s what happens with everything you do, isn’t it, love?”

“Now!” Bang mouthed. She gave a healthy shove to Pip, who then grabbed Grotton’s hand and, with a quick flick of the scythe, sliced off his thumb. Bang held out the mason jar she’d taken from the bunker, and the severed appendage landed neatly inside, its solidness dissolving into mist before it could produce a single drop of blood.

Everyone sat, stunned—Grotton most of all. Lex even let go, allowing his body to turn to fog once again as he stared at the spot where his finger had been. Then, gradually, a smile came back to his lips. He leaned close to Bang’s face, his yellowed teeth only inches from her nose.

“Well played, girl,” he sneered. “Happy reading.”

With that, he floated back up to the roof. The Juniors stared at the ceiling, not daring to breathe, praying that he wouldn’t go solid again and Damn them all in the space of the next second.

But he didn’t. And Bang, it seemed, wasn’t even concerned. Strangely overjoyed at the grisly trophy she’d taken for herself, her head was already back in the Wrong Book. She held the jar with care, grinning as the words on the page popped to life underneath its cloudy contents.

“It worked!” Pip said.

Uncle Mort seemed to be having trouble finding his voice. “To put it mildly,” he croaked.

“You guys are
amazing!
” Elysia said, her mouth agape. “You’re like superheroes! Or super villains! Something super!”

“Shh,” Pip said as Bang read. “She found the reset page again.” Bang drew the jar over the page with one hand and signed to Pip with her other hand, which he then translated. “—the harshest punishment in the known Grimsphere. To trigger a reset, a soul must be sent to the Dark.”

Uncle Mort and Pandora both inhaled sharply.

“What’s the Dark?” Ferbus asked. “I’ve never heard of that before.”

Bang kept signing, her face getting paler as she read. “The Dark,” Pip said, his voice dropping as he went, “is a realm of pure nothingness. A total vacuum. The absence of life; the opposite of the Afterlife. Souls that are sent to the Dark cease to exist, as if they’d never been born at all. They do not reunite with their loved ones. They do not get to spend the rest of eternity in peace. They’re simply . . .” He swallowed. “Gone.”

The car had fallen so silent, each pebble that crunched under the Stiff’s tires could be heard.

“Forever?” Elysia asked.

Bang nodded, then resumed reading. “Forever,” Pip continued, never taking his eyes off her. “Annihilation—the act of sending a soul to the Dark—is a fate that should be reserved only for the most evil of souls. For the utterly unforgivable.”

Lex was shivering even harder now. “That’s what happened back there, with the shadow around my hand? I almost Annihilated Norwood?”

Bang held up a finger as she read some more, then nodded again. “Sounds like it, with the shadow and everything,” Pip translated. “Because—it says that only a Grim with great power can Annihilate a soul. A Grim whose soul has already started to decay.”

“In other words,” Uncle Mort spoke up, “a Grim who can Damn.”

Lex blinked. “Me.ex blink　Me.e

She stared at the pelts on the floor for a moment, then glanced up at Uncle Mort. “So that’s what I have to do, then,” she said. “In order to trigger a reset, I have to Annihilate someone. Grotton.”

Uncle Mort nodded slowly. “Looks that way.”

Lex glanced at Driggs, sure that he’d be aghast—but he was looking out the window, seemingly not even listening.

The rest of the Juniors, on the other hand, were floored. “That’s—” Elysia let out a long puff of air. “That’s unbelievable. I mean, Damning is bad, but at least it leaves you with your soul, even though it’s in pain. But erasing a soul completely?” She gulped. “Horrifying.”

“Beyond horrifying,” Ferbus agreed.

“Well, if anyone deserves it, it’s Grotton,” said Pandora.

Lex shuddered. She wasn’t sure
anyone
deserved that.

The car went quiet again. Pandora turned on the radio, but all she could find was static. No one said anything for a while, until—

“He said dozens.”

Lex turned to Driggs, not even sure that he’d spoken. But quite sure that he was frowning. “What?”

“Norwood said you’ve Damned dozens of people. But by my count there was only Corpp and Heloise—then Norwood, unsuccessfully—and then those few Seniors back there. At most, that’s half a dozen. So why would he say something like that?”

The Juniors were all staring at her, waiting for her to explain it away, to come up with a perfectly reasonable explanation. And part of Lex’s brain did instinctively start to formulate lies: Norwood had lost his mind, Norwood didn’t know what he was saying, Norwood must have hit his head and forgotten how to count—

But she told that part to shut up. She’d avoided this for too long as it was. Her friends deserved the truth.

“Um,” she started slowly, “over the past few months, when Zara was Damning all those criminals—”

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at them—especially not Driggs, who was always hardest on her for taking vengeful matters into her own hands.

“Well . . . it wasn’t just her.
I
Damned some of them too. In secret. So whenever I told you I was just Damning inanimate objects or dirt or whatever, in order to discharge all that power building up inside of me—I was lying. I was actually Damning people.”

Lex opened her eyes, but at the last second chickened out and looked down before she could see anyone’s reaction. No one spoke, though, so she kept going.

“But I swear, I only ever Damned criminals. I never touched a single innocent, not like Zara did, going around zapping people for fun. I couldn’t help it. The urge to Damn was a force I couldn’t contain—I mean, you saw how it was back there. It’s just too strong, and I couldn’t—” She felt herself slipping, losing her conviction, starting to ramble. “But I thought carefully about who deserved it, you know? I know that doesn’t make it any better, but . . . if I
had
to be Damning people, I thought it would at least be better to eliminate the really bad ones . . .”

She trailed off. They all seemed like logical arguments in her head, but out loud they just sounded deranged. “But I know I messed up,” she finished, “and I’m sorry I lied to you.”

The silence was too much to bear. Lex looked up.

The Juniors were gaping at her, their eyes huge. All except Driggs, who was still staring out the window, at anything but Lex.

Lex’s insides fluttered at this, but she decided to first deal with those who could bear to look her in the eye. “Guys? Say something. Please.”

After a moment Elysia spoke. “T ca sst dealhat’s awful.”

“Yes,” Lex said. “Awful. I know.”

Elysia’s eyes were getting wet again. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“How could I?” Lex asked. “We Juniors were under enough scrutiny as it was, and the less you knew, the better, and also, um, it’s
awful
.” She slumped, defeated. “But I couldn’t help it,” she finished in a small voice.

Lex was sure they’d reached the point where everyone would begin reaching for their scythes to slaughter the fiendish hellion, but to her surprise, that didn’t happen. Even more to her surprise was what happened next—Elysia wrapped her in a hug, followed quickly by Pip and Bang.

“What’s happening?” Lex asked, her voice muffled by their suffocating love.

“Don’t talk. You’ll ruin the moment,” Elysia said. “Maybe before we’d seen it with our own eyes we’d be appalled, but after what happened back there in Grave, I think it’s pretty clear that this is something beyond your control. So we’re still your friends, and we still love you. Now please don’t make me say anything mushier, because my face already looks like a half-eaten omelet and I really don’t need to make things worse right now. Okay?”

Lex’s heart was soaring. Why hadn’t she told them right from the start? Of course they’d have her back—they always had her back.

Her relief, however, was short-lived.

“Pull over.”

Driggs was still looking out the window, but Lex could see that his face was strained. In fact, he was pulsing back and forth between solid and not, just as he had when he’d first changed. “Dora, stop,” he said. “I need to get out.”

Pandora looked at Uncle Mort, who nodded. She steered the car into a ditch, and before it came to a stop Driggs was out the door, slamming it as he left.

Lex watched him stalk toward the wall of trees that lined the highway and disappear into them. Several minutes passed, but he didn’t come out.

Ferbus, who had neither said anything after Lex’s confession nor joined in with the group hug, eyed her. “Well?” he said. “You want to go get him, Killer, or should I?”

Lex wanted to smack that judgmental look right off his face, but she opted to grab the door handle instead. “I’ll go.”

The woods were thick. She picked her way down the path that Driggs’s intermittent footsteps had created in the snow until she began to make out a clearing in the trees, then a shoreline. She looked out across a frozen expanse of water—

Where Driggs was standing atop the ice in the middle of the lake.

Lex screeched, then stopped, thinking that maybe ice could be broken by loud noises, like snow in an avalanche. And she couldn’t tell if he was solid at the moment—he certainly had been when he slammed the door, but with the fog coming off the lake, she couldn’t tell anymore. “Driggs!” she yell-whispered, sliding onto the ice but staying close to the shore. “Come back! It might break!”

“So what?” he yelled back in an oddly detached tone. “I already died of hypothermia two nights ago, right? It was such a rush, maybe I should do it again!”

“Driggs!” Lex’s voice got more desperate the more she focused on his face. She’d never seen him like this. He looked furious, tortured, and hopeless at the same time, all wrapped up with a neat little ribbon of insanity. “Come here,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

Abruptly, Driggs started sprinting toward her. His feet slipped along on the ice—
Which means he’s solid
, Lex thought with a lurch. Was it possible for a person to die twice?

She grabbed his hoodie when he got close. “What are you—”