Rogue (2 page)

But she soon caught them—the blue one first, then the brown one. He forced a grin onto his face. “Working on it,” he said, panting as he ran.

Lex swallowed and tried to look at the situation with a glass-half-full mentality. Except when your boyfriend has been turned into some type of weird part-ghost, part-human hybrid and it’s all your fault, the power of positive thinking becomes a bit of a challenge. “It’s really not that bad,” she lied through her teeth, contorting her face into something that resembled human happiness. She would be strong. She would
not
lose it, no matter how many creepy clown smiles she had to make. “It’s not.”

“I know,” he lied right back. Just then, he popped into tangibility, shoving his hand into Lex’s and letting out a breath. “There. Easy.”

ha>“Easy?”

“If the definition of easy has been changed to ‘extraordinarily strenuous,’ then yes.” He gave her another one of those awful grins. “Easy.”

And Lex’s heart broke all over again, into a million pieces, probably tearing up all her other organs in the process.

“Hurry up, you two,” Uncle Mort shouted from up ahead. “There’ll be plenty of time later for agonizing assessments of our cruel, cruel fate. That is, if we survive.” He turned back to glare at them as he ran. “Which, judging by your glacial pace, seems like something that I’m the only one trying to do.”

The spectral white figure floating just behind Uncle Mort held up a single bony finger. “Actually, if we’re to be precise, I cannot technically
survive
if I am already—”

“Dead?” Uncle Mort finished for him, shooting Grotton a rude sneer before surging on ahead. “Yes, we know.”

The centuries-old ghost gave him a thorny smile. “Just pointing it out.”

Lex and Driggs doubled their pace, winding through the dark trees that made up the woods surrounding Croak. Still, the mob of bloodthirsty townspeople wasn’t that far behind—Lex could hear their shouts echoing through the snow-laden trees into the cloudy night sky.

“Keep going,” Uncle Mort yelled. “We’re almost out of the—”

He stopped running so abruptly that Lex slammed into his back. Driggs’s hand was wrenched out of hers, and he instantly went transparent again, floating right past them. Grotton, meanwhile, chuckled to himself and drifted above everyone’s heads, crossing one leg over another as if patiently waiting for a train.

Lex began to rub her nose from where it had smooshed against her uncle, but she stopped as soon as she saw why he had halted. “Oh, shitballs,” she whispered.

Apparently only half of the townspeople had been pursuing them from behind. The other half had split off some time before, circled around, and were now coming at them from the other side, weapons drawn and at the ready. Norwood, the mutinous mayor, was at the front. His face was slick with sweat and loathing—unsurprising, given the fact that Lex had Damned his wife an hour prior. Standing beside him was Trumbull—the butcher who at one time had employed Zara but was now Norwood’s head goon—and Riley, she of the giant sunglasses and über-bitchery.

Uncle Mort bristled. “Shitballs is right.”

“Can we Crash yet?” Lex asked. Instantly scything out of there would be the best option, but she wasn’t sure it would work. “Are we out of range?”

“No more Crashing,” Uncle Mort said. “Norwood being granted the ability to Damn has most likely caused a huge wave of new destruction in the Afterlife. Add that to all the other Damning that’s been going on lately, and the Afterlife is probably hanging on by a thread. We can’t risk damaging it further by Crashing.”

Lex cringed. The Norwood thing had been her fault, too. She’d tried to Damn him, but had succeeded only in transferring some of her Damning power to him. And any time a Grim did something unnatural like that, a little bit more of the Afterlife eroded away.

And any time
that
happened, her dead twin sister, Cordy, and all the other souls in the Afterlife got one step closer to disappearing altogether.

“So . . . what’s the plan, then?” Driggs asked, the opaqueness of his body coming and going in waves now, possibly in time with his heartbeat.

“Um—” Uncle Mort winced. “Hide.”

Lex’s jaw dropped as Uncle Mort ducked behind a tree.
“Hide?”
she sputtered in disbelief, falling over her own feet as she tried to conceal herself. “That’s the best you can come up with?”

He gave her a look. “You got a rocket launcher in that bag of yours? No? Then hide it is. Grotton, get
down!
” he shouted at the ghost, who was now floating higher and seemed to be glowing more brightly.

Grotton lowered himself to the ground. “I was merely trying to provide a bit of light for your attempts at”—he let out a quiet snicker—“concealment.”

Uncle Mort, suppressing the urge to reach up and smack the everdeathing snot out of their new companion, gritted his teeth. “Next time set off some fireworks, it’ll be more subtle.”

A bang pounded through the air. Lex jumped, a fresh batch of goose bumps breaking out across her skin as she considered the possibilities of what could have made that noise. Seconds later it rang out again, followed by a series of slightly quieter staccato bursts of sound, like a machine gun. Then, oddly, a dry, wheezing noise, as if the machine gun were having an asthma attack.

Lex squinted across the dark field and finally saw it—a tall puff of smoke slowly coming toward them. The worried line of Uncle Mort’s mouth crinkled into a smirk. “That crafty old bag.”

“Crafty old what now?” Lex watched the slow-moving cloud, which was now weaving back and forth in wide, erratic curves. “What is that? A car?”

“No,” said Uncle Mort, standing up. “That, my friend, is far too fine a contraption to be called a mere
car
.”

“What then, a truck? A tank?”

“Is it—” Driggs stopped himself, looking embarrassed.

Lex looked at him. “Were you going to say Batmobile?”

“I was maybe going to say Batmobile. What of it?”

The townspeople didn’t seem to know what to make of the phenomenon either. They scrambled to get out of its way as it plowed toward them, some of them diving into the snow. Yet as the smoke picked up speed, something arose out of the murkiness—a glint of metal, a reflective glass surface—all the pieces eventually coming together to form something that was decidedly not even close to a Batmobile: a giant black hearse.

Uncle Mort grinned. “The Stiff.
”

The death car roared on, still sending townspeople left and right. It soon chugged to a stop where Uncle Mort had been standing not two seconds before, just as he’d shoved Lex and Driggs into a bush to avoid getting hit.

The driver’s side window rolled down. “Sorry,” Pandora said. “Been a while since I drove the thing. The gearshift sticks.”

“Yeah, must be the gearshift,” said Uncle Mort, brushing himself off. “Certainly not your pristine driving skills or the fact that you haven’t been licensed in decades.”

“Is that sass? Are you sassing me?”

“I would never.”

“Dora!” Lex burst out in amazement. “I thought you were in hiding! How did you find out what’s going on?”

“I haven’t the foggiest
idea
what’s going on!” the old coot shot back. “I saw the whole town riling themselves up like it was the second coming of Elvis, and figured that if trouble was afoot, then you three were probably smack-dab in the middle of it. So I grabbed the car, headed straight for the yelling, and lo and behold, here you are.” She smiled a toothless grin, quite pleased with herself. “Now get in before the unruly mob dents my paint job.”

Driggs headed for the back-seat door and assumed the stance of a personal chauffeur. “Well, darling,” he told Lex in a fancy voice, “here we are, dripping wet and scared and running for our lives, and yet the tricked-out ride I reserved has arrived right on schedule. Now, if we can only make it in time for the crowning of prom king and queen—”

Lex almost laughed, until the hand he was ure and he sing to open the door disappeared, causing her to smack her head against the glass.

Driggs’s face went red, even in its paler-than-usual state. “Dammit. Sorry.” He turned away from Lex, but not before she caught a glimpse of his throat moving up and down as if he were trying not to cry.

She tried to grab his face between her hands, but that particular part of him wasn’t quite tangible. “Hey,” she barked instead, insistently positioning her eyes in front of his, no matter how he tried to squirm away. “I’m fine. And you’re
going
to be fine. This—all this—” She waved her hand around within his transparent torso. “It changes nothing. I still love you and cherish you and all that goopy shit that I will further expand upon when we’re not about to get disemboweled by a gang of pitchfork-wielding maniacs. Got that?”

He blinked back at her, resolve slowly returning to his eyes. “Okay,” he said, but in such a little-boy-lost voice that Lex’s heart, now held together by the thinnest of threads, tore itself apart yet again. Surely there couldn’t be much of it left.

Uncle Mort, who was watching all of this with a haunted expression that matched Lex’s—as opposed to Grotton, who was pretending to file his nails—shook all emotion from his face and pushed both Lex and Driggs through the door.

The car smelled like a crime scene. There was a driver’s seat and a passenger’s seat, just as in a normal car, but the back end of the vehicle’s frame stretched out into a creepy open area with no seats to speak of. In their place, pelts of some sort of animal were draped across the floor, and the spaces in between were covered in what looked like approximately thirteen decades of gunk.

“Oh, stunning,” Lex said, gagging as she eased into the space that was normally meant to be occupied by a coffin.

“Don’t you start up, missy,” Pandora scolded her. “I haven’t driven this jalopy in twenty-some-odd years! It’s bulletproof, you know—keep it only for emergencies, hidden back behind the Crypt—”

Driggs nudged Lex. “Just be thankful there’s not a body in here.”

“—and you should count yourselves lucky there’s no body in here! If you want to ride in style, call yourself a limo, because I ain’t—hey! Quit straddling my gearshift!”

Grotton, gamely continuing his campaign of unhelpfulness, was now settling comfortably in the space between Pandora and Uncle Mort. “I highly recommend you refrain from spitting on me,” he said, giving her a distasteful look. “Hag.”

“Ooh! Let’s use the secret weapon,” Uncle Mort said, rubbing his hands together, his eyes lit up like those of a child’s on Christmas morning. “Just to scare them.”

Pandora grinned. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

Thrusting her hand through the obstacle that was Grotton, she put the car back into gear, executed a perfect three-point turn, and gunned it straight for the crowd of townspeople. Lex watched her push a red button atop the dashboard.

The field was bathed in light as a great plume of fire shot out of the front of the car. The townspeople scattered.

“Whoa!” Driggs yelled.

“What the . . .” Lex trailed off.

Uncle Mort turned around in his seat and smiled at her. “Told you, kiddo.”

Lex recalled her first ride into Croak, when she’d gotten her inital glimpse of the village from atop Uncle Mort’s motorcycle. This was back before she’d learned that she was a Grim, one of the few people on earth entrusted with the task of retrieving dead people’s souls and transporting them to the Afterlife. Before she’d delved face-first into the town of Croak and befriended its citizens, then later endangered Croak and majorly pissed off I pissedits citizens by being able to Damn people, sending their souls to eternal torment instead of the serene, lovely Afterlife. Before she’d shared this talent with her former friend Zara, who then used it to terrorize the Grimsphere and Damn innocent people.

Before she’d become the royal screwup she was today.

And of course, before she’d learned for the first time what a psychopath her uncle was. She smirked back at him. “Ah yes. The flamethrower always shoots forward.”

“Bingo.” He tapped the red button a couple more times for good measure, creating a path of melted snow for them to drive through. Lex looked out the back window. Unhurt, the townspeople slowly got to their feet, muttering at one another. Some shook their fists at the departing car. Driggs, meanwhile, was still watching the flames with glee, the word “Batmobile” begging to escape from his lips. “Don’t even say it,” Lex warned.

He gave her a wry look. “Hey. I wasn’t far off.
”

The car rumbled along across the field, bouncing as Dora hit divots and tree roots and probably a whole zoo’s worth of woodland creatures. “So!” she shouted, seemingly in fine spirits. “Let’s catch up! Starting with the invisible boy back there. What in tarnation happened to you, Driggsy?”

Driggs ran a hand through his cold, wet hair, inadvertently spraying Lex with small droplets. “Well—”

“Speak up, boy! And make it snappy!”

“Snappy, okay. Well, Zara kidnapped me and left me on the top of a cliff to die. And then I
did
die. But not really. Actually—”

“Oh, criminy,” Dora said, throwing her arms off the wheel for a second, causing everyone to grope for something to hold on to. “Like pulling teeth with this one. Lex, gimme the quick version. How’d you get sprung from the clink?”

The last thing Lex wanted to do was rehash this, but if she didn’t, Dora would yell even louder, and no one wanted that. “Zara let me out.”

“Why?”

“So that she could force me into doing a shift with her. Sofi helped.”

“That little lying sneak,” Pandora growled. “Never did trust her. Too many hair colors.” She made a loud spitting noise. “So a shift, eh? And the target was—”

“Driggs.”

“Why?”

“So she could threaten to Damn him if I didn’t give her the Wrong Book.”

“But you didn’t give it to her, judging by the presence of Sir Snottington over here.”

Grotton bristled, and Lex nodded. “Right.”

“And instead of Damning Driggs, she ghosted him?”

“Well, no. Before she could do anything she’d planned, I sort of—”

“What?”