Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) (32 page)

And what else was there for Georgiana to eat here but us?

“Butcher—I mean Tiny Doom—I think we should get out of here,” I said urgently The Butcher ignored me, still staring at her ghoulish grandmamma.

“Grandmamma, can we help you?” she asked.

“I am hungry and I want to eat,” Georgiana said, and reached out one long bony arm. The Butcher remained transfixed. I ran forward and yanked her boot; she tumbled off the plinth, landing heavily on me, and then rolled to her feet, protesting.

“Come on!”
I shouted. “Tiny Doom, RUN!”

Georgiana was standing, her red hair falling about her like some wiry galvanic cape. “Come to me, my little poppet!”

“But Grandmamma!” the Butcher wailed. I grabbed her arm. Georgiana’s movements were jerky, but swiftness made up for the lack of grace. She clambered down the side of the sarcophagus, spiderlike. In a blur of motion, she was almost upon us, clawlike hands outstretched, mouth a gaping maw of rotting black teeth.

W
E RAN LIKE
jackrabbits out of the clearing and into the maze. I was huffing and puffing; I should sign up for track at Sanctuary and work on my wind. The Butcher’s wind was fine. She sprinted like a trooper doing triple-time with an entire company of Flayed Riders behind her, quickly outpacing me.

Though our drumming feet made too much noise to hear the sounds of pursuit behind us, I knew that Georgiana was hot on our heels. She was hungry, and we were fresh and sweet; who knows when she’d again have the chance for such a yummy snack?

Up ahead the maze forked; the Butcher had already torn down the right-hand path, even though the blaze indicated we should go left. I tried unsuccessfully to grab her, but she threw me off, kept going. I followed, not wanting to be left behind, even if we were going the wrong way.

“Darling girls...” The mournful cry echoed unnervingly close behind us. I tripped on a root, and the Butcher hauled me back onto my feet. We hit a dead end, turned around in a jumble, and made it back to the junction before Georgiana did. We plunged down the other pathway—but now she sounded much closer.

“Pig!” I puffed. “Set him on her!”

“I don’t want him to hurt her,” the Butcher puffed back.

“She wants to
eat
us!”

“She’s my grandmother!”

“She’s a
ghoul!”

“It’s not her fault! To the right!”

Behind us now, we could hear the shuffling slither of Georgiana’s robes, the wet slap of her feet. “Baby dolls, a little nibble. I promise you, just a tiny nibble...”

The moans were getting closer, as was the stench of disintegration, strong enough that even the funeral incense couldn’t hide it. We turned a corner and ran down a long leafy passageway I looked over my shoulder and saw the shuffling shape of Georgiana, bony arms outstretched, her hair crackling and writhing around her head. She was gnashing her blackened teeth, which, though wobbly, looked more than sharp enough to shred our flesh.

“Darling lonely only,” Georgiana slurred. She was fast, only a few feet behind us now, close enough that I could smell—could taste—the rancid puff of her breath as she wheezed air in and out of her lungs, not to breathe, of course, but to speak.

The Butcher sped up and pulled me with her, my lungs turning to painful bellows.

We turned another corner, and then another, and then saw up ahead—a dead end. If we doubled back now, we’d run straight into Georgiana. She hadn’t caught up with us yet, but she was going to soon.
Oh Nini Mo, help us now, please.

“Fike! Fike!” the Butcher gasped. “We are fiked. Completely fiked!”

“Language!” I panted. I noticed that near the ground some of the branches in the maze wall were bent enough to make a small opening. I slapped at the branches and discovered a burrow just big enough for the two of us. Quickly, we slithered inside.

We lay in the burrow, hardly daring to breath, and listened to Georgiana stagger by, muttering. The burrow smelled strongly of coyote, which hopefully would mask the smell of us. My heart was pounding so hard that it seemed as though my blood would pump right out of my ears. The Butcher pressed tightly against me, trembling, her quivery breathing echoing in my ear, her breath damp on my hair. Her presence was comforting. At least I wasn’t in this alone. Also, she was closer to the opening, so she’d get eaten first. Gradually, the sounds of Georgiana’s progress grew fainter.
A near escape,
said Nini Mo,
is better than no escape at all.

“I need a cigarillo,” the Butcher whispered, after a long, long time.

“I need to pee,” I whispered back.

“What do we do? We have to free her from the ruin of her body Send her on through the Abyss. We can’t leave her like this.” The Butcher sounded anguished.

“We’ll have to call Paimon; he’ll know what to do.”

“I can’t,” she moaned. “Hardhands will kill me. He’ll kill us both if he knows that we opened the tomb. He made her like this! He hated her, and he made her into a ghoul. We have to do something!”

“But what can we do?”

“You must know some sigil or something that will free her. You are a ranger
—do something!”
the Butcher hissed. No longer was she so cocky; now she was looking to me for a plan, and I was realizing the downside to lying through your teeth. What if you came to a point when you needed to prove yourself and could not? For a while Georgiana’s crashing had been distant, but now it was starting to sound closer again, and the stench of the ghoul was growing stronger.

“Look, she’ll be back any minute and she’ll find us,” I said. “And how can we help her if she eats us? Nini will know what to do. We’ve got to get out of here, and Nini will help us. Didn’t she dispatch an entire crew of ghouls in
Nini Mo vs. the Meat-packing Sausage Makers
?”

Of course, Nini Mo had dispatched the ghouls by putting them through their own meat grinder, but I hoped that the Butcher was so freaked that she wouldn’t remember that detail.

“Bungalow baby dolls!”

The branches above us shook. We froze. The Butcher’s clutch became viselike. The stench of the grave was overwhelming—I gagged, clenching my teeth, feeling my blueberry buckle burn in the back of my throat. If I puked now, we’d be lost. Next to me, the Butcher gurgled; I slapped a hand over her mouth, pressing down hard. Then the air lifted, and the noise of breaking branches began to move off again.

Never before had I felt less like a ranger. No ranger would ever have allowed herself to be trapped like this, her back against the wall, unable to escape. A ranger would come up with a plan to escape, use what she had.

“Do you still have that Direction Sigil?” the Butcher hissed.

“Ayah, but it didn’t work before.”

“You didn’t do it right. You must have mispronounced the Word. Let me see the Sigil.”

I squirmed, loosening the Butcher’s grip enough to pull the Sigil out of my pocket. Its coldfire glow was dim, but it was there.

The Butcher squeezed me encouragingly. “Look, I’ll say the Word this time. You focus your fear.”

I didn’t need to focus my fear; my fear was already pretty darn focused on exactly what would happen if the Sigil went wrong. I’d rather take my chances with the ghoul than end up all the way inside a wall. “It’s too dangerous. Remember what happened to my hair!”

“We’re cool, Flora. The Key controls movement in Bilskinir. It won’t work without a door, but the Direction Sigil is a kind of door. Together, the Key and the Sigil will combine into a Translocation Sigil that will get us the fike out of here! There’s no chance it will go wrong!”

While we were whispering back and forth, the ghoulish noises had been getting closer again. Now that the stench of the grave was growing stronger, suddenly I felt as though maybe I would rather take my chances with the Sigil; surely if I ended up in the middle of a wall or floor or piece of furniture, I’d die instantly And that was better than being chewed to death.

“Get us out of here, then!”

“Focus your fear!”

The Butcher covered my hands with hers, so that the Sigil was tight within our combined grip. The Butcher’s hands were hot and sweaty, but then so, too, were mine. I didn’t need to use my imagination to conjure up visions of horrific monsters about to snatch me up and rend my flesh from my bones. Not when I could hear the horrific monster, crashing around me, crying out, “Oh sweetness, where have you gone?” As I focused all this panic and fear upon the Sigil, the familiar buzz began to spread through me, stronger than before. The Butcher’s hands ground into mine, cracking the bones. Pigface, she was strong, and her grip was hard, fierce, and galvanic.

The heat of the Sigil reached my head and again the world began to tilt and whirl. A great drumming filled my chest—my heartbeat and the Butcher’s, thrumming together. I could see the brilliant glow of her Anima—blue and gold, tinged with black—even through my closed eyelids. Then the Butcher’s grip loosened, pulled away, and she let out an almighty shriek. I opened my eyes to see her squirming and kicking in Georgiana’s grip.

“Oh, my bright-haired child of sunset,” Georgiana cackled. “How lovely you smell.”

With my free hand, I grabbed one of the Butcher’s kicking boots, trying to pull her away, but the ghoul was too strong. I needed both hands, yet I didn’t dare drop the Sigil; if it activated when I wasn’t touching it, it would go and leave me behind. And if the Sigil activated while Georgiana, the Butcher, and I were still linked, we’d all end up in the Cloakroom of the Abyss, which would be no escape at all. I pulled harder on the Butcher’s boot, but it was no use. The ghoul had the strength of a starving creature who knew her next meal was nigh. In my hand, the Sigil was crackling and spitting.

“FLORA!”

“Say the Word!” I screamed.

the Butcher shrieked.

I let go of her boot.

And she—

The ghoul—

I—

Gone.

T
HE BRIEF SENSATION
of falling surrounded me, and I landed hard, the impact shooting all the air out of my lungs and momentarily stunning me. I gurgled, lungs inflating, gasping. When the sparkly darkness lifted, I discovered I was lying on top of a man dressed in old-timey plate mail, the ridges of his armor digging painfully into my arms and legs. The man looked as though he were asleep, but he was not. The man was Albany Bilskinir, the husband of Georgiana Primera Haðraaða, and he’d been dead for years and years.

I was in the Cloakroom of the Abyss. The Translocation Sigil had worked, though it wasn’t going to work again. The Sigil had burned up, leaving behind a throbbing scorch mark in my palm. There was no sign of the Butcher or Georgiana Segunda.

Other families dispose of their dead decently, bodies carefully wrapped and placed into holes or burned up on funeral pyres and placed in large pots. But the Haðraaða Family is not so tidy The walls of the Cloakroom of the Abyss are lined with alcoves, stacked four levels high. Each alcove contains a catafalque, and upon each catafalque rests a Haðraaða corpse, perfectly preserved.

The Cloakroom is silent, except for the distant pulse of the sea, lit only by wavery greenish light that seems to be coming from the green marble itself. This light is dim and fluttery, and in it the corpses lie on their marvelously carved catafalques perfectly preserved. From my previous visit to Bilskinir, I knew this perfection was merely an illusion. Under the disguising Glamours, the bodies bear hideous marks of death: childbirth, dog bite, hanging, arrow to the throat.

I knew where I was, but
when
was I? When I climbed down from Albany Bilskinir’s bier, I beheld the answer: There, in the middle of the room, stood Hardhands’s shiplike catafalque, draped in sail-like red curtains. Hardhands was dead and I was home. I had no idea why the Sigil had taken me not only to the right place, but also to the right time, but I didn’t care.
Don’t look a gift mule in the mouth,
said Nini Mo.

Of the six alcoves at floor level, five contain Haðraaðas, but the sixth, I remembered from before, is empty. The mermaid figurehead at the prow of Hardhands’s catafalque seemed to be watching me as I staggered over to that empty alcove. As I approached, the inscription on the lintel lit up:
CYRENACIA SIDONIA ROMNEY BRAKESPEARE OV HAÐRAAÐA.
When Tiny Doom had told me her name, she had left out the most important bits—the parts I would have recognized: Cyrenacia Brakespeare. An ivory-handled whip lay on the plinth, its lash made from a long vivid red braid: Poppy’s hair, sheared as a sign of mourning. By the time the Birdies got done with her, there was nothing left to bury.

I stood there, looking at the whip. I knew Tiny Doom had survived the ghoulish Georgiana and had lived to die another day, but I still felt terrible for abandoning her, what seemed like only minutes ago. She’d come back for me, but I’d left her behind. Rangers never abandon a comrade.

I still could not reconcile Tiny Doom and the Butcher Brakespeare—the girl she’d been, the woman she’d become. But I couldn’t think of her as the Butcher anymore, only as Tiny Doom. Whatever monster she grew up to be, she hadn’t been a monster then. She’d been pretty darn cool, brave and faithful, clever and quick. And I’d lied to her and left her in the lurch.