Orphan of Mythcorp (30 page)

I pulled him off of the helpless cop. “Easy
man. He can’t do anything now. Let’s just go.”

Ash stood and calmed instantly. “You’re
right. Thank you. But you need to stay here with Lamorak and the
officers. Agravaine and I’ll be back slam-bang quick, I
promise.”

With that the little tyke took off for the
Mayor’s office.

I dragged Lamorak’s surprisingly light body
over to the car and propped it up against the back door. My thermal
started wailing as I sat beside him, watching the Officers slide
into the front seats in mute obedience.

After injecting myself with a vial of nanites
I fingered the chem-shades. They were completely opaque but with a
severe dark blue tint. I tried them on. Under their guise the world
took on a . . . actually everything looked the same. I’d half
expected the world to look like it had been submerged.

I took them off and slid them over Lamorak’s
nose.

“
What am I doing here?” I asked no one.
My sudden fit of laughter spooked even me. “Oh yeah, that’s right.
My stupid quest to get my curse lifted.”

It seemed almost impossible that I was a few
hours away from getting my biggest wish fulfilled. It seemed
equally impossible that I had done the things I’d done. The
Ash-zombies sitting in the car had come to arrest me for beating
the beejeebers out of a fellow student. I was the bad guy here and
Ash’s victims the good guys.

“
When did I become the bad
guy?”

“
The only bad guys are the ones who
attack innocents like our parents and Gareth,” Lamorak said. He’d
woken up sometime during my soliloquy and had rudely failed to
inform me of this.

“
Jeez,” I gasped. “How long have you
been awake?”

“
Long enough to learn that you still
have a conscience. Which is good. Ash couldn’t have picked a better
normal to help us.” He smiled and turned his head towards me. “But
then you’re not exactly normal, are you? And what are these doing
on my face?”

“
Oh, sorry.” I removed the chem-shades
and stuffed them in my bag. Who knew when they might come in
handy?

Ash returned twenty minutes later with
Agravaine and the Montaigne’s in tow.

He helped Lamorak to his feet. “Did you get
it? Did it work?” Lamorak asked, rubbing his shoulder, which he’d
landed on after being shot with Officer Graham’s dart.

Ash dug into the pocket of his white pants,
withdrew a gold and blue key card: the key to Mythcorp.

He held it out to Lamorak, who beamed.

“
Come on out, Officers,” Ash said.
“It’s time.”

My body temp was plummeting again. Fear does
that. Terror more so. I followed the group, taking up the rear. I
was all in now. No matter how this ended, I would see it through.
I’d gone too far to quit now.

I was . . . an accomplice.

Escaping Vera City proved trickier than
entering it, but eventually we succeeded and the experience—other
than forcing me to give a smidgen of begrudging respect to the
vulgar and disgusting Ishmael—didn’t add anything to my life.

Two hours later we arrived at Izzy’s
house. We’d taken the bus instead of renting a car because (1) I
didn’t know how to drive, (2) Faustus didn’t like driving, and (3)
Kana was too short to drive safely. Sweat oozed out of my neck and
back and my pits as we walked the two blocks from the bus stop on
63
^rd
to Izzy’s house on
65
^th
Street.

A sneeze took hold, and then I
knocked.
She’s going to help us. She’s
going to help us
.

The door opened. A middle-aged woman
appeared. After deciding we weren’t a group of terrorists (Kana was
the deadliest ninja in our group and she barely weighed 100 pounds)
the elderly woman with the excess of mascara seemed to relax. Her
eyes turned to me. Before she spoke I knew we had knocked on the
wrong door.

“
How can I help you?”

“
Um,” I began. “I’m sorry. I think we
have the wrong Macawber’s.” I looked down to check the address I’d
written down from the directory on Kana’s FAD. There were only two
Macawber families listed in Philicity. The other was located near
the Montaigne Tunnel on the opposite side of the metropolis. “We’ll
be going then,” I said to Mascara Fanatic.

“
Who are you looking for?” she
asked.

“
Izzy,” I said. “We’re friends of
hers?”

Mascara Fanatic laughed. “You have the right
house. Izzy is my daughter. Would you like me to get her? What were
your names?”

I gave her our names and she toddled off to
get Izzy.

Faustus tried to muffle laughter. “What?” I
asked.

“
Let me guess, you thought because Mrs.
Macawber was of average height, she couldn’t possibly be the mother
of a dwarf,” he said. I nodded and asked why this was funny. “It’s
funny, because Knox at least understood genetics. But you don’t
have a clue.”

‘
He’s right,’ Castor rejoined. ‘You’re
like those retarded orphans upstairs at the Home.’

I turned back to face the door as it squeaked
open again. This time my favorite little person in the world
appeared. “Yes?”

“
Thank God you’re all right,” I
breathed. “Ah, this is Kana and Faustus. Are you ready?”

Izzy inspected my Mythicon partners with her
beady little peepers, a discombobulated expression on her face.
When she inspected me, her face did not change.

“
You’re Morgan, right? What do you
want?”

‘
Oh man,’ Castor said, sounding
genuinely concerned for once. Marie laid a phantom hand on my
shoulder and said, ‘Look at her eyes. She’s been Mesmerized. I’m so
sorry, Morgan.’

The world spun. My flesh rippled with shivers
and went cold.

“
Are you okay?” Izzy asked.

I glanced back at Kana. She mirrored Marie’s
expression. “Ash,” I spat. Then, speaking to Castor, I added “Ash
did this as payback for what you made me do to Sanson. You took
Izzy away from me!”

Instead of sucking on a B-drop, I swallowed
one whole. The doojee-coating on the butterscotch is absorbed
quicker that way. It’s a more potent but much shorter lasting high.
The spooks quickly dissolved away to nothing.

I turned back to Izzy, who’d miraculously
remained on the other side of the screen door, watching. Her mother
wasn’t behind her, so I leapt forward and opened the screen door in
one fluid motion. Taking Izzy’s soft and slightly plump cheeks in
my hands, I gazed into her peepers. Unlike with Bruno Groothius, I
did not hold back. I bore into her soul, pouring my will into hers,
sensing her mind and will and forcing her to feel mine.

I didn’t know if a person could be
de-Mesmerized. It was like trying to erase whiteout from a word
that’s been covered over. But it didn’t matter, I had to try.

It was quick, no more than a few ticks.
The gist of it was:
You remember our
friendship and you want to remember everything that we’ve done
together. You remember our friendship and you want to remember
everything we’ve done together.

From somewhere outside my intense focus, I
heard screaming.

I snapped out of it, found myself five feet
away from Izzy, my arms pinned behind my back by Kana. “I’m cool,”
I told her in the calmest voice I could manufacture. The smidge
wonder woman released me and I stepped up to Izzy, who had just
finished screeching her head off.

Faustus was holding the door open. When Mrs.
Macawber appeared behind Izzy, I was glad to see he kept it open.
“What did you do? What did you do to her?” Mrs. Macawber
demanded.

“
I think they were trying to kiss,”
Faustus joked.
“But if so, then it was the strangest
kiss—”

“
Faustus!” Kana tried to stomp on his
toe, but he stepped back just before she could.

I moved forward to explain, but Izzy beat me
to the punch. “It’s all right, mom. They’re friends.”

“
Friends who make you scream?” wondered
Mrs. Macawber.

“
That’s actually a good point,” Faustus
looked to be having the time of his life, the jerk.

“
It’s just something we do,” Izzy
explained, winking at me, sending warmth throughout my body. “It’s
like a game,” Izzy continued, “to see who can scream the loudest.
Watch.” And she belted out a fine old scream.

I got the hint and followed her with my own
howl. Kana jumped in next with a holler that could make the dead
stand up.

After explaining that we were all going to
the movies (and after receiving the dirtiest look in history) I was
given permission by Mrs. Macawber to take Izzy with us. I couldn’t
be sure, but while I was trying to convince her, Faustus seemed to
be concentrating hard on Mrs. Macawber, almost like he was mucking
with probability, putting the ball in our court.

Izzy grabbed her black plastic crutches and
followed us down the steps out onto the street. We all waved
goodbye to the mom and started up another screech-contest to
reinforce our story. I wondered what the neighbors thought.

At the bus stop I couldn’t stop ogling Izzy.
Finally she looked up at me and in a moment of pure and rapturous
connection, we embraced. “Thank you,” she said. “I can’t believe I
let him do that to me. I thought my mind was sharp enough to resist
being screwed with.”

“
Don’t beat yourself up,” I said,
resisting the urge to pat her head. “No one pulls a stronger Mesmer
than Ash. He’s been practicing for years.”

“
Besides,” Faustus said, “the old Jedi
Mind Trick has been known to work on the strong minded. In
Star Wars Episode
Eight,
Jacen Solo pulls a fast one on Ben, who’s
quite powerful in the force you know. Plus—”

“
Give it a rest, Red,” Kana
interceded.

On the bus, while explaining the latest news
about Ash and Sanson and Nimrod to Izzy, I noticed Faustus staring
through his window out at the sky, a distinctively dire expression
crinkling his freckled face.

We all gawked at him until his brown peepers
turned to us. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“
What’s up?” Kana asked.

Faustus rubbed his peepers. “Look at the sky.
That’s a brimstorm sunset. It’s gonna hit inside ten minutes. I’d
bet Ishmael’s liquor cabinet on it.”

“
No way,” Kana argued as she and Izzy
sat up on their knees to peek through my window. “It’s too soon. We
just had one like a few days ago.”

“
Yep, welp, tell that to God,” Faustus
said while trading stares with an old crone in the opposite seat.
“We’re going to have to go in through the back, through the loading
bay doors. There’s a roof there. It’ll at least give us some kind
of cover while we try to bust in. I mean we could go through the
front, but you’d all get slammed by brimstone, and then I’d just
end up alone.” Here he raised his hands. “I can see the headlines
now: Man is sole survivor of a horrific brimstorm, and he is
miraculously unharmed. It’ll be like the headlines for Bruce
Willis’ character in
Unbreakable
. Wicked good first movie of an
awesome series.”

The bus was slowing down even though the
light ahead was green.

“
What’s going on?” I asked no one and
everyone. That shivery feeling was returning.

“
Oh no,” Izzy groaned.

“
What?” I asked, but a few ticks later
the PA system rumbled on with an annoying squelch and the bus
driver spoke in his most official tone: “I’m sorry folks, but the
Weather Service just grounded all public transportation vehicles.
An unexpected brimstorm is brewing. Just sit tight.”

A flurry of complaints burbled up as he
finished: ‘Oh come on’ ‘This is some bullcrap,’ ‘What kind of a
candy-cane weather service can’t get its head out of its butt long
enough to do a real forecast?’ ‘I am going to sue those bastards
over at MNT Weather’ ‘I’m hungry.’

The bluish-black clouds rumbled overhead. It
doesn’t really thunder during a brimstorm, but there are what we
call rumbles, a sort of fracas in the clouds that sounds exactly
like a fatty-patty’s gut after an all-you-can-eat Mexican buffet.
Disturbing and nasty, sure as sure.

Despite having a whopping amount of doojee
flowing through my body, I was on edge, legs jittering, teeth
chattering, tongue jabbering. “We can’t stay here. We have to go.
Now.”

“
Whoa!” a punk in a leather jacket
said. “I saw the first thread. You all owe me Pepsis.”

“
Shut up,” another punk
said.

Izzy patted my leg and nodded slowly. It was
all very condescending. “You want us to go out in a brimstorm? Why
don’t we just wait until tomorrow? It’s supposed to be a clear
sky.”

“
Today was supposed to be a clear sky,”
Faustus pointed out.

Kana and Izzy gave him withering glances.
“She’s right,” said Kana. “We can’t go out in this. Besides, what’s
the hubbub? Why rush. Tomorrow we—”

“
Ash is the hubbub rush,” I snarled
through my teeth. “He won’t let this slow him down. He’s probably
already inside Mythcorp. You know what, forget it. I’ll go by
myself. You all can stay here and twiddle your thumbs, but I can’t
sit still while that little upstart get’s his jollies off playing
God.”

Kana grabbed my arm as I made to rise,
yanking me down with embarrassing ease.

“
I still don’t understand why a Morai
reopening Mythcorp would be so bad,” she said, all innocent and
ignorant as a rock. “It’s gotta be better than Alexander running
it.”