Rogue Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Post Mortem

  Read More from Gina Damico

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2013 by Gina Damico

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

  eISBN 978-0-544-15153-6

  v2.1013

  For Gamma and Papa

  Acknowledgments

  This may sound weird, but I must first and foremost give thanks to the following things: bread, boredom, and crossword puzzles. This is because the idea for Croak first popped into my head while I was working at a bread store, bored out of my mind, and doing a crossword puzzle. This is the definitive, winning formula for book ideas, folks. Write it down.

  And what a strange, wonderful, carbo-loaded journey it’s been since then! It’s hard to believe this series is over, and even harder to say goodbye to the characters that have been renting a room in my noggin for all these years. I know, I know—someone prep the straitjacket—but in my mind they’re all Velveteen Rabbits: when you love them, they become real. I’ll miss them.

  What’s that? I’m supposed to be thanking people who aren’t works of fiction?

  Fine. As always, huge thanks to my agent, Tina Wexler, the dollop of ice cream to my deep-fried Oreo, who has truly made me a better writer, and who, if she ever left her job as an agent—which she must NEVER EVER DO—I think could make a real career out of being one of those cops who talks troubled people down from very tall precipices.

  Thank you to my editor, Julie Tibbott, for believing in these little stories of mine, and for paying me awesome compliments like “I admire your willingness to kill off your characters,” which is really just a polite way of saying, “I think you might actually be a serial killer, and I’m fine with it.”

  These books would be nothing but doorstops without the tireless efforts of everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, including my publicist Jenny Groves—who, when I tell her I want to plan borderline insane things like a two-week road trip book tour, somehow approves of such madness—and Carol Chu, Betsy Groban, Julia Richardson, and Maxine Bartow.

  Thanks also to Stephanie Thwaites and Catherine Saunders at Curtis Brown UK, who think that my stories have enough potential to cause international incidents, and Liz Farrell and Katie O’Connor at ICM, and Audible, for allowing me to assault my readers’ ears as well as their eyes.

  Thank you to Kelley Travers, photographer extraordinaire, whom I have unforgivably forgotten to thank until now, which is why she gets her very own paragraph.

  To the Apocalypsies and all the other authors I’ve had the fortune to meet in the past year or so: you are some amazing people. Maybe a little too amazing, actually. Knock it off.

  Teachers and librarians: You are the glue that holds this world together. You hear me? YOU ARE GLUE. Whenever I get to meet one of you, I’m bowled over by your enthusiasm and love for spreading the magic of reading to students. You make my cold, shriveled heart grow three sizes every time, and I so appreciate and respect what you do.

  To all the bloggers and booksellers that have spread the Croaky love: Thank you so much for embracing these books, in all their offbeat glory. You, in all your offbeat glory, rock.

  Thank you to my family and friends, many of whom probably never would have picked up a YA series about grim reapers on their own, but who genuinely seem to enjoy it now that it’s been foisted upon them. I’m very grateful for your love and support, and I promise next time to not write something so dark and morbid. (Note: I will not keep this promise.)

  To Alphonse Damico, Mary Damico, and Laurie Mezza- lingua: You are missed. I hope you’re knocking elbows with some very cool people in the afterlife.

  To all the creatures living in my house: Will, thanks for staying married to me even though the vows did not read “in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, through first drafts and revisions, to the brink of insanity and back”; Fezzik, you’re distracting, and you’ve now eaten roughly 85 percent of my possessions but you’re still a very cute dog; Lenny and Carl, sorry we got a dog; and to the squirrel that took up residence in our walls and basement during the writing of this book, WTF GET OUT.

  No thanks to leaf blowers, and the neighbors who use them constantly. It’s called a rake, people.

  Finally, thank you times a billion to you, the readers and fans. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to hear back from all sorts of people—guys and gals, teens and not-so-teens, humans and cyborgs—and learn that these stories and characters have resonated with so many of you. It’s nice to know that if these places I go to inside my head were real, there’d be a whole bunch of friends there to hang out and drink Yoricks with me. I love you all.

  Which is why I feel so bad about spring-loading these pages with blow darts. Duck and enjoy!

  Prologue

  Grotton wondered, for a brief moment, if there were a special circle of hell reserved for someone like him—or if Dante would have to cobble together an entirely new one.

  “Please,” the farmer at his feet moaned. “Please.”

  Other than delivering a small kick to shut the man up, Grotton ignored him and went back to his task. He had to keep his wits about him, or this would never work.

  The heavy smoke had darkened the thatched roof of the farmer’s hut, but some small bits of light had begun to edge back in. Grotton picked up his scythe—a heavy stone made from lead, forged by his own two hands. The best blacksmith in the village, they’d called him, back before the rumors started.

  He smiled at the irony, how the only people who were able to confirm that the rumors were true never lived long enough to tell anyone.

  Case in point: the cowering, dirty wretch on the ground, worlds away from the puffed-up, righteous man he’d been up until a few moments before, as if someone had pricked him and let all the air out. Every few moments his gaze would dart to the two still lumps beside him, but he’d quickly squeeze his eyes shut and let out another whimper.

  “I was only protecting our village,” he moaned. “With a demon in our midst—”

  “I’m not a demon.” Grotton knew better than to engage in conversation with the brute, but the words came regardless. “I hurt no one.”

  The farmer looked up at him, a swath of greasy hair falling over his eyes. “A demon,” he insisted. “Stalking through the night, taking the souls of—”

  “Of people who are already dead.”

  Dead and cold and filling with mold, his students liked to say. There’d certainly been no shortage of test subjects for them—the Great Plague had made sure of that. They’d called themselves reapers, which Grotton had found amusing at first—and, as their experiments continued with increased success, oddly appropriate. He was glad his students had not been identified; perhaps they’d be able to rejoin him after he fled the village.

  After he’d taken care of this one loose end.

  “You hurt no one?” the farmer growled. Perhaps he knew what awaited him; but then again,
even Grotton did not know. They were breaking fresh ground today, the two of them—the scientist and his lab rat. “How can you say that?”

  “You mistake my words,” said Grotton. “I hurt no one—until today.”

  To illustrate this, he administered another kick, this time to one of the little lumps lying next to the man. That did it—whatever small amounts of bravado the man had conjured now melted away. He dissolved into sobs, putting his thick hands over his eyes to block the view of the blood seeping out of his children’s skulls in thin rivulets, draining to the sunken center of the floor.

  “Please,” he said again. “Mercy.”

  “Mercy?” Grotton almost laughed. “Like the kind you showed my family?” He knelt down to look the man in the eye and spoke calmly and evenly. “Setting fire to a man’s home, roasting his wife and children alive—that sort of mercy?”

  “I thought you were with them . . . We needed to be rid of you, all of you, demons—”

  Grotton slapped him across the face. The man went quiet.

  Grotton stood back up and wiped his red-stained hands on a towel. “I already have shown you mercy.”

  The man made a noise of disbelief. “How?”

  “Your children,” Grotton explained in a measured voice, “are merely dead.” He walked over to another heap on the ground, this one charred and black. “Your wife did not fare as well; she is Damned, her soul in unbearable pain as we speak.”

  The farmer cried out, no doubt replaying in his mind the way Grotton’s hands had squeezed her skin and set her on fire, black smoke bursting out of her body and filling the room.

  “Yet neither of those fates,” Grotton finished, “are as odious as yours will be.”

  By now the man could barely speak. “I—I—”

  “You set the fire,” Grotton said, his voice growing thick, the taste of revenge on his tongue. “You made your choice.”

  “No, please—”

  The scythe in Grotton’s hand was already black, but now an even denser shadow seemed to burst out of it, surrounding his hand—as if it were glowing, but with darkness instead of light. He raised it above his head, allowed himself one last look at the man’s terrified eyes, brought the blade down into his chest—

  And the room went dark.

  “So all that really happened? What you did to the farmer, all those years ago?”

  Grotton nodded. “More or less.”

  A pause. “Think you can do it one more time?”

  “If you brought what I asked for.”

  His guest emptied the requested items onto the table. They clinked and bounced, producing a sound like wind chimes. “Here.”

  Grotton leaned forward, his face aglow in the light of the burning candle. “Then I believe we have a deal.”

  1

  Driggs’s hair was still wet.

  That’s the odd thought that popped into Lex’s head as they ran. She and Driggs and Uncle Mort were fleeing a mob of angry villagers—in the middle of the night, through a thick forest, and in a blizzard, no less—so it wasn’t as if there weren’t other things to focus on.

  Yet she couldn’t take her eyes off his hair, which had been that way since he’d died of hypothermia a few hours before. Shouldn’t it have dried a little by now? They’d stopped in Grotton’s relatively warm cabin long enough for at least some of it to have evaporated. But he still looked soaked, making his dark brown hair spikier and more chaotic than it usually was.

  Appropriate, Lex thought bitterly. Drowned hair, drowned life. Just when she thought she’d stumbled upon some evidence that proved Driggs hadn’t just been turned into a ghost—those fleeting moments when he went solid, his fingers physically brushing up against hers as they ran—here was this hair thing, slapping her in the face.

  Determined, Lex reached out for Driggs’s hand but grabbed only air—not because her aim was off, but because air was what his hand was made of at the moment. She slowed her sprinting pace to a jog and tried to look straight into his eyes, but the way his head was fading in and out of existence made it somewhat difficult to figure out where his eyes actually were.

  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.”

  “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?”