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  Lex swallowed. She had not forgotten the fear that choked her throat when she’d spotted that white figure lurking in the woods. “We’re going in there?”

  “What, too creepy for you?”

  “No.” But the nails digging into his arm suggested otherwise.

  They shuffled through the hole in the trees, the crunchy, fallen leaves on the ground loudly heralding their arrival, the setting sun growing dimmer as they walked. Lex glanced up at the dark, cobweblike limbs that seemed to be closing in on them. No animals stirred. Except for the two foolish teenagers who had stumbled within, the woods were silent.

  The path began to narrow, becoming tighter and tighter, until Lex and Driggs were forced to walk single file, Lex somehow ending up in front. She was getting nervous. She didn’t know where she was going or what to look for or—

  Her foot rammed into a mossy log, knocking her off balance. Even in the fading light she could see that there was nothing up ahead but more forest. She looked at the ground. The path had disappeared.

  “There’s no road left,” she said, panic in her voice. She whipped her head around to face Driggs. “So Dead End really is a dead end?”

  He smirked at her. “What, you thought it was just a cute name?”

  “Driggs,” she said, trying to keep her tone steady, “show me the way to that cabin, or I swear to God I’ll feed you to the first bear that inevitably shows up to eat us.”

  He started walking backwards, motioning for her to follow him. “Back up a little,” he said. “. . . Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen—okay, stop.”

  He turned to his left and pushed aside some small branches. There, just off the path, was a tiny opening in the trees that Lex had passed right by without even noticing. It led to a narrow dirt lane that twisted through a mass of craggy shrubberies and ultimately disappeared in a patch of trees.

  “Here we are,” said Driggs in a chipper voice. “Off you go, special superpowery second-generation Grim.”

  Lex bit her lip and stared at the scary path. “Okay.”

  “Okay then.”

  “I’m going.”

  “Bon voyage.”

  He wasn’t letting her back out of this one, not when she’d been so cocky. Tentatively, she tiptoed through the opening and into the trees, her sneakers kicking up leaves left and right.

  One minute and seven seconds later she burst back out onto the path, panting and clutching her stomach.

  “Ready to move in?” Driggs asked wryly.

  Lex was so grateful he didn’t say “I told you so,” she fell in love with him all over again. “I don’t think Ikea delivers to creepy enchanted forests,” she choked out.

  “Pity. I so love the neighborhood.”

  Lex straightened, her nerves all fired up. She hadn’t quite seen the cabin, but she knew it was there. All she had to do was get inside and the needless carnage would stop. “We have to get through. The Wrong Book has to be in there.” She was hopping around by now, her face flushed with excitement. “And who knows what else!”

  He gave her a disapproving look, then started laughing as he headed back out toward the bridge.

  “What?” she asked, following him and putting up her hood. It was starting to rain.

  “What nothing. You’re hilarious.” His voice was skeptical, but Lex’s excitement was infectious—even he couldn’t hide the flicker of intrigue in his eyes. “Four months ago you refused to believe a place like Croak even existed, and now look at you. All jazzed up and concocting crackpot theories that probably involve a hidden flock of unicorns.”

  “Or dinosaurs,” Lex said with a grin. “Let’s not prematurely dismiss a Jurassic Park scenario.”

  It was getting almost too dark for them to see each other and the rain was really coming down, so they broke into a run, laughing all the way. By the time they got back to the house, they were soaked, muddy, and disgusting.

  And horny.

  “I call shower,” they said at the same time.

  Eyebrows were raised. A wacky idea took shape.

  And by the time Uncle Mort figured out that the water had been running for far too long and that he had made the critical error of not installing cameras in the bathroom, it was too late.

  They heard his heavy footsteps pounding up the basement stairs. “Did you lock the door?” Lex asked Driggs, panicked.

  “I thought you did!”

  “Shit! Quick, grab a towel—”

  “I’m trying to—could you just—move—” The cramped conditions weren’t doing them any favors, nor was the soapy tub, which caused Lex to slip and tear down the entire shower curtain. They quickly wrapped it around themselves, Driggs unfortunately yelling, “WHERE are my PANTS?” at the exact moment Uncle Mort burst in.

  “Remember how I said I don’t regret bringing you here, Lex?” Uncle Mort said, putting up his hand to block out the steamy, painfully inept scene before him. “I may have to revise my views on that.”

  Lex and Driggs, meanwhile, were trying so hard to put their clothes back on that it seemed as though they had forgotten how. Lex’s shirt was on backwards, Driggs had his head through an armhole, and neither of them, still, could find their pants.

  “I’m closing the door,” Uncle Mort announced, aiming his gaze directly at the sink. “For precisely twenty seconds. When I open it again, you’ll be dry, clothed, and . . . in control of your faculties.”

  Twenty seconds later Lex and Driggs piled out of the bathroom, their faces red. “We were just showering,” Lex muttered.

  “Of course,” Uncle Mort said. “Everyone knows how impossible it is to get zestfully clean without assistance.” He put a hand on each of their shoulders and marched them down the hall toward their rooms. “Grounded for a week, shall we say?”

  “But Uncle Mort, we found the key to the cabin!”

  “No Corpp’s, no pay, no hanging around after your shifts. Straight back here and into your respective cells.”

  Driggs whispered to Lex out of the side of his mouth as they walked, “I never got grounded before you came here.”

  “You never touched a boob before I came here either.”

  “Touché.” He flashed a goofy grin as Uncle Mort shoved him into his room and slammed the door. “Worth it!”

  9

  Later that night, Uncle Mort finally registered what Lex had said to him about the key, forced her to surrender it, and promptly took it down into his basement to run some tests.

  “Bone,” he said a few days later as he tossed it back into her room, where she’d been sequestered all week owing to the Incident That Must Not Be Named.

  “Huh?” she said, picking it up where it had landed on the bed. “I thought we decided that wasn’t his real name, just part of the code.”

  “No, I mean the key,” he said. “It’s made of bone.”

  Lex raised her eyebrow. “As in ivory?”

  “As in human.”

  She let out a shriek and dropped it.

  “Sweet dreams,” he said with a smirk, closing the door.

  Lex and the Juniors researched the key to within an inch of its life after that, but still found themselves drowning in a sea of failure. Which was unfortunate, since things were going from bad to worse, and then barreling straight on to catastrophic. Over the next month The Obituary kept rolling in with more reports of Zara’s Damning attacks, each more disturbing than the last. While a few guilty parties were still peppered into the mix, the majority of her victims really did seem to be regular, innocent people—a respected veterinarian, an elderly lady in a nursing home, a well-liked Culler in Necropolis. Lex searched the Internet for any possible crimes they might have committed, fervently hoping that the vet had maybe built a kitten torture chamber in his basement, but nope—they were saints, every one of them.

  Even the media in the outside world were starting to catch on, with laughable reports of “abnormal rises in the spontaneous combustion rate” popping up every few days or so. More teams had been dis
patched from Necropolis to track Zara down, but without the ability to Crash, they were never fast enough, showing up at her last known location hours after she’d left. By the month’s end, they were no closer to nabbing Zara, Lex still hadn’t found the Wrong Book, and Ferbus had seemingly been replaced by a happy, upbeat doppelgänger.

  “Happy Halloween, cats and kittens!” he said with a wide grin to the rest of the Juniors that day at Corpp’s. “You ready?”

  “For what?” asked Pip. “A costume party?”

  Ferbus blinked. “What are you, ten?”

  “It was a valid guess!”

  Ferbus stifled a sneer. Even Pip couldn’t bring him down today. “Grims in the Graveyard tomorrow,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Capture the Flag rules, Killers versus Cullers, all night long.”

  Bang worriedly looked up from her book, her increasingly pouffy bangs now growing out at a strange angle. She signed something to Pip. “That sounds intense,” he translated.

  “It’s not,” Elysia reassured them. “It’s just a big game of hide-and-seek.”

  “Why isn’t it tonight?” Pip asked.

  A sad expression passed over Elysia’s face. “Um, Halloween is too busy a night for Grims. Lots of kids get hit by cars.” She forced a smile. “Which is why we do this the night after. To cheer us up.”

  Corpp hobbled over to them. “Can I get you kids anything else?”

  Ever since the Morgue incident, the Juniors had decided that it was better to stay invisible than risk more conflicts with the Seniors, so they’d taken up a row of stools at the back of Corpp’s bar for their lunch breaks and noshed on basketfuls of the fried food Pandora snuck in through the back door. Lex especially disliked the fact that they had to hide like frightened turtles, but she figured that since she was the cause of most of the Juniors’ problems, it wasn’t really her place to tell them where they could or could not scarf their corn dogs.

  “We’re good, Corpp, thanks,” said Driggs. “You playing tomorrow night?”

  “Defending the Culler base, as usual.”

  Dora entered with a basket of onion rings. “I’ll be doing it for the Killer side, and you bet your sweet patootie I won’t be quiet about it.”

  Corpp grinned and gave her a peck on the cheek. “When was the last time you were quiet about anything, dear?”

  Lex watched them as they returned to the kitchen, thinking of her mom and dad. Were they keeping their spirits up too? Had they banded together in the wake of tragedy or fallen apart after Cordy died? She didn’t even know. She hadn’t stuck around long enough to find out.

  She shifted in her seat. With all that was going on, she knew she should call her parents and make sure they were all right, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Locked in a stalemate with the telephone, she knew the the minute she heard her mother’s weepy voice, the guilt would wash over her like molasses, too sticky and suffocating to scrape off.

  Elysia spread out a copy of The Obituary. “Ah, crud,” she said, pointing. “Look.”

  They followed her finger to a grainy photo of an expectant mother. Zara’s latest victim.

  “That is so. Messed. Up.” Elysia made a face. “What is Zara thinking? How could she be so hypocritical? Damning all these innocent people completely goes against the whole vigilante-justice philosophy she worked so hard to establish in the first place.”

  “I’m sure that irony is not lost on her,” Lex said thoughtfully, chewing the same french fry over and over. She’d been wondering about this stuff a lot lately, the motivations behind Zara’s actions. They seemed erratic, yet somehow . . . not.

  “But still,” Elysia said. “I don’t understand how she can do a one-eighty like that, just flip that switch.”

  “Well,” said Driggs, “I think it’s more that she sees it as a means to an end. If the Wrong Book contains a way to Damn vast amounts of criminals, then she feels justified in sacrificing a few innocents to get it.”

  “But she’s still going after some criminals,” said Pip. “She Damned that school shooter Lex and I saw.” Indeed, a week after the shooting spree, The Obituary had confirmed the teacher’s fiery demise. “We knew as soon as we got there that Zara would go after her. Right, Lex?”

  “What?” Lex had flinched at the mention of the shooter. Now everyone was staring at her. “Yeah. Right.”

  Driggs gave her an odd look. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s just—” She wiped her greasy hands with a napkin and wrung them in her lap. “Maybe it’s not completely Zara’s fault.”

  Ferbus choked on his onion ring.

  “Okay, that’s so not what I meant,” Lex said as Elysia slapped his back. “I’m not defending her. She killed my sister and she’s legitimately evil and I hate her. But—it’s just that none of you know what it’s like, the urge to Damn. It’s like a drug.”

  Ferbus looked ready to say something highly unpleasant, but Elysia stopped him. “What do you mean, Lex?” she said gently.

  Lex lowered her eyes. “When it flares up, it’s like this . . . ache. You have to Damn someone—right now, as soon as possible, and it doesn’t really matter who it is. Of course, it does matter, but—you know how sometimes you get so hungry you’ll eat anything? That’s what it’s like.”

  “But you don’t Damn people,” said Driggs. “You just Damn office supplies and ugly housewares.”

  A bead of sweat formed on Lex’s forehead. “I know,” she muttered. “But it’s not the same. It’s like eating a Life Saver instead of a five-course dinner.”

  Pip’s eyes were wide. “So it feels good to Damn?”

  Lex sighed. “Yes.” They looked horrified. “Look, I don’t know why it does, and I wish it didn’t. But I think that’s why it’s been so easy for Zara to Damn those innocent people. The Damning energy has to go somewhere, and maybe it no longer matters to her where. The whole slippery slope thing.” She looked down. “That’s my theory, anyway.”

  The group nodded, sullen. “Well,” said Driggs, “good thing you’ve got more willpower than she does.”

  Lex thought of the school shooter, of how much she deserved the Damning that she got. “Yeah,” she said bitterly. “Good thing.”

  ***

  Ferbus ended up having to wait just a little longer for his favorite night of the year. It was decided that since Zara knew that Grims in the Graveyard always took place the day after Halloween, it might be better to hold it the night after that and make her think it was canceled, in case she was planning anything.

  So at seven o’clock the next evening, dozens of Grims assembled at the fountain. They chatted nervously, their usual fears ramped up even more now that they were out in the open, at night, in the dark.

  Uncle Mort wasn’t forcing anyone to play, of course. But he’d also been determined not to break tradition, going ahead with the plans despite the ever-present threat of attacks, hoping to put all those worries on hold for at least one night of—dare they think it—fun.

  The Juniors were all for it, especially at the thought of getting a little revenge on the Seniors. They gathered together away from the crowds and handed out flashlights. “I wish we could be on the same team,” Elysia said to Lex.

  “You don’t get to complain,” Lex said. “You get Driggs, Pip, Kloo—”

  “What Lex is trying to say,” Driggs said, “is that Cullers are officially more awesome.”

  “You wish, D-bag.” Ferbus backed away from the group. “Come on, Killers, let’s talk tactics,” he said, beckoning Lex, Bang, Sofi, and Ayjay to him. Once they were far enough away, he looked hesitantly at Bang. “Uh, how do I talk to this thing?” he shouted back to Elysia.

  “She can hear!” said Pip. “How many times do I have to tell you that? Just talk!”

  “Shut up, Pipsqueak! I wasn’t asking you!” He turned back to Bang. “Think you can keep up with us?”

  She signed something they didn’t understand, but even Ferbus could tell it ended in a que
stion mark. He let out a frustrated groan.

  “Look, this is my first time too,” Lex told her before he could jump in with something insensitive. “I don’t know what I’m doing either.”

  Bang looked relieved. And luckily for her, Uncle Mort had jumped atop the fountain and begun demanding everyone’s attention, bringing Ferbus’s strategizing session to a premature halt.

  “Happy post-Halloween, everyone!” he said, waving an air horn. “And welcome to the annual Grims in the Graveyard tournament. Rules are the same as years past, but for the rookies’ sake—”

  “Where’s Norwood?” someone shouted. “And Heloise? Why aren’t they here?”

  The smile slid off Uncle Mort’s face. “Norwood and Heloise were vehemently opposed to my idea of maintaining a sense of normalcy,” he said in a quieter voice. “I’m told they are spending a quiet evening at home.”

  Rumblings of discord shot through the crowd. “Wait, they’re not here?” Riley asked in a snotty voice. “You really think this is a good idea, Mort? What about security?”

  Their outbursts weren’t surprising. Zara’s rampages had lately whipped the entire Grimsphere into an unprecedented frenzy of fear and paranoia. A few people had even left. The spidery proprietress of Ashes showed up on Uncle Mort’s doorstep one day with suitcase in hand, begging to be Amnesia’d. He eventually talked her out of it, but she hadn’t been the last.

  Uncle Mort remained polite, but Lex could tell he was getting annoyed. “Countless measures are in place—cameras, alarms, the whole deal. If anyone scythes in, we’ll know about it and take action. You’re perfectly safe.”

  The townspeople looked at one another. They didn’t seem convinced.

  “All right?” Uncle Mort said. “Hoodies on, everyone. Roze, Wicket, start passing out the tags.”

  They got to the Juniors last. Roze handed Lex a sticky, fibrous blob. It looked like white cotton candy.