Rogue (21 page)

Most fell asleep quickly—except for Bang, who kept methodically sweeping Grotton’s finger over the Wrong Book’s pages, still preoccupied with figuring them out.

Lex watched her while picking through some cold spaghetti. “This is going to sound bonkers,” she said to Driggs, “but I wish Grotton were still here.”

“Do you miss his sparkling personality? His devastating good looks?”

“Oh, shut up.” She chucked a piece of meatball at him. “The guy’s a stone-cold dick, no question. But with the whole Dark thing, and what Bang’s been reading in the Wrong Book, I just feel like there’s something we’re missing, or . . .” She looked at the blurb on the wall describing Grotton’s treachery. “Something off about him.”

“Some
thing?
” Driggs said. “Singular?”

“Okay, there is an entire Old Country Buffet of things off about him, but I just get the feeling—it’s like he knows something we don’t, or—ugh, I don’t know.”

Driggs grinned. “You’re sexy when you can’t form sentences.”

Lex raised an eyebrow. “So, uh, speaking of stone-cold dicks—”

“Classy, Lex.”

“—Any chance you can . . . hop into your body?”

The corner of Driggs’s mouth tugged upward. “I can try.” He squeezed his eyes shut and started to exert some effort, as if he were lifting something heavy.

Lex couldn’t help but snicker. “You look constipated.”

He opened one eye. “Not helping.”

She laughed again, and that seemed to do it—his body popped back into being.

There was no time to waste. “Come on.” Lex grabbed his hand, dragged him to the farthest end of the museum, and plopped them both down on the floor. “Hope there isn’t anyone below us.”

“If so, they’re already asleep. I mean,
I’d
already be asleep if you weren’t licking my ear. Why are you licking my ear?”

Lex retrieved her tongue. “Because I feel like something awful is going to happen tomorrow. And I’m really hoping it doesn’t involve my grisly demise, or an even grislier demise for you than your last one, but—” She swallowed. “I want this night to be a happy one, because I think they’re going to be in short supply from now on.”

“Yeah, but—” He glanced behind them. “With four friends, one uncle, one Pandora, and a comatose museum curator within hearing range?”

“Good point.” Lex nodded thoughtfully, as if they were debating tax reform. “However: this.” She grabbed his hands and slapped them onto her chest.

His eyes bulged, then met hers. “Compelling rebuttal.”

Lex grinned and dove back into his face while Driggs’s hands reached around her back. “Ah, the over-shoulder boulder holder,” he said in a sneering voice, picking at her bra. “My old nemesis.”

“Okay, don’t panic,” Lex said. “Do it just like we ju. “Copracticed.”

“Right. The hook faces out.”

“The hook faces
in
.”

“DAMMIT.”

While Driggs worked his fumbling magic, Lex relaxed against the glass and only slightly wondered if any souls in the Afterlife were watching the rampant debauchery unfolding within. Eh, free show. Who cared. Her heart was too busy fluttering each time he touched her bare skin, her brain and body firing off all sorts of frolicsome hormones. She dreamily let her gaze fall on the opposite wall, where a series of photographs hung.

“Did you
add
hooks?” Driggs said, his yanks getting more and more desperate.

“Yeah, because somewhere in between all of our daring escape plans, I totally busted out my sewing . . .” She squinted harder at the photographs and trailed off. “. . . machine . . .”

“I’m just saying,” he said. “This can’t be normal.”

Lex’s throat had gone dry. “Driggs.”

“Might there be magnets involved?”

“Stop.”

He stopped, freaked out by her expression. “What’s wrong?”

Over the past year, Lex had been surprised by a lot of things. She’d been surprised to find out what her uncle really did for a living, and that she was destined to become a Grim just like he was. She’d been surprised when Zara revealed herself to be the murderer Lex had been hunting for, she’d been surprised when Cordy died, and she’d been really surprised to learn that she was special, like Grotton, a one-of-a-kind Grim with extraordinary powers.

So many of those times she had flipped out, lost her shit right there in front of whoever was unfortunate enough to be in the same room/building/city as she was. But the expression that Driggs saw wasn’t one of outrage or horror. It was blank. The only hint that something was wrong—seriously, seriously wrong—was in the details. Her nostrils flared in and out. Her bottom lip quivered slightly. And she wasn’t blinking.

“Uncle Mort,” she said.

“What?” Driggs tore his gaze away from her face to look at the photograph on the wall. He frowned when he recognized it as a duplicate of one of the photos in the library in Croak, one of many taken of the townspeople every year at the Luminous Twelfth celebration.

“Go get Uncle Mort,” Lex said, still staring, not blinking.

“Why? What’s—” Driggs got up and moved closer to the picture, trying to figure out what she was looking at, what it was that they’d never noticed before in the photos back home.

He squin
ted.

Moved closer.

Found Uncle Mort as a grinning Junior. To his right, Skyla and LeRoy. And to his left—

Driggs was physically shocked back into transparency. Now a hovering shade of white, he whipped back to Lex. “I’ll go get him,” he said, holding a hand out to her, as if she might try to run. “Stay here.”

But Lex wasn’t going anywhere. She stood up and took Driggs’s place in front of the photograph, keeping her eyes on the same spot until she felt Uncle Mort walk up beside her. And even then she didn’t stir, just went again down the line of the four Juniors: LeRoy, Skyla, Uncle Mort, and Abby. Abigail. Gail.

When she spoke, it was only a single word, her voice no more than a whisper.

“Mom.”

Lex and Uncle Mort sat next to each other on the floor. They faced the windows and looked out into the darkness of the Kansas plains. Lex wanted to believe that the stars here were even brighter than the ones in Croak, but the grayness of the Afterlife made them imposs ju. he darible to see.

“She was a couple of years older than I was,” Uncle Mort said.

He hadn’t cracked any jokes. He hadn’t made excuses. He’d just sat her down and started talking, no sugarcoating involved. As she listened, Lex couldn’t help but feel that he’d been waiting for this moment for a long time; he sounded relieved. As if he appreciated that she hadn’t flown off the handle as she usually did.

As if he owed her the truth.

“When I came to Croak as a Junior,” he said, “I took to it immediately, just like you did. I made friends fast, which had never happened before—I was the weird, violent kid whom everyone hated and who got in a lot of trouble.” He let out a sharp laugh. “You have no idea how similar we are, Lex.”

“You bit your classmates too?”

“I set fire to my classmates. Well, technically it was a chemistry experiment gone wrong, but parents were called, suspensions were issued.” He snorted. “In school, I was hated. But in Croak, I was revered.”

He scratched his head. “But as much fun as I was having, I started to feel a bit uneasy. And it didn’t take long for me to figure out that a few of my fellow Juniors had the same sort of . . . inclinations that I did. The sense that even though being a Grim was what we were all really good at—and really enjoyed—something about all of this was fundamentally wrong. That human beings should never have been entrusted with the weight of this responsibility in the first place, shouldn’t have been allowed to touch it with a ten-mile pole. And that eventually the system would crack. Your mother agreed. And thus was born the tank-smashing plan.”

He looked at Lex. “She was the kingpin, Lex. I mean, the schemes that girl could come up with . . . they were diabolical. But they would have been nothing without her drive, the desire to actually see them come to fruition. Your mother was the one who made it all happen. Your mother was the one with balls.”

Lex just shook her head. “She made me keep a swear jar in the kitchen. She despised it when I got in trouble.” She swallowed. “I mean, for shit’s sake, she’s a history teacher!”

“Well, no surprises there. She was the best Afterlife Liaisons employee Croak ever had, until Elysia,” he said. “I’m not surprised she retained some of that residual love for the ex-presidents.”

Lex let out a puff of air. She should have been able to figure it out. But how could she? How on earth could she have known?

“But Mom didn’t come from a crappy family,” Lex said. “My grandparents were perfectly lovely people.”

“Having a troubled home life isn’t a prerequisite for becoming a Grim,” Uncle Mort said. “It’s just that those particular kids are more likely to really throw themselves into the Grimsphere, since they have nothing nice to go back to. Plus—well, there’s no way to say it without sounding callous, but it’s true: They’re less likely to be missed once they’re gone.”

Like Driggs. He wasn’t missed at all, and probably wouldn’t have been even if his parents had lived.

“But your mom was such a natural, the mayor at the time simply couldn’t pass her up. Certainly came to regret that, I bet.” He let out a long breath. “It smelled like paint, I remember. Under the Bank porch, where we hid right after the attack, when they were looking for us. Someone had recently repainted the wood, and those were the fumes we were breathing when your mom begged us to rat her out. Make up some excuse, do whatever we could to be absolved of our crimes, as long as the full brunt of the blame ended up on her. Because someone had to take the fall, she kept saying. Someone had to take the fall so that the rest of us could keep rebelling against the system from within, keep planhin her. Bening for the final strike that would finish what we started. And even though she loved the Grimsphere just as much as we did—maybe even more—she was willing to give it up, erase every memory she ever had of the place in order to save the Afterlife—her beloved presidents, all those souls.”

He rubbed his eyes. “So we did it, for her. We turned ourselves in: four accused, but only one guilty. We stood up on that fountain in front of the town and loudly lied that yes, your mother forced us into it. It was all her idea. Wipe
her
memory. Exile
her
.”

He sighed. “And that’s what they did.”

Lex recalled something he’d said at the end of last summer. “Is that why you broke your Lifeglass?” she asked. “So they’d never find out what you guys planned?”

He smiled, pleased that she remembered. “Yes.”

“Still—why didn’t she get the Hole?”

“They went easy on her because she was a Junior. Tried as a minor, I guess you’d say. The mayor back then wasn’t nearly as harsh as Norwood, sentencing kids to the Hole left and right.”

Lex fidgeted at the memory of that awful room, those wrenching screams.

“But I cared about your mother,” he said. When Lex raised her eyebrow at him, he shook his head. “Not in . . . that way. Skyla and I were already christening rooftops all over town, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

“But your mother had become a sort of older sister to me. I couldn’t stand to see her thrust back into civilization without a clue, without knowing where the hell she’d been for the past few years or even how to be an adult out there in the real world. So I did what I do best. I schemed.”

“How?”

“Well, I had a perfectly good big brother sitting around.”

Lex’s jaw dropped. “What? They always told us they met when he tripped and spilled ice cream down her shirt!”

“Who do you think pushed him?”

Lex just sputtered.

“They never suspected a thing,” Uncle Mort said. “My brother had an inkling that I was mixed up in something weird—as he still does—but he didn’t know his soon-to-be wife had ever been a part of it. And thanks to the massive dose of Amnesia she got, neither did she.”

Lex thought on this for a moment.

“So you knew what you were doing,” she said quietly. “That if my parents had kids, those kids would be direct descendents of a Grim—”

“And that those kids could possibly be the most powerful Grims ever born. Yes.”

“But not if you followed the Terms, which say that relations of Grims aren’t allowed to become Grims. You
brought
me to Croak. You
made
me a Grim.” Her breathing was getting faster. “You didn’t have to do that. You could have let me just stay in my old life. This entire clusterfuck could have been avoided, and—”

“And you’d still be miserable today.”

She looked up at him, anguished. “Do I look happy to you?”

“Okay, you’re still miserable, but it’s because you’re fighting for a cause you believe in. Look around you, Lex.” He gestured at the room. “You’ve got friends over there who are willing to die for you. You’ve got a boy who adores you. You’ve got me. And you’ve got a life that you were born for. So was it worth it? You’ll have to make that call for yourself. But I’d say it was.”

Lex said nothing.

“And what’s more,” he went on, “I think that if your mom knew what you’d become, she’d think the same thing. I think she’d be damned proud of you.”

Something akin to tears was brewing inside Lex, but there were st t whatill too many thoughts whizzing through her head to properly disgorge them. “Still,” she said in a low voice, “you used me. You knew what I might be capable of, that I would go through all the agony of Damning, the hell that my conscience has put me through, and you didn’t even care. As long as you got my Damning ability in the end, to defeat Grotton.”

“That was only a contingency. Sealing the portals was my main plan. The Grotton-destruction thing is gravy, something I only dared to hope for.”

“So what? It was still part of your plan, even if it was a long shot. You needed me to do your dirty work for you.”

Uncle Mort grabbed her wrist and held it up in front of her face. “I don’t see any handcuffs,” he said. “Did I drag you here at gunpoint? Did I ever
once
force you into a single thing you’ve done? Every decision you’ve made since you came to the Grimsphere was yours, Lex. You made your own choices, and you could have left at any time.
Any
time, and I wouldn’t have stopped you. But you chose to stay. It’s what your mother would have done, had she the option. Every time you’ve caught another blow—and you’ve caught a lot of rotten blows—you stayed, you rebounded, you fought even harder. There is honor in that.”