Deadly Pink (20 page)

The king shrugged expansively.

“Mountains,” Emily said. She sighed. “Back where we came from. I've seen them swooping over the mountain peaks.”

“Wonderful,” I muttered. It wasn't that our trip away from the mountains had been useless, since we hadn't had all the information we needed when we'd been back there. But it had taken us all day to get this far—and that had been flying. “Any advice on how to get there?” I asked.

Again the king shrugged, with a helpless smile. It was as though the English language had suddenly dribbled out of his brain—either that or his IQ had dropped forty points.

“Anyone?”

Gypsy girl and pig man followed the king's lead and gave their own shrugs.

“There's no way,” Emily told me. “It can't be done. I'll help you gather those seven coins you need, and then
you
can go home.”

“Not without you,” I told her. I was remembering when I'd been seven years old and I was afraid of some of the older kids at the school bus stop. Dad tried to convince me I could ignore them, and Mom offered to talk to their mothers. Emily had made a game of it. We were superheroes, with powers that changed at our whim. We needed to maintain our secret identities, which those middle schoolers were too dumb to see through. But if we needed to, we could always use our superpowers. Once I was no longer afraid, the middle schoolers lost interest.

Fortified by this memory, I repeated more forcefully, “I'm not leaving without you.”

“We'll see,” Emily said.

She'd given up.

That
We'll see
was a delaying trick our mother sometimes used, and that thought brought Mom to mind—Mom waiting at Rasmussem, watching those readouts, growing more anxious by the moment. She'd been like two and a half seconds from a meltdown when we'd been assuring her that both Emily and I could get out of the game any time we wanted to.

“I have a plan,” I told Emily.

She didn't look hopeful. She didn't even look particularly interested. But she asked, “What?”

“I'll tell you as we walk back to your place,” I said, unwilling to talk in front of King Rasmussem.

Which made little if any sense, considering that the entire game was going on in my head, and he was in there, too.

But I didn't want to look at his smug face anymore.

“Come on.” I pulled on Emily's arm, and she shuffled along beside me. Past the boat ride, past the petting zoo, past the spot where I'd tied up the mime. (Either he'd been reset, too, when the king reinstated the original code, or someone had rescued him, because he was gone.) Cirque du Soleil lady was still doing her thing with the scarves. The merry-go-round was playing a jaunty carnival tune and had turned its lights on, because the sun was only a handspan or two above the horizon. At this point, I felt the lights gave the arcade a look that wasn't so much festive as sinister.

Of course Emily's horses had disappeared just as surely as her gold and her magic had. So that's how we came to be walking through the forest, heading toward her house. Along the way we each captured two more butterflies, which was one of those good news/bad news things: good, because we could use all the gold coins we could get; bad, because that goes to show what incredibly slow progress we were making, with Emily needing to sit down frequently. The sky still had a bit of pink when we got to the first clearing, which was
just
a clearing: no sign of lute-guy, since he had been conjured up by Emily. By the time we got to the second clearing, night had fallen.

There was a full moon—according to Emily, there was a full moon every night—and that gave enough light to show that the forest ended at an expanse of lawn. Only a few wildflowers dotted the grass—no garden in this new scaled-down version of the game, so no flower-matching game. No gazebo. The topiary maze was still there, since that's where the sprites' fountain was, but the king had warned us that the sprites wouldn't come back till we went to their homeland with the gold we owed them. Probably all for the best. I don't think I was mentally up to the challenge of dealing with them. And Emily's house? Her fine Victorian mansion had returned to its default setting, no upgrades, just a plain little cobblestone cottage with a thatched roof. We had gone back to basics. It had one door, one window. The flower box beneath the window was empty.

Inside the cottage, the floor was concrete, like a garage. One big room. The stones the place was constructed with made bare walls, the same inside as out. A toilet and sink were set off in the corner behind a wooden partition. There were two sleeping bags on the floor, one for each of us. To add insult to injury, they were that ugly green of surplus army equipment.

“See?” Emily said. “I hate entry-level games.”

Certainly not rich accommodations, but we weren't planning on spending much time here. As I had explained to Emily while we walked, we had to get a dragon to come to us, since there was no way we could reach the mountains where they made their dens, not without magic, not in the time Emily had left.

“It's not going to work,” Emily had said.

I had gone to that old family fallback position of “We'll see,” because I didn't want to argue with her. I was getting tired of her being tired, and of me having to be the responsible one. When was it going to be
my
turn to get to be tired? A cranky little part of my brain kept repeating that we were in this bad situation because of Emily, and it was hard not to let my irritation spill over.

The last thing I needed was Emily feeling sorry for herself. It infringed on
my
feeling sorry for
myself.

I opened the food cupboard and saw that the entire stock of edibles consisted of bottled water and cans of Spam. We should have bought some of that fried dough and ice cream at the arcade before our money had been magicked away.

At least this time I had no trouble finding the mail slot, which was what we had come back for. It was in the wall beneath the window, giving the appearance that any letters we wrote would drop directly into the empty flower box. Hopefully, even in the no-frills version of the game, there was mail pickup. Next to the slot was a little shelf that held several sheets of paper and a quill pen. These were not as fine as the parchment and the ostrich-plume pen from Emily's loll-top desk, but—as with the Spam—were better than nothing.

There was no place to sit. And there were no lamps. So I needed to work standing at the window, by the moonlight. Thank goodness for that full moon every night. I picked up the pen.

“Can't we rest just a little?” Emily begged from where she was sitting on one of the sleeping bags.

Don't whine,
I wanted to snap at her. Instead, I told her, “You can rest while I compose the letter.”

“'kay,” she said. “Grace?”

“What?”

Maybe I wasn't doing as great a job hiding my resentment as I thought, because she said, “I'm so sorry I got you into this.”

“It's okay,” I said, suddenly feeling that it was, in the face of her remorse. What kind of cold and insensitive sister was I? “I'm not leaving you, Emily.”

“I won't hold you to that.” She closed her eyes, letting her chin drop to her chest, not even taking the time to lie down.

This
had
to work.

I picked up the pen and wrote:

To the nearest dragon-
We've got gold.
Lots and lots of gold.
We bet you're not smart enough to get it from us.

Sincerely,
Grace and Emily Pizzelli

I reread the letter, then changed the last line:

The Pizzelli sisters: Grace and Emily

I don't know why I liked the sound of that better. More dramatic, I guess.

Emily was looking so peaceful, I decided not to bother her to get her opinion. The wording wasn't important. We needed to get a dragon ticked off enough that it would come to get our gold from us. Yeah, well, and if it wasn't completely ticked off before it came, it would be once it realized all we had were five gold pieces. But we'd have to deal with that later.

I folded the letter and dropped it into the mail slot. I listened carefully but didn't hear a thing. Which I guess was a hopeful sign. If it had really dropped into the flower box, that probably wouldn't have been a good thing.

When we'd had our tea party, our guests had rung the doorbell and servants had let them in. I very much doubted there was a doorbell, and there sure as heck weren't any servants in this house.

How long would it take? Before, the clock had already started chiming when I'd invited the girls to come at four o'clock, giving them like three seconds from the moment my fingers had let go of the letter to their arriving on our doorstep, dressed and ready to snarf down petits-fours.

Emily was snoring quietly, but I moved closer to the door so I could hear anyone approaching.

It's not that I expected the dragon to knock.

But neither was I expecting him to rip the roof off the house.

There I was listening for footsteps or the sound of beating wings. Instead, the nails holding the roof frame to the house squealed in protest.

There was a big difference between facing my sister transformed into a dragon and having this massive stranger-dragon perched on top of the open-to-the-sky wall of the house, holding the peeled-back roof in his claw, peeking at us like we were the last two wontons at the bottom of a box of Chinese takeout.

Chapter 21

Gold

W
HEN MY SISTER
had been a dragon—and how many people can say
that
with a straight face?—when my sister had been a dragon, she had still spoken with her normal human voice. When this dragon spoke, there was nothing normal or human about it. His voice was fire and gravel, ancient and relentless, the sound of tectonic plates grinding together before an earthquake.

“Give me the gold!”
he demanded.

Whether it had been the ripping off of the roof or the geological voice of the dragon, Emily had awakened.

“Holy catastrophe, Batman,” she said, “what have you gone and gotten us into?”

Maybe she was trying to be funny, but at that point if the dragon had told us “I require a human sacrifice,” I would gladly have shoved her into his path.

The dragon's golden eyes didn't blink, but his forked tongue flicked, tasting the air. He repeated his demand, raising his already massive voice, as though we hadn't answered because we hadn't heard.
“GIVE ME THE GOLD!”

Emily and I both dug into our pockets with shaking hands. We offered up our accumulated wealth: me, three coins; Emily, two. I didn't bother showing him the wooden nickels.

The dragon's tongue became more agitated, preparing us—okay, well, not really— for his roar:
“WHERE IS THE GOLD?
"

“This is it,” I managed to squeak out.

The dragon bellowed,
“YOU SAID YOU HAD 'LOTS AND LOTS' OF GOLD.”

I looked at the coins in my hand and tried to sound sincere.
“I
did?”

Emily looked at me like
THIS is your plan? Oh, boy!

The dragon retracted his snakelike tongue. That was the only warning we got before a stream of fire shot out of his mouth. Luckily, it wasn't aimed at us. But the partition blocking off the toilet went up in flames.

“You insulted me,”
the dragon growled,
“AND
you have no gold?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Any way we can make it up to you?”

This was a kids' game, I reminded myself. I needed reminding at that point. Regardless of what had happened, I was counting on there
not
being a human-flesh-eating dragon in a game that had been designed with glittery butterflies, unicorns, dolphins, and a flower-matching game. And that was about as far as the specifics of my plan went. So maybe Emily was right, and this catastrophe—this particular catastrophe—
was
my fault.

But maybe it wasn't a catastrophe after all.

The dragon puffed out his chest. (Yeah, like a dragon sitting on the corner of our house where he'd ripped off our roof had to make himself look bigger to be intimidating.)
“You will be my slaves,”
he announced.

“Okay,” I said, and I was aware that Emily's eyebrows shot up.

Her expression said,
I don’t know where you're going with this, Grace, so you’re on your own.

Actually,
slaves
sounded good.
Slaves
sounded like we would be serving him, and that was better than being served
to
him. “For how long?” I asked.

“Ninety-nine years.”

Sure. Why not? That was as doable as King Rasmussem's eighty-seven-thousand-whatever gold pieces.

“When do we begin?” I asked.

“Now.”

The dragon reached into the house and grabbed me in a taloned claw, his grip not tight enough to hurt, but tight enough that I couldn't fill my lungs for a good scream. Then he snatched Emily with his other claw. And then he threw himself into the night air.

His leathery wings beat noisily, something like when you're standing directly beneath the huge school flag on a windy day. Something like that ... times five.

Far below, even as we were still angling up, I glimpsed the lights of the Rasmussem arcade—the carousel, the midway, a Ferris wheel that was at the end of a path we'd never followed—and then there was the forest, miles and miles of forest. Occasionally, there were lights there, too, festively strung between trees, possibly marking a settlement. Once, our way briefly followed the course of a river, and between the snaps of the dragon's wings I could hear a few notes of ragtime music and I saw a brightly lit paddle-wheel boat, a bejeweled miniature about as big as the palm of my hand.

By the light of the moon, I could see Emily hanging limply in the dragon's grasp. Fainted? Or fallen asleep? “Emily!” I shouted as loudly as my squeezed lungs would allow. But the wind caught my voice and flung it away.