Fine, if she wouldn’t come down, I would go up the old-fashioned way. Climbing chicken legs wasn’t much harder than climbing trees.
I ascended the chicken legs one wrinkly skin fold at a time. My fingerholds must have tickled because the legs shimmied a little, shaking the hut on top. After I passed the knee, the left side buckled slightly, causing the house to tilt dangerously forward.
A head rolled out the front door like a screaming crystal ball and sailed through a piece of broken porch railing. Wrapping my feet as tight as I could around the chicken legs, I leaned out with both hands to catch Hydra’s head before she went kersplat. I did so without thinking, because if I had thought, I would have remembered how gross her heads are and waited to see if she bounced.
My right hand grabbed her by the tangled gray web she called hair; my left cradled her gooey neck stump. “Oh, nymph nads. I’m gonna hurk.”
“All the king’s horses could not have been putting back me I think,” Hydra said.
She’d been dropped and rattled around a lot lately, so she was making less sense than usual. I’d long since gotten over the weird of having just a head talk to me, but I would never get over the ewww. I couldn’t very well drop her now, which meant I was stuck dragging her up the chicken legs with me.
As sure as the three suns, Ethos, Logos, and Pathos, rise and set over the realms of Story, no good deed goes unpunished.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you have, like, feeling in your neck and stuff?”
“Is like chill in frosty bites, yes? Vy are asking?”
“Just because,” I answered and stuck Hydra’s head on the end of my bow with a glop. Problem solved.
With just a few more shimmies, and a lot of cursing from Hydra, we arrived at the top.
Dorthea waited on the porch for us. “I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry.”
Her prince, Kato, stood next to her, rubbing his temples. “Rexi, I’m handling it,” he said over her run-on apology.
“Bite me, beast boy. You can handle this.” I took the bow off my back and gave Kato the Hydra on a stick.
Narrowing my eyes, I advanced on the princess who had turned my simple life into chaos. “Someone found us, right? You needed to go all warrior princess, and that’s why you had to snack on my life force.”
Dorthea gulped, not meeting my gaze, but the tips of her enchantedly flaming hair crackled with green sparks “Well, not exactly.” Her eyes shifted to the open door.
I leaned to the side so I could peer in and see what was making her nervous. Even though Hydra’s houses changed shape and dimension based on which head she used, some things stayed constant. Normally, shelves filled with her collection of heads and disgustingly slimy spell ingredients she kept alive for freshness lined the walls of her home.
That wasn’t the case anymore. Now there were plush carpets, jeweled vases, and a wall-to-wall closet system stuffed with enough shoes for every foot within a hundred-chapter radius.
Verte bounced up and down on a silk-covered bed, the hair on the green-skinned sorceress’s wart swaying with the motion. “Just proves you can take the princess out of the palace, but give her a bit o’ magic, and you can’t keep her from making herself a new one,” she said, ending in shrill cackle.
Dorthea winced. “I’m soooo sorry, Rexi. It was an accident. I swear I didn’t mean to.”
Through our connection, I could feel her regret, the genuine sincerity in her words. And that only torqued me off more. Because she never meant to do anything wrong, and yet I always ended up getting scorched.
My fists opened and closed of their own will. I could feel my nostrils flaring like a minotaur’s. “You nearly sucked me dry for a home makeover?!”
“Storymaker practice got slightly out of hand. I was supposed to be channeling the creation magic to make one object. But I got distracted and started thinking about how much I missed home and Glenda’s fall collection…”
I lunged for her throat before she could finish.
Dorthea shrieked and raised both hands to fend me off, emerald flames shooting from her palms. Her eyes grew wide as the flames hit me square in the chest and sent me flying backward into the rotted wood railing.
Looking up as I fell, I saw Kato quickly kiss his princess so he could transform into a flying chimera.
But there wasn’t enough time.
I screamed, but there was no one and nothing to catch me except the ground with a force that snapped my spine in half.
Welcome to my story, where, as usual, I get the pointy end of the arrow.
“In death we are all equal… I jest, of course. If that were true, everyone would have their own monuments. Heroes die in greatness. Villains die in infamy. The rest just die.”
—Grimm’s Reapers Guide to the Afterlife
2
Forget-Me-Knots
While my body lay broken on the ground, my soul traveled back to the underworld of Nome Ore. There was no bright light, tunnel, or chubby, harp-playing baby at the gateway to the world of the erased. In fact…the gateway looked an awful lot like an office.
As usual, I materialized in the dreary, boxy room right in front of a desk that had stacks of paper tall enough that one good sneeze would create a blizzard of pages. The room seemed to double in size each time I died.
This was number four.
“Six,” said a voice, slippery and dark as ink.
“Huh?”
“I’m beginning to think you like it here.” Morte—Nome King, Grimm Reaper, and part-time shadow stalker—strode through the office door. He buttoned up his rigid topcoat and stepped behind his desk, where he edited out the dead from their stories. “This is the sixth time your soul has come back to interrupt my day.”
I tallied my previous deaths in my head, knowing that he’d just eavesdrop on my thoughts anyway. There was the first time, when I jumped in front of the stormbolt the wicked witch Griz hurled at Dorthea. The second death when Chimera Mountain erupted about a half hour later. The third time, an ironwood tree went rogue and skewered me while Dorthea tried to use her Storymaker magic to transform it into an apple tree. And the fourth, well, even without a flesh-and-bone body, my back felt crooked.
Couldn’t help but notice Dorthea was a consistent theme in my recurring fatalities, but since I needed her to bring me back, I focused my ire on Morte instead.
“Someone needs to go to nursery rhyme school and learn to count. That’s just four.”
“Of course, surely I am mistaken. Even the greatest editor can make an error.” The tall, angular man adjusted his glasses on the crook of his nose and smiled like a forest python that was still digesting its last meal.
Morte reminded me of a negative imprint of a portrait, paper-white skin with graying teeth, nails, and hair. The worst part was his eyes—black irises with white pupils. I folded my arms and resisted the urge to step back as he stepped forward. The flickering light from the fluorescent glow crystals in the ceiling cast shadows on his bone-pale skin.