May Bird, Warrior Princess Read online

  Apparently, vampires liked biting much more than being bitten.

  When Somber Kitty was certain he had gotten his message across, he let go, flying across the air and landing easily on all fours. Tail flapping, he watched as the vampire escaped into the fog. Then he gave his paws a good lick and looked around. He had no idea where he was. It looked more desolate than any spot in the Ever After he had seen—full of drifting fog and emptiness. Somber Kitty let out a purr, gave the ground a good sniff, peered into the fog, picked a direction, and sauntered forward.

  He hadn’t gotten very far when he saw it. A door, standing in the middle of nothing. He pranced up close, sensing that he shouldn’t linger but unable to resist. The door was etched with a skull and crossbones, only the skull was that of an animal—it was horse-shaped, in fact. “Mew?” he asked curiously. It wasn’t every day you ran across a drawing of a horse skull in a dead world where all animals were banished. And this door had a smaller square etched in the bottom, right beneath the skull. A cat door.

  Somber Kitty, who was nearly perfect, did have his flaws, and one of them was conceit. He was sure that whatever danger he was sensing wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. He decided to give the door a closer sniff.

  He tiptoed forward, his nose quivering, searching. And then, with a great creak, the cat door swung open and a hoof-tipped leg appeared, shooting out around Kitty and scooping him inside.

  Chapter Twenty

  A Big Nothing

  The next night the Colony did something it hadn’t done in years. It threw a party.

  The cavernous main hall—which opened onto several tunnels that snaked upward through the piles of junk like ant burrows—was festooned with torches dangling from the old chandeliers and tucked into crevices amid the old car parts and coffins piled up to make the walls. Everyone dressed in their finest, which for living outlaws in the land of the dead was their least dirty set of rags. Beatrice and her mother, inseparable since the moment they’d arrived, served refreshments. May, the guest of honor, sat in a corner of the room, watching the others celebrate. Lawless Lexy herself had done her hair, tying it into great and elegant silky knots behind her head and lacing it with flowers from the Colony’s gardens. She had dressed May in a fuschia kimono she’d been saving for a rainy day—one she’d had in her trunk the day her ship had gone down in the West Indies. May felt awkward and grown-up.

  People kept coming over and pinching her for luck.

  “Finally back to finish the job!”

  “You’re our good luck charm!”

  “We knew The Book of the Dead wouldn’t lie!”

  May smiled and nodded painfully. But the truth was, she didn’t have a clue what to do next, or if there was anything she could do. Anxiously, she turned her mind to Somber Kitty. If anything happened to him, if Bo Cleevil so much as touched a piece of fuzz on his head, she would … she would …

  May, restless, kicked her feet against the sandy floor of the cavern.

  “You look like a caged tiger.”

  May started and turned. Lucius was standing there, his blond hair combed sideways across his forehead, his maroon school jacket freshly pressed, his pinkish cheeks glowing.

  “Who did that to your hair?” Lucius asked.

  May turned her profile to him, not a little proudly. “Lawless Lexy.”

  Lucius strung his slingshot and stretched it over and over, gazing about the room. May stared at her fingernails, then at the walls. He kept peeking at her out of the corner of his eye, and May felt herself blushing, feeling pretty. Finally he muttered, “It looks goofy.”

  May’s heart sank. “Well, it’s a good thing I don’t care what you think,” she answered brightly, gazing at a group across the room playing Mother May I. Pumpkin, the farthest behind, kept glancing over at them and narrowing his big black eyes. Lucius shrugged insouciantly and zipped off to find some way to torment the players.

  Pumpkin broke policy and did some singing with a backup band of a lesser caliber than he was used to: two banjo pickers and a jug blower. They plucked along merrily through such lounge favorites as “I Left My Hand in Vile Vista” and “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Shuck Dog” while the Live Ones danced jigs, or stood along the walls talking and laughing, or sat at the wooden picnic tables swapping tall tales. They played Pin the Tail on the Donkey, musical chairs, all the old favorites from Earth. Beatrice refused to play Ring-Around-the-Rosy because she said it reminded her of the plague, but she taught everyone how to fold handkerchiefs properly.

  Bertha, May, and the gang sat at a table in the corner into the wee hours, catching up. Bertha “Bad Breath” Brettwaller may have been the smelliest, but she was also the fiercest and fieriest leader in the Ever After. She leaned forward, cockeyed. “And you haven’t received any messages from the Lady since you’ve been here?”

  May shook her head.

  Bertha let out a long breath, sending everyone leaning backward. “Curious, that. Very strange indeed.”

  They watched the band, both lost in their own thoughts. Beatrice was dancing with Fabbio, spinning and spinning.

  Lexy appeared, waving a handful of telep-a-grams.

  “We’ve got the first responses back,” she said, grinning, and handing them to May.

  “That was fast,” said May; she had sent out the telep-a-grams that morning, to every place in the realm she could think of. She smiled hopefully at the others.

  “Well.” Bertha nodded, yanking at her wiry gray hair. “Open ’em!”

  May scanned them first for one from the Lady, but nothing. She thought of Bo Cleevil’s words. I’m afraid she’s no longer here. What had he meant? Had she been at the party?

  “She’ll be in touch when it’s time,” Bertha said reassuringly.

  May opened them one by one—New Egypt, Horrific Hamburgers in the Pit of Despair, the Catacombs. They all looked on eagerly. Then, slowly, their expressions sank as they read the responses.

  No thanks, busy that weekend.

  Have a dentist appointment.

  You must be out of your mind.

  There was no word at all from the spirits of Risk Falls.

  “Maybe Zero doesn’t know how to read,” Bea suggested hopefully. Zero was the leader of the wild spirits of Risk Falls.

  Bertha sniffed. “Cowards, every one of ’em.” She let out a ragged, garlicky sigh, and May and Beatrice exchanged a suffering look. “We’ve been fighting our tails off,” she said, looking tired. “But them dark spirits are like lice, you can’t even count ’em there are so many, and there are so few of us….” Bertha shook her shaggy head. “The long and short of it is, they”—Bertha nodded at the responses—“what’s left of ’em, they think it’s hopeless. The dead aren’t very good at hoping, or seeing how things could be different, ya swannee?”

  May knew too well the truth of Bertha’s words. She had met too many spirits who thought fighting Bo Cleevil was someone else’s problem.

  Bertha looked at her, cockeyed. “Are you sure you’re not just half-dead?” Word had spread quickly of May’s fatal tumble off the roof of White Moss Manor. It had been hard for the undead to overcome their glee at May’s arrival long enough to express their sympathy. But now Bertha looked at her sadly.

  May leaned forward on her elbows. “Pretty sure.”

  She must have looked especially lost, because Bertha patted her hand with her own rough, calloused one. “Don’t you worry. Them astronauts will come for us all one day.” Lexy, sitting at Bertha’s side, rolled her eyes at May secretly. Ever since May had told Bertha that space travel had been invented, Bertha had been convinced that Earth was working furiously to make contact with the spirit world. Nobody had the heart to burst her bubble.

  They all sat silently for several minutes. May looked around at the Colony of the Undead: their careworn, grimy faces, their tattered clothes from years of hiding out in the world of spirits.

  “Oh, I can’t stand these long faces. Come with me,” Bertha ordered. />
  She summoned them with a nod and they wound their way out of the hall, up through the booby-trapped hallways carved through the garbage. The Colony of the Undead was rigged from top to bottom with traps—set for all manner of dark spirits should they ever be discovered—that only the undead knew about. Bertha carefully steered them around, over, and under them, and up. “It’s probably the safest place in the realm now,” she said, “aside from North Farm.” The roof gave them a view of the surrounding desert.

  May had stood here once before, when Kitty was still by her side, when she had been sure of the Lady, when things in the Ever After had seemed so scary. It hadn’t been nearly as scary as now.

  “The Galaxy Gulf’s a nice place to see,” Bertha said, pointing off north. “Lots of exciting things to visit, even out here in the Nothing Platte. Well, used to be that way. Now it’s just empty Cleevilvilles, and anyone who’s left doesn’t dare go out.”

  Staring across the sandy platte, May gasped. In the air, a giant shadow was moving across the sand far away, back and forth. May could just make out that it had the shape of a hand, a hand that looked like it was feeling around on a dark shelf.

  “Bo Cleevil’s looking for you, all right,” said Bertha.

  May watched the giant shadow hand.

  “Bertha, what is Bo Cleevil, exactly? I mean, what kind of spirit is he?”

  “He’s more powerful than you’ve seen yet, my dear. And none of us can hide from him forever.” Bertha nodded ominously toward the giant, shadowy hand. “He’ll find us eventually.”

  A deep shadow settled over May’s heart.

  “I have to go see the Lady,” she said.

  “Girly, now you know that if the Lady hasn’t invited you, you’ll never make it across the Petrified Pass. Remember what happened last time?”

  May thought of the terrors that had awaited them in the tunnels beneath the Petrified Pass, where they had faced their worst fears.

  “Achoo!” Everyone standing around Bertha leaned back as she snuffled and let out a big, stinky breath. “The Lady works in her own time. If she wants you, she’ll call you. Meanwhile, we gotta wait for her before we can do anything about Bo Cleevil. I don’t think we can succeed without her.” She nodded to the shadow hand. “As long as there’s still a little light left in the Ever After, we have time. And there’ll be light in the Ever After until the very last town has fallen.”

  May kicked at the ground darkly. “But we can’t just sit here in the meantime.”

  “I suggest …” Fabbio paused dramatically, then whispered, “Sabotage.” He thrust a finger in the air grandly.

  “How do you sabotage the world’s most powerful dark spirit?” May asked.

  “Bo Cleevil’s biggest thing is fear. What’s our biggest thing?” Beatrice asked logically. Her hands were busy folding her sash into exact right triangles.

  May looked around the group. Pumpkin was patting his tuft and intoning low me-me-me-me-meee’s. Beatrice had moved on to cleaning her fingernails with a special brush she’d found down below. Lucius was making farting noises with his hands, right near Fabbio’s rear, and then pulling away quickly. Fabbio kept looking behind him, bewildered, and then around at the group, blushing.

  “Goofiness?” May said despondently.

  Lucius floated upright, a rakish grin spreading across his lips. His glow had multiplied so exponentially that everyone had to squint, surprised, to look at him. May lifted her hands over her eyes to soften the glare. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The Free Spirits Were Here

  Snicker, snicker, snicker.

  Flapping his tail, Somber Kitty stared up at the spirit who had accosted him. His captor looked to be having quite a laugh, blowing air through his great nostrils, his big lips almost smiling. The great animal nudged Kitty, as if wanting to play, and let out a whinny. Horses could be so immature.

  Somber Kitty peered around, taking in the scene before him. Rolling hills, full of tigers, snakes, bats, cats, armadillos, anteaters, three-toed sloths, dodo birds, dogs … every animal in the rainbow loped across the green grass, flew through the blue sky, frolicked amongst the trees. Somber Kitty was no detective, but something told him this was the realm to which all animal spirits had been banished. And something told him they weren’t having all that bad of a time.

  Somber Kitty gave his whiskers a twitch, stood up, and gave the horse a parting wave of his tail. It was all very lovely, but he had other things to do. Mainly, he had a girl he needed to protect.

  He was just turning to leave when he saw her.

  She was gray, in a purple collar. Her delicate paws were wrapped around a twig, which she was gnawing on ecstatically while writhing back and forth on her back. She seemed to sense she was being watched, for her ears turned to Kitty, and then the rest of her did, and she bounced into the air like a Super Ball and landed on all fours, looking at him. Trying to look as smooth as possible, Somber Kitty lay down on his belly and belly-crawled toward her.

  “Meow,” he said, which in English means, “Hey babe, I have somewhere I need to be, wanna come with?”

  “Mew,” she replied, which in English means, “Love to.”

  And, far from being trapped, the two cats simply traipsed out the way Somber Kitty had come.

  THE PLATTE OF DESPAIR MEDITATION

  AND YOGA RETREAT FOR BUSY GOBLINS.

  May, Lucius, Pumpkin, and Beatrice stood with their backs against a red brick wall on which these words were announced, staring across the lawn at something they had written in the grass.

  They couldn’t help but admire what they’d done.

  “Do you think we should add some curlicues?” Bea asked. “It could be dressed up a bit.” Lucius and May blinked at each other, shaking their heads. Fabbio had stayed home to play badminton, considering the whole outing useless. Staring at what they’d just done to the lawn of the Yoga Retreat, May thought he might have a point.

  “Well,” she breathed, “let’s go.”

  They sneaked into the building through the side door, first going into the locker room. Through a window they could see several goblins sitting in lotus position in the room beyond, their eyes closed.

  On the far wall was a sign:

  MANTRA: WHEN I GET TIRED OF TERRORIZING OTHERS,

  THERE IS A PLACE I CAN GO TO RECHARGE.

  They rolled their eyes at one another, and then sneaked onward, arriving at a room where the goblins had hung their slimy clothes. Lucius opened a couple of the washing machines and began mixing lights and darks. Beatrice went to work, putting glops of ectoplasm in the rows of designer shoes, grimacing at the slimy goo. Pumpkin hovered near the door, nibbling his long white fingers and ready to escape at any moment. May found a stash of shoe polish and hurried to the showers to mix it up with the goblins’ shampoo.

  While she was busy with that, Lucius drifted past, holding his nose and wincing, his arms full of underwear. Noticing May’s boggled look, he motioned for her to follow him to the kitchen, then to a giant silver refrigerator against the far wall. The room was lined with kegs labeled ORGANIC GUTTGRASS JUICE. “Can you open the freezer for me?” Lucius whispered.

  May had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing as they shoved pile after pile of goblin underwear into the freezer.

  Lucius waved a pair of underwear at her threateningly.

  She waggled another pair back at him. They burst into an underwear sword fight, dodging left and right, cutting capers, waving the underwear behind their backs and through their legs, dashing at each other like swordsmen.

  “Fear the undies,” Lucius growled.

  “Never!” May hissed back, throwing her underwear so that it landed square on his head.

  “Really, you two.” They both turned to see Beatrice in the doorway, frowning sternly. “If the goblins catch us …”

  Pumpkin was standing by one of the Organic Guttgrass Juice urns, trying to pour himself a glass. He kept t
ilting the urn farther forward, finally sticking his mouth under the tap. The three turned to watch him and realized a moment too late what was about to happen.

  The urn reached its tipping point. And suddenly it came crashing down, dousing Pumpkin in green glowing juice and rolling across the floor.

  A moment later a figure appeared behind Bea in the doorway. May and Lucius noticed it first and then, seeing their eyes, Beatrice’s own widened in fright and she swiveled, coming face-to-face with a fearsome goblin, about half her size but with razor-sharp teeth that took up almost his entire face. He was wearing a turban and ballet pants.

  “Ahh!”

  They all turned and ran for the back kitchen door—knocking aside big kegs of Organic Guttgrass Juice in their wake—and burst onto the front lawn, zipping off into the night, laughing madly.

  Behind them they left a chaotic scene of goblins screaming and screeching to find their lights and darks had all turned the same shade of pink, and a reminder blazing on the front lawn:

  THE FREE SPIRITS WERE HERE!

  “That underwear idea of mine was good,” Lucius said, grinning from ear to ear. He picked a nightshade flower that happened to be growing near where his feet landed and handed it to May. Pumpkin let out a tiny growl, almost like he was clearing his throat. May took the flower and twined it about her bowstring, looking at Pumpkin curiously, then back at Lucius.

  “Yeah, it was,” she said, like a mother would say to a child, exchanging a grin with Beatrice.

  “I outdo myself sometimes,” he said, reaching down for another flower and handing it back to her. This one May tucked behind her ear. A moment later Pumpkin’s long white hand appeared at the corner of her eye as he plucked the flower from her ear and tucked it behind his own, scowling at Lucius’s back.