May Bird, Warrior Princess Page 4

  May’s heart thudded. The last time she’d been here, the streets had been full of bustling, happy spirits of Belle Morte—dead Pompeiians gleefully leaping out of the Towering Inferno Hotel, gooey ghosts out shopping and chatting mournfully, sinister-looking murderesses sweeping the crowds with menacing glances, specters in all stages of decay, and dimly glowing house ghosts. They were all gone.

  May drifted through the back door of the Moldy Page Bookshop, brushing cobwebs out of the air in front of her face and sneezing at the dust. On the counter by the old metal cash register, a book lay waiting to be purchased: A Farewell to My Arms. The amount had already been rung up on the old metal cash register, and its drawer hung open, full of gold coins.

  She floated uncertainly to the front of the store, where a door opened onto the main square of Belle Morte. As she emerged, she saw a structure toward the edge of the square, where Main Street began its journey out of the center of town. A shiver went through her.

  COMING SOON! CLEEVILVILLE #786

  PARDON OUR DUST!

  COMING ATTRACTIONS: CRAWL-MART,

  CHAR-BUCKS, SKULLBUSTER VIDEO

  “Eugggggggh.”

  May ducked back through the doorway, clutching Kitty tight. She watched as a group of zombies lurched across the far side of the square—their bloodthirsty yet dimwitted eyes scanning the area for any stray spirits, their clothes tattered, their greenish gray arms sticking straight out ahead of them and their legs jerking them along lopsidedly. Another group, she could see now, was gathered at the Char-Bucks—which was only half-built—sipping steaming drinks and Eugggghhhhhing at each other. “Eugggghhhhh” was the only word in the zombie vocabulary.

  “Pumpkin,” May breathed, her lips trembling. The dark spirits had taken over his hometown.

  Her eyes shot to an old Victorian bicycle—basket and all—lying on the ground a few feet away. Watching the zombies in Char-Bucks, she scurried over and lifted it up, dumped Kitty gracelessly into the basket on the front, and climbed on. She wobbled and swerved as the bike floated along, several inches above the ground, finally setting a straight course up Main Street. She began to pedal furiously. Within a few moments the town had fallen far behind them.

  Beehive House sat all by its lonesome in the middle of the sand, light glowing from its windows. It looked perfectly intact, perfectly still and peaceful. May skidded to a stop, taking a deep breath. But when she saw that the front door stood wide open, she felt a new wave of panic. She and Kitty looked at each other. “Meay?” he asked.

  May walked warily toward the door, Somber Kitty at her heels. She stepped into the open doorway, into the shadow of the threshold. “Hello?”

  Finally she pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped all the way in. “Oh.” She sighed.

  When May had last been to Beehive House, it had been a cozy dwelling, inhabited by Arista, a bookish, puttering beekeeper and master of the house. Pumpkin, who was a certain type of spirit called a house ghost, had been his servant, but not a very industrious one. The house had been on the cluttered side. But now it was in chaos—books and papers were strewn across the floor. May walked through the kitchen, into the study, where Arista’s skull-o-phone hung off the hook. “If you’d like to make a call, please press the anterior bicuspid and dial again,” it said, over and over again. Arista’s maps had been torn up, and his globe of the universe, which showed what all the stars and planets were and how many spirits lived on each, was cracked down the middle like a hard-boiled egg, but still blinking and twinkling. There were brochures for Rotten Roxie’s Roller Rink and Remaining Fingers Nail Salon, mixed among a pile of newspaper clippings from the Daily Boos. May sifted through them, reading the headlines, the words brightening to a distinct green glow as her eyes touched them:

  DARK SPIRITS TAKE OVER REALM, CURIOSITY GROWS

  OVER RASH OF TACKY STRIP MALLS LEFT IN THEIR WAKE

  HOPES OF SALVATION BY LIVING GIRL

  DASHED BY HER DISAPPEARANCE

  THOUSANDS OF VANISHED SPIRITS RUMORED

  TO BE KEPT IN BO CLEEVIL’S BASEMENT

  REPORTER VANISHES AFTER REPORTING ON

  SPIRITS KEPT IN BO CLEEVIL’S BASEMENT

  The next article was just a blank page.

  May scanned the papers again, hoping that maybe here she would find some sign from the Lady of North Farm, like she thought she’d seen at school in Hog Wallow. But there was nothing. She laid them down, thoughtful. She drifted back to the kitchen, and then into the guest bedroom, where she had spent her first lonely, scary night in the Ever After. The sheets of the bed, ratty and decayed in the first place, had been torn up. Somber Kitty leaped onto the bed and sniffed around.

  As she went back into the kitchen again, she caught a glimpse out of the corner of her eye of something moving. She swiveled toward it, then breathed a sigh of relief. It was only her reflection in the mirror—in her death shroud. Tall, lanky, long-haired, and disheveled, she looked far different from the little girl who had stood in Arista’s house three years before. Then, she hadn’t known about Bo Cleevil at all, or ghosts for that matter. She had been terrified of Pumpkin. She hadn’t known he had been haunting her house all her life, watching over her, invisible.

  “Pumpkin’s grave,” she whispered, and rushed out of the house. Pumpkin’s grave wasn’t hard to find, it sat just beyond the beehive in Arista’s garden, a big rectangle in the ground with a slab of stone on top engraved with his name. Spirits in the Ever After used their graves as doorways to haunt the Earth—all very routine and proper. There were countless graves gathered around all the towns for this purpose. Though if you tried to use someone else’s grave (or just fell in by mistake), you ended up as a lost soul, doomed to drift about the universe alone forever and ever.

  She gave the stone slab a shove and peered inside. But only a gaping rectangle stared back at her.

  But no, there was something else. A black lump, just in the corner.

  May reached in and lifted it up. A bow and a quiver of silver arrows. Her bow and arrows. Pumpkin had expected her to come back! The bow had once felt awkward on her, but now she shouldered it without a moment’s thought.

  She floated back indoors, into Arista’s study. She stood in front of the broken globe, tracing with her finger a line between the star called the Ever After and the planet Earth. Not knowing what else to do, she settled in for the night, poring over a map of the Ever After, wondering what to do, where to go. Her finger, tracing the map, landed on the capital city of the realm, Ether. Ether was an ancient city, and the Eternal Edifice, in the center of the city, was the oldest in the realm, as old as the Ever After itself. The Edifice was guarded by the magic of the Lady herself, along with the high ghost court. Most especially because it contained The Book of the Dead, which held all the answers to the universe.

  No matter what happened in the Ever After, May was sure that the Eternal Edifice was safe.

  She sank onto her elbows. When she looked up from under her eyebrows, she noticed something glowing red under the map, and lifted it.

  There, underneath, was a piece of paper, carefully folded and pulsing with red light. Against her better judgment, May reached for it and unfolded it. She jerked back when she saw the light was coming from a stamp at the bottom, of a pair of glowing red eyes. Written in dim letters above it were these words:

  Hidey girl and scaredy cat,

  If you are reading this, you have come back to the Ever After. And that was a mistake, but it is not unexpected. I am looking for you. We are both singular sorts of spirits, and there is no way we can avoid one another. Remember, little speck. You will find me, or I will find you.

  There was no signature. Only the red eyes, which May knew were the eyes of Evil Bo Cleevil.

  She looked around the room again. How long ago had this note been put here? Days, weeks, a year? What had happened to Pumpkin and Arista? Had the dark spirits taken them? Had Cleevil? She feared the worst. If she had been here, would she have b
een able to protect them? She pulled out one silver arrow from her pack and stared at it, gleaming, perfectly smooth.

  She stood and with a heavy heart drifted into the spare room and sank into bed. She curled up with the arrow beside her and watched it shining in the dark, wondering. Finally, she lay back and drifted into a fitful sleep. Somber Kitty curled around her head like a pair of earmuffs, watching the door the long night through.

  Whe May woke the following morning, her eyes were on the exact same spot she’d closed them on the night before: the tiny chandelier just above her head. She squinted for a moment, trying to make out what she was seeing.

  She sat straight up. She stood up and squinted. There was something written in the dust that clung to the chandelier. It took her a moment to make the letters out, they were so smudged.

  POD

  “Meow,” Somber Kitty said, sniffing the air.

  There was no telling how long the message had been there. Had it been before the residents of Belle Morte had disappeared, or after? Did it mean what she thought it could mean? May looked at Somber Kitty, then leaped off the bed and hurried into Arista’s study. She unrolled the map of the Ever After again.

  There. May jabbed her finger at the spot on the map. Pit of Despair Amusement Park. It was in the west, south of the city of Ether and west of New Egypt. To get there, they would need to take the great road called the Trans-Realm Floatway, which ran along the Dead Sea, and then hooked west under the city of Ether.

  There were a million reasons why it might turn out to be a dead end. Maybe “Pit of Despair” was not what the letters meant. Maybe the Pit of Despair was no longer standing.

  But it would give her something to work toward until she had more direction. Until the Lady contacted her and told her what she needed to do next. Somewhere along the way, the Lady’s help would surely find her.

  She folded the map into a pocket inside her shroud, tucked Somber Kitty under her arm, and hurried out the front door.

  Back in town, May ducked from building to building. Clutching her arrows tight, and hoping she’d have the courage to use them if she needed to, she scurried back into the Moldy Page and tucked Kitty safely onto one of the shelves, crawling about to find a Goblin-Ghoulish-Zombie to English dictionary and snatch a handful of gold coins from the register, which she didn’t think the spirits of Belle Morte would miss any time soon.

  She laid Kitty in the bicycle basket, covering him with an old, moldy blanket. And they took off, pedaling north.

  Chapter Seven

  Like a Ghost

  The southern bluffs of the Ever After rose to overlook the dark, oily Dead Sea, which stretched off into the horizon as far as the eye could see. May and Kitty wove along the Trans-Realm Floatway, which hugged its outermost curves, May carefully steering the bike, her brows knitted in concentration, for fear that they would tumble over the side and fall into the dark waters below. Even though they could float with their shrouds on, it was very different from flying, and if they wandered off the edge, they would drop like stones into the sea. And any souls touched by even a drop of Dead Sea water would immediately be transported to dungeons in the dark realm far below its surface.

  Kitty sat piggyback, his claws clutching the fabric of May’s shroud, as they wove through towns perched on the cliffs—retirement communities like Shrouded Shores and Restful Recluses advertising skull bowling in the withered front lawns, budget resorts full of cozy graves such as Seaside Sarcophagi, and ritzy beachfront communities full of decrepit, crumbling mausoleums with million-dollar views of the dismal black sea. All were deserted.

  Occasionally they had to stop so May could squint at the map, knowing the Floatway would bring them close to Nine Knaves Grotto, which, of course, was nowhere on the map. The grotto was a secret town full of pirates, bandits, bank robbers, and the like, where May had spent a night with its wild inhabitants and made a dangerous partnership with a shady knave named John the Jibber. Lucius had dwelled very close to there once, hiding with several other boys in the depths of the catacomb cliffs. Maybe he had come back. It seemed like it must be close.

  She climbed off her bike and looked over the side of the cliff, the wind blowing back her long hair in thick black tangles, scanning the area below in either direction—the long, empty beach, the places where the sea oozed against the rocks. Her heart sped up when she spotted the tiniest path, winding down the cliffside.

  With Kitty at her heels she wound down the path, until she was at a gaping hole that sat, like a cavity, in the side of the cliff. She hesitated, looking over her shoulder, then up at the sky. This was the realm of the luminous boys, and they were known to be mischievous. Sometimes too mischievous. The first time May had encountered them, she had ended up locked in a birdcage. She didn’t want that to happen twice.

  Still hovering uncertainly, she noticed something moving in the sky far over the ocean. It looked like black specks of oil at first, as if the water of the Dead Sea had escaped into the air. And then she could make out the separate, manlike figures. Instinctively, she stepped just inside the cool darkness of the cave, reaching out to pull Kitty in too. They waited in silence for a long time. Curiously, May noticed that she couldn’t hear the sound of her own breath. A chill crept from the tips of her toes back through her heels and up to the roots of her hair.

  Above, the creatures got closer. They were indeed men—capes hung from their backs like wings, their faces pale, their hair black and glinting. May knew she should retreat farther into the cave, but she couldn’t look away—soon they were close enough that she could just make out their faces, and then fangs that poked out from their closed lips. Vampires! And then they were directly overhead, and their eyes were swiveling in her direction. At the last moment, May ducked back into the dark. Nothing happened for several seconds.

  When she looked out moments later, they were gone. She waited a few more seconds and then stepped out from the overhang of the cave, peering into the sky all around, and then down at the sea below. A few planks floated on the surface of the water. One of them looked like a sign. May squinted at it: N.K.G. SCHOOL OF THIEVERY AND PICKPOCKETING.

  “They destroyed it.”

  May whipped around. A glowing boy stood in the cave opening. He had red, spiky hair, big ears, freckles, and the unmistakable white glow of a luminous boy. May recovered herself enough to back up a couple of steps.

  “A few years ago,” the boy continued, “right after that living girl took Lucius away. We ventured out the next day, looking for him, and there the ghouls were in the Grotto, tearing it down.”

  May knew the luminous boys rarely ventured out of the Catacombs at all. They were too fearful of what awaited them outside. She cleared her throat, feeling suddenly shy. “Ahem. Is … is Lucius here now?”

  The boy looked her up and down. “Who wants to know?” he growled, obviously trying to sound tough.

  “I’m the girl you were talking about. May Bird. I really need to find Lucius.”

  “Noooo.” The boy shook his head thoughtfully. “No, it wasn’t you. This girl was small, and alive.”

  “I’ve grown,” May said. “But I’m still that living girl.”

  A mischievous grin spread across the boy’s freckled face. “Well, don’t you think you’re tricky.” He thrust out his skinny chest proudly. “I know a living girl when I see one.” He gestured to her translucent, ghostlike body. “And you are not one. You’re a specter, all right.”

  “Oh,” May breathed, realizing the problem. “This is just my death shroud.” She reached to pull back her shroud, throwing it over her shoulders. “See?”

  He looked her up and down, unimpressed, and crossed his arms. “Do I look like I died yesterday?”

  May stared at him for a moment, boggled, and then glanced down at herself. When she saw her own body, she gasped. Nothing had changed. She still floated. She still glowed, translucent, like a ghost.

  She threw the shroud back farther, violently. Then, as if it we
re full of roaches or spiders, she frantically worked on the knot at her neck to untie it, yanking it off her shoulders and dropping it to the ground. She couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. She turned to Somber Kitty and pulled off his shroud. He, too, still hovered, ghosty. She looked at the boy, as if he could help her make sense of it all. Her head was spinning. But he was looking up at the sky, at where the vampires had passed overhead. “They’re always in the sky, looking for her,” the boy whispered.

  “Who are they?” May demanded, her head all jumbled, her heart beating lopsidedly as a one-man band.

  The boy looked at her for a moment, and then his gaze darted to something behind her shoulders, and his eyes widened. In a moment he was a flash of light, zipping off into the depths of the cave. The light of him lingered for a moment longer in the deep shadows of the tunnel and then disappeared, leaving the Catacombs completely black.

  May felt a hard poke jab into her back.

  “Well ain’t it fancy meeting you here?” a gravelly voice said behind her.

  Instinctively May reached for her arrows, but the thing in her back jabbed harder, making her stumble forward. “Eh-eh-eh. Hands up. Turn around real slow like, or yer likely to get all wet.”

  May scanned the ground for Kitty, but he’d disappeared. She raised her hands into the air and swiveled slowly, as a rough hand reached out and slid her bow over her head.

  Three familiar faces greeted her, Somber Kitty squirming in the arms of the figure to the left. May had seen them all before, when Nine Knaves Grotto was still standing. The specter in the center had a scraggly beard, dimpled chubby cheeks, a patch over one eye, and he held a water gun full of Dead Sea water in his left hand.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said, reaching out his grimy free hand. “I’m Peg Leg Petey.” He squinted. “Ye’ve grown like a vine. But it’s you all right.”