Rogue
Authors: Gina Damico
Copyright © 2013 by Gina Damico
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file
.
eISBN 978-0-544-15153-6
v1.0913
For Gamma and Papa
This may sound weird, but I must first and foremost give thanks to the following things: bread, boredom, and crossword puzzles. This is because the idea for
Croak
first popped into my head while I was working at a bread store, bored out of my mind, and doing a crossword puzzle. This is the definitive, winning formula for book ideas, folks. Write it down.
And what a strange, wonderful, carbo-loaded journey it’s been since then! It’s hard to believe this series is over, and even harder to say goodbye to the characters that have been renting a room in my noggin for all these years. I know, I know—someone prep the straitjacket—but in my mind they’re all Velveteen Rabbits: when you love them, they become real. I’ll miss them.
What’s that? I’m supposed to be thanking people who aren’t works of fiction?
Fine. As always, huge thanks to my agent, Tina Wexler, the dollop of ice creiss>am to my deep-fried Oreo, who has truly made me a better writer, and who, if she ever left her job as an agent—which she must NEVER EVER DO—I think could make a real career out of being one of those cops who talks troubled people down from very tall precipices.
Thank you to my editor, Julie Tibbott, for believing in these little stories of mine, and for paying me awesome compliments like “I admire your willingness to kill off your characters,” which is really just a polite way of saying, “I think you might actually be a serial killer, and I’m fine with it.”
These books would be nothing but doorstops without the tireless efforts of everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, including my publicist Jenny Groves—who, when I tell her I want to plan borderline insane things like a two-week road trip book tour, somehow approves of such madness—and Carol Chu, Betsy Groban, Julia Richardson, and Maxine Bartow.
Thanks also to Stephanie Thwaites and Catherine Saunders at Curtis Brown UK, who think that my stories have enough potential to cause international incidents, and Liz Farrell and Katie O’Connor at ICM, and Audible, for allowing me to assault my readers’ ears as well as their eyes.
Thank you to Kelley Travers, photographer extraordinaire, whom I have unforgivably forgotten to thank until now, which is why she gets her very own paragraph.
To the Apocalypsies and all the other authors I’ve had the fortune to meet in the past year or so: you are some amazing people. Maybe a little too amazing, actually. Knock it off.
Teachers and librarians: You are the glue that holds this world together. You hear me? YOU ARE GLUE. Whenever I get to meet one of you, I’m bowled over by your enthusiasm and love for spreading the magic of reading to students. You make my cold, shriveled heart grow three sizes every time, and I so appreciate and respect what you do.
To all the bloggers and booksellers that have spread the Croaky love: Thank you so much for embracing these books, in all their offbeat glory. You, in all
your
offbeat glory, rock.
Thank you to my family and friends, many of whom probably never would have picked up a YA series about grim reapers on their own, but who genuinely seem to enjoy it now that it’s been foisted upon them. I’m very grateful for your love and support, and I promise next time to not write something so dark and morbid. (Note: I will not keep this promise.)
To Alphonse Damico, Mary Damico, and Laurie Mezza- lingua: You are missed. I hope you’re knocking elbows with some very cool people in the afterlife.
To all the creatures living in my house: Will, thanks for staying married to me even though the vows did not read “in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, through first drafts and revisions, to the brink of insanity and back”; Fezzik, you’re distracting, and you’ve now eaten roughly 85 percent of my possessions but you’re still a very cute dog; Lenny and Carl, sorry we got a dog; and to the squirrel that took up residence in our walls and basement during the writing of this book, WTF GET OUT.
No thanks to leaf blowers, and the neighbors who use them constantly. It’s called a rake, people.
Finally, thank you times a billion to you, the readers and fans. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to hear back from all sorts of people—guys and gals, teens and not-so-teens, humans and cyborgs—and learn that these stories and characters have resonated with so many of you. It’s nice to know that if these places I go to inside my head were real, there’d be a whole bunch of friends there to hang out and drink Yoricks with me. I love you all.
Which is why I feel so bad about spring-loading these pages with blow darts. Duck and enjoy!
Grotton wondered, for a brief moment, if there were a special circle of hell reserved for someone like him—or if Dante would have to cobble together an entirely new one.
“Please,” the farmer at his feet moaned. “Please.”
Other than delivering a small kick to shut the man up, Grotton ignored him and went back to his task. He had to keep his wits about him, or this would never work.
The heavy smoke had darkened the thatched roof of the farmer’s hut, but some small bits of light had begun to edge back in. Grotton picked up his scythe—a heavy stone made from lead, forged by his own two hands. The best blacksmith in the village, they’d called him, back before the rumors started.
He smiled at the irony, how the only people who were able to confirm that the rumors were true never lived long enough to tell anyone.
Case in point: the cowering, dirty wretch on the ground, worlds away from the puffed-up, righteous man he’d been up until a few moments before, as if someone had pricked him and let all the air out. Every few moments his gaze would dart to the two still lumps beside him, but he’d quickly squeeze his eyes shut and let out another whimper.
“I was only protecting our village,” he moaned. “With a demon in our midst—”
“I’m not a demon.” Grotton knew better than to engage in conversation with the brute, but the words came regardless. “I hurt no one.”
The farmer looked up at him, a swath of greasy hair falling over his eyes. “A
demon
,” he insisted. “Stalking through the night, taking the souls of—”
“Of people who are already dead.”
Dead and cold and filling with mold, his students liked to say. There’d certainly been no shortage of test subjects for them—the Great Plague had made sure of that. They’d called themselves reapers, which Grotton had found amusing at first—and, as their experiments continued with increased success, oddly appropriate. He was glad his students had not been identified; perhaps they’d be able to rejoin him after he fled the village.
After he’d taken care of this one loose end.
“You hurt no one?” the farmer growled. Perhaps he knew what awaited him; but then again, even Grotton did not know. They were breaking fresh ground today, the two of them—the scientist and his lab rat. “How can you say that?”
“You mistake my words,” said Grotton. “I hurt no one—until
today
.”
To illustrate this, he administered another kick, this time to one of the little lumps lying next to the man. That did it—whatever small amounts of bravado the man had conjured now melted away. He dissolved into sobs, putting his thick hands over his eyes to block the view of the blood seeping out of his children’s skulls in thin rivulets, draining to the sunken center of the floor.
“Please,” he said again. “Mercy.”
“Mercy?” Grotton almost laughed. “Like the kind you showed my family?” He knelt down to look the man in the eye and spoke calmly and evenly. “Setting fire to a man’s home, roasting his wife and children alive—that sort of mercy?”
“I thought you were with them . . . We needed to be rid of you, all of you, demons—”
Grotton slapped him across the face. The man went quiet.
Grotton stood back up and wiped his red-stained hands on a towel. “I already
have
shown you mercy.”
The man made a noise of disbelief. “How?”
“Your children,” Grotton explained in a measured voice, “are merely dead.” He walked over to another heap on the ground, this one charred and black. “Your wife did not fare as well; she is Damned, her soul noed, her in unbearable pain as we speak.”
The farmer cried out, no doubt replaying in his mind the way Grotton’s hands had squeezed her skin and set her on fire, black smoke bursting out of her body and filling the room.
“Yet neither of those fates,” Grotton finished, “are as odious as yours will be.”
By now the man could barely speak. “I—I—”
“You set the fire,” Grotton said, his voice growing thick, the taste of revenge on his tongue. “You made your choice.”
“No, please—”
The scythe in Grotton’s hand was already black, but now an even denser shadow seemed to burst out of it, surrounding his hand—as if it were glowing, but with darkness instead of light. He raised it above his head, allowed himself one last look at the man’s terrified eyes, brought the blade down into his chest—
And the room went dark.
“So all that really happened? What you did to the farmer, all those years ago?”
Grotton nodded. “More or less.”
A pause. “Think you can do it one more time?”
“If you brought what I asked for.”
His guest emptied the requested items onto the table. They clinked and bounced, producing a sound like wind chimes. “Here.”
Grotton leaned forward, his face aglow in the light of the burning candle. “Then I believe we have a deal.”
Driggs’s hair was still wet.
That’s the odd thought that popped into Lex’s head as they ran. She and Driggs and Uncle Mort were fleeing a mob of angry villagers—in the middle of the night, through a thick forest, and in a blizzard, no less—so it wasn’t as if there weren’t other things to focus on.
Yet she couldn’t take her eyes off his hair, which had been that way since he’d died of hypothermia a few hours before. Shouldn’t it have dried a little by now? They’d stopped in Grotton’s relatively warm cabin long enough for at least some of it to have evaporated. But he still looked soaked, making his dark brown hair spikier and more chaotic than it usually was.
Appropriate
, Lex thought bitterly. Drowned hair, drowned life. Just when she thought she’d stumbled upon some evidence that proved Driggs
hadn’t
just been turned into a ghost—those fleeting moments when he went solid, his fingers physically brushing up against hers as they ran—here was this hair thing, slapping her in the face.
Determined, Lex reached out for Driggs’s hand but grabbed only air—not because her aim was off, but because air was what his hand was made of at the moment. She slowed her sprinting pace to a jog and tried to look straight into his eyes, but the way his head was fading in and out of existence made it somewhat difficult to figure out where his eyes actually were.