“Height?” Nebula asks.
“Uh, five-one, I think,” I say with a shrug.
She gets the rest of my details and then motions with her head toward the back of the room. Demien leads me through another gate, and I almost collide with the largest hoodie I’ve ever seen. Usually we hoodies tend to be on the shorter and slighter side, but he was halo huge, with forearms the size of Christmas hams.
“Hey, Wolf,” Demien says and nods at the Goliath.
Wolf nods back and places his palm on the handle of what looks like a club hanging from his side. Usually I don’t have a hard time calling things for what they are, but this “club” is the size of a tree trunk and has jagged shark teeth embedded into the end of it.
Wolf notices my gaze and a nasty smirk crosses his lips.
“We’ve got ourselves a temp here,” Demien says and motions toward me. “He tried to perform an unauthorized death. Needs a scare, non-permanent, but something he won’t forget.”
“Sure thing, Demien,” a high-pitched voice responds.
I do a double take and look around to see where this helium-induced voice has come from.
“I’ll put him in with Pandora,” the mousy voice screeches.
I whip my head back around and shake it in disbelief. I stare at Wolf’s lips daring him to speak again.
“She should terrify him enough,” Wolf peeps.
I can’t help myself. It starts as a snicker.
“What’s so funny, boy?” Wolf squeaks.
I try, but that takes me over the edge. My snicker leaps to a full laugh, and I can feel the tears start to form in my eyes. I’m terrified of this ogre with a leprechaun’s voice, but it’s too much. The next thing I notice is Wolf’s meaty hand rise above me and come down on the top of my head. All goes black, and in my dreams I am transported to a world of rainbow rivers, purple meadows, and talking gummy bears.
five
I assume I’m still dreaming as I skip hand in hand with a peach-colored gummy bear through a cotton candy forest. Another gummy bear jumps on my shoulders, and we start to sing some show tune that my mom really likes. Yes, even our moms listen to that stuff.
After a few notes, I also learn that I am an exceptional tap dancer as I do a solo routine across a candy corn walkway. Don’t make that face; I’m dreaming. I suppose you’ve never had a dream that was a little on the weird side?
I feel a soft raindrop splash on my forehead. I look up and see puffy-cheeked clouds with tears of joy springing from their eyes. My dancing has touched them so much that they’ve become emotional. Another teardrop hits my forehead, but with a bit more force this time.
I look up at the clouds and say, “It’s okay, guys. I don’t eat watermelons.” When I said it, it seemed a perfectly normal thing to say to a cloud. It doesn’t help; they continue to weep for joy, and another huge teardrop hits my forehead and knocks me forcefully to the ground.
I blink, and the clouds have disappeared. My head begins to throb. Through a fog I see rusted bars and a grizzly-faced woman leaning over me. Her hair hangs like greasy spaghetti clumps around her face. I assume she has eyes, but they are buried into her skull and hidden by deep shadows. She has a fuller beard than my dad, and a piece of boiled egg hangs tangled in wisps of her mustache. Her back curves like a question mark causing her head to stick out from her body like a turtle’s. A guttural sound escapes her throat, and she purses her thin lips. A chunky loogie drips down. Before I can move, it smacks me directly in the forehead.
“Hey!” I scream and jump to my knees. I’ve moved too fast, and my vision starts to swirl and flip. Everything starts to go dark again, but I grab one of the nearby bars and steady myself. My surroundings start to calm, and gradually the sensation of pitching and reeling as if I am in a sea storm tapers off.
I can hear the loogie-hacking hag chuckling at me between scratchy coughs. I nearly rip my shirtsleeve off to wipe away the pool of phlegm that has collected in my eyebrows.
“That’s disgusting!” I bark.
The hag is still laughing, but then without warning, she is attacked by a series of grating coughs that cause her to double over. She spits onto the floor and grimaces as she caresses her throat.
“You were singing, singing,” she wheezes. “Sounded like a dying animal!”
I look around. The cell is narrow but long, at least twenty feet. It has two sagging bed frames and a solitary chair that leans dangerously to the left. Rusted steel bars make up one of the long walls; the other three are made of ancient stone. Hundreds of etchings have been carved into them, mementos from former visitors.
Another cell lies parallel to mine across a wide walkway. It has identical furnishings, but seems vacant. I turn my attention back to my cell mate. She is still caressing her throat and eyeing me with a decayed smile.
“Gave you a scare, didn’t I!” she shouts.
“You were spitting on me,” I growl.
She folds her arms and cocks her head to one side.
“And that’s the thanks I get!” she says. “Suppertime coming up, coming up, and you were gonna sleep right through it! Where would you be then, I ask you? Sad and starving, sad and starving! You’d be begging Pandora for a bite! No, no, I would say! Pandora doesn’t share her supper! Not with a starving boy, not with starving rats, not with nobody!”
With that, Pandora drops suddenly into a crouching position and begins caressing the floor like she was petting the back of some long-lost pet.
“Nobody, I say!” she yells, still fixated on the ground.
I try to take a step backward to create some space between me and the craziest old bat I’ve ever seen, but my calf hits the base of one of the beds, and I teeter.
“Nowhere to run! Nowhere to hide!” she screams.
I catch myself before I fall. “Why are you yelling?” I ask. “I’m right here.”
She blinks and sniffs once. She doesn’t answer; instead, she pulls out some strands of hair from her scalp and places them lovingly on the floor.
I navigate myself to the far end of the bed and sit down, keeping one eye on Pandora.
“Meat loaf and corn! Meat loaf and corn!” she yells.
“Ugh. I hate meat loaf,” I say under my breath.
Pandora stops pulling hairs out and glances up at me.
“More for Pandora then, yes?” she asks without screaming at me.
“Yes, you can have all my meat loaf and corn,” I say.
Pandora’s eyes mist over, and her face contorts into a hideous smile. Moving faster than her age should allow, she springs over and grapples me into a fierce bear hug.
“Get off! Get off!” I shout, trying to squirm away. Pandora must do a lot of working out in the Lock’s gym because she’s got the grip of an orangutan. Her arms are just about as hairy as one too.
I can’t break free. I nearly faint from her rancid breath, but just as I think I’m going to give up the ghost, she releases me. She doesn’t go far. She sidles up to me, nearly sitting on my leg.
“Love you! Love you, Meatloaf-and-Corn! So what did Meatloaf-and-Corn do? Whatcha do?” she asks.
“My name is Night.”
“No, nope, nopers, Meatloaf-and-Corn!”
“Whatever,” I say, scooting away from her but nearly slip off the bed. She won’t have it. She bounces over to sit right next to me. I try to get up, but she grabs me by the belt loop and tugs me back onto the bed.
“Talkity-talk now, Meatloaf-and-Corn,” she says.
I try to get up again, but I can tell she’s got a fistful of belt in her hand, and I don’t budge from my spot on the bed.
“I was practicing for my Death’s Academy entrance exam,” I peep.
“Bad Meatloaf, bad Corn. Offed someone illegally, did you, bad boy?” she asks with a grin.
“Not someone. A half-dead chipmunk and he got away.”
She lets out a machine-gun laugh and smacks her knee. A cloud of dust erupts from her pants, and I gag.
“Not very good, are you? Not very good! You’ll never get in, nope, nope, nope!” She laughs. Her cackle doesn’t last long. She doubles over once again with a vicious series of coughs. I use this distraction to jump away and cradle myself against the far corner.
Her cough eventually subsides, and I brace myself for another encounter with this crazy hag. However, what she does next catches me off guard. Tears spring from her eyes and she smears them away with her dirt-caked serape, or poncho, or whatever that mustard-yellow piece of clothing is that she’s wearing. The cloth is so dirty that it paints mud around her eyes, making them look even more sunken in than before.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that she isn’t pawing all over me, but this whole crying thing is a bit unnerving. A sob erupts from her chest, and she scoots herself on the bed so I can only see her quivering back.
Against my better judgment, I speak. “What’s wrong?”
“No, not going to say,” she says between sniffs. “Okay, I’ll say … I remembered Pandora taught at Death’s Academy, before you, before this,” she croaks and starts to wring her hands together. “Pandora was famous. A great professor, she had many students. More than she can count.” She folds her arms tightly into her chest. “Not anymore.”
I don’t think my eyebrows could get any higher on my forehead. There is no way that this batty creature could have ever taught at Death’s Academy.
“Pandora wasn’t always this way. Pandora wasn’t confused and silly,” she says and then pushes herself up from the bed. She stands more erectly than before and brushes her hair from her face. Taking measured steps, she reaches the cell bars and grasps them with her hands.
She glances over at me, a bit of light from the flickering torch illuminating her eyes. They are red from crying but seem steady and in control. She looks away and places her forehead on the iron bar.
“What happened?” I ask.
She doesn’t move from the spot, but releases an exhausted sigh.
“Pandora taught a lot of classes—Death Construction, Animal Languages, the Art of Lightning Strikes—but her favorite was History of Death,” she says with a voice that seems to be carried from far away. “She taught about the first Death and the origin of his power, also about the beginning of Death’s civilization. She loved to teach.”
Without meaning to, I can feel myself ungluing from the corner of the cell and taking a step toward her.
She shakes her head as if she is trying to dislodge a painful memory. “She was also vain and sought praise from others. She forgot what she loved most; she forgot about teaching and began only to do research. She scoured the world. She discovered many amazing things from the past, but she also found something else … Something up north …” Her voice trails off to just above a whisper. She raises her head from the iron bar, and her gaze rests on me.
“What? What did you find?” I ask.
“I found them,” she says, her eyes unfocused for a moment, and she blinks.
“Who?”
“Hundreds of them, hiding, waiting … an entire city. They captured Pandora. Tortured Pandora, made her tell them all about our great secret.”
“Great secret?”
“The Scythe of Grim, the foundation of all our powers,” she whispers. “Without it we would cease to be what we are. Without it we would cease to exist. They forced me to tell them where it was hidden.”
“The Scythe of Grim?” I ask and notice that I have taken another few steps toward her.
She licks her lips. “It’s here,” she wheezes and stomps her foot on the stone floor. “Below us, locked away. They want it. They want to pay us back, to destroy us all.” Her eyes slip again out of focus, and she wavers on the spot.
“Who wants to destroy us?”
“Pandora escaped, but no one would believe me, believe me.” As she speaks, her back begins to curve and droop.
“Who was it, Pandora?” I ask, grabbing her by the elbow.
Her glance darts to my face, but I can tell she is looking beyond me, and her expression goes vacant right before my eyes.
“Pandora?”
“Unicorns,” she whispers and then laughs out loud, patting me on my head. She turns away and shuffles to the stone wall and knocks on it. She knocks again and then places her ear up against it.
“Hello!” she yells and chuckles. “Hello!”
She turns to me. “I came here last week, last week. We have an appointment. Yes, we do, an appointment. They are home, yep, yep. I’ll wait.” She then flops onto the ground facing the wall and stares at it. Occasionally she reaches forward and acts like she is about to knock again, but stops herself by slapping her hand down and shaking a finger at it. “Don’t be rude.”
I lean up against the iron bars. Hundreds of unicorns? She really must be crazy. The unicorns have been extinct for at least fifty years. Even I, a hoodie who hasn’t been to Death’s Academy, know that. I smile as I watch her slap her hand away again.
“Old loon,” I whisper and peer through the bars and down the torchlit walkway.
She’s got to be making it up. If there were hundreds of unicorns, the Sickles would know all about it … But if they didn’t know and she is telling the truth—well, let’s just say we hoodies would be in real danger.
“Midnight Smith!” a voice squeaks.
I turn to see the gargantuan guard Wolf striding down the walkway.
“Your parents are here.”
six
As soon as our car passes through the Lock’s gate and out onto the city street, my mom whips around in her seat. Her face is purple and her eyes are about to pop out of her head.
“Midnight Smith, you are grounded! No friends, no skull ball, no anything for, for, for—”
“A very long time,” my dad pipes in.
“Longer than that!” she barks and turns back in her seat, taking out her frustration on her seat belt.
“A very, very long time,” my dad says with a nervous glance at my mom.
“But we have the big skull ball game tomorrow. It’s the championship! I’m the roller! I can’t miss the game—the whole team is counting on me,” I protest.
“You should’ve thought of that sooner,” my mom says.
“We’re disappointed in you, son,” my dad interjects.
“Disappointed? We’re a heaven of a lot more than disappointed!” she growls. “Not only that, but you pull this stunt right before the Reapless? We’re leaving in two days! You know we look forward to it all year. Your dad and I don’t have time to deal with you and get everything ready to leave.”
“I still don’t know why it’s such a big deal. They let me go,” I say.
My mom gives me a look that … well, let’s just say I’m lucky I’m not within striking distance because I’d have a handprint across my cheek right now. I’m not going to tell you which cheek, though.
She grits her teeth and growls, “Internal Affairs has contacted Aunt Dementia, and they are inquiring how her chipmunk death schedule fell into your hands. She might be facing a disciplinary tribunal!”
“Mom, I’m sorry. I wanted to get some practice before my next pre-exam,” I say with as sad a face and voice as I can muster. “You saw the grade I got on the first one. I mean if I had a benefactor—”
“No, no! We’re not having this conversation again,” my mom blurts out.
“But, Mom, how do I stand a chance to get into the Academy if I can’t practice? You had a benefactor. Dad had one. It’s not fair!”
“We have told you now a thousand and one times. We can’t afford one. With your dad being bumped down to part-time at the prison and my two jobs, we’re just scraping by,” she says. “Besides, you have your dad. He can help you get ready.”
I can’t believe my mom was actually able to say that last part with a straight face.
“Are you kidding me? Dad? With his help I might as well not even show up for the exam,” I say.
My mom makes a noise that almost sounds like
she is agreeing with me. I glance up into the rearview mirror. My dad’s scowl has deepened, and I notice his grip on the steering wheel tighten and twist, the sun-bleached rubber cracks underneath his hands. He is probably thinking of wringing my neck, but you know what? It’s true. My dad is an absolute embarrassment. Everywhere I go, when someone hears my last name, they automatically ask who my dad is. When I tell them, “Obsidian Smith,” they get this look on their faces as if I just farted up their nose.
No one will tell me exactly what happened, but what I have been able to piece together over the years is that my dad made one of the biggest bungles in the history of death. In fact, hoodies my parents’ age will say things like, “I pulled an Obsidian” when they do something really dumb. How would you like to have that trailing after you your whole life? Yep, it sucks.
“You’re just going to have to make do, Night. I’m trying to keep our family afloat, and my jobs don’t leave me enough time to breathe, let alone get you ready for the exam. You need to take responsibility and get yourself ready,” she says.
I open my mouth to retort when she adds, “Legally.”
My shoulders slump.
“Oh goodness, look at the time. I told them I would be back at the office ten minutes ago. You’re going to need to drop me off first,” my mom says.
We drive in silence to her office, and she doesn’t even wait for the car to come to a complete stop before she’s out the door and running up the sidewalk.
“I’ll put your dinner in the fridge!” my dad calls after her.
She waves her hand back at us and then disappears into the building. The car lurches forward, and I take a deep breath while folding my arms.
“When we get home, you need to just go up to your room and stay there until dinner, got it?” my dad says.
“Whatever,” I spit back.
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