Orphan of Mythcorp (21 page)

“
Wow,” Izzy said. “That was a little
melodramatic, don’t you think?”

“
I’m sorry,” I managed. “It’s just—”
But the girl had wandered over to my cot and found the bottle. She
popped it open.

“
If the rumor-mill is to be believed,”
she said, setting the bottle down and walking over to me, “you
returned only last night. Which means Miss Little could only have
given you this bottle this morning, seven hours ago.
Correct?”

“
Right,” I said. Her motherly tone and
the disapproving scrunching of her brows reminded me of Ava, or
rather, a miniature Ava.

“
And since the school doesn’t normally
stock pharmaceuticals, I’d guess no one else has dipped into this
bottle; so you must’ve swallowed twice the recommend
dosage.”

I hobbled over to my cot, plopped down. Felt
a smidge better. Now our peepers were almost level (sure as sure
she had nice peepers, but that was probably not why I felt better).
“Actually, Miss Little gave a few to Gareth. So technically I might
be within the recommended . . . um, sodage—” I couldn’t think
clearly.

“
Technically,” Izzy snorted. And then
she just stared.

Spun and dumb as I was, many ticks passed by
before I realized she was waiting for me to ask “Did you want
something to drink?”

“
No, but
you
should drink some Listerine or something,
your breath is nasty.” When I didn’t immediately get up, she
digressed as only girls can. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking
about what you said the other day.” She set her crutch on my cot
and, with a bit of an effort, raised herself up along beside
me.

A girl was on my cot.

I always suspected I was The Man.

‘
Well say something you dickless goof,’
Castor said. ‘You think the tiny chick is going to wait all day for
you to make your move? Come on, at least say hello, you useless
mound of flaccid flesh.’

I searched the drawer of my nightstand,
spotting the bottle on top as I rummaged. I knew I would pop
another couple pills as soon as Izzy left. I drew out a pack of
gum, started chewing on a couple sticks, and offered some to
Izzy.

Izzy ignored me. She’d discovered the
manuscripts, which I’d foolishly left on the blanket. “How did you
get these? I thought they were all destroyed.”

“
You know about them?”

“
Of course,” she answered, holding up
the third script, titled PHILICITY. “My mom told me about
the
Mythcorp Trilogy
, said she
had one when she was twenty-one, but FBI guys came and took them.”
She set the manuscript down, inspected my draggled form. “These are
the originals, aren’t they?”

“
Yes.” Another gut-wrencher attacked as
I answered.

“
How’d you . . . What are you doing
with them? Are you planning something?”

I paused to consider my answer. Looked back
at the bottle on the bed stand. Now that I’d puked up the morphine,
I was unfortunately mostly sober, so now all my spooks were showing
up: in addition to Castor and Marie and Naked Charlie, Felix and
Her Royal Highness were milling about, inspecting Izzy with looks
of disapproval on their eternally buggered faces.

And my hands were jittering again. I twisted
on the cot to reach for the bottle, and groaned as I ripped open a
few welts. Izzy hopped down and hobbled to the bed stand, swiped
the bottle and dropped it in her bag. “I think you’ve had quite
enough of these, mister.” She glowered. “They’re going to destroy
your kidneys, or give you bleeding ulcers or something. “Lift your
shirt.”

“
Excuse me?”

She hopped back up onto the bed and started
to lift my shirt, but her itty-bitty arms made it impossible for
her to raise it past my chest. Even so, she got a good peep at the
snaky wounds. “Jeez out loud. The Iconocops did this to you?” She
was talking about the welts on my back too, the ones Faustus had
administered.

“
Yeah.”

Izzy ran her hand along my back, drew
it around to my chest, brushing my flesh with hers. If not for the
pain, it would’ve been glorious and—at least in
my
noodle—intimate. With Castor the Perverted
Ghost and Charlie the Nudist Spook bouncing in the background, I
felt like an anatomy class guinea pig. I flinched under her
touch.

“
Ooh, I’m sorry,” she jerked her hand
back. “Did I hurt you? They look infected.”

“
No,” I assured her. “They’re just like
megabomb sensitive. I need to apply another layer of this ointment
crap Miss Little gave me. I can do the front but . . . I guess I
got to get Ava or someone to apply it to my back.” Ah yes, how
deviously clever of me.

“
Ava?” Izzy wondered. “She’s the female
Morai, right? Is she like, your bitch?”

“
What? No. She’s a friend. Jeez.” I
began to apply the ointment to my chest, starting with the recently
opened welts. When I finished with the front, I made a show of
struggling to reach the back.

Izzy grabbed the bottle from me and laughed.
“Give me that.” I liked her laugh, it was honest and alluring. She
was gentle. I shivered, hoping she noticed neither that nor my
other inadvertent gesture of appreciation. “You know, you’re not
nearly as clever as you think. There was nothing subtle about that
devious ploy you just pulled.”

“
And yet the result is the same,” I
boasted. “You think you can you reach all the way
around?”

“
Hey, I may be a little person, or a
smidge girl, as your pals put it,” she continued applying the
ointment while I observed the bottle in her purse, itching to pop a
few caplets, “but I can do anything Ava can do.”

“
I’ll bet you can.”

Finished, Izzy went to wash her hands in the
bathroom. Meanwhile, Castor checked her out. “Hey,” I whispered.
“Isn’t there some zipperdick you’re supposed to be spying on?”

He snapped off a totally un-witty one-liner
before bamfing away.

For some inexplicable reason (I fed my ego by
convincing myself it was due to my charm and rugged good looks)
Miss Izzy kept me company for the next few hours, missing four
classes and giving excuses for her presence on my bed whenever one
of my fellow orphans wandered in to grab a book.

We spent that time reading the
manuscripts, gleaning loads of info on Knox and the Mythcorp War
and on Alexander and Nimrod. By Final Bell we’d perused all three
scripts and declared ourselves experts on all things Mythcorp. The
feeling was not as pleasant as you’d think. Sickly, in fact. There
was a reason all copies of the
Mythcorp
Trilogy
had been burned.

I couldn’t even process the emotions I
suddenly had concerning my so-called mother, who’d turned out to be
a nasty hermaphroditic witch—and that was before she’d been sent to
some Void and transformed into a spirit-goddess-thingy. Way too
much to process.

“
So,” Izzy said as Camelot began
filling up with Morai. “You’re going to try to break him out,
aren’t you?”

She meant my father, who, at the end of the
War, had been cryogenically frozen inside Mythcorp. The reason he’d
been unceremoniously banished to the land of quasi-eternal-buggery?
The same reason the manuscripts had been burned: he knew too much,
and a lot of people wanted to see him swinging at the end of a
short rope.

“
Heck yeah I’m going to break him out,”
I whispered. “But we’ve got three major problems: First, we have to
find a way to break
in
to
Mythcorp.”

“
Incredibly impossible,” Izzy drawled.
“You think that Gabriel gangster still has his people positioned on
the tops of the buildings in Virgil’s Nave?”

“
Considering Murphy’s Law? Absolutely
he does. Second problem: the impregnable doors.”

“
Opened only by keyed cards we don’t
have and cannot get,” Izzy said. “Check.”

I nodded with a smile, but this was no
laughing matter. “Problemo the third: if my paranoia is correct,
Ash is already working on getting inside, and he’ll probably do it
with the help of the Mayor—and right soon like too.”

“
How do you know?”

How droll could I be without coming off as a
jerk? “I have my sources.” Very droll, apparently.

Castor bamfed into existence between me and
Izzy just as the dwarf was about to speak. I jerked back on the
cot, startling her. “You all right?” Meanwhile Castor was waving
his hands and blathering on about something.

“
Ah, yeah,” I stammered. “Hey, I could
use some water.”

“
You’ve got legs,” Izzy snorted. “Nice
long skinny legs. Get me some water too while you’re about it.
What? You have any idea what a hassle it is for a little person to
get a glass of water?”

“
Right,” I said. “Sorry.” As I stood
and hobbled over to the stainless steel kitchen at the back of
Camelot, I could hear Castor arguing with Marie. No idea what they
were arguing about, though.

While puttering around in the kitchen,
appreciating for the first time in my life how easy it was to get a
glass of water, Castor wafted over to me. ‘They’re going to get
inside Mythcorp,’ he ranted. I’d never seen him so animated, even
when mocking me. ‘Did you hear me, Morgan? Your pal Ash is going to
get inside Mythcorp, soon. And he’s got no interest in your
excuse-for-a-father.”

“
Then what exactly does he
want?”

Castor jerry-rigged his ripped up face into
an ‘are-you-serious’ expression. ‘They froze the Sorcerer too. Do I
have to spell it out for you? Ash is going to wake the Sorcerer and
use him to manipulate congress into reopening that bastard of a
corporation, with Ash as lord of all he surveys, the creepy little
manfac.’

I thought about it. “Of course. Why didn’t I
realize that?”

‘
Ah, because you’re about as smart as a
horseshoe,’ Castor offered.

‘
Leave him alone, Cas,’ Naked Charlie
chimed in, bouncing over to us in the kitchen.

‘
Yeah,’ Marie agreed. ‘He’s just
getting used to the fact that his father is a—’

‘
A first rate scumbag?’ Castor
said.

“
What do you expect me to do about it?”
I asked them. The kitchen was getting crowded and if anyone noticed
me meandering around to avoid the dead-heads, they’d probably think
me loony-tunes. “Call his mom? He hasn’t got one of those. Tell a
teacher or an Iconocop? Fat lot of good that’ll do; they’re all
either Mesmerized or afraid of Ash.”

‘
Oh my God, what a whiny little
pissant,’ Castor said. ‘Marie, it’s time you took over. If this
skinny jerkoff isn’t going to prevent the reopening of Mythcorp,
then we’ve got to do it ourselves.’

Marie retreated, floating backwards out of
the kitchen through the large center island. ‘No. I promised Knox
I’d never do that again.’

‘
If you don’t do it, I will,’ Castor
threatened. My left hand, grasping Izzy’s glass of water, was
jittering. What the flip were these crazy spooks going on about?
‘If I do it,’ Castor continued, ‘I’ll enjoy it—a lot. Now do it,
Marie. Do it!’

I peeped at Marie. “Do what? What is he
talking about?” But I knew. In MYTHICON, Marie had found a way to
temporarily possess Knox. He’d lost consciousness during her
possession, and woke up covered in blood in the car of the man
who’d been chasing him. A raging migraine had accompanied his
waking.

Izzy called my name just as Marie zoomed
towards me, apologizing. ‘Sorrysorrysorry.’

‘
Get up, Morgan!’ Castor’s voice
intruded on my sleep. ‘Get up off your ass. That Hunter scumbag is
coming and he doesn’t look happy.’

I tried to pry open my peepers, but they felt
glued shut, heavy with caked crap.

‘
Oh please wake up,’ Marie this time,
sounding like a woman pleading for her kidnapped boy to be
released. ‘Felix says he doesn’t see Malthus anywhere and you can’t
fight Nimrod off on your own. Oh Jesus, please wake him up.
Morgan!’

I was wondering why she didn’t just try to
possess me again if she wanted me up so badly. But then, maybe
pulling the old spook-possession-snafu robs spooks of their
ectoplasmic zest. Either way I didn’t want to be around when Nimrod
showed. So I raised my hands—which also felt all gummed up with
crap—to my peepers and pried open the lids.

“
Owee.”

Marie, shining bright in the dying light of
day, was the first thing I saw. Not an altogether unpleasant way to
wake up. After blinking a zillion times, I sat up and had a peek
around.

“
What the flip?” noticing the dried,
purplish fluid coating my hands. “Whose blood is this?”

Not one of my spooks dared answer. Through
the pavement I could feel the thud of someone heavy pounding my
way. “Whose. Blood. Is. This?”

Bile rose. Hands jittered. Butt rumpled from
the thud of approaching bad news, and despite lingering heat from
the spring day, my flesh was ice. Marie floated towards me, Castor
lingering behind with a kooky expressing screwing up his ugly face.
‘It’s Sanson’s. Castor made you attack Sanson with that,’ pointing
a partially transparent finger at my cane sword, which lay open;
the tip of the blade was covered in sticky redness.

“
What?” I gasped. “Castor took over? I
thought he wasn’t going to.”

‘
Yeah,’ Castor ghosted up to me. He
could not hide the smirk, even behind a network of scars. ‘But what
you think and what happens is not always the same thing. In
fact—”