Suck It Up and Die (40 page)

She focused her mind on her human form—like Morning had once told her when she had grilled him about CDing—and was stunned by how quickly she exploded back to herself. Her preening sense of accomplishment was cut short by the breeze coming in the window, which not only goose-pimpled her legs but made her realize that she was—except for an X-shaped Band-Aid on the back of her neck—butt naked.

The president’s hand gripped the front of the desk as he started to pull himself up.

Despite being human again, Zoë’s nervous system fired with birdlike speed. She grabbed the presidential flag standing next to the window and threw it around herself.

The president’s head rose behind his hand gripping the desk. His grimace of pain expanded to stunned disbelief as he spotted the girl wrapped in the blue presidential flag. “Where did you—” His eyes narrowed with recognition. “Wait a minute. You’re Zoë Zotz, the girl who got turned by—”

“Yes, yes,” Zoë cut in, “by Morning McCobb, but it wasn’t Morning McCobb, but I don’t have time to explain that now!” Then, remembering who she had just interrupted, added, “Mr. President.” While clutching the flag in front of her with her right arm, Zoë reached her left hand up to the back of her neck.

The president, certain she was reaching for a weapon, opened his mouth to shout, but a new back spasm strangled the sound in a painful gasp.

Zoë ripped the Band-Aid holding the flash drive off her neck. Still clutching the flag with her right arm, she stepped forward to put the flash drive on the president’s desk. “You have to watch this right now. It’s footage of—” Having forgotten the flag was attached to a stand and a pole with a sharp finial on top, she pulled the pole over. It toppled toward the desk.

Possessing the hyperacute senses of a vampire, Zoë saw it unfold in slow motion. She flipped the Band-Aid/flash drive on the desk—reached her left hand across her body for the falling pole—realized if she turned and reached far enough to catch the pole she would expose herself to the president—yanked her hand back in time to stop herself from becoming an Oval Office flasher.

The flagpole finial hit the desk like a machete, and stuck.

The president grimaced with a new pain: knowing his legacy would now include a deep gash in the desk that had been used by presidents since John F. Kennedy.

“Sorry!” Zoë yelped as she grabbed her flag-cover with her left hand and yanked the finial out of the desk with her right. “It was the pole or …”

“You made the right call,” the president sighed. Using the desk, he hauled himself up. “Tell you what, Ms. Zotz. I promise to watch the footage on that flash drive, right now, if you promise to leave the way you came, right now.”

“I promise,” Zoë blurted. “But do you really promise?”

“I’m not only the president, I’m a father. I never break promises to young ladies.”

Before she finished saying “Cool” and flashing him a big smile, Zoë realized how ridiculous she looked. Draped in a flag and holding a spearlike flagpole, she probably resembled a twisted version of Joan of Arc.

She backed up, made sure the flagpole was steady on its stand, and closed her eyes. An instant later the flag collapsed around her and a swift darted out from a fold. She circled the Oval Office once, then darted out the still-open window. This time her wings broke the invisible laser beams barring the window.

A few seconds later, two Secret Service agents burst through the twin doors on the other side of the room. “Mr. President, everything all right?”

The president feigned surprise at their entrance as he walked casually around his desk. “False alarm. A gust of wind must have fluttered the flag in the window. Perhaps it would be best if I shut it.”

Back in the Mother Forest, Portia radioed Morning that they were ready. Morning acknowledged they were ready too. Wearing their face masks, Armando and Sully ran in with great bundles of tumbleweed and threw them into the gap between the jetty and the fire. They ran for safety as the fire jumped on the bundles. A second later, the jetty exploded with flames like the lashing tail of a red dragon.

On the other side, the Leaguers heard the
whoosh
of air sucking from the fire. A sooty, fireless tunnel appeared in the flames.

“Go!” Morning shouted. The Leaguers sucked in the breath that would hopefully carry them through the tunnel’s heat and gases and sprinted into it one at a time.

From the Chinook, DeThanatos watched the escape. He had seen enough. He banked the chopper toward the blowout.

Morning waited until the last Leaguer had disappeared
into the black hole of swirling ash and smoke, then raced into the darkness himself.

Portia and the probies cheered as the first Leaguer broke through the blowout and ran toward them. Prowler had his eyes on the Chinook dropping closer. He suddenly realized what DeThanatos was up to. “Go! Go! Go!” he yelled as more Leaguers sprinted from the hole.

One of the empty buckets hanging from the Chinook released like a hammer throw and plunged toward the blowout.

Morning ran blindly through the smoke, ash, and blistering heat. Dim shapes began to appear at the end of the tunnel, when a great fiery ball suddenly crushed it, shaking the ground.

Prowler’s voice shouted in his walkie-talkie. “Go back! Go back!”

Armando tackled the last Leaguer out, rolling him on the ground to put out the flames licking off his clothes.

Prowler and Portia watched in horror as the chopper’s second bucket smashed down through the fire and crushed the inside end of the blowout tunnel. If Morning was trapped in between them, he was toast, ash, and no drop of Portia’s blood would ever revive him. His pile of ash would be gone with the firestorm of oxygen that now rushed back into the tunnel, flooding it with fire.

Portia grabbed the walkie-talkie from Prowler. “Morning, you there?”

There was a long silence.

“Morning, come in,” she pleaded.

DeThanatos glared down at the scene with seething rage. The Leaguers had escaped. Worse, Morning had dodged the second bucket and made it back inside the ring of fire and shimmering spirits. Sure, the fiery noose was tightening, but for DeThanatos, it wasn’t good enough. The tireless patience that came with immortality had finally been unraveled by his lust for revenge. This colossal mistake of a blood child had once nearly destroyed him in the Mother Forest; now it was the kid’s turn.

The Chinook wheeled away from the fire, then banked in a sideways skid toward the wavering veil of spirits. As DeThanatos watched the flickering sheet of light race toward him, he shape-shifted into his falcon.

Everyone on the ground watched the Chinook fly into the spirit shield and explode in a fiery ball. The only shrapnel blasting from the fireball not trailing fire was a falcon. It shot inside the ring of dancing flames, having created its own blowout hole.

Morning saw the falcon flash overhead. He was baffled as to why DeThanatos had risked it.
What’s the point?
Morning wondered.
Being blood sire and spawn, it’s not like we can slay the other without annihilating ourselves. Unless
, he thought with gut-coiling fear,
after I went re-mort, then back to vampire, the rules have changed
.

There was no point trying to decipher DeThanatos’s deranged thinking. Morning had to gather his strength for the battle that was coming. He tried not to think how different this one would be from the fight he’d had with DeThanatos a year before. In that one Morning’s veins had been turbocharged with blood tapped from Portia. Now he was running on the fumes of a Blood Lite he’d had forty-eight hours before.

He saw a blur of motion and tried to spin away before it struck. The saberlike claws of a big cat sliced his shoulder as the resounding
clack
of the cat’s flesh-ripping jaws exploded in his ears. Morning had barely missed his skull being crushed.

Grabbing his already healing shoulder, he spun to face the next charge of what he saw was a black panther. As the ferocious cat surged forward, Morning locked his mind on an answer before it was too late.

The panther sailed toward him but missed again as Morning dropped and mushroomed into a giant saber-toothed cat from another era: Smilodon.

As the panther whirled and took in Morning’s first CD, it wasn’t the Smilodon that did all the smiling. Whereas Morning had hoped to be displaying Smilodon’s twelve-inch canine sabers and soon sinking them in the panther, something had gone wrong with his CD. The panther yowled with delight as one of its paws pointed at
Morning’s head. It was Morning’s human head, not the head of Smilodon, that protruded from the cat’s huge body.

Morning lifted a paw to his mouth to confirm it. Sure enough, the twelve-inch sabers had remained in the darkness of his imagination; his feline pads felt his human face. His mind raced for an explanation. Maybe he wasn’t even fighting on Blood Lite fumes. Or, for some wild reason, he’d begun to re-mortalize again and his CDing powers weren’t firing on all cylinders, or on all
body parts
.

No answers charged into his mind. What charged was the panther, looking to take Morning down in the first round and drive a bristlecone stake through his heart.

He dodged the cat’s snapping jaws as the partial Smilodon imploded down to a smaller animal: a giant tortoise. But again, the tortoise’s head was no wise-looking old reptile; it was the confused head of Morning.

He shuffled and scraped his tortoise body around as fast as he could. The panther was waiting. It lunged forward and swiped a rake of claws. But not before Morning sucked his head into his shell, along with his feet. Sure, it was a totally defensive CD, but Morning desperately needed time to figure out either why his CDs were malfunctioning or how he was going to survive a fight to the death using weapons from only the neck down.

DeThanatos, unable to fully enjoy the moment as a cat, popped back into his naked self and bent double with laughter. Finding his voice, he leaned down to the hidden tortoise. “C’mon, Morning, come out and fight. Or is your head so far up your backside you’re tied in a knot?”

The shell remained silent and still.

“Seriously,” DeThanatos continued his ridicule, “picking you up, tossing you in the fire, and serving your friends
barbecued tortoise ribs is okay as revenge goes, but it’s nothing to brag about at the next Rendezvous.”

The shell might as well have been a stone.

“All right, if you’re not coming out, I’m coming in.” DeThanatos dropped to the ground. By the time he landed he had shape-shifted into a six-foot black mamba. With its gray-black skin and sleek body, the snake wasn’t terribly scary-looking unless you knew its fangs packed some of the deadliest venom in the animal kingdom. The snake slithered toward the head-hole in Morning’s shell.

Morning was fixed on his next CD. His shell disappeared, replaced by a black and white plumed secretary bird with stork-long legs and a bright orange eye mask. Unfortunately, the orange eye mask didn’t hide Morning’s human face and head. Fortunately, under the head was a four-foot-tall bird with an unusual talent.

The black mamba reared up to strike the bird’s white-plumed chest. Before it could shoot forward, one of the bird’s legs karate kicked in a blur of motion. The snake recovered, rose up to strike again, and got stomped back down with a left double-kick. The snake hissed violently and slithered in retreat.

Knowing his opponent wasn’t going to let himself get pummeled by a snake-stomping bird, Morning flapped his wings and tried to fly. For any bird, getting airborne with a human head would be tough, but Morning managed to lift into clumsy flight and labor toward the treetops. Besides escaping from DeThanatos’s next CD, he wanted to check on the fire. What he saw made his wings even heavier.

The fire had spread inward, igniting more trees. Now a double tier of angry spirits billowed and shimmered above the crowning flames. Morning struggled to fly high enough
to see if Prowler and the probies had built another jetty to free him from the fire and the fight he would surely lose. But his wings felt like feathered lead. He flapped to the top of the Matriarch and landed clumsily on one of the bald branches.

Outside the fire, Portia, Prowler, the Leaguers, and the probies were working in a frenzy to prepare another jetty for a second blowout. When they saw the second tier of spirits rise above the flames, they realized their efforts were futile. It wasn’t their only discovery.

The trees surrounding the fire that weren’t burning were filling with the dark silhouettes of birds. Other birds dotted the sky as they descended. The fire in the Mother Forest, and the disturbance of the Old Ones’ spirits had reverberated through the Loner world. The first waves of Loners were arriving to witness the cataclysmic event.

Still perched in the top of the Matriarch, Morning looked for whatever creature DeThanatos was going to throw at him next. He noticed something odd. Next to the tree he was in was another huge tree. In fact, it looked like the mirror image of the Matriarch.

Before he could shake away what had to be a vision, the branch under him collapsed. As he fell through the imploding tree, branches transformed into the lines and strands of a massive web. He tried to fly out, but the sticky webbing gathered around him like a net. When he landed on the ground where the tree had been, his secretary bird was trapped in the web like a skydiver under his parachute.