Storymakers.
Wanted.
Betsy Schow.
Dedicated to my beta-reading wizard, Jess. And to the wicked and pun-tastic adventures of PB&J. This book wouldn"t exist without you guys.
"Rule #52: No matter how difficult the obstacles or all-powerful the evil villain may appear, one can rest a.s.sured that the hero of the story never dies. The sidekicks though...they should be worried."
-Definitive Fairy-Tale Survival Guide, Volume 2: Villains.
1.
Happily Never After.
"And they all lived happily ever after," I muttered in falsetto. "Yeah, not so much."
I stared at the wanted poster on an ironwood tree in the Sherwood Forest that had my name, Rexi Hood, emblazoned across the bottom.
Being an outlaw, I could deal with-after all, it was sort of a family tradition. No, I took issue with the fact that the ill.u.s.tration above my name featured my red-caped, directionally challenged cousin with her nauseatingly cute, dimpled smile and long, brown, braided hair, rather than my perma-smirk and short, blond spikes.
"I can"t believe those troll t.u.r.ds at Fox and the Hound News," I grumbled.
Even worse were the charges listed on the bulletin: Accomplice to Princess Dorthea of Emerald"s wishing crimes. Grand treason against the land of Story.
"Accomplice," I ranted, pacing back and forth in front of the poster, using the bow I"d borrowed from Nottingham p.a.w.n to swat at the tall weeds. "They make it sound like I"m her sidekick! I will go on record to anyone who will listen and state that I absolutely, definitely, no way, no how had a blasted thing to do with that. Dorthea pixed off the Ever After crowd by making a wish on a cursed star. She turned all the rules of fairy tales upside down and scorched everyone"s happy endings. I claim zero responsibility for it."
"No, you can merely claim responsibility for enabling the release of Blanc, the wickedest of witches, who will white-out ALL endings. Both happy and otherwise," a voice whispered, dark and cold as a night in the forest during the new moon. "Well done."
"Shut it, grim reaper," I hissed down at my shadow, or rather the disembodied voice that taunted me from it. "n.o.body asked you." Princesses and heroines got fairy G.o.dmothers or a guardian angel. I got the equivalent of a guardian demon.
Long story. Short version: a potent mix of temporary insanity and guilt made me jump in front of a stormbolt meant for Dorthea. I died in the process. Well, I sorta died, since she used her powers to bring me back to life. Only something followed me back from the underworld. So as usual, my fairy tale sucks. The end.
Except, not really the end I guess, since Chimera Mountain erupted with Dorthea, Kato, Verte, Hydra, and me still in it. The rest of Story"s happy endings were still a bit mucked up because of the wish fallout, so now my friends and I were all outlaws, hiding out in Sherwood Forest. Oh, and the equivalent of the devil"s wicked stepmother had been free for about a week.
Minor details.
"Blanc is many things. Never a minor detail," my shadow sniped.
"That evil water hag can have a slumber party with the Little Mermaid for all I care. As long as she stays away from me."
"That"s my little hero."
"Go to spell, shadow man." In a fit of frustration I nocked an arrow, aiming straight for the cutesy dimple on the poster. "This rots!"
Thwack. My arrow landed dead center-in the tree next to the one I was shooting at.
"Your aim appears to be what"s rotten."
"For hex"s sake, Morte. Does the King of the Underworld seriously have nothing better to do than-"
The rest of what I was going to say got lost as green specks clouded the edges of my vision. The pendant I wore cracked, emerald streaks flaring throughout the red-orange fire opal.
Morte wasn"t the only souvenir from my unplanned vacation to the underworld. When Dorthea brought me back, she used the opal to pour her life magic into me, becoming my tether to the living world. That tether was really more like a chain that now weighs heavily around my neck. It forged a bond that made it so I can sense her, feel her in my head.
All the time.
I"d have loved to sever our connection and smash the hexed gemstone into a giant pile of glitter, except the opal pendant was the only thing keeping me alive. Once again, minor details.
The bond and the opal also made me Dorthea"s backup power source. And right now, for some reason, she was tapping into that. Her presence in the back of my mind, which usually felt like a wispy breeze, turned into a raging cyclone. As the crack in the pendant widened, the air was ripped from my lungs, bringing me to my knees.
Why did Dorthea need so much power? The bright-orange swirls from the pendant dimmed along with more of my sight. My vision was completely awash in that awful, inescapable, green light.
Energy leeched out of me. All I wanted to do was lay down and sleep.
"Coming back to see me again so soon?"
Screw that. "I"m not dying today." I forced myself to my feet with a grunt.
I needed to have a few words with the spoiled wench who kept borrowing my life force as if I were a pair of overpriced shoes.
Unlike Hansel and Gretel, I didn"t need any moldy bread crumbs to find my way home. My body seemed to guide itself, like a puppet being pulled by a glittering emerald thread back to its master. With each step, my strength returned and my sight shifted back to normal.
Before long, a thick, twisted wall of ironwood trees stopped my progress. Their branches rustled and bent, while the knots in the center tree"s trunk squeezed smaller, as if squinting to get a better view of the intruder. The trees of the forest still retained a piece of the wild magic that had thrown the world of Story into chaos-yet another lasting memento of Dorthea"s wish-pocalypse.
"Move," I commanded in a low and growly voice on par with Prince Kato"s or one of the overgrown chimera beasts he ruled. Either the tone worked or the trees could see the threat of murder in my eyes.
Pulling up their roots, they shifted to the side, creating an arched path, so I could enter the clearing. A shack towering atop troll-size chicken legs stood in the center of our sanctuary. It belonged to Hydra, the head-swapping witch-and the shack matched the Baba Yaga head she was currently wearing.
As a headhunter, she had quite the collection. It"s not the most savory of hobbies, but I filched random things people left behind, so who was I to judge?
Standing at the base of the chicken legs, I looked up and yelled, "Dorthea, get your bejeweled b.u.t.t down here!"
Silence.
"You know you can"t hide. Not from me." I could feel her up there.
Still nothing.
Fine, if she wouldn"t come down, I would go up the old-fashioned way. Climbing chicken legs wasn"t much harder than climbing trees.
I ascended the chicken legs one wrinkly skin fold at a time. My fingerholds must have tickled because the legs shimmied a little, shaking the hut on top. After I pa.s.sed the knee, the left side buckled slightly, causing the house to tilt dangerously forward.
A head rolled out the front door like a screaming crystal ball and sailed through a piece of broken porch railing. Wrapping my feet as tight as I could around the chicken legs, I leaned out with both hands to catch Hydra"s head before she went kersplat. I did so without thinking, because if I had thought, I would have remembered how gross her heads are and waited to see if she bounced.
My right hand grabbed her by the tangled gray web she called hair; my left cradled her gooey neck stump. "Oh, nymph nads. I"m gonna hurk."
"All the king"s horses could not have been putting back me I think," Hydra said.
She"d been dropped and rattled around a lot lately, so she was making less sense than usual. I"d long since gotten over the weird of having just a head talk to me, but I would never get over the ewww. I couldn"t very well drop her now, which meant I was stuck dragging her up the chicken legs with me.
As sure as the three suns, Ethos, Logos, and Pathos, rise and set over the realms of Story, no good deed goes unpunished.
"Hey," I said. "Do you have, like, feeling in your neck and stuff?"
"Is like chill in frosty bites, yes? Vy are asking?"
"Just because," I answered and stuck Hydra"s head on the end of my bow with a glop. Problem solved.
With just a few more shimmies, and a lot of cursing from Hydra, we arrived at the top.
Dorthea waited on the porch for us. "I"msorryI"msorryI"msorry."
Her prince, Kato, stood next to her, rubbing his temples. "Rexi, I"m handling it," he said over her run-on apology.
"Bite me, beast boy. You can handle this." I took the bow off my back and gave Kato the Hydra on a stick.
Narrowing my eyes, I advanced on the princess who had turned my simple life into chaos. "Someone found us, right? You needed to go all warrior princess, and that"s why you had to snack on my life force."
Dorthea gulped, not meeting my gaze, but the tips of her enchantedly flaming hair crackled with green sparks "Well, not exactly." Her eyes shifted to the open door.
I leaned to the side so I could peer in and see what was making her nervous. Even though Hydra"s houses changed shape and dimension based on which head she used, some things stayed constant. Normally, shelves filled with her collection of heads and disgustingly slimy spell ingredients she kept alive for freshness lined the walls of her home.
That wasn"t the case anymore. Now there were plush carpets, jeweled vases, and a wall-to-wall closet system stuffed with enough shoes for every foot within a hundred-chapter radius.
Verte bounced up and down on a silk-covered bed, the hair on the green-skinned sorceress"s wart swaying with the motion. "Just proves you can take the princess out of the palace, but give her a bit o" magic, and you can"t keep her from making herself a new one," she said, ending in shrill cackle.
Dorthea winced. "I"m soooo sorry, Rexi. It was an accident. I swear I didn"t mean to."
Through our connection, I could feel her regret, the genuine sincerity in her words. And that only torqued me off more. Because she never meant to do anything wrong, and yet I always ended up getting scorched.
My fists opened and closed of their own will. I could feel my nostrils flaring like a minotaur"s. "You nearly sucked me dry for a home makeover?!"
"Storymaker practice got slightly out of hand. I was supposed to be channeling the creation magic to make one object. But I got distracted and started thinking about how much I missed home and Glenda"s fall collection..."
I lunged for her throat before she could finish.
Dorthea shrieked and raised both hands to fend me off, emerald flames shooting from her palms. Her eyes grew wide as the flames. .h.i.t me square in the chest and sent me flying backward into the rotted wood railing.
Looking up as I fell, I saw Kato quickly kiss his princess so he could transform into a flying chimera.
But there wasn"t enough time.
I screamed, but there was no one and nothing to catch me except the ground with a force that snapped my spine in half.
Welcome to my story, where, as usual, I get the pointy end of the arrow.
"In death we are all equal... I jest, of course. If that were true, everyone would have their own monuments. Heroes die in greatness. Villains die in infamy. The rest just die."
-Grimm"s Reapers Guide to the Afterlife.
2.
Forget-Me-Knots.
While my body lay broken on the ground, my soul traveled back to the underworld of Nome Ore. There was no bright light, tunnel, or chubby, harp-playing baby at the gateway to the world of the erased. In fact...the gateway looked an awful lot like an office.
As usual, I materialized in the dreary, boxy room right in front of a desk that had stacks of paper tall enough that one good sneeze would create a blizzard of pages. The room seemed to double in size each time I died.
This was number four.
"Six," said a voice, slippery and dark as ink.
"Huh?"
"I"m beginning to think you like it here." Morte-Nome King, Grimm Reaper, and part-time shadow stalker-strode through the office door. He b.u.t.toned up his rigid topcoat and stepped behind his desk, where he edited out the dead from their stories. "This is the sixth time your soul has come back to interrupt my day."
I tallied my previous deaths in my head, knowing that he"d just eavesdrop on my thoughts anyway. There was the first time, when I jumped in front of the stormbolt the wicked witch Griz hurled at Dorthea. The second death when Chimera Mountain erupted about a half hour later. The third time, an ironwood tree went rogue and skewered me while Dorthea tried to use her Storymaker magic to transform it into an apple tree. And the fourth, well, even without a flesh-and-bone body, my back felt crooked.
Couldn"t help but notice Dorthea was a consistent theme in my recurring fatalities, but since I needed her to bring me back, I focused my ire on Morte instead.
"Someone needs to go to nursery rhyme school and learn to count. That"s just four."
"Of course, surely I am mistaken. Even the greatest editor can make an error." The tall, angular man adjusted his gla.s.ses on the crook of his nose and smiled like a forest python that was still digesting its last meal.
Morte reminded me of a negative imprint of a portrait, paper-white skin with graying teeth, nails, and hair. The worst part was his eyes-black irises with white pupils. I folded my arms and resisted the urge to step back as he stepped forward. The flickering light from the fluorescent glow crystals in the ceiling cast shadows on his bone-pale skin.
"How I wish you could see yourself exactly as I do." He locked gazes with me. Unblinking. Unflinching. Empty. "Or perhaps you already do, more than you are willing to admit."
"I don"t know what you"re babbling about." I couldn"t help it-I turned away to escape those empty, white eyes that reflected nothing. Which was a mistake. Morte had left the door open, giving me a perfectly awful view of Nome Ore"s bleak landscape. What at first looked like the rolling hills of the countryside became far more macabre when you looked closer.
The hills were alive, but not with the sound of music. More like moaning. Rather than dirt, the rise and fall of the landscape was built from the mottled, decaying, and sometimes still-moving souls of the Forgotten-the characters who didn"t matter, who no one remembered, who were sentenced to slowly fade into recycled ink piles.
"Whatever," I said, shutting the door on the Forgotten and everything else I didn"t want to think about-like my graying hands. It freaked me out that my soul existed in the underworld as a faded reflection of myself that could be erased at any moment. "Can we just get on with this already? I"ve got better places to be. Like anywhere but here."
"Please take a seat." Morte gestured in front of his desk. A petrified Forgotten had been twisted into a chair with literal "arm" rests.