Ahead of me was a milling crowd of early tourists. Only they weren’t tourists. Clovis had kept hold of Marge and Homer’s peeps for himself. That’s why he’d chased the two of them away. And now the army was waiting for me. The tonton macoutes were everywhere, and I knew how deadly they were.
I leaned against the wall of the building, taking stock of the competition. There were easily a hundred of them, and I couldn’t outfight or outrun them all.
I fumbled with my bag, flipping it open and hoping for some sort of miracle to appear out of it.
What I got was Jinx.
“Hey, are we rescuing that kid or what?” She tumbled out of the bag, still a very small spider.
“Can you get me out of here?” I asked.
It took Skeletor several minutes to get out of the ground—I didn’t have that kind of time. I yelped as I swung my remaining knife at the tonton macoutes next to me. He screamed and fell backward, and I swallowed hard.
Hadn’t Penny told me they couldn’t feel pain? Not alive, not dead, she’d said. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I’d seen the necro use Louis as a marionette. Maybe this was the same thing on a much bigger scale. No matter how I sliced it, dealing with them was dangerous to both them and me.
Jinx grunted. “I’m not a damn horse!”
“I’ll get you whatever books on editing you want for the rest of my life!” I yelled as I pushed another voodoo person back, not wanting to use my knife again. “Books on craft, books on passive writing, books on shitty dialogue and how to fix it, anything you want! Just get me out of here!”
“Oh, now you’re talking,” Jinx said.
I turned and groaned at the sight of what she’d shifted into. It just had to be that animal, didn’t it?
26
I stared for half a second at Jinx, who was now the size of a small elephant because that was what she’d turned into. A freaking elephant, though her skin was dark as night and she seemed to have retained her spider hairs on her legs, which all but quivered as if they’d shoot out and stick me.
Before I could contemplate this turn of events, she grabbed me around the waist with her trunk and all but threw me up onto her back. I belly flopped but managed to grab the top of her left ear to keep from sliding off to the side.
“Why not a horse?” I hollered as she lumbered forward, slowly picking up speed. I finally got upright so I could see where we were going.
Jinx let out a bellowing trumpet before she answered. “How boring is a horse? Anyone can say they rode a horse into battle, but how many people can say they rode an elephant? And a black elephant, no less!” She flung her trunk from side to side, clearing the voodoo people out of her path, and those she missed with her trunk, she flattened with her big-as-serving-tureens feet.
They screamed and wailed as she blew through them, not caring about the damage she did.
I swallowed hard. “Be careful, I don’t think those are dead people!”
“They are dead, I can smell them and they can’t feel shit!” Jinx tossed a few more bodies out of her way. Since I didn’t want to think about the ramifications, I decided to go with it. “We need to find Crash. He’s one of the only ones who can stand up to a power like this!”
I didn’t disagree with her. “I don’t know where he is, do you?”
“I can find him. He’s my boss after all. As the crow flies, he’s this way.”
She changed direction and headed toward St. Louis Cemetery Number 1.
My stomach dropped.
The thing was…
“Whatever spell is around that cemetery makes me super weak! And there is something in there that doesn’t like me! Like a whole lot of somethings!”
“Well, that’s a problem,” Jinx grumbled as she boomed her way down the streets. I was surprised I didn’t see the houses bouncing as if we were in some cartoon. “You’d better figure it out, because we’re almost there.”
As we thundered across lanes, I could see the cemetery up ahead, and the buzzing started in the soles of my feet. Nausea twisted up my guts because the last time I’d tried to enter the cemetery, I hadn’t made it twenty feet before I had to crawl away, unable