Deadly Pink (15 page)

The reminder that we were both in very real physical danger was not doing anything to clarify my thinking. Still, sniping at each other would accomplish nothing.

“All right,” I said, “so what do you want to do? Fight with me? Break things? Give up? And just sit here waiting to die, grumbling about how unfair it is?”

“No,” she admitted sulkily.

“Okay,” I said, “if we can't force the sprites to come back here, then we'll have to go to them wherever they are. Which I assume would be back in the center of the maze?”

Emily shrugged.

“Is that where you first found them?”

She gave a nod that was hardly more enthusiastic than the shrug.

Since she wasn't being much help at all, I finished, “And I'm assuming there's no instant teleportation spell or device...”

She shook her head.

“...so the fastest way to get there would be the way I came: flying in our dragon forms?”

Emily summoned the energy to mutter, “I guess.”

“Okay,” I said. “So what are we waiting for?”

Emily raised her arms, and in the blink of an eye she was a bronze dragon. She was huge, her head far longer than I was tall. And she was beautiful. As well as terrible. Her wings flapped once, twice, slow, majestic moves that displaced enough air that the resulting wind almost knocked me over. But then she was rising: over my head, then tree-level, then bird-level. She circled, waiting for me.

“I wish to be a dragon,” I said, though I hadn't needed to say it out loud the first time, nor had Emily spoken any words.

I held my arms out.

I flapped them.

I bunny-hopped to break contact between my feet and the ground.

How had I done it last time?

I had simply wished it, and it happened.

So what was wrong this time?

Knowing the sprites' tendency toward treachery, I had been very careful with what I'd asked for, not wanting my metamorphosis into a dragon to be a one-shot deal, just in case, nor wanting it to be irreversible—also just in case. I had worked out the wording in my head beforehand, so

I remembered exactly what I had wished for and paid for: I had asked for the power to turn into a dragon at will.

Okay,
I thought,
I'm willing it now.

Emily glided back down to earth and hovered before me in all her dragon splendor. “What's the delay?” she asked, her voice her own, despite her dragon body.

“You reversed my spell,” I said. “Apparently, those demon-spawned sprites took that to mean
all
my spells.”

Emily sighed, the warm air of her breath like a megahair dryer on my entire body. She settled to the ground. “I'll carry you,” she said, reaching a dragon claw toward me.

“No way!” I scrambled backward, remembering how hard I'd had to clutch the sack to maintain a firm hold. “Lose your concentration while you're flying, and if you didn't puncture me with your talons or squeeze the life out of me with your grip, you'd drop me.”

Emily studied her claw. “Dragons should come with opposable thumbs,” she mused.

“Yeah,” I said, “take it up with Rasmussem's design department. How about if I climb onto your back and ride you?”

Uh-huh. Easier said than done. Even when she lay flat on the ground, I would have had to climb like three times my height. And her scales were hard and slippery. She picked me up—very careful not to puncture, squeeze, or drop—but her arms weren't long enough to go around to her back: another definite design flaw.

“All right,” Emily said. “We'll return to my castle. I'll wait under one of the tower windows, and you can go up there and jump out on my back.”

“Jump out a window onto your back?” I repeated.

“Yes,” she said.

“And count on not killing myself in the process?” “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” I explained, “what if I miss?”

Emily snorted, singeing my eyebrows. “I'm a pretty large target to miss.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I could slide right off you and hit the ground, and there wouldn't be any way for you to catch me.” I tucked my elbows in close to my body and waggled my shortened arms helplessly, dragonlike.

“Well, if you die...” she started. But she didn't finish. The truth was, we didn't know what would happen if I died in the game world. The previous times, I had returned to Rasmussem, but things had changed. And we didn't know how much. We couldn't count on anything happening now the way we thought it should. I remembered the pain I had inflicted on myself with that rock that had bounced off the ballroom window. What if, now, I couldn't die in the game, but could still feel the pain of injuries, even deadly injuries?

“All right, all right,” Emily said impatiently—but the fact that she said it at all showed she was reasoning along the same lines I was. “No diving out of windows.” She looked at me as though evaluating. “I wonder,” she said, “if I could pick you up in my mouth by taking hold of your head, very gently, using just my lips...” She tried curling her dragon lips over her dragon teeth. “...I could kind of swing you around...” She angled her massive head over her shoulder to see how far back she could reach.

I, of course, had lost it the moment she'd said she'd take my head in her mouth. I think I finally got through to her the fifteenth or sixteenth time I chanted
no.

“All right, then, Grace,” she said,
“your
turn to make a suggestion
I
can poke holes in.”

Since I wasn't able to get rid of the mental image of her dragon teeth making Swiss cheese of my skull, that was unfortunate phraseology on her part.

“How about,” I suggested, “if you lie down again, and you don't tuck your front arms under you, but stretch one of them out, sort of like a ramp for me to use?”

Scornfully, Emily muttered, “A handicapped-accessible dragon,” but did as I suggested.

I scrambled my way up talon, wrist, forearm, elbow, before I saw there was just too much back muscle for me to be able to climb farther.

“Can't do it,” I told her. “May I try it on your wing?” Sort of the way a kite is made with paper stretched over a wooden frame, the dragon's wing was leather stretched over bone. Being careful to put my weight only on the edge of the wing, I hauled myself up onto my sister's back. It was no harder than, for example, climbing up that stupid rope they have in obstacle courses—which, by the way, I've never been able to do.

But, eventually, I made it. I even found a relatively flat spot between her wings to sit. Well, actually, I was more lying belly-down, since that seemed more secure. Except, of course, that her scales were already scratchy on my face—dermabrasion for the fantasy set. “Okay,” I said, summoning all my bravery and my optimism, “this might work.”

Then she flapped her wings, and that changed everything. “Down,” I screamed. “Down, down, down!”

“Just hold on,” Emily said.

“To what?” I yelped.

She rose higher and higher into the air.

“No! Stop! Let me get off!” But meanwhile, I finagled my fingers under one of her scales to have something to hold on to, all the while wondering how likely it was that I'd accidentally pluck out the scale.

“See, you're fine,” Emily said.

“No wonder the sprites hate you,” I told her.

Emily didn't answer, and I realized it had been a cheap shot. What I should be doing was working hard to raise her spirits so she wasn't so depressed. But I mean, come on!

As wonderful as flying in my dragon shape had been, flying
on
a dragon was the exact opposite. Even going beyond the sheer terror of I'm-going-to-fall-and-plummet-something-like-a-gazillion-feet-to-the-ground-and-go-splat!-and-probably-still-not-have-the-luxury-of-being-dead-despite-the-fact-that-I'll-be-feeling-every-shattered-bone-and-ruptured-organ, it was not comfortable riding on the dragon's back, and every wing flap tipped me forward, backward, and sideways. Emily was flying no higher and no faster than I'd been, but my stomach was lurching. Yet I knew if I started throwing up, I'd be sure to fall off. I tried closing my eyes, thinking that might cut down on the dizziness, but it added to the out-of-control feeling. Plus, I kept picturing the inhabitants of the Land of the Golden Butterflies going, “Ick! It's raining vomit!” which made me even queasier. I figured I would be likelier to maintain my balance and stay on the dragon, plus keep my stomach contents actually inside my stomach, if I could see what was happening.

I won't say it got easier with time, as my hands and arms ached from holding on to the scale so tightly, and the panic didn't exactly fade, but a certain numbness set in.

And time did pass.

A lot of it.

And eventually, I realized that Emily was gliding downward.

“Are we there?” I asked.

It didn't look like we were there.

All I could see was forest, no Victorian house on the edge of a lake.

“No,” Emily said. “I just need a rest.”

There was a river cutting through the forest where Emily found a section of bank with a large, level sandy spot and coasted in.

“Do you know where you're going?” I asked. “Are we lost? I didn't need a rest stop when I was flying.”

“You weren't carrying you,” Emily said. She transformed back to herself just as I shifted my position to sitting up, and for one totally weird moment I was sitting on her back while she was standing up—and then I slid down and hit the ground, butt first.

“Besides,” Emily added, sounding defensive, “I haven't eaten since lunch with the gypsies yesterday.”

“Ooo, lunch with the gypsies,” I mimicked, since the only food that had passed my lips in this game had been that single cinnamon cookie when I'd first arrived. I
was
hungry, I realized.

“I'm going to take a nap,” Emily said. “Just a few minutes. Maybe you can make yourself useful and find something to eat.”

"
Find something?
" I echoed. “Like what? Lake dolphins? Unicorns? What
does
one eat here?”

“All the fruits are edible,” Emily said. “If there are gypsies nearby, they always have stuff like hot dogs, and taco salads, and macaroni and cheese.”

Ah! The traditional foods.

She lay down right where she was, making no attempt to smooth the sand or form it into a hollow or anything more comfortable, and curled herself up small. “Can you look, please, Grace? I really need to sleep. Then we can eat whatever you've found and be back at the house by midafternoon.”

“Okay,” I said. “I guess.” I was hungry and tired, too. But had carrying me been
that
hard for Emily, or was this a symptom of her having been in the game too long? Was her real-life body beginning to weaken? And if so, would virtual food and rest help?

No chance to ask Emily her thoughts, as she was asleep already.

There shouldn't be anything here dangerous enough that Emily would need me to stand guard,
I thought.
This is just a little kids' game.

Yeah, right. There were a lot of
shouldn’ts
in this game. I found a blackberry bush close enough that I could pick while still keeping Emily in sight. It was hard not to eat more than half, but I was just hungry, not in danger of fading—at least not yet.

When my fingers were purple and sticky, not to mention cramped from berry picking, I sat down in a grassy patch and waited for my sister to wake up.

I hadn't caught any of the golden butterflies the previous day when I'd had a sack full of gold coins, and I certainly hadn't been in the mood earlier while holding on to Emily's dragon scales for dear life. But now, while I waited, I caught half a dozen butterflies and turned them into coins. By counting “One Mississippi, two Mississippi...” I estimated that they came every five minutes or so, in pairs, evidently one for each of us. But after a while, that got so boring, I fell asleep despite my best intentions.

I awoke to find that what was left of the morning had turned to afternoon, and the berries I'd saved for Emily were beginning to dry out and look old, and finally I gave her a nudge. Then another. “Emily!” I called, shaking her shoulder, convinced I wouldn't be able to rouse her.

Her eyes fluttered open. “Grace,” she said, “really, please just give me five minutes.”

“You've slept something like three hours already.”

“No,” she mumbled, closing her eyes again, and settling back into her fetal position.

I had newfound sympathy for what our mother went through, trying to get us up for school.

“Emily,” I said, shaking her harder, “you need to wake up now.”

“All right, all right,” she grumbled, but she made no move.

I grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her up to a sitting position. “Now,” I said sternly.

She sighed and finally opened her eyes. “All right,” she said, sounding a bit more convincing this time. “All right.” She yawned and stretched. “Did you get something to eat?”

I nodded toward the pile of berries, which looked pretty paltry considering how sore my fingers had gotten. “And,” I pointed out, “another couple hours and we'll be back at the house. We can confront the sprites, and if they can't send us back home right away, we can eat in your kitchen.”

Emily, busy snarfing the berries down by the handful rather than savoring them one by one, didn't sound too enthusiastic about my plan. But she said, “All right.”

“And,” I said, “I think I figured a way how to get on your back more easily.”

“Okay...” she said warily.

“You can change into any animal, right?”

She nodded.

“Turn yourself into a Saint Bernard.”

“That'll be useful,” she scoffed. “You
do
know I won't come with one of those little barrels of brandy or whatever it is that those rescue dogs in the Alps have?”

“No, that's okay. What I'm thinking is that you can turn into a dragon gradually ... in different steps ... getting bigger and bigger.”

Emily still looked skeptical, but that's what we did. She turned into a big dog, and I straddled her, not putting my weight on her back until she morphed into a pony; then she became a full-sized horse; then an elephant; then she dragonized herself. There's a significant difference between an elephant and a dragon, but at least I was in position.