Chapter Twenty-Seven
She knew the truck wasn’t going at a normal speed.
Mostly because she had been plastered to her seat from the moment Jack put his foot down.
She couldn’t even lift her hands to hang on to something.
Though she didn’t really need to. The truck had secured her with about twelve extra seat belts.
A kind of safety helmet had sprouted around most of her head.
It even voiced some disapproval at first.
“She’s My Baby,” it bleated. As if it couldn’t bear to see her hurt.
It was surprisingly exhilarating.
She found herself laughing hysterically.
Then Jack was laughing hysterically, too.
“I think we might be delirious with terror,” he yelled, over the music and the insane sound of a truck going seven million miles an hour, and then behind them—something horrifying.
Something really bad. Something that made her think of that movie where nothingness catches up to reality, and starts to eat it.
She didn’t even want to look back in case that was a good guess.
But then Jack checked the rearview, and said, “Come on, come on, come on,” to the truck, and the truck strained and screeched and tried to go faster, and she had to. She glanced back, somehow, even though it felt like fighting gravity, and made her hair form a weird tunnel around her face.
And there it was out the back window.
The black teeth of nothing at all.
A great mass of it, a great maze of it, it made her eyes go funny to see it. Because it’s not really what it looks like , she told herself. But it didn’t help to think of it that way. She wanted something concrete, something she could fight. Her hands were already buzzing with spells to do it.
So she asked.
“Tell me what to do to it,” she said, thinking of undoing, unmaking.
Heck, for a moment she wondered if she could simply blip them away from all this. Like the Dorothy hurricane she’d done before. Only when she tried, she got the honk. And Jack seemed to know it was coming before she did.
He grimly shook his head.
“Yeah, that’s not gonna work. Truthfully it’s a miracle we’re even outrunning something that should exist in eight dimensions.
There isn’t really any such thing as moving only in a straight line for my dad.
Or for me, if I’m being honest. We don’t even really obey space and time and gravity.
A thousand years and five minutes exist simultaneously in Hell.
It’s how I was gone for a few hours for you, but it felt like a thousand years to me. ”
“So how are we doing this?”
“I think it’s mostly you.”
“But I haven’t cast a spell.”
“No. However, we’re still technically under the parameters of your first one.
All you broke was the deal my dad added.
It’s how you were able to do it, because really it shouldn’t have been there at all.
It was a commandeering of the blank space you left.
Now it’s gone, and so the rules are wholly yours.
The reality is yours. If your mind can’t go further than this, than neither can anything else. ”
“Hell is way more fair then I imagined it would be.”
“Don’t speak too soon. We’ve got incoming of the things you can accept.”
“So, spindly weird monster creatures with ten mouths and razor tails?”
“Oh man, why say it out loud? They’re definitely gonna be that now,” he said, and just as he did the truck lurched. Violently . Her stomach almost left her body. If it hadn’t been for the twelve seat belts, she most likely would have sailed by Jack and out the driver’s-side window.
Either that, or Jack would have caught her.
Which seemed pretty likely, considering how fast he caught the pen that flew out of her hand.
He snatched it out of the air while driving one-handed.
And not even straight-line driving, either.
He spun the wheel, until the whole car slid into a near jackknife.
Then he hauled on the hand brake so hard it really should have sent them flying or turning or god knows what.
Though the hand brake not actually being real probably had something to do with it.
Everything in here isn’t a truck , she thought, as it screeched to a stop.
But it didn’t seem like the thing they ran over knew that.
There was an almighty crunch and something awful splattered over the window at her side.
And while she was still gasping from that, Jack punched the dashboard.
“Come on, man, get it together,” he yelled, and the truck took off again.
Though this time it wasn’t at lightning speed.
Like the threat had changed, it had stopped being a chase.
Now it was about dodging things that flung themselves at the truck. That tried to get on the hood, until Jack braked and flung them off. That snapped at their wheels, and the side mirrors, and almost took off Jack’s arm when he tried to snatch at one as it went for his window.
The only thing that stopped it was her.
She wrote fast without thinking, and slashed.
And the thing fell away. Only for another to almost immediately take its place.
It came for him again, fast as anything, and she got it.
She got four of them, in quick succession.
But then they seemed to get smart. She could see them out of her side mirror, skulking around the right side taillight.
And when she aimed, she couldn’t get the angle right.
Even though she had no clue why an angle was even needed.
It felt like she should just be able to fire a heat-seeking missile and explode them from the inside out. But rules were rules were rules—and so she changed tactics. She waited until Jack was looking away, and wrote quick, quick, quick. Steve holds no dominion over me , she put.
Then she wound down the window.
And eased herself up and out, until she was sitting on the rim of it.
One hand on the roof of the truck to hold on.
The other ready to cast her spells. No problem , she thought.
But of course Jack didn’t seem to think so.
“Hey, hey, you get back in here . Nancy, do you hear me, get your butt in this truck before I let it get ahold of you,” he bellowed.
But the truck answered for her. “Impossible,” it played.
Much to Jack’s utter fury. “You let her spell-lock you, you stupid piece of shit? When we get out of this I am going to strip you for parts.”
Then she felt Jack’s hand brush her shin.
Like he was fucking reaching for her while trying to stunt-drive around monsters.
He was trying to haul her back in. So she paused in the middle of attempting to get one of the things in her line of sight, and flung a word at him.
A hot one that made him yell in outrage.
“Did you just jab me with a nonexistent fork, you little shit?” he wanted to know.
“Next time it’ll be a nonexistent hot poker,” she said, as she turned, shut one eye, and aimed down the barrel of her pen.
And this time her aim was true.
She got three in one go.
But she didn’t get a chance to thrill at the evidence of her power. She couldn’t, because just as she went to, she saw it. She saw that the maze of teeth had taken on shape and form. It had amassed into more, into hundreds of them, into thousands of them, stretching as far as the eye could see.
And she knew it wasn’t going to be enough.
There were too many of them, too many to fight. And they were still so far from the store. They weren’t even on Main Street yet, and truthfully she wasn’t sure they should be. People wouldn’t be able to see these things. They couldn’t be swallowed by nothing that was only intended for her and Jack.
But a monster could be smashed through a window.
Someone could be knocked off their feet.
It was too much.
“Jack,” she said as she slid back inside. “We can’t.”
Only Jack wasn’t listening. He was staring ahead, determined.
“We can. I just have to wait until the last second,” he said, and it should have been reassuring, really. But something about it made her stomach drop. It made her want to tell him wait, no . It made her think of when he’d left her to fight alone.
If you do that again I’ll never forgive you , she thought.
Only she did it just as he told her, “Hold on.”
And then suddenly they were off the ground.
They were in the air. They were flying through it—and not just in a we hit a really huge speed bump way.
In a way that came with wings. She looked out of the passenger-side window, and there they were.
Great big black ones that beat the air. That held them aloft.
That sent them so high for a second she thought she saw treetops.
“Oh my god ,” she tried to say.
But the words fell inside her throat.
Everything fell inside her throat. She couldn’t do anything but watch in wonder and terror as they flew over Main Street, as gracefully as a swan. The truck even said it himself, as they glided. “I’m Like a Bird,” he played, cheerfully. As if this were all normal, instead of completely deranged.
And it only got more so.
Because now she could see her store. It was rushing up to meet them, incredibly fast, and once she’d registered that, she knew what Jack was going to do.
She could see it in the determined but terrible wince all over his face—like he knew this was going to be bad and very foolish.
But by god he was going to do it anyway.
Man , she couldn’t believe he was going to do it anyway.
Until he said it, a second before he went ahead.
“You got her?”
And the truck did. It surrounded her completely.
Just as it smashed through her roof, and into her home.
T HE FIRST THING she did when the soft foam the truck had swaddled her in dispersed was check that Jack had not “mysteriously” failed to protect himself, and wound up beheaded.
Then after that came a lot of fuming, ending on her spelling out what she thought was very obvious.
“We could have just flown the whole way,” she said. But he had an answer for that.
A sheepish one.
But he had it.
“I wanted the element of surprise.”
And honestly, she didn’t want to let him have that. She really wanted to stay mad. But the thing was: too many other things were getting in the way. Starting with the fact that the armies of Hell were most likely remembering, right around now, that they, too, could sprout wings and fly.
And ending with a jarring realization:
She could see her own bed, through the now nonexistent windshield.
It was right there, just below the bumper of the suspended-at-a-diagonal truck.
Then just as she was thinking that looked like an impossible drop, she felt the seat ease her up, and sort of slide her into a position where she could get through.
And Jack did the rest. He went first—carefully, so as to not dislodge the truck.
And once he was on the bed, he urged her to come to him.
So she did, and he caught her as she slid over the bonnet.
Slow and gentle, his hands on her waist. But then they were a little more frantic once she was standing in front of him.
And she could see why.
The truck was already shaking as things clambered onto the back of it.
She saw a hand claw into the hole they’d made, searching for purchase.
“Go, go, find it, I’ll hold them off,” he yelled, and in answer she scrambled down to the bedroom floor.
She raced to her closet, with the sound of them scrabbling at the metal drilling into her brain.
Driving her on. Turning this all into a psychotic countdown to them breaking through, and hurting Jack.
Because they could hurt him like this.
It would be easy to do, when he was human.
You should have never talked me into blocking your demon form , she thought at him as she started frantically going through the closet.
But it did nothing to help her. It just made her shaky, made her toss shoeboxes then realize they could be it.
She ripped nails opening an old suitcase and struggled for twenty seconds with a zipper that didn’t even need to be unzipped.
And all the while that sound got louder.
His breathing grew harsher.
She heard him yell and smack something, hard enough that it ended on a wet note.
Before she forced herself to focus only on the search.
Only on the mounds and mounds of papers she didn’t even remember keeping.
She unearthed old stories, old slips of spells.
Turn this carrot into candy. Keep my glasses on my nose.
One of them was even an attempt at not needing glasses at all.
In fact, she remembered it. It had made her eyes turn purple. Her mom had thought she’d been drinking too much grape juice, and banned it from the house. And there was more, there was more, there was every memory here, packed away, pretending not to exist.
I’m surprised they didn’t burn them all , she thought despairingly.
And suddenly there it was. Curled like a rose petal in the middle of a circle of papers.
Just a scrap of some notepad torn out, barely a page filled.
Hardly a story at all, but oh so familiar it made her ache.
Once upon a time there was a prince who thought he wasn’t , it started. But she didn’t stop to read on.
She just raced to the end.
The sentence that wasn’t finished.
She even remembered why it wasn’t now. It wasn’t just that her hope had fallen short of what was possible, for no reason at all.
Her dad had yanked her hand away before she could.
She could see the line her pen had made, diagonally down the page.
You need to stop all this childish nonsense , he’d said, and for the first time in her life, she’d listened. She’d believed him, and not herself.
But not anymore.
Not now.
Now she went still, in the middle of this maelstrom. Dust from the ceiling swirling around her, Jack yelling “Anytime now, Nance,” snarls and the screeches of metal puncturing the air. Then she put her pen to the paper. Just a ballpoint, this time, but it being one didn’t seem to matter.
The power was in her.
It had always been in her.
And they lived happily ever after , she wrote.
Then listened to the low, sweet sound of all her dreams coming true.