Chapter 6
“What the hell, Willa?” Ravi shouts over Whitney Houston / everyone else on the dance floor loudly singing along. He helps Tanya to her feet. “Tanya, are you okay?”
“I’m…” She turns toward the windows. “Oh my God!”
“What?” he asks.
“Look out the fucking windows, Rav,” I say, slipping off my heels so I’m ready to run.
“Um…” he says, squinting. He either can’t see or can’t believe what he’s seeing.
“You need to just trust me when I tell you those flowers are trying to kill us.”
“The…what?” he asks.
A scream spurts from somewhere. It sounds far away but feels close. There’s spittle on my cheek.
No, that’s sweat. It’s boiling in here. Claustrophobic with hot, botanic breath.
The vases tip. They fall like dominoes all around the room. Some people notice, pull away. But most people are too busy dancing.
Flowers spread across the tables—stems convulsing, petals peeling back.
They birth these viscous yellowish sacks that travel forward slow and slimy as slugs.
The first one that bursts startles me so much that I go woozy, my vision whiting out.
I blink back to the scene, and they’re all bursting.
Gentle pops punctuating the transition between the end of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and the opening of “Come On Eileen.” From the yellow jelly emerge these small, jittery shapes.
Little creatures with grotesque, hateful little faces, like the ones I saw in the windows.
They’re a few inches tall. Fragile, emaciated things with long arms and legs. Translucent skin. Petal wings. They have rosy cheeks, bug eyes, wide mouths with thorn fangs, coils of pale hair that’s still wet from the sack and matted to their bulbous heads.
The screams spread. The music plays on; Luke and Jace and Wyatt skank in the middle of the floor, drunk and wonderfully unaware of what’s unfolding around them.
One of the little creatures—the little flower sprites—marches to the edge of a table and points at the window.
It makes a high-pitched whining noise, speaking gibberish and gesturing to the rest of the sprites, who talk back.
It’s nails on a chalkboard, the shrill wail of a fire alarm, a malicious whistle that would cause panic among animals. Practically ultrasonic.
“Ah!” I cover my ears.
The sprites jump to the windowsills, flitter around trying to figure out how to open them to let their friends in. They go on gabbling to one another in their squeaky, animated language.
I back away, stepping farther onto the dance floor, where I receive a kick to the shin from Luke, who is so far from sober that he doesn’t even realize what he’s done. He just keeps singing along with Dexys Midnight Runners, swinging his arms and legs.
The pain is so sharp I can’t breathe. I stumble off the dance floor, clutching my leg and narrowly avoiding Wyatt’s elbow. A drop of yellow slime lands on my shoulder. It’s almost honey-like. Reeks of flowers.
“Ugh!” I tilt my head back. They’re on the beams. They’re crawling all over the ceiling.
Everyone who isn’t caught up dancing observes the sprites in utter shock. They’re stunned into inaction. They watch the creatures while slack-jawed, wide-eyed, wine spilling out of their glasses.
Except for this one guy. He looks a lot like Steph’s dad, so I’m guessing he’s her uncle, and I know he’s an idiot because he reaches down, slips off his shoe, and lifts it up over his head.
He shouldn’t do what he’s about to do, but he does it anyway.
He smacks his shoe down on the table, onto one of the sprites.
SPLAT.
He lifts the shoe. Ribbons of thick yellow goo cling to the sole. The sprite is splayed out, limbs bent at vile angles. Its head is cracked open, revealing a pink meaty center.
I gag.
The sprite nearest to the dead one jumps up and down, obviously very upset. It hisses, spits, gnashes its little thorn teeth. It gets the attention of all the other sprites, who join in when they see the body.
I must now possess some perverse tolerance, because a few days ago, to witness something like this would have fried my circuits, would have cracked my sanity clean in half.
But after the Eyeball Man, the Top Hat phantom and his ravens, zombies, aliens, why would I be fazed by hundreds of tiny shrieking flower sprites?
Together, they’re louder than the music. The DJ finally notices that something’s going on. He takes off his headphones.
The sprites point at the uncle, and I already know what’s coming, and that it will be gruesome.
They’re on him. They’re not eating him, I don’t think, but they do appear to be biting him.
Leaving small marks on his face and hands and neck, any exposed skin.
They pull his hair—what little is left of it.
Paw and scratch and poke with their hands—no bigger than dimes but their nails are sharp enough to draw blood.
He tries to swat them away, but there are too many of them.
They’re nasty. Relentless. They pry open his mouth and yank out his teeth.
They peel back his eyelids, hold his lashes tight like reins and scrape out his eyes.
A woman, probably his wife, tries to pull them off, but now they’re on her, too.
In the background, it’s still Dexys Midnight Runners. “Come on, Eileen, ta-loo-rye-aye / Come on, Eileen, ta-loo-rye-aye…”
Jace and his dad run over, wanting to help but not sure how.
I hear Ravi on the phone behind me. “I’m at a wedding at the Lakeside. We’re experiencing an attack. It’s…no. No…I’m not sure what they are.”
The dance floor clears out, and I drag myself and my bum leg across it, my shin destroyed courtesy of Luke’s intoxicated dancing. I need to get to the kitchen. We need to leave through the kitchen door because there are more flowers out front, more sprites.
“What’s happening?” Steph asks, backing up against the sweetheart table. Her bouquet is there, shaking violently. She eyes it—transfixed—as it shimmies closer.
I hobble toward her. “Steph! No! Careful!”
The bouquet levitates. Steph’s hands go right in her mouth, defaulting to the nervous nail bite.
“Steph!” My screaming finally snaps her out of her fear-trance, and she grabs the bouquet, swings for the fences. She lets go, and it rockets through the air for about four feet, before hitting Vicky Moldando’s big blond head. It falls into Vicky’s hands, and she looks down at it, confused.
The center rose burps, basically, disgorging one of the yellow blobs square into Vicky’s face. The mucus covers her eyes, her nose, her mouth. The sprite frees itself of the membrane, sliding down onto Vicky’s chest.
“Oh my God! Get it off me! Get it off! Oh my God, get it off!” She leans over, thrashing around, but that just upsets the sprite, and it clamps on, digs its nails in—tiny but fiercely strong. “It’s hurting me! It’s hurting me!”
Steph breaks down in sobs as I take her into my arms. “Out the back. Get as many people as you can and go out through the kitchen. All right? Through there. You’re—”
I’m interrupted by chaos.
Someone had the terribly misguided idea of opening the doors to the reception hall, letting in hundreds, possibly thousands more sprites birthed from the floral arches.
The sprites cyclone through, pull hair, nibble earlobes, poke and prod.
They tear the world apart. Smash glasses.
A few of them are using cutlery as weapons.
The guests retaliate. The floor is littered with dead sprites, their pink innards leaking out, making the surface slick.
The crowd rushes away from the front doors, and a few people fall. They’re trampled by the rest of the guests. Danny stumbles past me carrying a wounded Jace. “Willa! I’ll come back for you.”
“Don’t,” I tell him. “Just keep going.”
But he’s already gone, swept into the mayhem. I spot Tanya—she’s got Ravi’s jacket over her head, and she runs toward the back hallway, toward the kitchen.
“Tanya! Tanya, wait!” I follow her, try to keep up, but my shin is swollen black-and-blue. I have more questions. Does it matter when in the day I go through the wormhole? How will I know if I find it? How will I know if it’s about to collapse? How do I know it hasn’t already?
“They’re killing him! They’re killing him!”
I spin around.
The sprites have the uncle in the air. They’re ripping him limb from limb, chanting in their language.
Their voices sound like if a bunch of cats huffed helium on double speed.
They tear off one leg, then lose some leverage.
A small group of them saw at his middle with a piece of broken glass.
They gut him like a fish in the middle of the dance floor, while making an unbearable racket. Goblin-pitched war cries.
It might be the grisliest thing I’ve seen so far. This man’s disemboweling.
Ravi emerges from the surrounding madness, runs up to me and knits his arm around my back. He helps me limp to the hall, and through it into the kitchen. “You all right?”
I nod. “Are you?”
“I—”
“What in the ever-loving fairy fuck is happening?” It’s Cassie. And Luke and Evan and Wyatt. They come sprinting into the kitchen.
“What did I take, what did I take, what did I take? Dude, my shit was laced. It was laced. I’m so fucked,” Luke says, tearing off his shirt like the Incredible Hulk.
“Hurry. I hear them coming,” Wyatt says, corralling us with his enormous wingspan. He pushes us around the corner and out the back door.