Elle: Does it matter?
Karl: No. I’m just curious. They were scared, I think. Just like Osvaldo. I keep thinking I should be mad at them, at him, and I’m not, especially when I try to put myself in their position. I understand it. We can’t hate each other. There’s so few of us left.
Elle: I agree. Look where we are and look what we’re doing right now. We’re doing our best, and we’re risking our necks, again, to just save a few people. I wouldn’t have it any other way. At least we have another crazy Carl plan to chase. I don’t know if you realize how important these things are to us. In the end, it doesn’t even matter if they work or not. I mean, it does matter, ’cause, you know, we’ll die if it doesn’t. But we will die with hope in our hearts alongside our friends, and that’s gotta mean something.
We turned the corner to the street with the Hairpin—the entrance bar to the Desperado Club—and I saw them all there waiting.
Karl: That Corky guy said something similar to Dong once.
Elle: Don’t ever mention that Corky guy again. Donut won’t stop talking about his weird wang.
I let out a laugh, but it came out as a bark, which was followed by a Donut hiss.
I paused before the group of about thirty crawlers. They all stared at me open-mouthed.
I blinked, looking at the man standing there next to Imani. I hadn’t seen him like this in so long.
Chris. It was Chris. He’d been transformed from an Igneous to a werewolf. But that werewolf form spent most of its time ashuman, and I hadn’t realized until just that moment what that meant.
He was wearing the same clothes as when I’d first met him. I knew he’d obtained a lot of random equipment along the way, but he didn’t need most of it. The man in his Meadow Lark work overalls looked so strange, and it hit me with a pang of sadness that someone dressed so normal would now seem out of place.
God, his eyes. It struck me how sad he appeared, but then, just like that, Imani turned and looked up at him, and everything changed. His entire soul smiled in a way I hadn’t seen in so very long.
I remembered the conditions for the transformation to end. It would time out when we went down the stairs. If we did this correctly, Chris would never go down another set of stairs again.
Elle had turned into a goblin wearing her ever-present socks. Next to her, Prepotente stood fingering his now-glowing Apito crystal. I was surprised he’d even come, as he was usually the first to jump down the stairwell. But then I spied Jurgen, talking to a pissed-looking Lucia Mar, who stood in the back. Prepotente couldn’t leave without Jurgen, and Jurgen wouldn’t leave until he knew Lucia was safe. The crawler was in her beautiful-woman form.
Donut and I padded forward, and everyone continued to gape.
And then, as one, they started howling with laughter.
Despite all the death, all the horror, they laughed. This wasn’t just a random chuckle, either. This was a bent-over, struggling-to-breathe, screaming thing. All of them. From Imani to Chris to Jurgen to stoic Prepotente to even Lucia, they each fell all over themselves.
They were laughing at the sight of me as a dachshund.
“And I thought the kangaroo was funny,” Imani said, laughing so hard, tears rolled down her face. She stepped forward, scratched me under the chin, and cast a spell.
You have been cured of Slugpox!
Ahh, man. I loved those little fuckers.
She carried a tiny red starfish in her right hand. This was Jacobus, temporarily changed. Water squirted from the sea creature.
Everyone continued to howl with laughter.
“Dude, your dick is peeking out,” Louis said.
Donut scoffed. “He saw Imani’s purse dog, and it hasn’t retracted since. The Princess Posse is going to be scandalized.”
“Laugh it up, assholes,” I muttered, though I was secretly relieved. “Let’s go rob a casino.”
[ 85 ]
Clarabelle didn’t even tryto stop us.
She saw us walk in, and she held up her hands and said, “Nope.”
“Does this door go to the top level?” I asked.