AWFUL IS ME

Peaches wasn’t sure whether the world returned to stretch beneath her feet or she and her friends returned to it. What she did know as she looked down was that she was angrier than she’d ever been. Their brief trip into nowhere and nothing had reminded her how badly she missed her daddy and of the no-good thievin’-ass haint who had stolen his most recent letter. From here, she could see Stagger Lee and First Chief both. The bird-man had frozen midstep, elbows crooked, fingers spread, goggling at the muzzle of Stagger Lee’s gun.

Peaches Lavelle did not wonder whether she’d be fast enough, strong enough, or bad enough. All she knew was that the swell of emotion in the pit of her belly was rapidly rising up her throat, and she felt ready to breathe her own unforgiving fire. It was a lucky thing that Stagger Lee was up to no good: Peaches needed a focus for her rage, and he would do just fine.

“Now!” Perry shouted, and Peaches dived.

For a shining instant, she was weightless and perfect. She moved so fast that she left all her fear, and even her anger, behind. This was how she felt when she dived into Big Lake. With a slight doubling of her thoughts, she imagined herself from afar—an arrow-shaped fish, fired by the Ocean God, straight at the Enemy of Everything.

She hit him so hard that her consciousness skipped. She understood the force of the impact, understood that she was unhurt, but she knew nothing else for a beat. When her vision returned, Stagger Lee was on his back, and she knelt on his barrel chest, with one fist pressed against his throat. The flesh there was as hard and cool as marble, and Peaches wondered for an instant just how strong Stagger Lee really was.

He glared up at Peaches, and the force of his hatred felt like needles on her skin.

It’s the gun, she thought. All his power in it. He ain’t nothing but a bully. “And I chews up bullies and spits ’em out!” she growled.

Peaches smacked the gun out of Stagger Lee’s hand, and neither of them looked to see where it went. In fact, Stag seemed to care so little for the loss of his weapon that Peaches had to wonder. Maybe he really was bad as bad could be.

Bad or not, nobody liked being punched in the nose. Peaches brought the heel of her hand down on the broad bridge of Stagger Lee’s nose, but the bone held firm beneath the blow.

When they’d fallen together, Stag got his right arm between them. Now he used it to lever Peaches off, send her flying. She stumbled past First Chief, fighting to recover her balance, but she didn’t stop until her shoulder met the side of a white van parked alongside the Pancake House. The force of her fall stove the van’s side in, and she elbowed it out of her way, sent it rolling onto the sidewalk, then turned to face Stagger Lee.

Behind him, Peaches saw First Chief, Brendy, Perry, and Fess moving in slow motion. Perry was opening his bag, making ready to say his Words, glaring at First Chief as if First Chief were the enemy. Brendy was craning her neck, trying to see where Peaches had gone, her magic rock clutched in her little right fist. Fess sat at the Mess Around, his hands moving calmly across the keys. The sound of his music poured like molasses from the baby grand, and its rocking imperative must have cleared the innocent bystanders from the scene.

YA DONE DONE IT NOW, Stagger Lee boomed. I’MA KILL YA TWICE, AND I DON’T NEED NO.45 TO DO IT.

Peaches made a rude noise. “You welcome to try, dummy. You know you don’t scare me none.”

THASS CUZ Y’AIN’T TOO BRIGHT.

Peaches rushed him, but Stag was too quick. He crow-hopped toward her and slapped Peaches, harder than hard, across her face. The blow spun her facedown into the street—hard enough to crack the pavement. Hard enough to hurt!

Peaches had never felt a blow hard enough to cause her pain. Until now, she hadn’t realized such a strike existed in the world. After all, her daddy was the only one who could hit so hard, and he never would.

The blow scared her, but it thrilled her, too—made her blood roar in her ears.

Perry’s voice finally made it out of his throat—but it wasn’t his normal speech. It was the hollow boom of his Magic Words. “STAGGER LEE! WEDE ĀSIMATENYA JONIYAYĒ BEFIT’INETI!” he roared, and the sound of it made Peaches shudder—as it had every time she heard it. These were not the words Ms. Yvette had given him when she’d told him how to use the sack. She’d said “clickety-clack” something, and Perry had repeated the nonsense phrase. But down in the no-place, when he’d used the sack to return them to the world, that magical African-sounding Hoodoo Speak, that undeniable command, was what he’d spoken into the air—except he’d said it backwards.

Peaches turned to watch her enemy disappear, but he stood with his feet planted and his shoulders squared. His image trembled, flickered a bit, but remained whole. He grunted with the effort of staying put, but whatever was keeping them out of sync with the rest of the world was allowing him to defy Perry’s witchery.

Now Peaches knew. She knew she’d have to hit Stagger Lee for real.

Before they parted, Peaches’s daddy had warned her. She saw him now in her mind’s eye, his stinky pipe clenched between his golden teeth as he stood at the schooner’s wheel, staring straight ahead across the vast and deathless ocean.

“You gettin’ ta be pretty strong,” he said in his gravelly whisper of a voice. “One day you be strong as me. But remember: You can’t just go hittin’ things and people, baby. Most of ’em, they can’t take it. Most times, play-fighting and slappin’ get the job done.”

“But not every time?” she’d asked.

“Not every time. Sometimes, you gotta hit somebody so he stay hit. You gotta hit ’im for real.”

“How I know when, Daddy?”

“You’ll know, babygirl. You’ll know.”

Peaches laughed softly to herself. “Jus you and me, baby,” she said. “You ready?”

Stagger Lee smiled, and briefly, the nastiness disappeared from his expression. In that instant, he was startlingly attractive, and he was just as excited for this as Peaches was. BRING IT, LIL GIRL.

Peaches rushed, drew back her fist like a stone in a slingshot. Now she was John Henry, and her fist was her hammer. She drove that steel right past Stagger Lee’s guard and into his jaw.

As she threw her punch, Peaches heard a groan—a tortured sound almost like metal bending. When the blow connected, it sounded like a car wreck.

Stagger Lee stumbled hard, almost losing his footing. The expression on his face was one of suppressed shock. At the last split second, he recovered his balance and returned the punch, slamming his fist into Peaches’s ribs on her right side.

Peaches had felt pain before—rarely, but she’d felt it. It had hurt when Stagger Lee burned her with his fire, but Peaches had never felt pain inside her body. The punch hurt all through her, and for the first time, Peaches felt her organs—her heart, her lungs, her kidneys, and they didn’t like what was happening at all. They wanted her to turn and run.

The thought made Peaches see red, and when Stagger Lee swung again, she blocked with her left forearm and stepped back for an uppercut, giving the punch everything she had. Her knuckles connected with the underside of Stagger Lee’s jaw, and this time, the air didn’t just groan, it shattered, and the Mid-City street disappeared.

Trismegistus stepped onto the street. From here, he could see the tag close-on. It read JAYL313 in bubbly, stylized letters. A bit generic for Jayl, but it was undeniably one of his. After all, who else could draw 3D on nothing at all?

The tag’s color shifted slowly within its fat black outline. First it was off-white, then blue, bluer, then, abruptly green. And there were more like this, Other Casey had said. The city was full of them.

He said there’d always been graffiti like this, here. But Dr. John had said… Casey felt a dizzy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had read once that time was a fiction. That it existed, but that it was imaginary—like a story in a book. That seemed even more true, here. It wasn’t that time didn’t pass at all, it was that it had a different character than it did in Casey’s world. The continuity didn’t feel the same. Like Rev Keith and Casey had told him, something bad was about to happen here, was already happening, but Casey sensed that if he’d come here sooner—say, last month? Or even the year before—it would have been now, here in the city. That if he came next year, it would still be now—or maybe not. Maybe by then there’d be no here to come to.

Casey shook the thought away. What did this mean? Jayl was here somewhere, making these tags, but maybe he’d always been here. Maybe he’d been brought here at the moment of the Hidden City’s birth, and he’d been here for… Casey asked himself for how long, and he didn’t like the answer his mind whispered back: Forever.

If Jaylon had already been here, tagging the air, forever, what could be left of him by now?

He wouldn’t panic. He would. Not. He couldn’t spare the time.

On a whim, he reached for the tag, touched it. A mad, fizzing feeling raced from the tip of his right pointer finger to his shoulder. He stared down at the brown flesh of his forearm and watched iridescent scales rise on his skin, only to disappear again, almost at once. This wasn’t just the product of some unbelievable painting technique; this was reality-altering magic at least as powerful as Casey’s own.

After a moment, the electric sensation faded to pins and needles, and Casey’s skin seemed to behave normally again. Flooding the city with tags would require an enormous amount of magical power, even if it cost nothing to maintain them—and this one did look a little worse for wear, its surface blistered in places, and if Casey turned his head a bit, instead of looking 3D, it looked less convincing, like some sort of optical illusion.

Jayl’s magic had to be related to Casey’s own. So, maybe if Casey focused, he could feel the tags being made, identify their origin. He took a seat on the curb, resting his arms on his knees, and shut his eyes. The heat. The heat of the day. A cascade of sewing pins falling to a carpeted floor. His grandmother’s hands, the soft wrinkles of her skin. Back. His plastic car seat when he was little little. The dim, slightly dingy laundry alcove in his parents house. His mother used to sit his car seat on the dryer while it ran to make Casey go to—

Wait. There was something. A sound so soft, so quiet, it could barely be called a noise. It was like a single sustained musical note played on a ghostly synthesizer. Casey listened to it just to listen, letting his hearing (though he knew this had little relationship to his auditory sense) guide him along it. As if gliding over water in a canoe, hanging a finger over the side to skim, just a little, across the surface… The sound broke for a moment, resumed.

Casey opened his eyes. That was it. That was a tag being born somewhere in the city. Somewhere… somewhere off Elysian Fields? Gentilly, maybe. Probably. Certainly. And if he could narrow it down this far…

A breeze swept by the tag, sent it bobbing down Frenchmen Street. Silently, Casey wished it well on its travels and took off walking.

Perry lay enveloped by a darkness so profound that it seemed tangible. He imagined that if he could move his fingers, he could rub the darkness between them and feel its oily slickness. It seemed proper, somehow, this dark. It seemed safe—neither warm nor cold. For an instant, he was back in Da Cut, watching Stagger Lee’s bullet sail toward him. He turned his head away, trembling.

But Peaches wouldn’t turn away. Peaches was strong, unafraid. Peaches would—

Perry sat bolt upright and took a whooping pull of city air. “Who touchin’ me!”

Perry scrabbled to turn himself around. A dark-skinned grown-up with a broad pulpy nose and hair clipped close to his scalp knelt on the asphalt beside him. His right hand was still outstretched, and in his left, he held something small and shiny. Something that blurred Perry’s vision when he tried to focus on it.

“You Perilous?” the man asked.

“Who wants to know?” Perry asked.

“I’m Casey,” said the man. “I’m here to help. Where’s Fess?”

“Where’s—?” Perry stopped short. “I don’t know.” Where was Doctor Professor?

“Ain’t seen him since last night,” Casey said. “I need you to come with me. The Wise Women can tell us what to do next. You got others with you. A sister? Where she at?”

Instead of asking another question, Perry kicked to his feet and scanned his surroundings. The crowd of onlookers were all gone, and Brendy was picking herself up from the sidewalk outside the Pancake House. “Awwwwwwww,” she groaned. “What happened? Was it fireworks?”

“A bomb?” Casey asked. “A bomb went off?”

“It wasn’t a bomb,” Perry said distractedly. He was relieved to see that Brendy was unhurt, but the last thing he remembered was seeing Stagger Lee and Peaches fighting, moving so fast that Perry couldn’t quite track their movements. The noise and the force of their blows had buckled the street beneath them, and then—and then they’d disappeared…

“Listen, Mr. Casey,” Perry said hastily. “Thanks for your concern, but we gotta go. Our friend—”

“What happened? What are y’all doing?”

Perry didn’t stop to consider. He explained in broad strokes.

“Is First Chief still alive?”

“He’s safe,” Perry said. “He’s in my sack. I grabbed him as soon as the fight started. Problem is, my friend and Stagger Lee, they’re fighting, and she needs our help.”

“What sack?” Casey asked. “What are you—?”

“We gotta get Doctor Professor,” Brendy said. “He’ll know what to do.”

“Fess took off like a scared pigeon,” Perry said. “Now, either you call up your haint and have him take us wherever they’ve gone or I’ll trade you for my sack and I’ll do it myself, ya heard?”

“I’m scared,” Brendy said simply.

“I know,” Perry said. “But I’ll tell you a secret: There’s no such thing as grown-ups, Brendy. They’re just old kids, pretending.”

A shocked expression appeared on Brendy’s face. Perry considered darkly that this must be the same face he’d made when Peaches first told him. “What that means?”

“I’m not a kid,” Casey said before Perry could answer. “I’m not pretending.”

Instead of looking directly at his sister, Perry watched Casey’s face. The two regarded each other as Perry spoke. “It means we’re enough. It means we can do this.”

Something in Mr. Casey’s expression changed. A new light seemed to dawn in his eyes. “Okay,” he said.

“Okay what?” Brendy asked. “Who you is anyway, Mistuh Man?”

“I have something that will take us to your friend—”

“Well, bust it out,” Perry said.

After a beat, Mr. Casey withdrew a brassy locket from the pocket of his jeans. He took a breath, then, “Compass, can you take us to Peaches?”

Yes, said a disembodied voice. Perry realized after a beat that it was the locket who had spoken. The compass. Gather.

“All right,” Mr. Casey said. “Get close.”

Perry kept watching Mr. Casey’s face, and he thought he understood the look the man was giving him. It was one of respect.

A hissing, fizzing noise filled the air. Perry, Brendy, and their new friend disappeared.

“Where we is now?” Brendy asked.

She, Casey, and Perry had winked back into the world, and Perry found himself up to his calves in mud. He pulled at his legs, trying to turn around and get a look at their surroundings.

“Look,” Mr. Casey said. “In the sky.”

Perry stopped his struggling to look up into the sunlight. Shadows flitted there, backlit, and Perry recognized a paper condor pursued by a paper dragon with a long, segmented tail. “Kites,” he said. “This must be City Park.”

“City Park ain’t got no mudhole,” Brendy said.

“This isn’t a mudhole,” Perry said, thinking aloud. “This is Big Lake.”

A bloodcurdling whoop split the air, and as Perry watched, the middle of the dragon’s tail caught fire. It took Perry a few seconds to realize what he was seeing. Someone had loosed a series of flaming arrows at the dragon, and they sliced through him, blackening his body and saving the paper condor from its vinyl claws.

“You got it, Tammara?” called a woman’s voice. It was almost musical.

“Wow,” Casey said softly.

“Wait,” Brendy said. “If this Big Lake, what happened to the water?”

“That must be it right there,” Mr. Casey said.

Perry saw what he meant. At first it looked like a flying saucer made of clear and spinning glass, gleaming in the sunlight. But it wasn’t. Something had spun all the lake water into the air as a single mass, and here it came, hurtling right back at them at amazing speed. It cast a shimmering shadow on the lakebed around them.

As soon as he recognized it for what it was, Perry understood how stuck they were. If all that lake water came down on them, it wouldn’t hit them like rain—it would crush them like concrete, and they’d die before they had a chance to drown.

Perry pulled his sack from his jeans pocket. The more he used it, the more natural it felt to do so. Was he getting stronger, or was it? “Brendy Graves! Mr. Casey!” he shouted. “Click—!”

There! said the Trouble Compass.

The fizzing sound began again, and by now the lake water was so close that Perry could see nothing else. Toy fish, seaweed, Mardi Gras ducks, and even a couple moldering bodies were still submerged inside it. Had some killer dumped corpses into—? No. One of the bodies turned its head, and its wide, staring eyes locked with Perry’s.

Of course. What better place for a zombie to get a little rest than the bottom of Big Lake? Perry hoped the undead survived the fall. Then again, would Perry and his companions?

Perry shut his eyes tight as he and the others fizzed away again.

They were in a bar. Not Da Cut, but some other bar Peaches had never seen before. Peaches knew this because she and Stagger Lee fell straight through the ceiling onto the scuffed linoleum tile behind the counter. Stagger Lee hit first, and Peaches came down on top of him.

Someone had left the jukebox on, and a rocking saxophone solo filled the room.

You learned all them dances, the shimmy and the shake

Ain’t no use unless you got you a honey to take!

The scents of stale tobacco smoke, beer, and oil soap hung musty in the air. Before her enemy could register what was happening, Peaches grabbed the back of his suit jacket and the seat of his pants and lifted him from the floor like a bag of sand. She heaved him onto the bar top and launched him toward the stacked glasses at the bar’s far end. Stagger Lee crashed through them, and his head went right through the wall. He groaned as if in pain.

Peaches looked down at her dirty feet and saw Stagger Lee’s purple hat lying between them, daisy-fresh. It hadn’t been rumpled in the fight. Peaches grabbed it and stepped around the bar.

She tried not to wonder where they were. Christmas lights, signs, and promotional lamps for beer and booze Peaches had never heard of festooned the barroom walls. What was a Yuengling?

Everything except the bar looked fashioned from plywood, and most of the furniture had been stacked, secured by chains. What few windows there were were closed tight, maybe even nailed shut from outside. Photographs of happy drunks stood out on the walls. In most all of them, white folks and Black folks held their drinks aloft, as if in offering to some soggy spirit.

She remembered Perry showing her one of his schoolbooks—Peaches didn’t much like anything had to with school, but her daddy had made it clear before they got separated that reading and books were important. Perry had shown her an explanation of the world that said their planet was always turning and turning through space, that they and everything on it were traveling all the time forever. Peaches wondered now if the titanic force of her fighting with Stagger Lee had unstuck them from the world, made them stay still as the planet turned beneath them. If that was the case, they could be anywhere.

Get ready ready ready

Get ready ready ready

Get ready ready ready

For the Downtown Blue Jeans Ball!

Peaches breathed hard, not because she was winded or afraid, but because Perry had once told her she sounded like a T. rex when she did. She could be a T. rex. She could be anything he or the city of Nola needed. Her bare hands were dinosaur jaws, and they would crush her enemy with reptilian might.

Stagger Lee pulled his head from the ruined wall and turned to face her. One of his eyes had swollen shut—Peaches wasn’t sure she remembered punching him in the eye. Thin worms of blood crawled from his left nostril and from a cut at the corner of his mouth.

I did that, Peaches thought. Me. The baddest gangsterest gangster who’d ever lived had been smacked up good by Peaches Lavelle.

As soon as he saw her with his hat, Stag’s expression turned mean again, and hatred darkened his good eye.

“What you think you doing with that?” he said softly.

Peaches sipped a startled breath. He sounded like a man.

“You didn’t care when I took yo gun away,” she said. “But now you getting upset about a silly ole pimp hat?”

“That right there is a genuwine Stetson, and you best hand it back to me fore thangs get complicated.” He took an unhurried step forward with his right leg and showed her his left palm. One second it was empty, and the next he held his big old nasty gun. He didn’t point it at Peaches, though. Instead, he slid it into his suit.

“What you gone do?” Peaches asked, and for the first time, she felt out of her depth. “You gone breathe fire on me? You gone hurt people just because don’t nobody respect you?”

“Don’t pretend to know what goes on in my head,” Stagger Lee said lightly. “Up till now, we been playing. I ain’t never met nobody could stand up to me hand to hand, and my guess is you ain’t, neither. But playtime over, baby.”

“I ain’t stupid,” Peaches said. “You hurt bad. You can’t last much longer.”

“Neither can you.”

“Why you doing this? Where you gone live if you destroy the city?”

For a long time, he didn’t answer, and when he did, it was as if he had drawn his Stagger Lee–ness back around him like a cape. THASS WHAT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND: I AIN’T VIOLENT; I’M VIOLENCE. I AM VIOLENCE AND I AM HATE.

“You the Devil” was all Peaches could think to say. She had begun to sweat.

BABY, THE DEVIL GOT NOTHIN’ ON ME. HE WAS STANDIN’ RIGHT HERE, I KILL HIM JUST AS DEAD AS I’MA KILL YOU, YOU DON’T GIMME THAT STETSON. NOW, YOU MIGHT THINK I’M ON MY LAST LEGS, BUT YOU DON’T WANNA BET YO LIFE ON IT.

“I just wanna know why,” Peaches said. “I wanna know why you so awful.”

“I ain’t awful, little bit,” Stagger Lee said. “Awful is me.”

Peaches considered, then tossed Stagger Lee his prized hat. As it sailed through the air, she planted her feet, squared her shoulders, and brought her hands together as hard as she could, thunder-clapping, just as Stag had done in Big Lake.

The force of the concussion took them out of the world again.

This time, when she and Stagger Lee reappeared, Peaches knew exactly where they were. Congo Circus. It was night, but that meant nothing—it was always night in Congo Square. The darkness made the lights look better. They fell from thirty or so feet above, landing on the tiles maybe twenty paces apart. Peaches dropped lightly into a crouch, but Stagger Lee hit the stones hard enough to crack them.

Even so, when he stood up, his Pimpin’ Suit had been restored. His injuries had disappeared as well. Both his eyes were clear, brown, and full of hate.

Peaches knew she should do something. She knew she should rush Stagger Lee, snatch his hat again to distract him, and resume the fight to its finish, but her body wouldn’t obey her commands. The stones of the square were cold against her feet, and she just couldn’t lift them. All of a sudden she was tired all through her, and she hurt deep inside.

Stagger Lee didn’t speak. Instead, he locked eyes with Peaches, pointed at her. He flashed her a pained smile and then shaped his hand into a gun. He mimed a shot at her.

Peaches sank to her knees as if she’d been hit by a real bullet. When she looked up again, Stagger Lee was limping away, and piano chords had begun to sound out of nowhere at all.

It was Daddy Deke who had first brought Perry and Brendy to Congo Circus. The old man had driven them across town, laughing and joking like usual, but when they turned down North Rampart Street, his mood grew serious.

He found a parking space easily enough, guiding the car into place outside a laundromat shop front. “Now, listen here,” he’d said. “The place I’m bout to show you is the holiest place in all of Nola. Holier than all the churches and the boneyards put together.”

“How come?” Brendy chirped.

“Congo Square, where the circus at, is where jazz began, way back in Slave Times. The French used to let their slaves congregate at the open-air market and sell their wares, have their church services, and do their drumming. So the slaves, they used to drum and dance all the dances they remembered from Africa. That was how the Rhythm started. That was how the Jazz Spirit first entered the world.”

But now? Now the circus had stopped, and the Square had been desecrated.

As soon as they appeared, Perry could tell that he had arrived too late. His heart lurched with cheer as he smelled the roasting peanuts, frying funnel cakes, and spun cotton candy of the circus, but it sank as he noticed the crater. Somehow, the center of the square had been dented in, and a web of wicked cracks radiated from it.

A couple of the tents had fallen down. Figures of people and furniture lay swaddled, covered like cats under bedsheets. The big tent at the center of the square had lost some of its poles in the accident, and now listed badly on its facing side. Doctor Professor sat just beyond the radius of the damage, playing hard as ever, and the fortune-tellers and circus audience had left their seats to dance.

Lord don’t let it snow in New Orleans!

Lord don’t let it snow in New Orleeeeeeeeans!

I said what I said and you know what I mean!

Don’t want that nasty traffic or that ice beneath my feet

Lord don’t let it snow in New Orleans!

Instead of the fever to dance, Perry felt a pulsing in his temples. The sight of Fess playing his piano like nothing had happened—like he hadn’t abandoned Perry and the others just moments ago—made his head buzz like a hornet’s nest.

“Hey!” Perry shouted.

“Oh noooooo!” Brendy wailed and broke to Perry’s left.

Perry turned to see Peaches sitting on the flagstones, her legs splayed out in front of her, hugging herself and crying hard. Brendy stretched, enfolding her friend in her arms as best she could. “You okay now. We here. We got you.”

Doctor Professor had stopped playing, but Perry paid him no mind as he approached his friend. He squatted in front of her and rested a hand on her thigh, waiting for her to look up at him.

Peaches shook her head and sobbed, inconsolable.

“Are you hurt?” Perry asked.

Peaches seemed to consider, then shook her head again.

“He’s gone now, and we’re here,” Perry said. “You’re safe.”

She shook her head again, and a heat passed across Perry’s face. It reminded him of how sometimes, when he was home sick from school, he could feel his own fever baking up from his skin. He backed away, balled his fists, and turned.

Doctor Professor stood nearby, having left his piano on the far side of the Square. Circus patrons milled around, aimless, as fortune-tellers picked up their overturned card tables and folding chairs, looking to get back to work. Even as he opened his mouth to speak, Perry wondered what he would say. Could he think of anything besides cusses?

“Perry,” Peaches said.

He turned back to her. “Yeah?”

“I need to go home,” she said. “I ain’t quitting, but I just—I need to go home, just for tonight. You take me?”

“Yeah,” Perry said. “Yeah, I take you.” He turned back to Doctor Professor. “You heard her,” he said. “We going home.”

“Time growing short, baby,” said the ghost.

“We don’t care.”

“Listen, baby. I’m truly sorry for the way things—”

“That don’t mean nothing,” Perry said. “You left us. There’s things you care about more than you care about us, and that’s fine. But I care more about Peaches and Brendy and Daddy Deke than I do about your songs. Now, you take us to Peaches’s house right now, and we’ll take your quest back up in the morning if we choose!”

“What about me?” Mr. Casey asked. “Should I go?”

Perry considered. “You can come if you want, but you don’t know the danger we’re in. You could—You could die.”

Mr. Casey swallowed. The pain in his expression comforted Perry a little. The man didn’t know what he was getting into, but he seemed to understand that the stakes were higher than high. “I know.”

“I’ll take you home,” Doctor Professor said. “But you go to your mama house first, understand? Let her know you alive and kickin’.”

“What if we ain’t?” Peaches asked just loudly enough for Perry to hear.