MEANWHILE, 7,831 MILES AWAY, IN SEDONA, ARIZONA
“He’s not answering,” Camaro said, staring at the phone like she might smash it.
The golem was continuing to dance, but he was dancing on the floor, which was a good thing. “Maybe Mack’s dancing.”
(Mack was not dancing, as you know perfectly well. He was riding a dragon toward the Golden Temple of Amritsar.)
Camaro’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “There’s something very wrong here tonight. The question is: What do we do about it?”
“Leave a message?” the golem suggested, which was a pretty sensible suggestion. It surprised Camaro: the golem was not always25 sensible.
“Mack, it’s Camaro. Something very weird is going on here. There’s a bunch of creepy short dudes and a bunch of locust-looking people, too. Call me.”
She hung up the call, gave the phone back to the golem, and thought. Camaro might be a bit of a thug but she was not stupid. In fact she had good grades and had a particular knack for math and science. She could think when she needed to.
And she could observe, too. At this particular moment she was observing the fact that all the stocky little dudes and the buggy creatures were watching the golem.
So. They were there for the golem. This was about him, and, Camaro intuited, about that red-haired girl the golem had told her about. She was the one who’d almost caused the golem to kill Camaro.
Uncool.
Camaro searched the room for the redhead, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t the kind of girl you easily overlooked.
“So these are just minions,” Camaro muttered, and nodded knowingly. Minions were like underbullies. There might be a lot of them, but if old James Bond movies, Bruce Willis movies, and Star Wars movies had taught her anything, it was that minions are easily disposed of.
She sidled up to Tony Pooch, who flinched at her approach. “Bully emergency. Keep it quiet. Spread the word.”
She did the same with Ed Lafrontiere, the disgraced Twilight fans’ bully, who was now hoping for a new assignment. And Matthew Morgan, who dealt with nerds and dorks.
Within seconds the word had gone out to all twelve official bullies—and Disgraced Ed. They gathered around Camaro and the golem.
“Listen up,” Camaro said. “I am declaring this an official bully emergency. You are all bound by the oath you took to work together whenever there’s a threat to our thing.”
“Is it this guy? Mack?” the skater/punk bully demanded, jerking a thumb at the golem, who was at that moment pulling a small twig out of his nose.
“No, the gol— I mean, Mack, is cool. He’s on our side. In fact, he’s the one in danger.”
“In danger?” Popular Mean Girls bully Jennifer Schwarz asked. “Why should we care?”
Camaro thumped her on the head for that and explained, “You want someone else bullying our kids? Some outsiders who aren’t even part of our thing? Think before you say something stupid.”
“No way,” Ed said, anxious for any chance to prove himself. “No way some outside bullies bully our victims.”
“We call them clients, not victims,” Camaro corrected him patiently. “Now, listen up. You see those short, stocky dudes with the long skinny fingers and the sharp teeth trying to pass themselves off as kids?”
The bullies all looked.
“Now, do you see the skinny ones with kind of buggy heads dressed in raincoats and evening dresses?”
Most of them didn’t know what an evening dress was—and no surprise; it’s a totally inappropriate clothing choice for a chaperone—but they were able to spot the suspicious ones nevertheless.
“There are too many for us to take them on all at once. We need to peel them off, a few at a time,” Camaro said. She tilted her head and looked at the golem. Then back at the treasonous Tong Elves and the Skirrit. No, she didn’t know that was what they were, but she looked at them anyway and saw again that they were totally fixated on the golem.
“We use the gol—er, Mack—as bait,” Camaro said. She beckoned the golem and whispered in his ear. “I want you to walk toward the boys’ room. Then, at the last minute, just as you reach the bathroom, you’ll be close to the outside door, right?”
The golem had no idea if this was right. So he said, “Right.”
“When you get there, do something to attract attention. Then run outside real quick!”
Camaro did not specify exactly what the golem should do to attract attention, and this would prove to be a mistake. Because the golem followed her instructions perfectly. He walked toward the boys’ room. And there, just before he would have to go in, he attracted attention by sticking his tongue out.
Fourteen feet.
Golem bodies are capable of amazing things, what with basically being mud thinly disguised to look like skin and hair and clothing and so on.
So the golem didn’t really have a tongue like normal people; he had as much tongue as he wanted to have. In fact he could turn much of his body into tongue, and that’s what he did: first he stuck out his tongue, and then with both hands he pulled more and more tongue out until it was sort of like a limp fire hose just piling up in a coil on the floor as his body got smaller and smaller and—
And then there was a bunch of screaming as kids noticed. Some of that screaming came from Jennifer Schwarz, but pretty soon everyone—regardless of gender, race, creed, or national origin—was screaming.
It certainly did attract the attention of the Tong Elves and the Skirrit.
The golem bolted for the exit. But he was unable to move quickly due to the fact that he was dragging fourteen feet of tongue using legs now no bigger than turkey drumsticks.
“Oooookay,” Camaro said, somewhat discouraged. “Let’s get ’em!”
She charged at the Tong Elves, who were charging at the golem, who was dragging his tongue out into the common area outside the all-purpose room. Most of her bullies followed her, but none was exactly leading the charge.
So Camaro plowed into the back of a Tong Elf. It was like hitting a statue. Tong Elves are tough. Camaro couldn’t know this—indeed, few people do—but Tong Elves are raised from the age of three in deep underground caves26 where they are required to carve their own living space out of solid bedrock using nothing but a lighter and a hatchet. Their only drink is the condensation on cave walls, and they scrape the lichen from rocks with their specially adapted lower teeth. The lederhosen they wear are the tanned pelts of bears that they kill and skin in unarmed combat.
So, they’re tough, the Tong Elves. Even the treasonous ones.
Camaro literally bounced off the Tong Elf she’d hit. But she landed well and rolled back to her feet.
The Tong Elf turned wicked eyes on her and reached for the trident dagger that was the specialized weapon of his tong (Live Oak Tong). The weapon had three blades, the center one longer than the other two and serpentine in style.
“You filthy bag of seething worms!” the Tong Elf snarled.
“Who are you calling a . . . whatever you said?” Camaro demanded.
The Tong Elf slashed at Camaro and she dodged out of the way, but it was a close call. One of the smaller blades shaved a strand of dark hair from her head.
“Whoa!” Camaro cried.
“I’ll carve you like a Thanksgiving turkey, you vile, hideous, pestilential primate!”
Camaro had been a bully since second grade, but no one had ever almost killed her. This was a new experience and she didn’t like it. Her eyes darted to the wall, to the red steel-and-glass box that held the fire extinguisher. She leaped, grabbed it, and swung the heavy cylinder blindly just as the Tong Elf stabbed his three-way blade at her.
The steel cylinder caught the blades and broke one.
She raised the fire extinguisher and slammed it hard at the Tong Elf’s wrinkled-up apple-doll face.
Wham!
The Tong Elf recoiled, staggered back, and Camaro was on him in a flash. She hit the Tong Elf a second, powerful blow and—
Suddenly she fell to her knees.
She dropped the fire extinguisher.
She stared down at the long, glittering steel shaft that extended out of her chest. It was smeared with blood.
Feeling stupid, she turned to see the Skirrit standing behind her, its insect claw wrapped tightly around the short spear.
The golem tried to cry out in fear, seeing Camaro fall, but his tongue first had to be raveled back into his mouth, and his body first had to reassume some kind of normal proportions, and only then could he cry, “Camaro!”
The golem ran to her and knelt beside her as the Skirrit, showing no emotion on its dead-eyed face, pulled the spear from her body.
“Golem . . . ,” Camaro gasped.
“Camaro!” the golem cried.
Fighting, which had broken out between the foul creatures and the bullies, ended abruptly. It ended with half the bullies unconscious and the rest running for home and trying to come up with stories to explain why they had run in terror from their first real fight.
“Golem,” Camaro said, wheezing through her pain, “they’re going to try and make you do things . . . bad things. You can’t let them.”
“But . . . but I am just a golem,” he said. “I can only be what I’m made to be.”
“No, Golem,” Camaro said. She grasped his arm and pulled him down to her.
The golem saw her eyes flutter and she sagged back. He howled in pain and sadness, and he twisted one of his fingers off his hand and pushed the claylike mud into her terrible wound.
“You’ll be okay,” he said through tears that cut small channels in his cheeks. “You have to be okay!”
“Oh, isn’t this sweet?”
The golem had heard the voice before. A girl’s voice, though in truth the “girl” was millennia old.
He lay Camaro’s head gently on the ground, and turned to face what he knew would be his own doom.
She was stunning, of course, her red hair blowing in a slight breeze, her lips redder still, her skin the color of cream, her eyes like green fire.
Risky.
“Come here, little golem,” Risky said, and crooked her finger and smiled her crafty, evil smile. “We tried this once before and your little friend here got in the way. This time it doesn’t look like she’ll be much trouble.”
The golem felt something then. He felt something he had never really felt before. It was like there was a fire burning inside him. It wasn’t a feeling borrowed from Mack; it came from someplace else.
He leaped to his feet. His face twisted into a terrible mask of anger. And he stretched his hands out to wring Risky’s neck.
“Oh, how cute,” Risky said. “It has a temper.”
The golem wrapped its fingers around her throat and drew her close. And that was when Risky’s hand shot out like a piston and her fist rammed right into the golem’s mouth.
In seconds the golem began to feel . . . strange.
Different.
He was no longer choking the evil goddess. His hands fell away from her neck and hung by his sides.
From the distance came the sound of an ambulance siren.
But here on the quad, on the grass in front of the multipurpose room, every eye—human and not human—was watching the golem.
Watching as the creature most had thought was Mack, and some knew was only a version of Mack, changed.
His skin grew gray and hard. It was as if a suit of armor was growing over him.
At the same time he was getting taller and broader, with bunches of muscles like pythons, with fingers that ended in bird-of-prey talons.
His face was the last to change. He’d looked like Mack, of course, albeit a somewhat sloppy, slightly muddy, occasionally twig-poking version of Mack.
But now his cheeks became hard slabs of steel. His mouth was a slit lined with red-rimmed steel teeth. Two horns grew from his temples—twisted, bony horns that arced forward and came to sharp points just to the side of his eyes.
“Much better,” Risky purred. “Now, my little Destroyer, follow me.”
She turned, laughed in delight, and walked away as the lumbering monster who had sort of been Mack followed behind her like a sullen and dangerous dog.