“How…?” she managed to say. It was a question that encompassed the entire battle. How could he have survived? How could she finish Malakai? How could she kill what was already dead?
“The hilt,” he said. “The hilt hit me.” He motioned to the sword. There was a small puddle of blood near it. Gramps managed a smile to reassure Maria he would be okay…if she could end this.
She picked up the sword. Holding it made her feel a little better—which was not saying much, since she’d felt close to death.
Do it, Maria, Sherlock said. Do it for Dominion and Duke. Do it for both worlds.
She nodded at the Bloodhound.
She walked over to the mangled hump of blackness that was Malakai. He was not dead. His limbs twitched and his eyes blinked open, but the fire that had been in them was gone.
“For Dominion village,” Maria whispered. “For Duke, and my mother and father, and all those you have hurt.”
She raised the blade above her head. Somehow, her muscles allowed her to do it. Her muscles and her magic.
Malakai laughed and wheezed. Black blood flew from his mouth and dripped from his limbs. “Go ahead…go ahead and kill me. It won’t matter. It won’t…matter at all.”
Maria said nothing.
“The Widow’s reach s-s-stretches across worlds. She…she won’t stop until the music b-b-box is hers.”
Then Maria spoke. “Last words,” she said. “Should’ve made ‘em count.”
She brought the sword down point-first.
Before the blade sank into Malakai’s wounded sternum, something like disappointment passed over his many eyes.
Then he died for a second and final time.
The blade struck the pavement beneath him; a clean impalement. Maria didn’t smile or cry or scream. She was too tired and beaten for any of that.
As she fell backward, passing out, Malakai’s body began to catch fire. By the time her friends and family had woken her up, the body was nothing but a pile of ashes, scattered in the night wind.
Chapter Seventeen
“Holy shit! Did you see me cream that son of a bitch!?” Claire yelled. It was the first thing Maria heard once she regained consciousness.
Maria opened her eyes. She stared at a tiled ceiling.
“I don’t think I can, like, go to jail for that…can I?” Claire said. “It’s kinda like hitting a deer or something.”
Laughter came from behind her. Among it sounded like Salem and Agnes, even the Muffler twins.
“That was pretty awesome,” Tabby said. “I was sure we were going to die. I thought that…that thing was going to unhinge his jaw and just swallow the Kia whole.”
“Now that would be ridiculous,” a tired old man’s voice said.
It was Gramps. Ignatius Apple, formerly known on Oriceran in the village of Dominion as Ignatius Mangood.
“Ohh,” Maria moaned. She brought a hand up to her head and touched what felt like a wad of napkins. One pulled free, and she squinted her eyes, reading Salem’s on the paper. World class medical care, she thought. Ice cream shop napkins instead of gauze and Band-Aids. I wonder what they used to sterilize the wound—whipped cream?
“She’s up!” Claire shouted. “Maria!”
Maria tried to sit up.
“Easy, easy,” Tabby said.
“Yes, young lady, you took quite a beating,” Agnes said. She entered Maria’s field of vision, her wild gray hair swallowing up her view of the tiled ceiling.
“Yeah, I feel like I died,” Maria rasped. It hurt to talk.
“You should’ve,” Salem said. He hobbled over next to Agnes and put an arm around her waist. “How I could be so stupid as to miss a plain old cloaking charm, I don’t know. I am sorry, though, Maria. I know that doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of what occurred, but know that I’m eternally grateful to you. You saved my life.”
“Our lives, too!” the Muffler twins said from somewhere behind Maria.
“And mine,” Gramps said.
Maria managed to turn her head, but not before her neck cracked about twenty times. Yeah, she would definitely be sore in the morning.
Maria found Gramps with her eyes. Sherlock sat next to him. They both seemed to be smiling.
Seeing them gave her strength, just like the sword had done earlier. She sat up, barely registering the pain that wracked through her body.
“Gramps!” she said.
“Maria. Maria, Maria, Maria!” he laughed. “You are such a reckless fool. But what would I have done without you?”
“Died, probably,” Salem said. He laughed as well.
“I didn’t want you to risk your life for me,” Gramps continued. “I’ve lived long enough, but you, you have so much life left ahead of you. You are going to do so many great things.”
Eh, don’t push it, Ig, Sherlock said.
Maria rolled her eyes at him.
Suddenly, something popped into her mind. “The music box!” she shouted. “Where is the—”
Gramps seemed to produce it out of nowhere. “If I’d known how much trouble this little thing would’ve caused us, I think I would’ve gotten you a candy bar.”
“You did know,” Salem told him. “You knew it would cause trouble, but you also knew Maria could handle it.”
Gramps swallowed, the knob in his neck bobbing. He nodded. “I did. I guess you’re right, Salem.”
“Almost always am,” Salem said, grinning. His face was bandaged with napkins, too. He looked ridiculous. Maria knew she probably didn’t look much better.
“I knew she could handle it because she is my granddaughter. We Apples can handle almost anything,” Gramps said.
“Yeah,” Claire said. She and Tabby stood by Maria’s side. They always would, from then on. “Now that I’ve seen a giant spider-man…thing, I really do think you guys can handle anything.”
“And that you’re weird as hell,” Tabby added.
Everyone laughed. Even Sherlock, who made that odd chortling sound inside of Maria’s head.
“Couldn’t have done it without you,” Maria said. She looked at her best friends. “I’m sorry for the way I acted back at your place, Claire. I was just—”
Claire raised a hand. “Don’t sweat it. If you hadn’t acted like it, I wouldn’t have gotten to turn that asshole into
