Out of the Wild Page 9

  The Wolf—not any wolf, but the original wolf, the ageless fairy-tale wolf—lay still on the thick shag rug of Elvis’s bedroom. His jaws were open, and his eyes stared sightlessly at the crimson wall. His stomach had been sliced, and the fur around it was matted with drying blood.

  She stared at him and felt dizzy again. “You killed him.”

  “He ate you,” Dad said.

  “He isn’t coming back,” she said. “This isn’t the Wild. His tale won’t restart. He’s dead. Gone.”

  “I would do it again,” Dad said, “for you. I will not let anyone harm my daughter, regardless of the consequences.” It was the first time since his escape from the Wild that he’d called her “daughter.”

  She dragged her eyes from the wolf to her father. He no longer looked silly in the old rock-and-roll suit. He looked . . . noble. It was a king’s suit, and he wore it like a king. “I could have died,” Julie said, hushed.

  “I would do it again,” he repeated.

  She heard noises downstairs. There were people in the house. How long before they discovered the velvet rope that she had unhooked at the base of the stairs? How long before they came to check the second floor? How long before the guard woke? Was he awake already?

  “I don’t understand,” Julie said. It couldn’t have been an accident that the wolf was here inside Sleeping Beauty’s thorn barrier. He wasn’t lying in bed in the dark by accident. He didn’t leap on her and swallow her by accident. This was intentional. This was a trap. The wolf must have come here to stop them. But he’d failed. Barely. If Dad had found him first and been the one eaten . . . Maybe that had been the wolf’s plan. He had expected the prince to find him and had only leapt on her because she’d discovered him. If she hadn’t found him first . . . He could have killed them both.

  The voices were coming closer.

  The duffel bag lay where she’d dropped it. Picking it up, Dad strode to the curtains, threw them back, and raised the window. He took out the broomstick for himself and held out the bath mat to Julie. She unrolled it and climbed on.

  Following her father, Julie flew out the window and over the crowd of tourists, reporters, and police. She didn’t look down, and when Dad saw the trail of thorns again leading toward the setting sun, she didn’t argue. She just flew.

  Chapter Ten

  The Wild West

  They flew west.

  One by one, stars poked through the sky, and the hills below washed out to gray. She barely noticed. Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf had swallowed a girl, and a hero had sliced the wolf’s stomach open to save her. Most likely, the Wild had swallowed Julie’s house.

  Oh, who was she kidding? Dad had chopped thorns, fit a glass slipper on a woman, and now killed Little Red’s wolf. The Wild had to have swallowed all of Northboro by now.

  At least this time, everyone would have recognized the danger. They would have evacuated instantly. She pictured the roads clogged with cars and hoped that Gillian had gotten out.

  Mom and Grandma, trapped as pumpkins, wouldn’t have been able to escape, she thought. No one would have known to save them. Jack, Gina, and their friends were the only people Julie had told about the pumpkin spell, and they’d been arrested. In saving Julie, Dad had condemned Mom and Grandma. If Julie hadn’t walked into that room, if she had seen the wolf sooner, if she had run faster . . . Julie felt sick. The Wild was free, and Mom and Grandma were trapped inside—and this time, it really was her fault.

  Below, the dark hills changed into thick patches of lights. Over the edge of the bath mat, she watched the lights of Little Rock, Arkansas, flash by. There were more than a hundred thousand people below. Did they know that the Wild was free again? Were they watching it on the news? Were they scared? She wondered if Bobbi knew that her plan had backfired—the wolf had failed, and worse, the Wild had been strengthened.

  What could the fairy godmother possibly want with Sleeping Beauty that was worth the risk of the Wild escaping? What did she want that was worth killing or dying for? Jack was wrong—it wasn’t a practical joke. It was serious. Deadly serious. And Julie and Dad were the only ones who knew. If Dad hadn’t chased after Bobbi in the first place . . . “You were right all along,” Julie said out loud. “Rose is in danger. How did you know?”

  Dad was silent. Maybe he hadn’t heard her over the wind. His eyes were still fixed on the thorns that threaded across Arkansas. “I did not know,” he said at last. “But I had no other way to show my worth to Rapunzel. Or to you.”

  He didn’t know? And he’d chased after Sleeping Beauty anyway? “You left Mom as a pumpkin in order to impress us?”

  “In hindsight, it was perhaps not a well-thought-out choice.”

  “And you tried to leave me in New York too,” she said. “That’s twice.”

  “I feared for your safety,” he said. Glancing at her, he added mildly, “It was not an unwarranted fear. You were eaten.”

  She shuddered, trying not to remember how it had felt to slide through the hot, wet, putrid jaws of the wolf. “What if you’d been wrong? You risked a lot. You don’t know this world. Before yesterday, you’d never seen a car or an elevator—”

  “It is not the difference in transportation or entertainment or homes or clothing that is difficult,” he said. “It is the difference in the people I once knew.”

  She studied him as he flew. “You mean Mom.”

  He didn’t answer and didn’t look at her. His knuckles were white as he gripped the broomstick. His face was hidden in shadows.

  Maybe Mom had changed. How was Julie to know? She hadn’t known Mom five hundred years ago. “She could be the same inside,” Julie said. “You didn’t stay long enough to tell. You ran at the first opportunity.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said.

  “You knew?” And he’d done it anyway? He had no evidence that Rose’s kidnapping was for real, yet he’d risked everything to chase her?

  “Only in retrospect.”

  “If you had to do it over again, would you do today differently? Would you listen to Mom and Grandma and let them teach you how to fit into the world before plunging into it?”

  He thought for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “I am who I am.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that. In silence, Julie and Dad flew on, leaving Arkansas behind them. Below, dark fields were covered in shadows, punctuated by scattered house lights and minuscule towns. It was nearly impossible to see the thorns left by Sleeping Beauty. As it grew darker, Dad and Julie slowed, matching the speed of trucks on the highway in order to see the thorns in their headlights. Julie began to shiver in the night chill. She wished she’d taken one of Elvis’s coats. Her own had been pretty much ruined. She shivered harder and wished she could stop thinking about the wolf. Twice, she opened her mouth to talk to Dad and then shut it, unsure how to begin.

  Somewhere over Oklahoma, Dad broke the silence. “Tell me about your mother. What is she like now?”

  And so Julie began to talk. She told him little things like Mom’s favorite food (pizza with extra cheese and mushrooms), medium things (one time, Mom locked herself out of the house and actually climbed down the chimney to get back in—a trick not recommended by the Three Little Pigs), and big things (Mom never, ever broke a promise that she made to Julie). When she ran out of things to say, it was late. Maybe close to midnight, Julie thought.

  Back in Northboro, the pumpkin spell would be ending soon. Mom and Grandma would transform and find themselves trapped inside the Wild again. Julie had never meant for that to happen. She hadn’t intended to abandon them. It hadn’t been a conscious choice, unlike when she’d chosen to walk through the door to the Wishing Well Motel . . . Inside a castle, she’d found a magic door that led directly to Grandma’s motel. She knew if she opened that door, she’d lose her father. But if she didn’t . . . “Dad . . . that afternoon in the Wild . . .” Standing at the motel door, she had made the decision to leave him in the Wild. She had chosen to leave him to what cou
ld have been centuries more of imprisonment and instead made a wish that set her hometown free. How did you say “sorry” for that? Did he understand why she had left him and walked through that door? Could he forgive her for it? She didn’t even know how to ask.

  He was silent. Julie couldn’t read his expression in the dark. “You gave me great joy that day,” he said finally.

  Really? Despite everything, Julie smiled.

  “But you have given me greater joy today,” he said. “I never thought that I would have the opportunity to quest alongside my own child.”

  She’d never expected today either.

  They continued to talk as they flew. Somewhere in western Oklahoma, when Julie grew so tired that her bath mat began to dip, they stopped to sleep. Julie’s bath mat became her bed; Dad slept on the bare ground. Julie dreamt that her mother was in a tower, and she kept brushing her hair and humming as Julie called and called to her.

  In the morning, Dad waltzed into a Dairy Queen. She didn’t try to stop him. Who cared what some kid at the counter thought of him? The Wild was growing. Mom and Grandma were trapped inside it. The wolf was dead, and Sleeping Beauty was in danger. The normal rules didn’t seem relevant anymore.

  How had her world turned upside down so quickly? Just yesterday, the Wild had been subdued enough to become the topic of an English assignment. Julie drew the tattered pages of Gillian’s English assignment out of her pocket. This was a memento now. While she waited for Dad, she read it.

  The assignment had been to write about what had happened when Northboro was transformed into a fairy-tale kingdom, and so Gillian had written about the Wild. Sort of. As Julie read further, she realized that Gillian’s Wild was utterly unlike the real Wild. In Gillian’s story, you could be a princess or a knight or even a witch, but the Wild didn’t control your actions. You had a choice about what to do, and you knew who you were. The Wild didn’t force you into a story, and you didn’t lose your memories. In Gillian’s story, being in the Wild was fun. In her story, the Wild was nice.

  Gillian had promised to lie to protect Julie’s family, but this . . . this was taking it too far. She’d practically glorified the Wild. How could she do that? How could she even imagine that there was anything good about the Wild? Gillian had been forced to play a magic trumpet while trolls and bears and other wild animals danced for hours and hours, until her lips were so sore that she could barely speak. How could she romanticize the Wild after living through that?

  Dad emerged from the Dairy Queen with three paper bags. “I was victorious,” he said, smiling broadly.

  Ooh, were those cheeseburgers? Please say they were cheeseburgers. Story forgotten, Julie shoved the pages back into her pocket and took a bag. Yes! Double cheeseburger!

  The Dairy Queen door banged open, and a teenage girl scurried out with two more white bags. “Here!” she said, shoving them at Prince. “Fries!” She giggled and then ran back inside, but not before Julie glimpsed her T-shirt. Rhinestone letters read, Princess in Disguise.

  “What did you say to her?” Julie asked. She shoved a handful of fries into her mouth. Mmm, salt. It had been a long time since the last vending machine.

  “I told her that her happily-ever-after would come,” he said, climbing onto his broomstick. “She seemed to like that.”

  Suddenly, the fries tasted like dust in her mouth. She thought of Gillian’s story. She thought of the tourists at Graceland. What if, instead of fleeing from the Wild, people actually flocked in? What if they believed that the Wild would turn them into princes and princesses, give them happily-ever-afters, and make their dreams come true? Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester had apparently been flooded with visitors ever since it had transformed into the Castle of the Silver Towers. She’d seen people at school in tiaras, and of course there were those Fairy-Tale Capital T-shirts and bumper stickers and signs.

  What if people were making it worse?

  “Did she say anything about how far the Wild has spread?” Julie asked, trying to keep her voice from shaking.

  “She did not,” Prince said, “but she, in her innocence, is eager for it to come. She spoke of it as if it were a traveling carnival, as if she would spend one day inside the Wild, enjoy its stories, and then resume her normal life.”

  Oh, no. If people everywhere thought like that . . . if they were actually entering the Wild instead of running from it . . . then it could have grown even more than Julie had feared. It could have spread across all of Massachusetts. Julie shuddered and hoped she was wrong.

  Flying at twice the speed of cars, Julie and Prince caught up with the thorns again outside of Amarillo, Texas. In the late afternoon, in Arizona, the trail turned onto a smaller road and headed north. Julie and Dad turned north too, skimming over the road with the thorns directly in front of them.

  At sunset, they reached the Grand Canyon.

  Julie and Dad flew over red rock hills as the sun touched the horizon. Up ahead, light spread across the canyon walls, and the rocks seemed to burst into deep red flame. “Whoa,” Julie breathed. She’d seen photos. But the reality . . . It was beyond vast. Even from the sky, she couldn’t see all of the canyon at once. Clinging to the edge of the bath mat, she felt dizzy.

  “Up!” Dad shouted.

  Startled, Julie yanked the front fringe up. The bottom of her bath mat grazed the roof of an RV. She sailed up over it. Her heart thudded faster as she joined Dad circling above the camper. She’d been so distracted by the canyon that she’d failed to see the RV parked directly in their path.

  Just a few yards beyond the RV, the road terminated in a picnic area and the canyon began. “The thorns end here,” Dad said. He pointed at a line of brambles that ran up to and underneath the RV.

  Was Sleeping Beauty in there? But . . . why an RV, and why the rim of the Grand Canyon? Why had Bobbi brought her to another tourist spot?

  “Stay in the air,” Dad said. “It may be a trap.” He drew his sword.

  Julie had a sudden image of Dad charging in on a family of innocent tourists. “We don’t know for sure it’s them,” she said. Had Bobbi really traded the apple coach for an RV? She didn’t seem the RV type. “If Sleeping Beauty really is inside, shouldn’t there be more thorns?” The RV was parked. Thorns should be crawling up its wheels. It should be half cocooned in brambles at least. “Maybe the trail picks up somewhere else.”

  Dad hesitated.

  Below, the RV door swung open. A boy leaned outside and dumped soda from an open can onto the ground. He didn’t look up. He didn’t see them. But Julie saw his face as he turned back inside.

  It was the boy from Graceland, the Cutest Boy Ever, Henry.

  She felt her heart skip a beat. How could it be him? It couldn’t be him. He couldn’t have gotten here before Julie and Prince . . . unless he and his dad had left Graceland immediately and driven for, like, twenty hours straight. Henry had said that they planned to visit Graceland, the Grand Canyon, and Disneyland. Maybe this was a coincidence. And maybe it was also a coincidence that of all the spots to park at the Grand Canyon, Henry and his dad happened to choose the end of the trail of thorns. A very, very big coincidence.

  But what if it wasn’t? Dad had mistaken Henry’s father for Rumpelstiltskin and Julie had assumed he was wrong. What if he wasn’t? The run-in with the wolf proved that other fairy-tale characters were involved in Sleeping Beauty’s kidnapping. “What if Sleeping Beauty isn’t with Bobbi anymore?” she said. “What if Bobbi handed her off to someone else?” They knew Bobbi had changed her mode of transportation since she’d ditched the apple coach back in New York City. What if she’d loaded Sleeping Beauty into Rumpelstiltskin’s RV?

  Dad brandished his sword in the air. “We shall demand entry and search for her!”

  On the other hand, what if this was a huge mistake? “What if they’re innocent?” Julie asked. “Maybe we should . . . I don’t know . . . be sneaky or something.”

  “Do you have a plan?” Dad asked.

  Um .
. . no, not really. But Julie loved that he was asking her. Before the wolf, he would have simply charged in without waiting for her. Now they were like a team. The RV door opened again, and this time Henry’s dad (could he be Rumpelstiltskin?) stepped out of the camper. Slinging a garbage bag over his shoulder like he was Santa Claus, he proceeded to cart it down the road toward a public trash can. “If you can keep him away from the RV for a few minutes, I can try to convince Henry to let me inside,” Julie said to Dad. “I can be like a spy.”

  He nodded. “It is a good plan. You are your mother’s daughter.”

  Well, it wasn’t a save-the-world sort of plan, and it had the potential to be mind-bogglingly humiliating, but it was (moderately) better than charging in, sword raised. “And my father’s daughter too,” she said.

  He smiled at her, and Julie felt as if sun had burst through the clouds. Drawing courage from his smile, she flew down to the RV and hopped off the bath mat. Before she could reconsider, she knocked.

  Henry opened the door. “Hey, I know you! You were at Graceland! Julie, right?” He remembered her! Wait, was that because he liked her or because he was part of some nefarious plot? Or was it because he was just friendly? Friendly and cute?

  “Um, hi,” Julie stammered. “Um, sorry to bother you.” How do you phrase I think you have Sleeping Beauty in your RV? She wished she’d thought this out for maybe three seconds before she knocked, especially now that Henry was smiling at her. He had a really, really nice smile. “Um, this is going to sound a little crazy . . .” Or maybe a lot crazy.

  “Like calling-my-dad-Rumpelstiltskin crazy?”

  Yeah, a lot like that kind of crazy. “Like thorns-covering-Graceland crazy.”

  He thought about it for a second. “Okay.”

  In a single breath, Julie said, “I think you might have a woman in your RV, a sleeping woman, like comatose-sleeping, with, uh, thorns and stuff around her.”