May Bird and the Ever After by Jodi Lynn Anderson

tooth.”
    Arista sighed and pressed the left front tooth.
    â€œHellooooo,” a spine-chilling voice rasped.
    Arista cleared his throat. “I’d like an appointment.”
    â€œLet’ssss ssssee. We have a sssseven a.m. availablllllle . . .,” the voice hissed.
    â€œDear sir, you don’t have any later?”
    The line went dead.
    Arista shook his head. He smiled weakly at May’s confusion. “Zzzzzz. The Undertaker’s assistants always think they’re better than everyone else. Their bosses are very vain, and I suppose it rubs off. All that power over death. I’ll handle this.”
    Arista waved May out of the room.
    May trailed back into the kitchen, where Pumpkin was busy making hand shadows on the surface of the cupboard. “I’m awater demon” he growled, the shadow he made really resembling the horrible woman in the lake. “I’m not scared of you,” he said in another voice, his hands fluttering into the shape of himself. May watched, confused.
    A second later Arista emerged. “We have an appointment for seven in the morning.”
    Pumpkin turned, saw May, and blushed.
    â€œNow we just have to figure out how to get you into town, unseen, on one of the biggest vacation days of the year.”
    As May slept that night in her tiny nook of a room, the globe in Arista’s study continued to blink oddly. Something had entered the Ever After that it did not know what to do with, a creature it hadn’t processed in more than two hundred years.
    One million, three hundred thousand, seventeen miles away, the cause of the confusion was curled under the bench seat of a small boat as he drifted down the Styx Streamway.
    Somber Kitty was only a few miles from the Pit of Despair Boat Basin, sound asleep, when his nose began to twitch. He sat up with a start, his large ears rotating like satellite dishes.
    A scent he recognized was drifting up the river toward him, and it made his back arch and his fuzzy coat stand on end.
    The cat planted his front paws on the side of the boat and stared downstream. There was nothing to see but the gentle curves of the water through sand and low beach brush. Still a low growl emanated from Somber Kitty’s throat. The air was full of the smell of danger.
    His slitted eyes darted to the shore on either side of the boat, calculating the distance. It was several feet away, an impossiblejump for a person to make. But Somber Kitty didn’t think twice. The muscles of his hind legs coiled like bedsprings, and he sailed forward, hurtling onto the sand.
    He landed on all fours with a small breeze blowing at his back, gave his shoulders a few much-needed licks, then looked around furtively. He was on a scrubby beach dotted with scrawny bushes and large quartz boulders. He looked right, left, and up for the moon, but saw only zooming stars. He leaped onto a rock to get a better view. And then he crouched backward and hissed.
    There before him, traced in the sand at the base of the rock, were the eyes of a lady, her face hidden in the sand-traced leaves of an enormous tree. Above her, one hand extended upward, with one finger pointed along the sand.
    Somber Kitty’s eyes followed the direction of the finger, then darted back to the lady. But the tiny breeze scattered the sand, and the face disappeared.
    â€œMeay?” Somber Kitty asked the sand. But there was no answer. Not knowing what else to do, he followed where the hand had pointed.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Belle Morte

    T he television, which Arista called the Holo-Vision, I showed nothing but ads. That morning May, Pumpkin, and Arista sat on the couch in front of the glowing three-dimensional screen, waiting for a cab to arrive. Arista had called at ten past six.
    At the moment they were watching a commercial for something called Crook-Be-Gone cologne. A man in a black-and-white-striped prison suit sat in an electric chair, holding a bottle straight toward them so