Wood Sprites(184)

“What are you doing?”

“Hungry!” Joy cried. “Candy! You promised!”

“Bored,” Chuck Norris said.

“Scared,” Jawbreakers squeaked.

Nikola pressed up against Louise, nodding silently in agreement with the Jawbreakers.

“We need to feed her now.” Jillian went to the door and peaked out. “They said it would be hours for them to set the leg and him to fully wake up from the anesthesia.”

In other words, if they waited, Joy would only get more uncontrollable.

“I thought I saw some vending machines near the waiting room.” Louise scooped up Joy with one hand and plucked up the mice one at a time with her other, depositing them on her shoulder. “We’re getting something!” she cried as Joy squirmed. “Just be patient.”

They waited until the nurses at the station across the hall were distracted and then slipped out. The other rooms were all dark; the patients asleep. The twins walked quickly through the deserted hallways to the waiting room. There was an entire wall of machines. The first offered hot coffee. The second was water and chilled juice and milk. The third was fruit and veggies.

“Oh, God,” Jillian whispered. “Of course a hospital would only have healthy snacks. What about grapes? You like grapes.”

“Feh.” Joy muttered from Louise’s arms. She spotted what was in the next machine. “Ooooooooooooooooh!” She leaned far out of Louise’s hold to press her paws against the glass. “Candy!”

Jillian sighed and pointed out the ones they knew the baby dragon liked the most. “Gummy worms? Snickers bars? Kitt Katt? M&Ms?”

Joy gazed up them with pure delight on her face and nodded.

“Which ones?” Jillian asked.

“Candy!”

“I think she wants one of each,” Louise said. “She’s been really good so far. We owe her.”

“All this can’t be good for her.” Nevertheless, Jillian used her phone to buy one of each type of candy. “We’re lousy mothers, you know. Our mom would never give in to us. She’d give us that look and we knew we better behave and we would.”

Louise felt a sudden floodwater of sorrow rise up. “I know.”

“What are we going to do about the babies?” Jillian whispered. “Joy is good at taking care of herself, but what are we going to do with real babies?”

Louise steeled herself against wanting to cry. “I don’t know. We don’t have any way for the babies to be born yet, so let’s not worry about it now.”

“When they’re born, we’ll work hard and be the best mothers ever.”

“How can you be our mothers when you’re our sisters?” the babies asked.

“Oh!” Jillian used one of their parents’ distraction tricks. “We’re going to have to get new phones.”

Louise gasped as she realized that they would need phones to purchase everything from Joy’s candy to new clothes. (While they hadn’t been stripped down like Crow Boy, their clothes were blood-soaked and reeked of smoke.) Ming would be able to track every purchase and chart their movement through the city.

Louise took out her phone. “We can order replacement phones and pick them up at an automated kiosk.” It would mean severing ties with everyone they knew as they changed phone numbers. Should they call their Aunt Kitty and warn her? Her last text had her on a plane heading back to California; she needed to keep working if she had any hope of gaining custody.

She turned on her phone to check for recent text messages from Aunt Kitty. There were five hundred and six new texts. The first dozen all from their classmates.

Louise had gotten a handful of texts after their parents were killed. Their friends had wanted to know if they were okay. She hadn’t answered any of them. She didn’t know how, because the true and obvious response was “no.” After a few days, the incoming texts trickled to nothing.

Then, starting this morning, there had been a sudden flood and it showed no sign of stopping. As she stared at her phone, it vibrated with a new text.

It was the middle of the night. Why would anyone be texting this late?

The text was “Where are you?” from Iggy. The one before was from him too. “Are you okay?” And before that was “Call me!”

A quick scroll downward showed that all five hundred were from her classmates.

What in the world had happened?

She scrolled down and found the first text.

It was from Elle Pondwater, and all in capital letters. “OMG! OMG! I DIDN’T DO IT! I SWEAR!”

Oh, this did not bode well.

The next one was from Iggy. “Someone leaked your names to the press. The world knows you’re Lemon-Lime.”