Free Rogue by Gina Damico

condition and sends them straight to the Afterlife.”
    Lex inhaled so hard, her lungs nearly popped.
    All those people I Damned
.
And Driggs would get to go to the Afterlife after all! Or maybe
—the thought briefly flitted through her mind, not wanting to stick and get her hopes up—
maybe since he’s half and half, he’ll become human again!
    “This would fix everything!” Lex said, forgetting all about volume control. “This is what we need to do!”
    The rest of the Juniors jolted awake at the sharp outburst.
    “Yelling?” Ferbus asked, squinting in the orange sunlight. “Yelling is what we need to do?”
    Lex pointed at the Wrong Book—though without Grotton’s hand in front of it, all it displayed was a blank page. “There’s a way to restore all souls to the Afterlife—
all
of them. Trapped, Damned—” She turned to Driggs. “Even ghosted!”
    He frowned, then smiled, then frowned again, as if he were unable to decide whether it was worth it to believe her.
    But his spazzy face only made Lex more antsy. “So how do we do it?” She tried to shove the book back under Grotton’s floating form so she could read more, but Grotton jerked away, snickering.
    “How do
you
do it,” Uncle Mort spoke up. “And it’s not time yet.”
    Lex was so flabbergasted that Uncle Mort had entered the conversation—and, even more baffling, that he knew what they were talking about—that all she could do for a moment was sputter out a series of demented questions. “Me? Do what? When? Why isn’t it?”
    Uncle Mort shot a look at the Wrong Book, then spoke slowly and deliberately. “When you destroy Grotton, a reset will be triggered. That much is true. All souls, however damaged, will be restored and sent directly to the Afterlife. But before you try to chop his head off—”
    Lex was well on her way to trying to chop his head off. She grabbed her scythe with one hand and tried to grab Grotton’s floating form with the other—but he wasn’t solid, and he certainly didn’t look as if he planned on becoming so anytime soon.
    “You’ll have to do better than that, love,” he said.
    “He’s right, Lex,” Uncle Mort said. “Simply killing him won’t work. Damning won’t either.”
    Lex thought for a second. “I know!” She dug around in her pocket, pulled out her plastic skull-and-crossbones li Kcroherghter, and held it to the pages of the Wrong Book. “You’re attached at the hip to this thing, right? So if it goes, you go.”
    “No, don’t!” Uncle Mort shouted. Lex stopped. Grotton looked disappointed. “His soul is bound to the book,” Uncle Mort explained, “but it’s not a
part
of it. You destroy the book, it’s only going to break the bond and set him free, and then you won’t be able to keep him around long enough to reset anything.”
    With an irritated sigh Lex lowered the book and the lighter. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Then how am I supposed to do it?”
    Grotton flashed a taunting smile around the car as he floated upward. “You’re the Last,” he said, leaving through the roof. “You figure it out.”
    Everyone stared up at the ceiling for a few moments, then back at one another. But Lex was looking only at her uncle. “Really? Fresh out of ideas on the whole Grotton-destroying front?”
    Uncle Mort was visibly frustrated. He looked at the Wrong Book. “Last time I got a look at that book—twenty years ago, when LeRoy and I first trapped Grotton in that cabin—we only got a glimpse of the reset page before Grotton realized what we were trying to do. So I know that it
can
be done, and only by an extremely powerful Grim—that’s you, Lex—but I don’t know how.” He looked around at the other Juniors and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Which is where you guys come in. Grotton’s onto my tricks, but he doesn’t know the rest of you very well. You need to figure out a way to get him to reveal the rest of that page.”
    Bang’s eyes lit up, her hand