Snow White Sorrow by Cameron Jace Read Free Book Online Page B

morning sun came.
    He was wrong again.
    The houses were ghost carnivals, and they wouldn’t let him sleep. He was used to ghosts, but not to girl ghosts. They were no different from demon girls.
    He ended up driving away and hiding his Cadillac in the thick bushes in the forest. It was a shaky ride, but he’d finally found a place where he could sleep. Well, only until the frogs started croaking.
    Loki’s biggest fear was frogs. When they croaked, he felt as if a giant monster was roaring at him. The croaking sound was the scariest thing Loki had ever heard, and he wasn’t talking about the ribbet, ribbet part. He was scared of the other sounds frogs made: crooock, crrrrooock .
    Sometimes he dreamed of frogs wanting to kiss him.
    “Yucccckk! I’m not going to kiss a frog!” Loki woke up screaming and drove away from the bushes, his hands shaking on the wheel.
    Eventually, Loki decided to use a fortune cookie the Council of Heaven had given him through Charmwill; it was to help him when he needed to make a tough decision. It was an enchanted fortune cookie. Whenever Loki asked it something and crushed it open, an answer appeared written on a small piece of gummy paper from inside it. It turned back into a fortune cookie on its own afterwards, so he could question it again later. Loki loved the taste of the gummy paper, chewing the answer away—it tasted accordingly of the answer itself; bitter answer, bitter taste, and vice versa. The fortune cookie was Charmwill’s least favorite gadget, but Loki loved it. He named it Sesame.
    When Loki asked Sesame where to park his Cadillac, he got the strangest answer. The small piece of gummy paper read: pet cemeteries.
    Loki liked the idea; pet cemeteries were only occupied with dead animals. There were no humans, zombies, or sleepwalking dead girls to interrupt his sleep; just cats, dogs, and other pets. He’d heard about animals returning from their graves as zombies, but he knew he could deal with them. He loved zombies more than vampires; they were slow, funny, brainless , and easy to kill. Loki hoped people didn’t bury frogs in the pet cemetery.
    His first night in the pet cemetery was the hardest. He didn’t mind that the dead animals woke up and played drums on the roof of his Cadillac, or that they killed each other in a zombie dogs-and-cats fist fight. What he didn’t expect was them to talk to him.
    “Loki!” a cat meowed outside his car, scratching its nails on the window. “Open up!”
    Loki opened one eye, still tucked under the blanket, thinking he was dreaming, but then he heard another sound.
    Knock. Knock. Knock.
    Loki lifted his neck from under the blanket and saw who was knocking. It was a squirrel.
    “You’ll be alright, Loco,” the squirrel said. “Want a nut?”
    “This isn’t really happening, right?” Loki squinted “I’m not going nuts , am I?”
    “You’re not nuts,” the squirrel said, looking at him with its big curious eyes. “I’m offering you a nut in exchange for letting me sleep in the car because it’s really cold out here. Ignore the cat. It has nothing to offer you.”
    Loki tilted his head to the side and saw a black scruffy cat nodding its head.
    “Please, don’t speak,” Loki begged it with sleepy eyes.
    “OK, I won’t…” the cat meowed. “Until you tell me to. But do you think it will be long? Can I sing a song to you until I’m allowed to speak, or is my voice up to your standards?”
    “Oh, no,” Loki crept back under the blanket and stuffed cotton into his ears. There was nothing he could do. It was the only place where he could sleep, and it made him want to go back to Heaven even more. The Ordinary World was just horrible. “I swear I’m going to kill every vampire I see until I get out of this world,” he sighed.
    Even though he loved squirrels he had grown weary of them calling him ‘Loco’ and telling him that he was going to be alright.
    “I’m not alright,” he growled from under his