My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(47)
“I said stop it!” Elsa snaps at both of them.
The wurse closes its jaws around the broom and crunches it to smithereens.
“Stop i—” Elsa begins but doesn’t have time to finish the last “it” before The Monster has thrown both broom and wurse across the cellar with all his might, sending the heavy animal crashing hard into the wall several yards away.
The wurse rolls up and flexes its body in one movement, and is in the middle of a terrifying spring before it has even landed. Its jaws are open, and rows of kitchen knife–size teeth exposed. The Monster faces it with a broad chest and the blood pumping in his fists.
“CUT IT OUT, I SAID!” Elsa roars, throwing her little body right between the two furious creatures, unprotected between claws as sharp as spears and fists probably big enough to separate her head from her shoulders. She stands her ground, armed with nothing but the indifference of an almost-eight-year-old to her own physical shortcomings. Which goes a long way.
The wurse stops itself midleap and lands softly beside her. The Monster takes a few steps back. Slowly, muscles relax and lungs release air. Neither of them meets her gaze.
“The idea here is that you’re supposed to protect me,” Elsa says in a quieter voice, trying not to cry, which doesn’t go so terrifically well. “I’ve never had any friends and now you two try to kill the only two I’ve ever had, just after I’ve found you!”
The wurse lowers its nose. The Monster rubs his hands, disappears into his hood, and makes a rocking motion towards the wurse.
“Started it,” The Monster manages to say.
The wurse growls back.
“Stop it!” She tries to sound angry but realizes she mainly just sounds as if she’s crying.
The Monster, concerned, moves the palm of his hand up and down along her side, as close as possible without actually touching her.
“Sor . . . ry,” he mumbles. The wurse buffets her shoulder. She rests her forehead against its nose.
“We have an important mission here, so you can’t keep messing about. We have to deliver this letter because I think Granny wants to say sorry to someone else. And there are more letters. This is our fairy tale: to deliver every single one of Granny’s sorries.”
With her face in the wurse’s fur, she inhales deeply and closes her eyes.
“We have to do it for my mum’s sake. Because I’m hoping that the last sorry will be to her.”
16
DUST
It turns into an epic adventure. A monstrous fairy tale.
Elsa decides they should begin by taking the bus, like normal knights on normal quests in more or less normal fairy tales when there aren’t any horses or cloud animals available. But when all the other people at the bus stop start eyeing The Monster and the wurse and nervously shuffling as far away from them as it’s possible to be without ending up at the next bus stop, she realizes it’s not going to be quite so straightforward.
On boarding the bus it becomes immediately clear that wurses are not all that partial to traveling by public transport. After it has snuffled about and stepped on people’s toes and overturned bags with its tail and accidentally dribbled a bit on a seat a little too close to The Monster for The Monster to feel entirely comfortable, Elsa decides to forget the whole thing, and then all three of them get off. Exactly one stop later.
Elsa pulls the Gryffindor scarf tighter around her face, pushes her hands into her pockets, and leads them through the snow. The wurse is so delighted about escaping the bus that it skips in circles around Elsa and The Monster like an overexcited puppy. The Monster looks disgusted. He doesn’t seem used to being outdoors by daylight, Elsa notices. Maybe it’s because Wolfheart is used to living in the dark forests outside Miamas where the daylight doesn’t dare penetrate. At least, that is where he lives in Granny’s fairy tales, so if there is any sort of order to this story, this must surely be the logical explanation.
People who see them on the pavement react as people generally do when they catch sight of a girl, a wurse, and a monster strolling along side by side: they cross the street. Some of them try to pretend that it has nothing to do with the fact that they are scared of monsters and wurses and girls, by demonstratively pretending to be having loud telephone conversations with someone who suddenly gives them different directions and tells them to go the opposite way. That is also what Elsa’s dad does sometimes when he’s gone the wrong way and he doesn’t want strangers to realize he’s one of those types who go the wrong way. Elsa’s mum never has that problem, because if she goes the wrong way she just keeps going until whoever she was supposed to be meeting has to follow her. Granny used to solve the problem by shouting at the road signs. It varies, how people deal with it.
But others who run into the adventuring trio are not as discreet, and they watch Elsa from the other side of the road as if she’s being abducted. Elsa feels that The Monster would probably be good at many things, but a kidnapper who can be put out of action by sneezing at him would probably not be a particularly effective kidnapper. It’s a curious sort of Achilles’ heel for a superhero, she feels. Snot.
The walk takes more than two hours. Elsa wishes it were Halloween, because then they could take the bus without scaring normal people, everyone would just assume they were dressed up. That’s why Elsa likes Halloween: on Halloween it’s normal to be different.