Grimly, I realized that in the end, inanimate or not, I was still chatting with a pie.
“Are you asking me?” Remo’s voice stole my attention off the wrecked pastry.
“No.”
He hefted a dark eyebrow, still clutching the framed picture. “You think the pie has something to do with it?”
“Don’t you? I mean, if it was just about freaking us out, why not make other stuff appear? Whypeach pie?” Just as it had done too many times before, the spilled contents evaporated and reformed.
Pie. Pie. Pie. Pie. Pie. Pie.
The word shrilled in time with the blasted alarm.
I stood up so fast my chair skidded and toppled. “Pi! Remo, it’s pi!”
“We’ve established it’s pie. We’ve even established it’s magical and contains peaches.”
I rolled my eyes. “No. I mean it’s thenumberpi.”
“As in 3.14? That’s only three digits.”
My astonishment that he knew the basic number when everyone relied on technology for everything these days subsided at his ignorance that pi was an infinite number. “It’s actually 3.14159 . . .”
When his eyes grew as large as Gregor’s paranormal pies, my voice dragged off. Uttering the ensuing numerals served no purpose besides showing off my love for math, which Remo would probably see as showing off since he thought the very worst of me.
“So, you want to try 3-1-4-1?” he said between two beeps.
I swallowed, suddenly unsure. What if the resurfacing pastry had nothing to do with the alarm box? “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.” I raked my hands through my hair again. My locks, although still a little damp, were pie-free. My fingers, too.
“I think it’s smart.” He put down the framed picture on a neighboring table. “I think we should try it.”
I gaped at Remo. He thought something I’d said was smart?Wow.
“What?”
Before he could fathom how much his compliment affected me, I blurted out, “I don’t want to get blown up, Remo.”
He sighed, rough and deep. “Maybe we’ll just get buried under peach pie.”
“I don’t want that either.”
“It would make for a sweet death.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Then let’s live.”
As I stared at the blinking red dot, he turned toward the keypad and raised his index finger. And then he tapped in the sequence.
19
The Tornado
Red turned to green, and the inn fell silent even though my skull still beeped. The word WELL flashed on the screen followed by the word DONE.
The grinding sound from earlier erupted around us as the metal sheets retracted into the ground, letting in veins of bright light. I never thought I’d be happy to see the cloud-filled sky, but Great Gejaiwe, I was on the brink of prostrating myself toward it.
Until I noticed the shutters on the house across the street flapping as wildly as aquiladrunk on faerie wine.
