Chapter 13: Verschlimmbesserung

Krisalyn had never felt so useless. Joey was unconscious, barely breathing, and she didn't know how to help him or even what was wrong. Kaiba's brother and his bodyguard had both left the room and not returned. Zigfried was back at the controls, trying desperately to free the system's captives before missiles destroyed them all.

How had everything gone so wrong?

She shifted, trying to ease the ache in her legs as she continued to kneel beside Joey, unwilling to leave his side. When his fingers began to twitch, she gently grasped his hands in hers, holding them against his chest.

"This is not the date I had in mind when you asked me," she confided.

If he'd been awake, he would have laughed. She loved his laugh, loved the way it lifted a weight off his shoulders and brightened his entire expression. She'd never seen anyone as alive as Joey Wheeler in a laugh.

Releasing one of his hands, she reached beneath his honey-wheat bangs to feel his forehead and then winced at the radiating heat. First the coughing and the collapse, now tremors and a fever.

"I expect a real date," she went on. Her voice tried to shrivel, but she forced it to remain strong. There was no chance he could see her signing, or else she would have done that. But maybe he could hear. "You probably haven't thought it through yet, so I'll give you an advantage—don't ask me to the movies. It's not a very thrilling experience without the sound."

She glanced over her shoulder and caught Zigfried looking at her. Perhaps her voice had been louder than she'd intended. Heat flushed through her cheeks, but before she could shy away, her brother's lips twisted in the ghost of a smile. With his eyebrows raised, he shot off a quick sign. Boyfriend?

As her blush increased, so did his smile. Then he turned back to his work, and all the worry returned to the rigid line of his shoulders. Kris felt the momentary happiness flee.

Joey wasn't her boyfriend. She hardly even knew him. But she'd liked everything she'd seen so far, and if she never got the chance to know more, it would break her heart. She wanted to know more. Wanted to know why he dueled with such heart and what made him brave enough to jump in front of monsters and why he still liked her even when she was a spy.

She leaned forward, placing her lips right beside Joey's ear, and whispered, "Please wake up, Joey."

His hand tightened around hers.

Kris's heart shot into overdrive, a smile breaking across her face. She pulled back, expecting to see him looking at her, expecting to see him awake—

Instead, she realized he was still unconscious but all his muscles had tensed. More than tremors. His whole body started shaking.

He was seizing.

Yori opened her eyes to the inside of a pod. The light surrounding her dimmed, and when she gave a shove, the lid resisted her force, rising slowly on damper hinges. She sat up, drawing in a long, deep breath. Next to her, Seto had just stood from his pod, and he was staring at the third, empty one. Mokuba's.

"Unglaublich!" Zigfried shouted. He was pressed back against the control panel, staring at them both in wide-eyed shock, hand to his chest like a man under a heart attack. Or possibly a wilting maiden.

Unable to help it, Yori smirked.

Then Krisalyn screamed.

It took only a moment to realize why—Joey, collapsed on the floor. Convulsing. Yori's mouth went dry, and a wave of cold chilled her to the core. She stumbled forward, reaching the two just after Seto did.

"What happened?" Seto demanded.

Krisalyn was busy holding Joey's arms, trying to stop his thrashing. She didn't hear him, probably didn't even know he'd spoken.

"He was fine in the helicopter," Yori managed. "He was . . ."

Joey was too pale to be a person anymore. Blue veins showed just beneath his skin, mapping the road of his life, which seemed to be fading with every passing second. Yori didn't know anything about seizures or how to stop them.

Zigfried rushed up. He grabbed Krisalyn's shoulder and made a few quick gestures with his hands. She released Joey's arms, allowing Zigfried to turn the blond boy on his side. After rocking back on his heels, Zigfried stripped off his velvet suit coat, bundled it, and slid it beneath Joey's head.

"Zere is no doctor for hours," he said grimly, glancing up at Seto. "Your bodyguard has perhaps radioed, but . . ."

"I was with him all afternoon!" Yori knew the protest was stupid, but her mind was still spinning to catch up. "Joey wasn't even pale. He took down cyborgs on the beach this morning and was still bragging about the tournament!"

He'd asked about buying a helicopter and getting a dragon. He'd charged headfirst into helping Seto and Mokuba. He couldn't have gone from that to this in just a matter of hours.

After already failing Mokuba, Yori couldn't lose another friend.

"Alister," Seto said quietly. "When Wheeler tackled him off me, he was making his final attack. He said, 'Die, Kaiba.' I saw the activation flash, but when nothing happened, I assumed Wheeler's interference made him miss." He swallowed. "Apparently, it did, just not how I thought."

His meaning hung in the air like a sour odor. The scent of death.

Alister had meant to kill. He'd just hit the wrong target.

Zigfried frowned. "He has suffered an attack? Zis is caused by a wound?"

"I doubt there's a visible wound, but Alister's threat was clear. He intended to kill me 'slowly and painfully.'" Seto met Yori's eyes, then clenched his jaw, looking away.

Joey thrashed harder. Krisalyn reached for his arms, her face pale and teary-eyed, but her brother waved her back sharply.

Yori had to do something.

Even if they had a doctor, what use was medicine against magic?

Magic had to be battled with magic.

Closing her eyes, she plunged herself into the shadows. All at once, she couldn't see the others. Just a wide expanse of dark, swimming with red skulls. One of the skulls rose to face her, tilting in a way that unhinged its jaw. She stared into the hollow eyes.

Shada had warned her that every deal with the dark raised the price.

All the same, when the skull rasped a whisper without a voice—Power?—Yori answered with an unequivocal, "Yes. Give me the power to save him."

The skull swooped forward, bursting into mist as it touched her. She saw flashes of Dante, of his crimson-slit eyes, of his dragon fangs fading in a grin. She felt the tease of inspiration through her mind. The bracelet glowed hazy against her wrist, thrumming with power.

As the dark vanished, Yori dropped to her knees beside Joey, edging Krisalyn to the side. The girl seemed about to protest, and then she halted, staring at Yori's face.

"Your eyes—" she finally stammered.

They must have been bloodred. Yori ignored her, focusing on Joey.

"Joey," she whispered, "this will hurt. I'm sorry."

She reached for his arm first, then realized he was wearing his jacket. So she yanked up the edge of his shirt, exposing the pale skin above his hip, dotted with sweat and yellowed by a fading bruise. At the same time, she reached with the bracelet into his soul, feeling blindly until she hit a vibration, a faint echo that tremored through her own soul. His Ka.

Wake up, she ordered the monster, and save your better half.

"Yori . . ." Seto said warningly, as if he somehow knew what she was attempting.

But it had never been Yori's nature to be warned out of anything.

The bracelet heated against her wrist. Light built around it, growing brighter and brighter until it was blinding. Krisalyn flinched away. Yori squinted.

She held her arm above Joey's side. Then she turned her wrist, facing her bracelet's Eye of Horus toward his skin. Yori focused on its heat, and then she focused on its source—the shadows within.

She hesitated. This was no simple Ka summoning. This would change Joey forever. It might ruin his life.

She'd made a decision once before—a decision over someone's life, a decision that risked the hatred of someone she cared about. At least this time it wasn't murder.

And if she didn't act now, Joey would die.

If he wanted to stab her afterward, she'd lend him her switchblade. Until then, she wasn't about to stand by and let her friend die.

In one moment, she felt the roaring power of the shadows, and in the next, she slammed her wrist down, searing that power into Joey. Heat flared through her arm, melting the awareness of her fingers and wrist into one white-hot center of pain. Even unconscious, Joey cried out. Hands reached in from every direction to pull the two of them apart. Krisalyn and Zigfried must have thought she'd gone mad.

Perhaps she had.

The heat from the bracelet vanished along with the light, leaving spots in Yori's vision and a sharp, angry ache in her bones. But even while disoriented, she could still see the red, blistered skin above Joey's hip. The Eye of Horus. She'd scarred him for life with the mark of the most wretched god imaginable.

Krisalyn was yelling at her. Seto intervened, catching Yori under the arms and pulling her to her feet. Whatever he was saying, she didn't care.

She stared at Joey.

He'd fallen still, the convulsions over, but he didn't wake.

Yori's eyes stung with tears, pain rushing through her both body and soul. It hadn't worked. The shadows had lied.

Or maybe she'd just fooled herself to think she was strong enough to wield them.

Joey was taking a beating that never ended. He'd lost track of where he even was, lost track of everything except the blows that just kept coming, breaking his bones, bruising his organs. He'd curled into a ball, sucked everything in as tight as he could, but it didn't help, because somehow the strikes found even his hidden parts, and things kept breaking inside him even after he knew there should've been nothing left to break. He wasn't great at math, but even he could count his ribs, and he knew he didn't have a hundred stashed inside. But after a hundred blows to his chest, things were still breaking.

He thought about giving up and dying. It felt like that was an option, like there was a shadowy grim reaper standing behind whoever was throwing the kicks, and the reaper was just holding his bony hand out and waiting for Joey to take it, to admit he'd had enough.

Joey reached for it twice, but both times, he yanked his hand back before the reaper could get a good grip. Because he'd definitely had enough—he was so far past had enough that he was leaking tears out his hundred ribs and wishing he'd been born a jellyfish instead of a person just so he didn't have anything inside him to break—but at the same time, he hadn't had enough.

He hadn't had enough living. He hadn't had enough time with Serenity, who was still in Japan, still close enough to hug, to tease, to guard from her ponytailed boyfriend. He hadn't had enough classes in school, clearly, because he couldn't remember how many ribs he was supposed to have. He hadn't had enough tournament wins, because he still felt like a fraud, a fluke, an accidental King of Games—like they'd crowned him because nobody else was close by, or because his head just got in the way of the real king—and he didn't know if he'd lose the throne to the next guy around the corner or if he would keep it forever. Maybe he could keep it forever. Maybe he was actually worthy of it. Maybe there was a lot he was worthy of, if he could just let himself see it.

He desperately wanted to see it.

He wanted to fight and win a hundred more tournaments, one for every broken rib. He wanted to graduate high school and get a girlfriend and start his first job and go to college. He wanted to get married. He wanted to have a family and treat his kids a thousand times better than his dad had ever treated him.

He wanted it all so badly that the thought of not getting it was a worse pain than the torture.

For the third time, Joey pulled his hand back in, denying the reaper.

The blows kept coming. A snap of pain. A flash of agony. His very soul bleeding even though souls couldn't bleed. The whole world turned red with it. And what was he holding on for? A rescue? Who'd want to rescue him?

Yuugi, he thought. Half a prayer, half a plea. For everything Joey lacked, the one thing he had was amazing friends, with some amazing abilities. Maybe even amazing enough to stop whatever this was.

So Joey held on, and when he reached out in the dark again, it wasn't for any reaper. It was for his best friend.

Joey!

He could've cried just to hear that voice. He did. He sobbed in the void.

He couldn't see Yuugi, but he could feel him. The pain lessened and dulled, like it was hitting him now through a mattress, still jarring broken bones and bruises, but with enough space to breathe. Joey remembered they day he and Yuugi had become friends, when Yuugi had stood in front of him like a little guardian angel and taken a beating he didn't deserve.

He was doing it again.

Yuugi, don't—

Hold on, Joey. Yori's there. I can sense her.

For once, Joey just did what he was told. In an endless dark, he held on to hope and his best friend.

Until, after an eternity—

A golden light burst through the black.

The beating stopped.

His sense of Yuugi disappeared with it, and that was enough to make him wary, so Joey stayed curled for a long time, not trusting the change. But finally, he stood. He was alone in an endless black field, dark fog curling around his legs.

Not alone. Something growled in the night, chilling Joey's heart.

Was this it? If he turned, would he find himself alone with the reaper?

Every part of Joey ached. He limped as he turned, preparing to fight while also wondering if he had any fight left in him at all.

Then he blinked.

Because it wasn't a reaper at all.

It was a dragon.

"I know you," he managed, which seemed like a dumb thing to say. But it was true. He recognized the black dragon in front of him as surely as if he'd known it all his life.

It stood almost humanoid, with thick hind legs shaped like his except for the clawed feet and the spikes of black armor at the knees. That same armor covered its torso, like a medieval knight with obsidian plate mail. Its hands bore only three fingers and a thumb, each one tipped in claws as thick and sharpened as daggers. Both its neck and tail were skeletal, spiked at the back and linked like vertebrae. Bat-style wings spread from the dragon's shoulders, and they had to be too small to actually carry it.

Most striking were the dragon's pale red eyes, nearly white at the center, glowing with the light of intelligence. It tilted its head as it regarded Joey, parting its jaws to reveal enough razor-sharp teeth it must've put the sharks to shame.

"Red-Eyes Black Dragon," Joey said numbly. "I thought . . . thought you were just a card."

Maybe he was hallucinating. Maybe the pain had driven him insane, and if he was insane anyway, might as well imagine his favorite dragon.

The dragon took one lumbering step forward. Red-Eyes towered over Joey—probably ten feet tall—but that long, fluid neck meant he brought his eyes right down to Joey's level. Peering into his soul.

Joey gave a nervous little laugh. He reached his fingers up hesitantly, but he couldn't bring himself to touch the dragon's reflective black armor.

"Hey, thanks," he said hoarsely. "I been in a lot of scrapes you've pulled me out of, like the championship with Rich-boy. I know I musta let you down all that time in Battle City when you weren't in my deck, but I . . ." He swallowed. "I had to prove I was worth fightin' for. Did I do that, you think?"

Red-Eyes opened his toothy mouth in a leer that Joey chose to believe was a dragon-type smile. With a little surge of bravery, Joey reached his fingers forward again, but just before he touched Red-Eyes, the dragon pulled away, moving his head to the side. His piercing eyes had an intensity Joey had never seen.

He wanted something.

"I ain't got nothing." Joey gave a weary smile. "Seems to be my problem most the time. I ain't even got a clue why I'm here or how this is happening."

Red-Eyes crouched, rippling the thick muscles of his hind legs, claws glinting through the dark mist. He brought his head even lower, staring at Joey's chest. Right at his heart.

"Uh . . . if you wanna eat my heart or somethin', pal, we're gonna have a rough time. Kinda need it to live."

Then Joey realized his jacket was gone. Not just his jacket, his shirt. He blushed, covering his bare chest with his arms, not because he was worried about modesty in front of a dragon, but because he was covered in bruises. More than he'd ever had before. Worse than he'd ever had before. From his abdomen to his collarbone was one big mass of discolored skin, thick patches of it freshly purple, a few strips faded yellow.

All of it ached. All of it made him hunch his shoulders and turn away.

But when he turned, Red-Eyes was in front of him again, staring right at his chest with those white-red eyes, focused and intense and asking for something.

The skin above Joey's left hip burned. He grimaced, looking down to see a red scar among the bruises, blistered in the shape of a creepy Egyptian eye. The kind on Yuugi's puzzle.

"Somethin's wrong, ain't it?" Though Joey swallowed, his mouth remained dry. "I think . . . I think maybe that beatin' killed me after all. Is this some kinda test for the afterlife? I remember Grandpa used to talk about weighing the heart against a feather or something. If you're here to do that, I got bad news for the scales."

He didn't think his heart had ever been lighter than a feather, but it had definitely never been heavier than it was in this moment, realizing he would never graduate or have a job or anything else. He'd missed out on every dream. That was enough to make his heart a chunk of lead, sagging down against every broken rib, threatening to collapse him under the ache.

Red-Eyes rumbled, forcing Joey to focus up again. The dragon never glanced up, never lifted his head, and when Joey shifted, the monster's head swayed right along with the movement. His eyes remained trained.

On Joey's bruises.

Maybe that was worse than the heart thing.

"You don't want these, believe me." Joey shrank back, stepping into the mist.

But no matter where he turned, Red-Eyes was in front of him. Speaking to him in a language he didn't hear but just felt.

"You don't want these," Joey repeated harshly. There was nothing worse than carrying them, nothing worse than bearing the shame of it and the ache, always wondering if his friends would find out, always dreading they would but kind of hoping it, too, and hating himself for both. Nothing worse.

Except . . . death.

Joey swallowed. He stopped retreating.

"Why?" he finally rasped.

Red-Eyes stood up to his full height, stretching his black wings out and curling his tail. He formed a shell around Joey, as close as he could possibly be without touching. Warmth pulsed through Joey's veins, and even the black mist receded from where he stood. He was safe, protected. Not a feeling he had often.

"Okay," he whispered. "I trust you, pal. It's a deal."

With a satisfied, rumbling growl, Red-Eyes dropped his head to rest on Joey's shoulder. The sharp point of his jaw pricked Joey's skin, but the pain vanished instantly. In fact, all the pain left in a rush, all the aches in his bones and the tenderness of the bruises. Instead, obsidian armor grew along Joey's chest, covering his shoulders and abs, plating together down his back and making him stand tall.

The dragon disappeared, and Joey woke.

The moment Joey's eyes opened, Yori learned to breathe again. Her head pounded, and her wrist still throbbed—effects of the bracelet—but it would have been worth ten times that to see her friend sit up and look at her.

Even if his brown eyes had shifted to a pale red.

"Wha' happened?" Joey rasped, looking down at his chest like he expected to see something sitting on it. The color slowly returned to his face with each breath, and he opened his mouth to say something else.

He didn't get that far, because Krisalyn threw her arms around him and made his jaw snap shut and his face flush with pale red color to match his eyes. Zigfried eyed Yori's bracelet like it was an escaped lab experiment, and then he retrieved his suit coat from behind Joey and stood.

Even though she could see that he was okay—even though, as far as she knew, the shadows were forced to honor a deal—Yori had to ask anyway. And her voice broke on the question.

"You okay, Joey?"

He'd just clasped his arms tentatively around Kris, and he looked up with a sort of dazed-but-happy expression. "Yeah, Yor'. I met a dragon."

She laughed, but a worm of nervousness still wriggled inside. Perhaps it was her awareness of her own Ka, a creature she still didn't fully understand. Perhaps it was simply the fear that fixing something with magic often meant breaking something else.

But even so . . .

"Glad to have you back." She meant it. No matter the cost.

He grinned with signature charm. "Glad to be back. Joey Wheeler's got a lotta livin' left to do."

Note: This is another one of those chapters I've been waiting YEARS to write. So satisfying. Guys, there's so much in store for these characters, just wait.