“She lied,” Bloom whispered.
Jamie asked into the darkness, “What should we do?”
They were silent. Annie breathed again and thought about the knife Miss Cornelia gave her. Was now the time to use it? Was she brave enough to try?
Eva made an occasional moaning noise. Time passed. Seconds blended into minutes. They were terrified and quiet and had no clue what was going on above them.
Then Bloom gasped. “Annie. I’m so foolish … You’re a Stopper.”
Annie flinched in the darkness. “What?”
“You’re a Time Stopper,” Bloom said. “That’s why we needed you here.”
“You shouldn’t call yourself foolish,” Annie said, totally not listening to the rest of what Bloom was whispering.
He squatted down, and his voice was suddenly right in her ear. “No. Listen. You can stop time. Only one out of a million magic people can do that. The DNA is all recessive. It doesn’t always come out in a bloodline, but you are destined to have the skill. The Council said so. Even Megan saw it.”
Annie could feel his breath on her cheek. It smelled like mint. She closed her eyes the way she always did when she tried to focus, and finally whispered, “I really have no idea how.”
“It’s magic,” Bloom whispered frantically. “It’s something inside of you that allows you to stop time. You keep moving. Whoever you touch keeps moving, but everyone else is frozen.”
“Isn’t that what the bird is doing upstairs?” Jamie interrupted.
“No,” Bloom said. “I don’t think so. That thing has to touch people to freeze them, but the whole world doesn’t stop. When Annie stops time, the whole world will stop except for her and whoever she’s touching.”
“If I can,” Annie muttered. “I seriously don’t think—”
“The whole world? Everything?” Jamie whispered right over her. “Birds? The wind?”
“Everything,” Bloom insisted.
The monster cackled above them. The sound seemed to come through the ceiling and touch them. They hushed. Something cold and awful seeped into the very insides of Annie’s bones.
“How do I do it?” she whispered, again wanting to pull out her phurba. She gently put Eva’s head on the floor and stood up.
Bloom stood up with her, dagger at the ready in front of him. “I’m not sure. Ned the Doctor once said that the Stopper focuses, their vision blurs, and they say the word, ‘Stop.’ ”
Even though she’d read the same thing in one of the books in her room, Annie doubted it. “That seems a bit simple. Too simple.”
“I know,” Bloom agreed rather urgently, staring up at the entrance to the chamber. “Sometimes Stoppers need to do a tangible thing to make the magic work. Hold a rock. Sing a word. Touch a familiar. Your power, Annie? Has it ever shown itself before? Have you ever made something appear that wasn’t there before?”
“Sometimes … Sometimes … my drawings come to life,” she admitted. “I think.”
Suddenly, the covering to the hole that they’d come through slid open. Light shone down, illuminating the unconscious Eva, the terrified Jamie, the shaking but brave Bloom, and the growling Tala. Ice flooded Annie’s body, and a horrible smell assaulted their nostrils. Jamie gagged. A darkness overwhelmed the light. A wicked beak appeared in a cloud of black feathers. It opened and cackled.
“Found you. I’ll take the Stopper.”
23
Time Stops
In the future, when he would retell this story, Jamie would never be able to describe the massive terror he felt when faced with the black crow. Words were inadequate. The crow smelled of death, and it was cold, a cold sort of nothingness that was hard for him to think about, let alone describe. It smelled of his nightmares, of asparagus, and a bit like his grandmother.
As the bird stared down at all of them, peering with a dark, ominous eye that shifted into a beak and then back into an eye, Jamie could barely move. The fear was too profound and intense. His hands shook, and for a few seconds his poor heart failed to beat.
Beside him, Bloom clutched something small in his hand and muttered words that seemed to be in a different language. Annie trembled in front of both of them, easily the closest to the bird.
It wants her, Jamie remembered. That’s what it said, wasn’t it? If it takes her, will it leave the rest of us alone? It was awful to even think it, and Jamie did not want to find out. He glanced about the hole. Solid rock walls surrounded them. There were no doors. No windows. Only one way in … and out.
Bloom started murmuring louder and the crow cackled. “Foolish elf. Gibberish won’t save you.”
The beak lunged toward them, the cloud of blackness swirling behind it.
“Watch out!” Jamie yelled, jumping in front of Annie to protect her.
She grabbed his shoulder. Bloom grabbed his other one, yanking him backward into Tala, who didn’t even whimper. The dog stepped on Eva’s stomach, and for one quick moment the five of them were touching. The beak was a mere foot away from them, rapidly coming closer, snapping wickedly, open and closed, and Annie screamed so loudly that Eva jerked awake, only to see the beak and immediately pass out again.
“STOP!” Annie’s voice yelled the word, frantic and as terrified sounding as Jamie felt.
Nothing happened. It didn’t work. Annie wailed in frustration. Her hand wrapped around the handle of Miss Cornelia’s knife, but something told her there was a better way. What had Bloom been saying before to them? About her powers?
“Draw it, Annie!” Jamie ordered.
Annie’s fingers frantically moved across his arm, as if she were tracing a picture there. Nothing happened.
She tried again, even faster this time. A word appeared on Jamie’s skin, surrounded by red drawn feathers: STOP!
Silence descended on the world. It was like they existed in a giant, empty vast space of nothingness. Annie, Bloom, Jamie, and Tala gawped at each other and at the rise and fall of Eva’s chest. The crow was still.
Jamie’s jaw dropped.
What happened? Did I do it? Did I actually stop time? Annie’s mind raced. Jamie started to say something to her, but no sound came out of his mouth.
Annie was trembling. She staggered back against the far wall, terrified and tired as she stared back at them all. Her hands flattened against the surface of the stones. Jamie had promised to be her friend, but he’d not known then that she was magic. Really, really magic. It was somewhat terrifying. So, maybe he wouldn’t actually want her to be his friend since he was now aware of her true magical nature. Being magic seemed cool, but not if it meant losing Jamie’s friendship.
“Annie?” He whispered her name.
At the same time Bloom whooped. “You did it! You did it, Annie!”
The blond boy lifted her up and spun her around before dropping her back down on the floor. He glowed from happiness. His skin seemed so golden that it matched his hair.
Eva stirred from her position, jumped up, yanked on her pigtails, fixing them, and said, “What did I miss? Did I miss the good stuff?”
Jamie pointed at the cloud of feathers frozen in the air. The word STOP! had begun to fade from his arm.
“Dragon toots,” Eva cursed. “I missed it. I always do. Dragon doughnut tooting traitors.”
She kept muttering. She yanked on her left pigtail so fiercely that Jamie thought she might actually lose some hair.
“Annie stopped time,” Bloom interrupted her cursing.
“I did?” Annie whispered as Tala licked her hand.
Bloom’s voice was gentle. “You really did.”
She had. She’d actually done it. The bird was truly frozen before them. The dark cloud of it didn’t quiver or move. There was no cawing. Nothing.
“But how can this be happening?” Annie asked. “I don’t have a wand or a spell or anything.”
Eva snorted. “She knows nothing.”
“Of course she doesn’t,” Bloom said. “She’s been away from Aurora. It’s he
r first full day here, and she’s already stopped time without even knowing how. Cut her some slack, dwarf.”
Then Bloom turned to Annie and said in a soft, patient voice, “It’s a nonverbal magic. It comes from strong emotions. Only a few can do it, but it tends to be a bit … unruly. Focus comes from stones or spells, or for you it must be images and drawing. That’s why I was chanting. I was trying to help you focus. I’d heard elves can help Stoppers that way.”
“Um … ,” Jamie said. “How does the world start again? And when? You know? Because …”
He cleared his throat and gestured at the beak.
“Good question, runt.” Eva stood up and grabbed him by the arm and hauled him toward a tiny gap of light, a space that the cloud did not fill. “It depends on the Stopper. It’s Annie’s first time so …”
“It’ll probably just start again. Soon,” Bloom finished for her. He pushed Annie ahead. “Hurry. Let’s go.”
They climbed through the hole, barely fitting through the small space around the bird. Jamie wasn’t sure what would happen if they touched it, but it seemed important to not do so. He held his breath and willed the time stop to hold as he snuck through the gap.
Once out, the group realized that the bird’s black feathers filled almost the entire sitting room. Jamie could make out a thousand different wings, motionless but clustered together.
“It’s so horrible,” Annie whispered as they slipped past it, across the room and into the main foyer.
Jamie followed her and turned to watch as Eva and Tala scrambled out of the hole.
“Just hurry,” Eva grumbled.
“Stop being so bossy, Eva. At least you didn’t pass out again,” Bloom admonished.
Jamie breathed a sigh of relief, but the truth was that if time started right then … they weren’t safe at all. Eva was right; they had to hurry.
They zipped into the foyer and then stopped, shocked by the sight in front of them. There by the fountain, Miss Cornelia and three other figures were frozen and draped in a cloud of black crow wings. Pixies were frozen in midflight, hovering in clouds of blackness. Even the mermaids, even Farkey, were surrounded by the evil wings.
Eva rushed to her father, who held an ax in his hand. The ax was frozen midswing. “Papa.”
But it was the middle-size person that bothered Jamie the most. Miss Cornelia stood, hands open and raised as if she was trying to appeal to her attacker.
There is no reasoning with that crow, Jamie thought. It was like his grandmother. There was nothing good there at all.
“SalGoud,” Bloom said, waving his dagger toward the boy whose thick glasses had gone askew halfway down his nose. “He is my best friend.”
Jamie nodded respectfully. He wasn’t sure what else to do, or how to offer comfort to Bloom, who sounded so sad.
“And Gramma Doris,” Bloom continued, moving to a plumper figure. Bloom sighed. Then he continued, “She makes the best pies.”
Through the crow feathers, Jamie could make out her gray hair and high eyebrows and laugh lines around her big brown eyes. He didn’t know what to say and offered halfheartedly, “I guess she got back from her errand.”
Tala whimpered and licked Miss Cornelia’s hand.
Bloom’s face turned angry, hard and lined. “This is so wrong.”
“I will kill that crow beast!” Eva shouted. She grabbed the ax from her father’s hand, held it above her head, and marched forward toward the sitting room and the crow.
“We don’t know how to kill it, do we?” Annie asked in a tiny quiet voice.
“No,” Eva admitted. “But I will kill it!”
Annie touched the girl’s shoulder. “Not now. Not without knowing how. I don’t think an ax will do it.”
“What we need is a plan. We need to find someplace safe and then make a plan,” Jamie said. “We have to get out of here.”
The others focused on him, staring. It was unnerving to have all their attention like that, but he stood his ground.
“But where? What’s safe?” Annie asked. She quietly took the ax from Eva. The dwarf didn’t seem to notice.
“Nowhere,” Jamie said. “But we have to get some distance between us and that—that crow thing, in case time starts again.”
They all agreed.
“How about the bakery place? The Moony Horn Café?” he suggested, because honestly, he was still hungry.
“Perfect idea,” Annie said. She rushed to the front door, displacing a few frozen pixies and apologizing as she moved. “Let’s run.”
24
Frozen Citizens
Annie had never believed that she could be more frightened than she was at the Wiegles’ house, but that was before she faced the crow and witnessed lovely people like Miss Cornelia trapped, frozen, and surrounded by swarming black wings. But, there were good things, too. She was magic. Somehow she was unbelievably magic and she could stop time, which was just seriously the most stupendous event in the history of her whole entire twelve years of life.
Yet there was no time to really think about it, to figure out what it meant to be magic, where it came from, or how she even did it. Quickly, she tried to list what she knew. She knew she was terrified. She knew the word “stop” seemed to vibrate throughout her entire being. She knew it had happened. It had really, truly happened. For now, that had to be enough.
“Amazing,” she said as they ran down the hill toward the center of town. Tala stuck to her right side, nudging her hand with his nose.
“What’s amazing?” Jamie asked. He was keeping pace beside her, legs pumping hard.
Bloom was just a bit ahead, and Eva—poor short-legged Eva—was quite a distance behind.
“That I’ve stopped time. That I’m with three people I’ve never met before running to safety from some monster bird. That this place exists. That I’m alive.” Honestly, the list could go on forever.
“Yeah.” Jamie huffed. His breath came out in a white cloud because it was so cold.
They said nothing else, just ran, and when they were almost to the Moony Horn Café, time started again. It returned with a huge whoosh of noise and wind. But there were no human sounds. No activity behind the lighted windows of the little town. Every so often, Annie would spot people or dwarfs frozen in their homes, usually sitting or standing by their dinner tables, surrounded by the swirling black wings the crow left behind.
She stopped peering in windows.
“Here.” Bloom held open the door to the shop.
The light was on, but Helena wasn’t there. It was warm inside the bakery, though, and the place smelled of goodness, of sugar and flour and sweets. Annie and Jamie darted inside, followed by a staggering, huffy Eva.
“Hate running,” she muttered, and flopped down on a steel bar stool. “Lock the door.”
“I hardly think a locked door is going to keep that creature out,” Bloom protested.
“Lock the door!” Eva’s voice was panicked and her eyes were wide with fear.
For a second, Annie wondered if she’d pass out again.
Bloom snapped the door’s lock into place, and then bolted it. Once done, he raced into the back room to search for Helena. Not finding her, Bloom went to the upstairs apartment. They waited for him in the kitchen area. It seemed safer there somehow. Maybe it was the massive cream-colored cooker that had five separate little heating compartments or the happy spa-blue tile along the walls or the gigantic clear jars labeled “Chocolate” and “Brown Sugar” and “Sugar Sugar” that lined marble countertops. Annie wasn’t sure. Eva started pulling out éclairs from a white box and tossing them to the others.
“Helena would want us to eat.” Eva smiled. Pieces of éclair were stuck in her teeth. “She always wants us to eat.”
The éclair in Annie’s hand was too tempting to resist. She bit in. The chocolate seemed to dance on her tongue. Sugary sparkles drifted through the air, glistening like glitter and floating the way tiny bits of dust will.
“What is tha
t?” Jamie stuttered, staring.
Eva shrugged. “Helena’s food often does that. It’s her magic.”
Bloom thundered back down the stairs and entered through the spa-blue door to the left of the stove. “She’s upstairs surrounded by those wings.”
His hand trembled as he grabbed an éclair.
“I looked in the windows,” Annie said, still staring at the sugar dust floating in the air between them all. How could anything like the crow exist when there is something as beautiful as this? She didn’t know. “People are frozen everywhere.”
“It went to Miss Cornelia’s last, I bet. That’s what I’d do because she’s the strongest of us and would put up the most fight. It makes strategic sense,” Jamie said quietly. He’d finished his éclair.
Eva tossed him a chocolate doughnut. He chewed and swallowed. Chocolate sugar bits danced in the air in front of his face, and then slowly dissipated. “We need to find out how to reverse the spell, find out what the crow is, what it wants, what—”
“It wants her.” Eva used her elbow to gesture at Annie. “Nothing has attacked us in forever and then—poof!—Annie’s here. Everyone’s freaking under siege and surrounded by freaking bird feathers, which is freaking beyond weird, way beyond weird. Holy vile vampire vestigials!”
Annie’s throat closed. All of this was her fault?
“Enough, Eva!” Bloom ordered. “This didn’t happen because of Annie. It’s because the gnome is missing.”
Eva glowered at him and threw a doughnut right at his face. He caught it without even looking at it.
“What?” the dwarf said, as Tala jumped onto the counter. “It’s true. It’s not like it’s a bad thing. It just freaking is what it freaking is.”
“It is not Annie’s fault,” Bloom said, hopping up to sit on the counter. Tala made room for him, and crossed his doggy paws in front of his muzzle. “And you said the word ‘freaking’ eighteen thousand times.”
“Whatever,” Eva grunted. She tossed a doughnut to Annie. “I wasn’t trying to blame Annie.”
Annie caught the doughnut, but didn’t eat it. She handed it to Tala. “It’s okay. I know it is.”