‘You’ve got him well trained,’ said Rodeo Dave. ‘Not like my Kleopatra. I think she’s trained me.’
‘Any luck?’ Jaide whispered as they climbed into Zebediah, whose roof seemed to have opened itself now the rain had passed.
Ari jumped onto her lap. ‘Just bones and old feathers.’ He stuck out his tongue. ‘All I can taste is dust.’
Rodeo Dave put on his hat and started the car. Zebediah rumbled deep in its belly and the castle fell away behind them. If Jack concentrated, he could imagine that Zebediah was perfectly still and the world was moving around it. The gates of the estate, the outskirts of town, the town hall, the fish markets, Watchward Lane …
Susan was standing on the steps by the front door as though she had been expecting them. She waved as they drove up the drive, and came down the steps to meet them, then she waved again as Rodeo Dave drove back down the lane, minus his passengers.
‘How was your day?’ she asked.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Jaide. There was an odd look in her mother’s eyes that told her there was something up. ‘Is there something wrong with Grandma?’
‘With Dad?’ added Jack, feeling his heart suddenly thump hard in his chest.
‘Why would you think that?’ Susan asked them in return. ‘All I did was ask you how your day was.’
‘It was . . . fine,’ said Jack slowly. He looked down at his mud-streaked clothes, wondering if that was where the problem lay. ‘We got pretty dirty, though. All that dust and grime in the books.’
‘Nothing a bath and laundry won’t fix.’
The twins took a step forward to go inside, but Susan didn’t move out of the way. She stood there as if waiting for them to confess something.
Jack and Jaide just stared at her, completely at a loss. Which part had she guessed? That Grandma X’s accident was the work of The Evil? That Rodeo Dave was a sleeper agent? That their father was not on the other side of the world at all, but in their very neighbourhood, fighting to keep them all safe?
Susan did something entirely unexpected. She took her hand from behind her back and held up a small black box with an electric cord dangling from it.
A phone charger.
‘Perhaps one of you could tell me what this is and who it belongs to?’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Multiplication and Division
THE TWINS STARED AT THE charger with their mouths open. Jaide felt a wild urge to laugh hysterically. This was about nothing more than the secret of the mobile phone?
‘It’s the charger for our phone,’ blurted out Jack in relief. ‘Dad gave it to us – ow!’
Jaide kicked him in the shin. One secret led to another. If they started down the path to the truth by telling where the phone had come from, it would all come out and they would never be allowed to keep looking for the card, no matter how much they wanted to help.
Luckily, Susan didn’t believe them.
‘Your father and I agree that you’re much too young to have a phone. And besides, how could he give you a phone when he’s in Italy? Tell me the truth this time, or you’ll be in real trouble.’
They had to say something.
Jaide opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Fortunately, this time Jack was closer to the mark.
‘We know you told us you weren’t going to give us a phone,’ he said, ‘but we really need one to text Tara about homework and stuff, and everyone else our age has one, so we got it for ourselves from one of the kids at school. It’s an old one that doesn’t do very much. See? They would’ve thrown it out if we didn’t take it. We’re not wasting time or money on it. We pay for the credit out of our allowance.’
Susan looked at the phone in Jaide’s hand, clearly weighing up the veracity of their explanation. She had no reason to suspect that the phone came from their father, though it was clear she was still not entirely satisfied.
‘Please, Mum, please we can we keep it?’ asked Jaide.
Jack’s heart sank as Susan shook her head.
‘I don’t like you going behind our backs like this,’ she said. ‘It sets a bad precedent. If you’re good, maybe you’ll get it back one day, but not today.’
The twins argued, but they had no choice but to hand over the phone. It joined the charger in Susan’s back pocket, firmly switched off, and eventually she raised her hands to bring their pleas for clemency to an end.
‘All right, enough! Go inside, both of you. I’ve got some homework for you to do, after you’ve had a shower. I’m just going to the shops to get ingredients for dinner. There’s a recipe I saw on the internet at work – it sounds delicious.’
‘That’s my cue to go elsewhere,’ said Ari, who had watched the confrontation from the sidelines. ‘If it’s anything like last week’s chilli con carne with white chocolate, I’d rather be patrolling with Custer in the rain.’
He sprang off into the dusk, leaving them to their fate.
Jack and Jaide slouched up to their room as their mother scooped up her keys and bag and headed out to the car.
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Jaide. ‘This is a disaster!’
‘I know,’ said Jack. ‘But what else could we have said to Mum to make her change her mind?’
‘You could have told her the truth,’ said a muffled voice from inside Jack’s backpack.
The twins had completely forgotten about the death mask. When they peered in the bag, they found that Professor Olafsson was indignantly tangled up in old plastic wrap and a damp sock.
‘She’d never believe us!’ said Jaide.
‘Not about the devices you people employ to avoid talking face to face,’ he said. ‘About everything. You should tell your grandmother, too.’
‘We can’t,’ Jack told him. ‘Mum wouldn’t want to know about it and Dad told us not to worry Grandma.’
‘Do you trust him?’
‘Of course,’ said Jaide. ‘He’s our father!’
‘And he’s a Warden, too,’ Jack added.
‘What kind of father knowingly puts his children into danger?’ Professor Olafsson asked them. ‘What kind of Warden keeps the near presence of The Evil secret from the Warden in charge of the wards?’
‘He hasn’t really put us in danger . . . has he?’ said Jack.
‘I guess he has, kind of – if Rodeo Dave ever finds out what we know. But he won’t,’ Jaide told Professor Olafsson. ‘We’re good at keeping secrets.
‘Secrets, like lies, multiply in the keeping,’ said the professor. ‘Have you never thought to ask why this card is so important?’
‘Of course!’ said Jack again. ‘But there hasn’t been time, and we keep getting interrupted.’
‘And we’re just troubletwisters,’ said Jaide miserably. ‘No one tells us anything.’
Professor Olafsson’s expression softened.
‘I, too, was once excluded from Warden activities,’ he said after a moment, ‘because I argued too strongly for my theories to be tested. You know your father best. Perhaps you are right to do as he says, and I am wrong to question him. As a fellow Warden, I will keep the secrets he has asked you to keep, and I will help you find this Card of Translocation for him.’
‘But how are we going to find it?’ asked Jack. ‘If we can’t go back to the castle tomorrow, Rodeo Dave will beat us to it.’
‘Was that Rodeo Dave you were talking to earlier, when we left the castle?’ asked Professor Olafsson. ‘Talking about someone called Kleopatra?’
‘That’s his cat,’ said Jaide, ‘although she’s not anyone’s cat, really. She’s Grandma’s other Warden Companion.’
‘Odd. I recognise his voice from somewhere, but I can’t recall where.’
Jaide zipped up the backpack and headed to their room.
‘I want to check on Cornelia,’ said Jack, continuing on up the stairs. He needed to do something other than stew over the lost phone.
‘Okay,’ she called after him, ‘but don’t think I’m doing your homework for you!’
/> Jack found Cornelia and Kleo sitting in the blue room exactly as they had been last time. The macaw’s royal blue head came up as soon as she saw Jack, and she began walking rapidly from side to side as though pleased to see him. He crossed to the cage and fed a nut through the bars.
‘Hello, Cornelia. How are you doing today?’
‘Shipshape and Bristol fashion,’ she declared, taking the nut.
‘Is that good?’ he asked Kleo.
‘I think so,’ said the cat, extending her chin so Jaide could skritch under it. ‘But she still hasn’t said anything sensible. Maybe she will now that you’re here.’
‘You can trust us,’ said Jack to the bird. ‘Whatever you have to tell us, we’ll believe you.’
Cornelia bobbed up and down, sending bits of nut flying in every direction.
‘Rourke!’
With short but confident strides, she walked along the perch and climbed down the inside of the cage to the door. Gripping the wire in her powerful beak, she pulled the door upwards and, with a deft and obviously well practised manoeuvre, flipped herself through it. Then she climbed to the top of the cage and fluffed up her feathers.
Jack took a step backwards, unsure where this was going, while Kleo watched from the dragon chair.
‘Is this the first time she’s left the cage?’ he asked.
‘Hasn’t so much as put her head through the door,’ said Kleo, ‘until now.’
Cornelia looked at Jack, and then Kleo. The presence of the cat didn’t seem to worry her.
‘Rourke!’
The macaw’s wings unfolded, flapped, and suddenly she was airborne. She didn’t fly far, just to the other side of the room, where her beak tugged the elephant tapestry aside. Two swift hops took her through the door.
Jack heard her wings flap again. He ran to lift aside the tapestry to see what she was doing. He had a fleeting glimpse of blue flying down the stairwell, then she was gone.
‘Why did she do that? Is she coming back?’
Kleo shrugged. ‘If she won’t tell us, we can’t know.’
‘But she can’t tell us. She’s not like you, a Warden Companion.’ Frustration boiled in him. Had they failed Cornelia somehow by failing to understand?
‘What if we made her a Companion?’ Jack asked. ‘Is there a way to do that?’
‘There is, and it’s very difficult. Far too difficult for troubletwisters,’ said Kleo firmly. ‘Speaking of which . . . Custer left exercises for you. You’ll find them on the desk. I’m to make certain you do them before you go to bed.’
Jack groaned. More homework? It wasn’t fair.
‘I advise getting it over with,’ said the cat. ‘Let me fetch your sister for you. I’ll keep guard for your mother’s return, and check on Cornelia, too, in case she’s thinking of getting up to any mischief.’
‘All right,’ Jack said, rubbing his stomach. He was still looking at the tapestry, worried about Cornelia, but at the same time, their late lunch felt like it had been days ago, and he had shared it with Ari.
He slouched up the short flight of stairs with his sister when she joined him. There he found the homework as promised, a series of fiddly optical illusions for Jack (involving mirrors and lenses and beams of light in a wild variety of colours) and twelve triangular flags for Jaide that she had to make flap in a particular order using carefully targeted jets of air. Jaide joined him, and they set to their tasks with their minds on other things, so that half the time their efforts were to no avail. Flags whipped back and forth, lights flashed on and off, and inevitably their Gifts began to interfere with each other. One particularly uproarious mishap had both of them running for cover under a bureau as objects swept around the room in the grip of an invisible tornado.
The twins each felt five tiny pinpricks of pain in the small of their backs. Startled, they turned around.
‘I’ll take this as a sign,’ Kleo said, as the wind ebbed, normal visibility was restored, and a hundred tiny knickknacks fell with a clatter to the floor, ‘that you are tired and in need of dinner. I suggest you call it a night and head down, once we’ve tidied up here.’
Jaide brushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘Can I take the Compendium with me to read later?’
‘You may – although your grandmother says it’s terrible bedtime reading. It gives her bad dreams.’
‘Did Custer say anything when he came by today?’ asked Jack as they picked themselves up off the floor.
‘Only that he has observed several unusual meteorological phenomena near the estate.’ Kleo followed them and began batting hidden trinkets into view. ‘He mentioned a storm and all three of you getting wet. But there was no lightning, at least none that he saw. Did you see any?’
The twins shook their heads, wondering why that might be important. Their father travelled by lightning, using his Gift. They didn’t know what the absence of lightning might mean.
‘But the wards are strong, aren’t they?’ This was as close as Jack dared to asking outright if the fight against The Evil that afternoon had gone well.
‘Were The Evil to seriously test the wards,’ said Kleo, rounding up a series of chess pieces that were trying to run away from her, ‘I would know. Wardens aren’t infallible, and as you now know, sometimes they fall ill. They can be distracted by human concerns and affections. That’s why they have Companions: we can see things they do not. We are their eyes and ears when they are blind and deaf.’
With a gentle nip, as if she was picking up a kitten, Kleo scooped up the last wriggling pawn and tossed him into the box with the other chess pieces.
‘Thank you, Kleo,’ said Jaide, rubbing the fur under Kleo’s ears. ‘We’d better go back upstairs before Mum gets back.’
At that moment, the crash of breaking glass sounded from the drawing room.
Kleo led the charge to find out what was going on, Jaide almost treading on the cat’s tail as she ran after her.
Cornelia was crouched on the mantelpiece, clinging to the edge with her powerful claws and peering downwards. On the ground below her was a picture frame lying in a field of glass shards. She glanced up at them, then back at the wreckage. Instead of exhibiting remorse at the accident, Cornelia flapped down and landed gingerly among the splinters and began pulling at the frame with her powerful beak.
‘That’s no way for a guest to behave,’ said Kleo, running towards her.
Cornelia looked up and stretched her wings, flapping them violently.
‘Rourke! Rourke!’
Kleo retreated, and Cornelia returned to the frame, tossing it back and forth with wild jerks of her feathered head until it broke and the picture within fell facedown onto the carpet.
She tossed the frame away, nipped the corner of the picture in her beak, and flipped it over. The picture was a black-and-white portrait of the twins’ family taken when they were nine, showing them all dressed in Wild West outfits. Hector looked out of place in a cowboy hat, sheriff’s badge, and chaps, but Susan looked totally convincing with a six-shooter in her hand, despite her frilly dress. The twins were dressed in old-fashioned ‘Sunday best’. Jack remembered the way his stripy suit had smelled, of mothballs and faintly of sick, as though the last person to wear it had thrown up in it.
‘’ourke!’ said Cornelia, hopping across the floor to him, holding up the photo in her beak.
‘What’s that, Cornelia?’ he asked, crouching down to her level. ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’
‘’ourke!’ She dropped the photo in front of him and nodded her head up and down. ‘Rourke!’
‘Something about the photo?’
She stretched out and tapped it with her beak. ‘Rourke! Killer!’
‘Yes, that’s me in the photo, and Jaide, and Mum and—’
She tapped more insistently, putting a hole in Hector’s face. ‘Rourke! Killer! Rourke!’
‘I don’t understand, Cornelia. That’s my dad, yes, but—’
The tapping became more insistent, and the
hole bigger still.
Jaide squatted down next to Jack.
‘Cornelia, are you saying that Dad was the one who frightened Young Master Rourke the night he died?’
Cornelia stopped tapping, hopped backwards and waddled around in a circle. The message was clear: Finally!
‘But that’s impossible,’ said Jack. ‘Dad wasn’t there. He couldn’t have been.’
‘Was he the one who frightened you?’ asked Jaide.
Cornelia nodded. ‘Visitor! Killer!’
‘And is that why you were frightened of us, because you could tell we were related to him?’
Cornelia’s blue head bobbed rapidly up and down. ‘Visitor! Killer!’
‘Stop saying that!’ shouted Jack. The parrot stopped squawking, but gave Jack a very beady-eyed look.
Jack backed away until he bumped into Jaide’s shoulder.
‘Cornelia can’t be right,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Dad wasn’t there, and even if he had been, he wouldn’t have hurt Young Master Rourke. He wouldn’t have!’
Jaide was just as bewildered, but she was trying to think it through. ‘There must be some explanation. Perhaps he was there, and Master Rourke died of fright for reasons we don’t know anything about, or—’
‘There’s very little we can be certain of right now,’ said Kleo. ‘Let’s just be glad that Cornelia is starting to talk about what happened, and worry about making sense of it later.’
‘You don’t believe her, do you?’ asked Jack.
‘I believe your mother will be home soon, and we have some cleaning up to do. It would be best to hide Cornelia, too, to avoid making a scene.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Jaide. ‘Come on, Jack.’
‘But if Dad didn’t frighten Master Rourke, who did?’ he said in a dazed voice. ‘I bet he wasn’t there at all! You’re just making stuff up!’ he yelled down at the parrot. ‘And I thought you were my friend!’
The parrot lunged for the photo but Jack yanked it out of the reach of her sharp beak. He ignored her when she flapped and squawked in protest, thinking only of his father hiding in the forest in the rain, mistrusted by everyone. He couldn’t have killed Master Rourke – he wouldn’t kill anyone.