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A match flared. Jaide had found the box by touch in the darkness. ‘Let’s not mess around. Let’s just get on with it.’
‘But I wasn’t messing around! It really does seem that Wardens do things the hard way for no good reason. I mean, why did Dad send us that postcard when he could have just called us? Why fight The Evil with magic when a machine gun might work better?’
‘What if The Evil took over the machine gun and turned it against you?’ Kleo said. ‘What if your father’s voice on the telephone line woke your Gifts unexpectedly? Do not be so glib when it comes to the wisdom of your grandmother. She nearly always knows better than anyone.’
‘Just nearly?’ asked Jaide.
Kleo’s cold, blue eyes said it as clearly as words: She invited you here, didn’t she?
‘Try again,’ the cat instructed, ‘using only your Gifts.’
Jack sighed and did his best to draw the shadows in around the bright flame, making it gutter and fade.
Then Jaide blew it with a gentle but recuperating breeze, bringing it back to its former strength.
‘Good,’ said Kleo. ‘Try harder.’
Jaide got in first, this time. A rush of oxygen sent the flame shooting towards the ceiling in a thin, wavering line.
Jack gathered his concentration and wrapped the flame in ribbons of darkness, drawing it back down. He could feel his sister fighting him, and he only managed to outdo her with a mighty effort.
‘Better. Try harder still.’
Jack gritted his teeth and poured an avalanche of shadow on to the feeble flame. If he could blow it out with a single breath, he told himself, why couldn’t he do the same with his Gift?
The flame shrank down to a single glowing point, as faint as a distant star, and it looked for a second that he might have put it out.
Jaide refused to let her brother beat her. Calling on all the energy inside her, all the energy of the sun that fuelled her Gift, she held the spark on the brink of going out, then both swelled it and brightened it. This new flame didn’t burn as it had before. It was circular and white, and shrank and grew in time with the beating of her heart.
‘This is a duel – a competition,’ Kleo informed them. ‘The winner will save the other from The Evil one day.’
Jack didn’t really hear what she was saying. He just heard the word competition and found a reserve of strength he hadn’t known was there.
Flame and darkness warred in a vivid column, spiralling ribbons rippling up and down its side, like a barber’s pole but in black and white. Shadows danced wildly as light flashed and darkness crashed back in. The twins each glared at the candelabra and willed with all their might.
Ari uncurled and crouched on all fours on the cushion, with his head down low and ears twitching.
I’m going to win, Jack thought as he pressed the flame back down to a tiny flicker. Jaide felt her brother’s confidence and renewed her determination to keep the flame alive at all costs. The flame roared up to fill the room, driving every last shadow into retreat.
Jaide whooped in triumph, her face glowing in the brilliance.
‘Enough,’ said Kleo. ‘Jaide is the victor. Well done.’
‘She only beat me because I was distracted,’ said Jack disappointedly as the candle flame returned to normal.
‘Regardless, she won. There will be many distractions next time you come face to face with The Evil. It will show you no forgiveness.’ The tips of her sharp teeth showed. ‘Again.’
Ari look sharply at her. ‘Kleo, perhaps this is a little too fast. Grandma X did say –’
Kleo looked at him, and Ari fell silent.
‘Again,’ she repeated. ‘This time with two candles.’
Jaide found a box under the table and lit a new candle with the flame of the first. She stuck it firmly in the candelabra and stepped back.
‘Winner goes first?’ she said to Jack.
‘Not likely.’
While she had been busy with the second candle, he had been working out a different strategy. Instead of trying to smother the flames with darkness, his new plan was to snuff them out from the inside. Unnoticed by Jaide, he had moved slightly to his right so that the tip of his toe overlapped the flickering shadow of the table cast by the candles. The moment the contest began, he sent himself down into the shadow and from there moved up the table legs, under the candelabra and to the base of the first candle. From there it was much harder because the shadows cast by both flames were so unreliable, particularly with Jaide whipping them up into a frenzy, but with one wild leap he made it to where he wanted to be.
At the heart of every flame was a patch of darkness. Jack had often stared into gas flames and birthday candles and seen it for himself. It looked as though the brightness of the flame was floating in thin air, created out of nothing. He knew there was some kind of scientific explanation for why that should be the case, but it looked magical to him regardless.
And now he was inside that dark heart, and he could speak to it as he spoke to ordinary shadows. He found it was much easier to smother a flame from within than to overwhelm it from without.
Jaide gasped as one of her twin towers of light suddenly went out. It felt as though he had reached inside her and ripped something out. The shock of it almost physically hurt her, even though it was the flame Jack had attacked, not her. She didn’t know exactly what he had done, but she turned her Gift to strengthening the second flame before he could do it again.
Jack felt her fighting back. It was hard getting into the second flame’s heart because she was swirling it around like a corkscrew, keeping the shadows moving. Short of setting the actual candle wax on fire, however, there was no way she could stop him forever. He saw an opening and took it, and once there, he reached out to do exactly what he had done before.
‘No!’ Jaide cried, sensing victory about to be snatched from her. The remaining candle flame feathered and branched into thousands of numerous flames, fuelled by dozens of tiny twisters, each with a life of its own.
Jack became confused by all the dark hearts forming around him. He couldn’t kill them all at once – and to make matters worse, it was getting hard to tell light from dark in the first place. He could feel the flame wrapping him up and drawing him out of the shadow, into itself. He fought that feeling, not knowing what would happen if he gave in to it.
‘Jack?’ said Jaide, feeling that she too was losing control of the duel. Long, thin shadows were reaching out from the candle’s wick. It looked as though a flame made of darkness was eating into the ordinary fire and threatening to devour it.
She tried to tell her Gift to stop, but it was as caught up in the duel as she had been and didn’t want to let go.
The shadow-flame grew higher and wider until it licked at the ceiling of the Blue Room.
‘Stop,’ commanded Kleo.
Both Jaide and Jack were too embroiled in the duel to hear.
‘Stop, I said – I am trying to listen to something !’
The oddness of her comment – why wasn’t she worried about them burning down the house? – was what caught the twins’ attention. Jack snapped instantly back into his body, staggering a little. Jaide pressed a hand to her aching forehead as the allure of the dark flame ebbed. It was a relief to let it go, even though that meant neither of them won.
Blinking, they turned to look at Kleo.
She was poised oddly, with three legs on the back of the chair and the fourth crooked as though about to knock on an invisible door. Her head was cocked.
‘I hear them,’ she said. ‘I must go to them.’
‘But your oath!’ Ari protested, hopping from perch to perch until he stood next to her, looking worried. ‘She’ll be angry.’
‘I am a Warden Companion,’ she snapped at him, ‘not a babysitter. You stay with them.’
Kleo broke her pose and ran for the exit from the Blue Room. Ari followed her, w
ith the twins doing their best to keep up.
Jack reached the front door first, but by then Kleo was long gone. There was just Ari pacing back and forth, peering out into the town with his tail whipping like a snake. It was surprisingly dark; more time had passed in the Blue Room than Jack had guessed.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked the cat.
‘Can’t you hear it?’ Ari said. ‘Her people are fighting.’
Jack couldn’t hear anything over Jaide’s belated arrival.
‘If that’s the case, then of course Kleo should go and help them,’ Jaide said. ‘And we should help her!’
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ said Ari, with heartfelt weariness.
‘Then what should we do?’ asked Jack.
‘Return to your exercises. That’s what she and your grandmother would want.’
It was Jaide’s turn to pace. ‘This is ridiculous. What’s the point of having a Gift if we can’t use it?’
‘Using it wisely,’ said Ari, ‘that’s the trick of it . . .’
‘So people keep saying, but who’s going to teach us to be wise? You?’
Ari’s tail drooped disconsolately, and that took some of the wind out of Jaide’s sails.
‘Sorry, Ari,’ she said, crouching down to give him a tight hug. ‘Please don’t hate me too. I’m just frustrated.’
‘We’re all frustrated,’ said Ari, muffled by her shoulder, ‘and caught in the middle, and suffocating –’
‘Oh, sorry.’ Jaide let him go, and he shook himself all over to unflatten his fur.
‘Why don’t we ask the Oracular Crocodile what to do?’ Jack suggested.
Jaide’s bitten fingertip gave an involuntary twitch. ‘I don’t think so. Not after last time.’
‘We won’t need to give it any more blood. Let’s try.’
Before she could argue, he was off, trailing Ari like a shadow. When Jaide caught up with them, they had the animated crocodile skull in front of them, and were deep in argument with it.
‘But you owe us,’ Jack was saying.
‘Num-num-num.’
‘You took more than your fair share last time, and you won’t get anything ever again until you come good on it. Tell us how to find the excision!’
