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‘Use the Compendium like you did last night. Let it guide you. I’ll call you again tomorrow to see how you got on.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘But Dad . . . we could go with Tara to Scarborough for the day so you can come into the wards without affecting our Gifts. Wouldn’t that be easier?’
‘It would, but there’s no way your mother would let you skip school just to have fun, and we can’t wait as long as the weekend. If the card was lost or fell into The Evil’s hands before then, that would be a disaster.’
‘How would The Evil get through the wards?’ asked Jack.
‘I saw Custer on the estate,’ said Jaide. ‘Ari said he was picking up something weird.’
‘Jack is right,’ Hector said. ‘The Evil would know that the wards are being closely monitored after your grandmother’s accident. The slightest open attack would be noticed immediately.’
‘How would it know about the accident?’ Jaide asked. ‘Would it sense it somehow?’
‘Grandma says that some people work for The Evil without being taken over by it,’ said Jack. ‘There could be someone like that in town right now.’
‘There probably is,’ Hector said, ‘and you would never know. There’s no way to tell until they act against you. The Evil has even been known to plant sleeper agents who lead an ordinary life for years, decades sometimes, before they’re activated to work against the Wardens. Ideally, it would be someone who’s around a lot and completely trusted by everyone. Someone harmless and easy to overlook.’
That was a creepy thought.
‘It could be anyone,’ said Jack with a shiver.
‘It could be the person who drove Grandma off the bridge!’ exclaimed Jaide.
For a moment there was nothing but the drumbeat of rain over the phone, and both twins feared that the call would be lost. But then Hector’s voice came through.
‘That’s true,’ their father said. ‘Don’t be frightened unnecessarily, though. All most sleeper agents do is watch and report. Just be careful who you talk to . . . and find the card as soon as possible. You’ll do that for me, won’t you? You’ll have good news for me tomorrow?’
‘We will,’ they promised over the thickening hiss.
‘Good. And now, children, I must go.’
‘Already?’ protested Jack. They hadn’t talked about Grandma X or Professor Olafsson yet. Even over the phone, though, he could feel his Gift growing restless. The shadows were lengthening and growing darker, and Jaide’s Gift was scooting dust bunnies around the floor.
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Hector. ‘Be careful, both of you. You’re very brave.’
‘We love you, Dad!’ said Jaide.
But the call was already over. She lowered the phone and held it in her lap for a moment, unwilling to let go of the tenuous connection it provided to their father.
‘We’d better charge it,’ said Jack. ‘The battery’s getting low.’
Jaide forced herself to move. The charger was in a drawer. She plugged it into an outlet near her bed and connected it to the phone.
‘I wonder if Mr Carver is a sleeper agent,’ she said. ‘That might explain the nose flutes and everything.’
‘That’s weird, but it’s not actually Evil. And Dad said it would be someone easy to overlook. He’s impossible to ignore.’
‘Someone who’s been around for a long time,’ Jaide mused. ‘Someone harmless and trusted.’ ‘The only person like that is Rodeo Dave,’ Jack joked.
‘And it can’t be him because . . .’
He stopped, because Jaide wasn’t laughing and he couldn’t think of anything to follow ‘because’.
‘No way,’ he said. ‘He can’t be. Can he?’
‘Why not? He’s all Dad told us to look out for.’
‘Yes, but . . . but . . .’ Everything Jack wanted to say came back to the criteria of a sleeper agent. But Grandma trusts him. But he’s been around forever. But he’s just a funny old bookseller.
And then there were other things that occurred to him as the horrible thought took root in his brain.
‘The van,’ said Jaide. ‘Grandma was knocked off the bridge road by a van. Rodeo Dave drives a van.’
‘And you remember at school when we found out? Grandma was cut off when she was trying to talk to us, and suddenly he was there.’
‘And he was surprised when Mum said that Grandma was awake.’
The twins stared at each other, shocked by the possibility. Rodeo Dave had given no sign he knew anything about the Wardens or The Evil, so could he really be a traitor, lying low in Portland and biding his time? How could he just pretend to be Grandma X’s friend, and the troubletwisters’ friend, too, while planning to betray them all along?
The thought was an awful one. So, too, was the thought that they would be stuck in the castle with him all day tomorrow.
‘We should tell someone,’ said Jaide. ‘Custer, or Kleo—’
‘What if we’re wrong? We don’t have any actual evidence. Remember when we thought Tara’s dad was Evil, and it turned out he was just a property developer?’
Jaide did, and that cooled some of her desire to leap up and take action. Grandma was always telling them not to be so impetuous. Perhaps she should think it through, first, before making any wild accusations.
‘If Grandma knew, she’d be furious,’ she said.
‘If we were wrong, she’d be furious at us.’
‘I know. I guess we’ll have to keep an eye on him tomorrow and see if he does anything suspicious. When we know for sure, we’ll do something about it then.’
They agreed by bumping their fists, but neither felt reassured. Worst of all, Jack thought, was the possibility that Grandma X already knew about him. That would explain why Kleo supposedly lived at the Book Herd, to keep an eye on him. It might also be why Rodeo Dave didn’t know Rennie was the Living Ward, even though she was living and working there. But why would Grandma X put the twins into his hands so readily, without even warning them?
‘It just doesn’t make any sense,’ he muttered.
‘In Portland, nothing ever seems to make sense.’
The sound of footsteps outside the door interrupted them again. Jaide swung into action, throwing her backpack over the phone so their mum wouldn’t see it.
The door opened and Susan leaned in.
‘Time for bed.’
She ushered them towards the bathroom, where they brushed their teeth. Jack cleaned his much more carefully than usual, since he thought that it might be his breath that was putting Cornelia off him.
‘I’ve changed my shifts so I’ll be around in the evenings all week,’ said Susan as she tucked them into bed. ‘That’s one good thing to come out of all this,’ she added, brushing an errant hair out of her daughter’s eyes. Both eyes and hair were the same colour as Susan’s own, and although Jaide had the shape of her father’s face, it was clear that she and her mother would resemble each other closely when Jaide was grown up. ‘I miss you terribly while I’m away. You know that, right?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ Jaide said. ‘We miss you, too.’ On an impulse, she added, ‘Do you think Dad will be able to visit Grandma soon?’
‘I don’t know, dear,’ Susan said, dropping her eyes. ‘You know how . . . how busy he is right now . . . how difficult it is for him to come home. It’s not something I have any control over. But I wish he would come back. I wish it could be the way it was when we were all together and everything was . . . normal.’
Both twins wanted to tell her that he was just outside the bounds of Portland, but even if they could have told her that, there was no way they could ever be normal again, not in the way their mother meant. That was the deep and abiding truth Susan still wrestled with, under the veil of reassurance that Grandma X had cast over her. Susan rarely thought about what had brought them to Portland – the explosion of their home in the city, the truth about her husband’s work, and the legacy her children had been born into – but even with Grandma X’s cl
ouding of her mind, the facts still swam to the surface, and there was no hiding from the more painful truths of their new lives.
Susan blinked and shrugged off the dark mood that had fallen across her. She had two wonderful children and a job she enjoyed. She was even making friends, in town and at work. Life could be so much worse.
‘Sweet dreams, Jack and Jaide,’ she said, giving them both a kiss. On the way out she only half closed the door behind her, so the room wouldn’t be completely dark.
CHAPTER NINE
Between The Evil and the
Deep Blue Sea
IT TOOK THEM BOTH FOREVER to fall asleep, and then only seconds seemed to pass before the alarm went off again. The twins tiptoed groggily past their mother’s room and went upstairs for the second night in a row. They had a mission: to find the skeleton key and witching rod. Without them, the Card of Translocation might vanish forever – into obscurity or into the hands of The Evil, which would, presumably, use the Gift it contained against the Wardens.
In the blue room, they found Kleo and Cornelia in exactly the same positions as before, except the silk cover of the brass cage was off.
‘Hello, troubletwisters,’ said the cat, sitting up straight the instant they appeared. She hopped off the dragon-mouth chair and hurried to greet them. Cornelia watched her pad across the floor with one sharp yellow-rimmed eye.
‘Rourke?’ the macaw said, but in a way that suggested she was making wary conversation rather than looking for her dead master.
Jaide gave Kleo a pat. ‘Have you been in here ever since last night?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. The life of Warden Companion isn’t a constantly exciting and adventurous one, and I’m thankful for that most of the time, but I will confess to getting a little bored today.’
Jack reached for the bag of seeds and offered a nut to Cornelia. The great macaw was crouched on her uppermost perch, about eye level with him, and she looked at him with patient curiosity.
‘Has she said anything?’ he asked Kleo.
