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. . . the worried faces of Jack and Jaide . . .
She sat bolt upright, startling the regal cat sleeping at her side, tucked under the sheet so a passing nurse wouldn’t see her. The feeling that had woken her from her artificial slumber was startlingly clear. It was also unexpected and urgent. She was needed, and needed badly.
There was no phone by the bed, but she didn’t require one. She was awake now. Fully awake. Soon, her powers would return, and until then she was sure there was an ambulance she could borrow.
‘A mother,’ Grandma X whispered to Kleo as she swung her legs out of bed and began looking for her clothes, ‘never abandons her son.’
‘Run, kids!’ yelled Rodeo Dave. ‘Run!’
‘No!’ Jack protested. ‘His eyes are normal. He can’t be Evil. This can’t be happening!’
Hector Shield bent forward and pulled down his bottom eyelid. Around what looked like perfectly normal brown eyes was a ring of white.
‘Contact lenses!’ gasped Jaide.
‘But you can’t be in here,’ said Jack, clinging to one last piece of hope. ‘The wards will drive you out.’
++You would like to believe so, troubletwister, wouldn’t you?++
To Jack’s horror, the hideous parody of his father did another gleeful jig inside the wards’ invisible boundary. And only then did the twins realise what had changed when Hector Shield had used the card. The wards had failed.
As though from very far away, they heard Rennie cry out in pain.
++Come to us now,++ said The Evil, raising the card and studying the symbols flashing once again across its face. ++This family reunion is long overdue.++
++Indeed it is,++ said a voice to their right. ++Put the card down and step away from the troubletwisters.++
‘Grandma!’ cried the twins. For it was her, as young and beautiful as she always looked in her spectral form, standing just yards away.
++You can’t tell us what to do,++ snarled The Evil. ++We are beyond your authority.++
It thrust the card at Grandma X’s image, and a psychic whip lashed out at her, sending her reeling.
++Stop, H—!++
With a cry of pain, she vanished.
Aghast, the twins stared at The Evil as it turned, gloating, to face them again. It raised the card to attack them in turn.
‘Rourke!’ cried a voice from above. A blue-winged shape flashed in front of Hector Shield and snatched the gold card out of his grasp. ‘Repel boarders!’
++No!++
‘Cornelia!’ Jack cried in amazement. ‘Good bird!’
‘Everybody run!’ shouted Rodeo Dave. ‘Get back to the castle!’
He turned to face Hector Shield, who was advancing upon the older man with his teeth bared in a furious expression the twins had never before seen on their father’s face. There were lines of white around his eyes, where he had dislodged the camouflage lenses.
++The wards are gone, and you are old and feeble, Warden. The castle will offer no protection to the children. Come to us! We don’t need the card to deal with you.++
‘Go!’ ordered Rodeo Dave before either twin could ask him about what The Evil meant about him being a Warden. ‘It can’t be very strong or it would have taken us already. Take Zebediah! Go!’
Powerless and terrified by the defeat of their father and grandmother, the twins had no choice but to obey. Zebediah’s doors were open, and Jack ran to the passenger side, nearly treading on the two halves of Professor Olafsson where they lay in the mud. He scooped them up and jumped into Zebediah’s expansive front seat. The doors slammed shut behind them, the engine roared, and Jaide took the wheel as the mighty car leaped forward.
The pieces of Professor Olafsson stared up at Jack from where they lay in his lap, frozen in shock, mirroring the exact way Jack felt.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Jack.
‘Dad being Evil or Rodeo Dave being a Warden?’ Jaide couldn’t believe either shocking revelation herself.
‘Everything!’ he exclaimed. ‘The wards are down, and it’s all our fault!’
‘If the card had only done what it was supposed to do . . .’ Jaide suppressed a sudden feeling of panic that her Gifts might be gone for good.
Jack remembered Professor Olafsson asking them if they knew what translocate meant. He raised the two halves of the plaster mask and, figuring he had nothing to lose, pressed them firmly together.
Professor Olafsson sprang back into life with a start.
‘Good grief,’ he said. ‘Where am I? What caused this terrible headache?’ His rolling eyes caught sight of Jack. ‘Oh, yes. I remember now. The Warden who found me in the castle and asked for my advice. He’s an old man now but I still recognised him . . . eventually. It must’ve been he who hid the card in the first place, set the booby traps and everything!’
‘What?’ asked Jack. ‘Rodeo Dave can’t be a Warden! And why would he hide the card? What does it do?’
‘To translocate something is indeed to move it somewhere else. Judging by the way the card affected you two, I’d say it moves not things, but Gifts.’
‘But The Evil said that it has our Gifts now, or will soon,’ said Jaide. ‘That they’re in the card!’
‘That sounds like a reasonable hypothesis. For the Divination of Potential Powers and Safekeeping Thereof . . . although it’s not usual for cards to hold more than one Gift at a time. Perhaps this one is special because it holds the Gift of Translocation, which gives the Warden who possesses it the power to take other Wardens’ Gifts.’
‘Who would want a gift like that?’ asked Jaide.
‘The Gift chooses the Warden, not the other way around.’ Professor Olafsson stared at her out of the corners of his eyes. ‘This card must not fall into The Evil’s hands again or it will have all the Gifts it contains, as well as the ability to steal more. That’s what makes it so valuable as a weapon.’
Jaide brought the car around the estate. She had lost sight of Cornelia momentarily behind the castle. As they passed the menagerie, there was no sign of Tara or Kyle.
‘How can we get our Gifts back out of the card?’ asked Jaide.
‘I suppose you would do the same thing you did before, only backwards.’
‘Yes, but how exactly?’
Professor Olafsson shrugged with his eyebrows.
Zebediah bounced in and out of a deep rut. As they came up the other side, Jaide saw the golf buggy accelerating towards them, headlights burning with a cold, Evil light. There was no driver behind the steering wheel.
‘Look out!’ cried Jack.
Jaide wrenched the wheel as hard as she could. The buggy turned in the same direction, and the vehicles collided head-on. Jack and Jaide were flung forward onto the floor. The two halves of the death mask flew apart. Zebediah’s engine coughed and died with a hiss, its radiator pierced by one of the steer horns on its grill.
The twins picked themselves up and tried the doors. Jaide’s was stuck, but Jack opened his fine. The Evil buggy was a twisted mess of metal and plastic. As they stepped out of the car, the buggy twitched as though still trying to get at them.
++Come to us, troubletwisters. Be one with us!++
They ran for the castle.
‘Cornelia?’ called Jack, scanning the skies. The torrential rain made it hard to see anything. ‘Cornelia, where are you?’
They heard a faint ‘Rourke’ from up ahead.
‘Jack? Is that you?’
‘Over here!’ That didn’t sound like Cornelia, but it didn’t sound Evil, either.
Tara and Kyle came running towards them out of the rain.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Jaide.
‘Trying to round up the menagerie animals,’ said Kyle. ‘Their eyes went really weird, and then Chippy opened his cage somehow and they all ran away—’
‘Chippy?’ asked Jack.
‘One of the monkeys. They all have names. I visit them sometimes, when Dad lets me.’
‘Which way did they run?’ Ja
ide asked.
‘That way,’ said Tara. ‘We were following when we heard you.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Jaide, leading the charge.
They ran around the curving moat, and the drawbridge came into view. Next to it was the strangest thing Jack had ever seen: a giant creature made up of all the menagerie animals combined into one. The warthog and the zebra were at the bottom, holding up the lemurs and jackal, which in turn held up the wolves, on whose backs rode both chimpanzees, with all the forest creatures mixed in for good measure. It looked a bit like a gymnastic pyramid, but for the fact that it moved as one. Even through the rain, Jack could see how the fur mixed and mingled, creating a terrible hybrid of all of them at once.
The chimps were at the tip of two reaching limbs that swayed and clutched at something in the sky, gibbering excitedly.
‘Cornelia!’ shouted Jack.
