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‘But everything went wrong,’ he said with a hangdog look. ‘I forgot too much. I even lost the bookmark – I guess it went with a book I gave to George. And Harold must have watched me for years, noticing how much time I spent on the estate with my old friend, and guessed that was where my Gift was hidden. When George died, I knew I had to recover the card before it fell into the wrong person’s hands – I remembered that much – but I couldn’t remember where I had hidden it, of course. I couldn’t go back to your grandmother to ask for my memories back, because that memory was hidden with the card. I didn’t even remember asking her to take the memories out of my head, along with most of my memories of being a Warden. It was too hard, you see, to live life as an ordinary man, knowing what I had lost.’
Jaide couldn’t imagine what it would be like to voluntarily give up her Gift, or come to hate it as much as he had. But she had never once thought of Rodeo Dave as ordinary.
‘We thought the card would just move you somewhere else,’ she said. ‘That’s why we used it. I’m really sorry about that, too.’
He smiled. ‘No need to apologise. I would have done the same, in your shoes. And you’ve learned to your cost what it really does, haven’t you?’
She nodded gravely, thinking of what had been done to her uncle.
‘Somewhere deep inside,’ Rodeo Dave said, as though reading her mind, ‘I believe that Harold is still fighting. He has not, and perhaps never will be, totally subsumed by The Evil.’
At the head of the group, Hector was answering some of Jack’s questions, with Susan listening in, not saying anything for now. Harold had betrayed the Wardens a year before Susan had met Hector. His betrayal had taken place in the Pacific, during a mighty battle Custer had mentioned briefly once before. He had returned several times since then, during the twins’ childhood, but Hector had always managed to keep him at bay.
‘The Evil is cunning,’ he said, ‘but not as cunning as a person. And Harold was always the smarter of the two of us. I don’t know exactly what he was doing, but it is clear he can operate independently of The Evil, at least for a time. He had his own agenda. When Harold fought off The Evil when you left the wards, he was acting to prevent The Evil from jumping the gun, not out of any kindness for your sakes.’
But Jack remembered Harold saying that he had wanted to see them. He was sure that part of his uncle had wanted to meet his niece and nephew, even as another part planned to betray them in the near future.
‘What happens to him now?’ asked Jack. ‘Are you just going to let him go? He could still be dangerous, even without his Gift.’
‘We’ll take his memories,’ said Hector. ‘He’ll forget being a Warden, like Rodeo Dave did. He’ll forget his Gift, The Evil . . . all of us.’
‘I don’t know if that’s a mercy,’ said Susan, ‘or the cruellest thing of all.’
Hector reached around behind Jack’s head and took her hand. ‘You and me both.’
Jack looked up at his parents, together again for the first time in months.
‘Is Mum going to forget this, too?’ he asked.
‘Not unless she wants to,’ said Hector, glancing back at Grandma X. ‘As events proved, she needs to know what’s happening at all times, just in case anything ever happens to your grandmother again.’
Susan sighed. ‘I think you’re right. If I had known what was going on . . . if you and Jaide had been able to talk to me about it . . . none of this would have happened. So, yes, I think it’s for the best I stay in the loop. For good.’
Jack smiled with relief. Keeping secrets was hard. He didn’t know how Grandma X did it.
They came up the main drive. The wreckage of the golf buggy and Zebediah were to their left, across the sodden lawn. Jack pointed, and they set off through the mud.
They had barely gone five paces when Jack saw a dark figure rise up out of the car and turn to stare at them.
‘Hey, look,’ he said. ‘There’s someone there.’
‘Who?’ said Grandma X. ‘Tell me what you see, Jack.’
‘It’s not Tara or Kyle, or Custer, or Thomas Solomon . . .’ He squinted, straining his Gift to the utmost. Zebediah was still some distance off and it was very dark. But the figure was faintly familiar. It was small . . . a woman, perhaps . . . with tightly pulled-back hair . . .
‘It’s that new doctor,’ he said.
‘Doctor Witworth?’ said Susan. ‘What’s she doing here?’
‘Don’t let her get away!’ shouted Grandma X.
Witworth had seen them and was already moving, running around Zebediah and across the lawn with something tucked under her arm. Custer snarled and leaped after her. In tiger form he easily outpaced Hector, who had started running the moment Grandma X had shouted. Jack wanted to follow them, but Susan held him back, and his Gift was still too weak to do anything. The twins could only watch as Doctor Witworth fled across the estate with the Wardens on her heels.
At first, he thought she was running for the castle, and Custer clearly thought so too, for he ran at an angle to cut her off. But then she suddenly changed direction, and put on an extra burst of speed. She didn’t seem to be running anywhere in particular at all. Just running at random, Jack thought.
‘The edge of the estate,’ said Jaide coming up alongside him, breathing heavily. ‘She’s making for the boundary!’
‘It’s not where it used to be,’ said Grandma X, raising the gold card. ‘But not much further and it’s stretched as far as it can go. There must be something I can use in here . . .’
‘Sandler’s Quake?’ suggested Rodeo Dave.
‘Too dangerous.’
‘What about the Noose of Ceylon?’
‘We don’t want to kill her, David.’
‘What about the one I had for a while?’ suggested Jack.
‘Running’s impossible when your feet are sinking into the ground.’
‘Or you could put her to sleep with my other one,’ said Jaide, wishing her normal Gift wasn’t so exhausted. ‘Quickly! She’s almost at the trees!’
Witworth looked behind her, and on seeing Custer closing the gap in a long powerful lope and lightning gathering around Hector Shield’s upraised hand, she put her head down and took the final yards in a desperate lunge.
Grandma X pointed the card and the trees ahead of the escaping woman shook and rustled. Their branches came alive and laced together, forming an impenetrable net.
Custer leaped, and so did Witworth, right into the arms of the trees.
‘Why’d she do that?’ asked Jack. ‘She can’t possibly escape now.’
But then, unbelievably, one of the trees changed. Its knots glowed white, and its branches untangled themselves from its neighbours. With a weird, grinding cry, it pulled Witworth up above its crown, so that its branches pointed straight up along its trunk. Then suddenly it dropped down into the earth, pulled by its roots into the safety of the soil.
It all happened too quickly for Grandma X, Hector or Custer to respond. One second Witworth was there; the next she was gone, rescued by The Evil.
Grandma X muttered something about ‘that wretched woman’ under her breath and put the card back into her pocket. The trees returned to normal, while Custer and Hector peered warily over the edge of the hole that was all that remained of the tree. The sides were already falling in, softened by the downpour.
‘You need a Warden who can turn into a mole,’ said Susan.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Grandma X, putting a hand on her daughter-in-law’s shoulder and sharing some of the weight of her suddenly weary body. ‘But unfortunately she’s in Angola.’
EPILOGUE
The Legacy of the Dead
‘SO DOCTOR WITWORTH WORKED FOR The Evil,’ said Jaide as they waited by the drawbridge for the police to arrive. Thomas Solomon, currently standing guard by the gates, had called Officer Haigh about a natural disaster at the estate once he had finally woken up, shortly after The Evil was defeated. His memories had needed to be r
earranged only slightly to erase the walking armour from them. It was the same with the helicopter pilot – luckily both he and Thomas Solomon had needed only a small amount of Grandma X’s influence to incorporate what they had seen into a freakish weather event in their minds, different only in scale to the one that had destroyed the bridge three days earlier.
‘So it seems,’ said Grandma X.
‘But she couldn’t have been the sleeper agent,’ said Jack. ‘She only just arrived in Portland.’
‘What makes you think there was a sleeper agent?’
‘Well, someone drove you off the road . . .’
‘I got a look at his face,’ Grandma X said. ‘He wasn’t from Portland.’
Jaide knew better than to ask if Grandma X was certain she knew everyone in Portland. She probably knew what they’d had for dinner every night, too.
Hector Shield and Custer returned from a thorough inspection of Zebediah.
‘No booby traps,’ Hector announced. ‘And no Professor Olafsson, either.’
Cornelia flew down out of the sky and landed on Jack’s shoulder.
‘Man overboard,’ she said.
‘Doctor Witworth took him?’ Jack said. ‘Why?’
‘Will he be okay?’ Jaide asked.
‘That depends on what The Evil wants him for,’ said Grandma X. ‘He has no Gift, being an echo of himself rather than his true self. He can’t be consumed like living things. There seems no obvious reason to kidnap him, apart from his knowledge.’ She looked around, taking in the night sky, the castle, and the Wardens patrolling the estate looking for any remaining sign of The Evil. ‘I wonder if he was what The Evil wanted all along, and everything else was a ruse?’
This was just one more mystery to add to a night full of them.
‘Time for some quick final words,’ Hector Shield said, squatting down to look both his children in the eye. ‘I know you thought Harold was me, and he told you to keep secrets from your mother and your grandmother, and I think we’d all agree that this put everyone in very grave danger. Never again listen to anyone who tries to drive a wedge between you and your family, no matter how trustworthy he or she might seem.’
