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‘Stupid house,’ said Jaide, staring up at the ceiling and shaking her fist. ‘Let him through! It’s not going to do any harm, just talking to him!’
As though the house heard her, the rushing noise faded, and the words become clear.
‘All right, but . . . call later, hard to talk now . . . ask the Compendium.’
‘What do we ask it?’ Jack leaned close to the phone to hear as best as he could.
‘The Card of Translocation . . . but remember, be careful!’
With that final word, the call cut out completely, and Hector Shield was gone.
The twins sat staring at the phone for a long minute, considering everything their father had told them.
‘The Card of Translocation,’ said Jaide, rolling the words around her mouth as though that might tell her what they meant. What did Translocation mean? What kind of card? And why was it hidden at the Rourke Estate?
‘It doesn’t sound like much,’ said Jack. ‘What’s so special about a card?’
‘Is there someone else up here?’ asked Ari from the door to their room.
Jack snatched up the phone and shoved it deep into his pocket. Their father may have given it to them, but not with their mother’s or grandmother’s permission.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re just, uh, talking about homework.’
The cat narrowed his eyes for a moment. ‘I thought I heard someone else.’
‘You couldn’t have,’ Jack insisted, ‘because there’s no one else here.’
Ari’s eyes closed down to menacing slits, as if he was stalking a mouse. Jack and Jaide shifted uncomfortably, even though they weren’t lying to him. They were the only people in the house apart from him and their mother.
‘You’re sure you didn’t hear anything?’ asked Ari.
Jack and Jaide slowly shook their heads.
‘Ah, well.’ Ari’s eyes opened wider and he yawned, revealing every one of his very sharp teeth. ‘Perhaps I imagined it.’
‘You must have, I guess,’ said Jaide weakly.
‘But I have been hearing an odd voice all evening,’ mused the cat. ‘Hard to pinpoint . . .’
Ari suddenly shook his head once, then shook it a second time more violently, as if he was trying to dislodge something from his ear.
‘Have you seen Kleo, by any chance?’ he asked.
Kleopatra was the second of Grandma X’s Warden Companions, a Russian blue who was also Protector of the Portland ‘catdom’.
‘I haven’t seen her since yesterday,’ said Jaide, only realising that fact as she said the words. Kleo was normally close at hand, keeping an eye on the troubletwisters in case they got into trouble.
‘Sorry,’ said Jack.
With a worried look, Ari thanked them and padded from the room.
‘Oh,’ he added at the top of the stairs. ‘There’s chocolate pudding.’
‘Homemade or from the shop?’ asked Jack.
‘The shop. And if you’re not there in a minute, your mother’s going to give it all to me.’
The twins bolted past the cat to the kitchen, where Susan had just served up two bowlfuls of Jack’s favourite dessert and was in the process of adding dollops of thick, farm-fresh cream to both. She placed a smaller bowl on the floor for Ari, with a wink at the twins as though to say, ‘Don’t tell your grandmother.’
Even as they ate, thoughts of their father, mysterious cards, and their mission were far from forgotten. They couldn’t raise any of those subjects, but Young Master Rourke, who had a mysterious Warden artefact hidden somewhere on his estate, was still fair game.
‘He can’t have been completely isolated up there, can he?’ said Jaide. ‘Surely he had friends, family, the occasional visitor . . .’
‘There was a groundskeeper, I believe,’ said Susan. ‘But no one else. He was an only child who never married and didn’t leave any heirs. Sorting out what happens to his estate will be a terrible exercise, I’m sure.’
‘I wonder what he did all day?’ asked Jack, thinking of how easily a single card could get lost among so much stuff.
‘I guess he read his books,’ she said. ‘He was a great collector, apparently, and his library was very extensive.’
‘Wasn’t he lonely?’ asked Jaide.
‘Some people like the quiet, Jaide. Remember, your grandmother was alone until we came to live with her. Apart from the cats, of course.’
She reached down to pat Ari, who had finished his pudding and looked up hopefully for more.
‘It’s funny,’ she said, more to herself than her children. ‘I thought it’d be quiet here, but there always seems to be something going on. Giant storms, trains coming off the rails, rich old men dying, car crashes.’ She shook herself and smiled brightly. ‘Well, at least it’s not boring. Now, when you’ve finished, I believe it’s your turn to do the dishes.’
‘It’s always our turn to clean up,’ said Jaide.
‘That’s because you’re so good at it.’
Jack and Jaide polished off the last of their dessert and reluctantly took the dishes to the sink, where after a short argument Jack washed and Jaide dried. Susan wandered off to another room to do her own thing on the computer, Ari hopped back out the window, and the twins were able to whisper between themselves.
‘How are we going to get at the Compendium?’ asked Jack.
‘Later, when she’s asleep. I’ll set the alarm on the phone.’ Jaide blew soapy foam off the back of a plate. ‘I’m more worried about how we get back into the estate. I mean, we can’t keep going with Tara’s dad, can we?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jack. ‘Maybe we can. Besides, there might be another way. Remember what Mum said about Young Master Rourke and his books?’
‘He collected them. So?’
‘Rodeo Dave said that he was going back to the estate to catalogue the collection for the . . . what do you call them? Not executioners.’
‘Executors. Of course! We’ll ask tomorrow.’
The twins finished the dishes and the rest of their chores, and went to bed satisfied that they had at least the beginning of a plan.
CHAPTER FOUR
Forgotten Things
AN EAR-SPLITTING BEEPING WOKE JACK at two a.m. He lurched bolt upright in bed, heart pounding. He had turned the phone’s volume up high because he hadn’t wanted to sleep through the alarm. Now the whole house would be woken up for sure! How could he have known it would be so loud?
The beeping appeared to have stopped, however, and only slowly did he realise that it had only seemed loud to him. As well as turning the volume up, he had put it under his pillow next to his right ear. Once his head was off the pillow, he could hardly hear it at all.
The flashing screen was bright to his eyes, enhanced by his Gift. He switched the a
larm off and slipped out of bed, tiptoeing across the room to wake up Jaide. It took him two attempts, and even when her eyes were open he suspected she was still mostly asleep.
‘Is the Monster back?’ she asked blearily.
‘No, that was last time. And it wasn’t a monster, anyway, remember? It was the Living Ward.’
‘Oh, right.’ She slowly put the pieces together. The four wards of Portland came in different ‘flavours’, memorialised in a poem every troubletwister was taught:
SOMETHING GROWING
SOMETHING READ
SOMETHING LIVING
SOMEONE DEAD
The first time The Evil had attacked, it had been through the ‘something read’ ward, formerly a brass sign on top of Portland’s lighthouse. The twins had made some romantic graffiti their parents had written the new ward, and The Evil had been repelled. But a part of The Evil had been caught inside the boundary established by the wards, and it had attacked the Living Ward next. This was an axolotl that had mutated into a hideous creature Portland’s citizens had occasionally glimpsed, thinking it a monster. When the giant axolotl was killed, the new Living Ward became Rennie, a woman who had once been absorbed by The Evil but who had managed to free herself, though she was horribly injured. Now she lived in the attic above Rodeo Dave’s bookshop, recuperating and doing whatever it was the Living Ward was supposed to do, which the twins suspected was basically just staying alive.
The Evil had been quiet since then, and there had been no signs of it stirring. The weathervane on top of Grandma X’s house had only pointed in the direction of the wind for weeks now, and none of the other magical items that she had deployed showed any signs of activity.
Jaide got out of bed and put on her father’s old dressing-gown. Even though there was a slight risk that it might interfere with her Gift, since anything a Warden interacted with for a long time absorbed a little of their powers, Grandma X had admitted that the chance in this case was very slight and had allowed her to keep it.
