AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Alfred the Examiner moved a couch under the chandelier and Jaide dropped into it.
“Jack?” she called. “Jack?”
“I’m here,” he said, emerging from the hallway, looking as bedraggled as she felt. He tapped the side of his head. “I can’t hear you in here. Must be because we’re back to being ourselves again.”
They rarely hugged anymore, but she decided that this time was an exception. She pulled him to her and he didn’t resist. In fact, he held her briefly but tightly and was smiling when she let go.
“Congratulations,” said Alfred the Examiner, standing to one side with his arms folded. “You have passed.”
The twins beamed at each other, and basked in the admiration of the cats, who rubbed against their legs, purring loudly.
“Better late than never,” said Jack. “Where are Mom and Grandma? We must have missed lunch by ages.”
“Oh, no,” said Jaide. “The soccer tryouts!”
“What do you mean?” said Ari. “You’ve only been gone for a short nap.”
“One hour, forty-five minutes, and twenty-three seconds,” the Examiner proclaimed, with a wry glance at Ari.
“That’s short for me,” Ari said.
The twins looked at each other. Getting back to the house had seemed to take forever.
“Let’s put this couch back in its place,” said Alfred, “and then you can tell me how you did it.”
* * *
Over hot chocolate in the kitchen, Jack and Jaide on one side of the table, Alfred on the other, the cats sitting silently in a patch of yellow sunlight by the window, they recounted their story. With no bodies and no proper senses, there had been no way to tell how long it took to do anything. If they had to guess, the twins would have said that their bumbling journey to find each other had lasted several hours, and when they had done that, the real challenge lay ahead of them.
“It was hard just staying together,” said Jaide, frowning at the memory of the trials they had so recently endured. “Jack was in shadow and I was wafting around in the air. We couldn’t really see anything except for each other. How were we going to find a house?”
“Eventually it hit us,” said Jack. “A house was exactly the wrong thing to look for. I mean, we hadn’t gotten together that way — by looking for something that was a thing, if that makes sense. We had found each other.”
“So that’s what we decided to do,” said Jaide. “We decided to look for someone, not something.”
Alfred nodded. “Who?”
“Well,” said Jack, “first we tried Grandma, but we couldn’t find her. We guessed that was deliberate so it would be harder for us.”
Alfred nodded again. “Then you tried the cats.”
“We did,” said Jaide, “but we couldn’t find them, either.”
“For the same reason,” Alfred explained. “Ari here was asleep and Kleo was with me. However, I did not sense you looking for me. It must have been someone else.”
“Cornelia,” Jack said. “That’s who we followed. It took a while to find her, but when we did we followed her home.” He looked around. “Where is she? I haven’t seen her all morning.”
“In the blue room,” said Kleo. “She’s been acting weird again.”
“How weird?”
“Just … weird.”
Cornelia had come to live at Watchward Lane when her former owner, Old Master Rourke, had suddenly died. For several days she had been afraid of the twins, but eventually she had come to trust them. She had been friendly ever since, although sometimes it was hard to understand her. No one knew exactly how old she was, but her frequent use of pirate talk suggested that she was very old indeed. Jaide wondered if birds suffered from senility, then decided that was unkind. Cornelia was allowed to be a bit odd, as long as she wasn’t unhappy. She had just saved the twins from being lost forever, after all.
“How did we manage to talk to each other?” she asked Alfred. “Is it a twin thing?”
“It is,” he said. “And it is something that all troubletwisters learn, if they are compelled to.” His cool eyes regarded them both for a disconcertingly long time. “Your task now is to refine that ability, to enable you to communicate with others. Wardens are all twins, after all. That is how it works.”
They nodded, understanding instinctively that anything Alfred said wasn’t something they should lightly ignore.
“Tell me now about the rest of the test,” he said, folding his long, well-manicured hands on the table. “What did you experience?”
Jaide described how it had felt like she was the wind, and Jack followed with his experiences as shadow.
“Like the wind?” Alfred echoed back at them. “As shadow? There is no like or as in the Examination. You became what you became, and that is all there is to it.”
“I don’t understand,” ventured Jack somewhat nervously. He didn’t want to look foolish but at the same time he didn’t want to miss something important. “So I really was a shadow?”
“No. You became your Gift.”
“How?” asked Jaide, frowning. “Is that even possible?”
“It is, but it’s very difficult to explain. The short answer is that this is one of my Gifts,” Alfred said with a tight smile. “I predict that you found yourself unable to control your movements, in wind and shadow respectively, until you let your natures have their way. Is this correct?”
“It was exactly like that,” said Jack, remembering how he had bounced around until he had found Jaide, and then later when they had found Cornelia. “It was horrible.”
“You must remember this,” said Alfred, leaning forward over the table. “Your Gifts are not your friends. You think you control them, but you do not. They will fight you at every turn, unless you have … wooed them correctly. While you have made some important steps forward in this process, understand that it will never be complete, even if you pass all your Examinations. Your Gifts will be willful your entire lives. It is a constant battle.”
That was somewhat disheartening. Jaide had imagined that it was just a matter of practicing and practicing until everything worked perfectly.
“Why?” she asked. “Why is it like this?”
“That is one of the mysteries,” said Alfred, but unlike with Grandma X, Jaide didn’t sense that this was a stalling tactic.
“Is it like soccer?” said Jack. “Even the best players miss a kick sometimes.”
“Perhaps.” Alfred leaned back. “The other thing you must understand is that this was only your first Examination. There are four. The second will take place tomorrow evening. I will talk to your grandmother and she will ensure that you are ready.”
The twins nodded obediently, although all feelings of accomplishment had fled. Nothing could have prepared them for the first test. What was the second going to be like?
“What about Stefano?” asked Jack.
“He will be Examined, too. That is why he is here.”
“I thought it was to learn something special from Grandma,” said Jaide.
> Alfred inclined his head the tiniest fraction. “If that is what she said, I am sure it is so.”
In the living room, a clock chimed twelve. Jack’s stomach, immune to nerves, awoke at the merest suggestion of lunch. He got up and found the sandwiches and put them on the table. Ari pricked up his ears. His eyes followed every slight movement of the food.
“Would you like mine?” Jaide said to Alfred. There wasn’t one for him, and she wasn’t feeling especially hungry.
“Thank you for the offer,” he said. “Please don’t mind me. I will be leaving shortly.”
Jaide nodded but didn’t immediately open the wrapper. The thought of school and Stefano filled her with no small amount of dread, even if there was soccer to look forward to later. She had been practicing for weeks for this day. She wasn’t going to miss it for anything.
A small nudge at her hip indicated that Ari had noticed her hesitation and was giving her a hint.
“No,” she said. “Grandma told us not to.”
“And you always do what she says?”
“I try to.”
“And we should encourage that behavior, Aristotle,” said Kleo sternly.
“Aww, give a cat a break.” Ari rolled theatrically on his back, exposing his stomach. “I’ve been sitting here all day. Don’t I get a reward?”
Jack made a choking noise and pieces of sandwich sprayed across the table.
“It’s all very well for you to laugh at my predicament —” said Ari.
“No, look!” Jack pointed to the chair opposite him, where Alfred had been sitting. “He’s gone!”
Jaide whipped around and Kleo jumped up onto the table. Sure enough, the seat was empty.
“I was looking right at him,” Jack said. “His eyes were closed, and then he opened them, and then … whoosh!” There was no other word for it. “He went straight down.”
Ari touched the wooden floor under the seat with his nose, sniffed tentatively. “Warm. That’s how he did it.”
“He went through the floor?” exclaimed Jaide.
“Floorboards,” said Jack, smacking his palm into his forehead. “That’s what he meant earlier. But how can anyone travel that way? Surely he wouldn’t get very far.”
