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“Don’t feel bad,” said Kleo, padding up the stairs past Ari to give Jaide a head-bump. “Warden Companions weren’t allowed, either.”
“No … that’s not it … oh!” Jaide flapped her hands at her side, and nearly succeeded in actually flapping herself right up to the ceiling. “That man’s such a pain.”
“Which man?” asked Ari.
“Aleksandr,” said Jack, taking over the explanation, as he sensed his sister was close to another explosion. “He wants to trap Grandma X’s sister in the Evil Dimension forever. And she’s going to let him.”
“That doesn’t sound like her,” said Kleo.
“Maybe she doesn’t really mean to,” said Ari. “Maybe she’s going to do something about it behind his back.”
“What can she do?” said Jack. “She can’t take on The Evil all on her own.”
“That would be very unwise,” agreed Kleo.
“They kept talking about some catastrophe forty-five years ago, when Lottie was lost,” said Jaide. “Do you know what that was?”
Both cats shook their heads.
“You could look it up in the Compendium,” said Ari. The Compendium was the pooled records of every Warden’s dealings with The Evil, and it also provided valuable information on the Wardens themselves, when the information could be understood.
“We could do that, if the Compendium wasn’t in the blue room,” said Jack. “Maybe later, when it’s all over.”
“Is that you, kids? Are you done?”
Their mother’s voice floated up from ground level.
“She cooked dinner for you,” said Kleo.
“How bad is it?” asked Jaide.
“It looks … edible,” allowed Ari.
“On our way!” Jack called back. Susan Shield’s meals were notoriously bad, but his stomach was empty and the very thought of food temporarily put all other concerns from his mind.
Jaide followed her brother down the stairs with feet as heavy as her heart. How could Grandma X even pretend to abandon her sister like that? Whatever Project Thunderclap was, it wasn’t ready to go just yet, or Aleksandr wouldn’t be warning people off. There was still time, so why wasn’t Grandma X insisting they use it?
Halfway down the stairs, the lights flickered. Jack looked up, but didn’t think anything of it. The house was old. An electrician had once come to put extra outlets in the twins’ room, but after an hour inspecting the wiring declared his amazement that anything worked at all.
“What’s the Warden of Last Resort?” Jack asked.
The cats exchanged a look.
“Why do you ask?” Kleo wanted to know.
“It was just something Aleksandr said at the beginning of the Gathering. He said it had been called by the Warden of Last Resort. He wasn’t talking about Grandma, was he?”
The lights flickered again, this time accompanied by a prolonged crackling sound.
Jack looked up at the bulb above his head. Its color had changed from a soft yellow to a harsh blue. Tiny sparks shot from it and discharged harmlessly into the air.
“That’s weird.”
“Jack …?”
It was Jaide who spoke. She had fallen behind without him noticing. He turned and saw her standing five steps above him, balanced precariously in mid-step with a hand touching a banister on either side, as though afraid she might float away.
Every long, red hair on her head was standing on end.
“Jaide! Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding quickly. “But I think —”
The crackling sound came again. This time the lights flared green, and bright sparks ran down Jaide’s arms into the stairs.
“Jack, I think something’s coming!”
What is it, Jaide?” asked Jack, staring up at her in alarm. “What’s happening?”
Jaide couldn’t have explained it even if she’d tried. It felt like the air just before a thunderstorm broke, only inside her, building up in every nerve and fiber. She felt full of energy, and it was tugging her, pulling her forward….
“Outside,” she said, trusting suddenly that instinct to move, hoping it wouldn’t let her blow up or anything. Tiny, glowing balls of blue light appeared on her first step. They followed her as she ran down the stairs, past Jack and the cats, to the ground floor.
“There you are,” said Susan, appearing in the hallway with an oven mitt on her right hand. “I was just about to —”
She stopped in amazement as Jaide rushed past her, glowing purple all over and trailing a spray of orbs and bright sparks. Jack, Kleo, and Ari raced after her in a clatter of feet and paws.
“I don’t know, either,” Jack answered her unspoken question as he hurried by. Susan followed, tugging off the oven mitt and picking up a walking stick from the umbrella stand by the front door.
Outside, it was dark and starless. Jaide came to a halt in the front yard and spun around once. She looked up at the weathervane, but it was motionless, pointing stolidly west in accordance with the wind, as normal weathervanes did. She ran along the side of the house to the backyard, which was dominated by a single tall tree that was known, on occasion, to change species. Currently it was a giant sequoia with thick roots clenched tightly just under the yard’s lumpy surface. There Jaide stopped. Above her, faint lights danced among the branches of the tree and thick black clouds roiled. There was no rain or wind, just the steady flashing of sheet lightning.
“Is it Dad?” Jack asked, sudden hope blossoming in his chest. Maybe he had come to make them feel better about being kicked out of the Grand Gathering. Maybe he had been kicked out, too.
“Is it Hector?” asked Susan, holding the walking stick upraised, like a club. The cats looked around them, tails swaying from side to side.
“I don’t know,” Jaide said, trying to take the measure of this strange new feeling. It was like being filled with electric lemonade and told not to burp. The sensation was building so fast it was almost painful. “It feels like him, but … different.”
“I think you should come inside,” said Susan, eyeing the clouds with misgiving. “It could be dangerous.”
Jaide was inclined to agree, although the strange feeling in her body didn’t want her to
move. She took a step forward. Sparks flared and spat. She took another step, fighting the feeling with every inch. Her hair whipped and flailed about her head, glowing like lava.
She raised her foot to take a third step and a thick bolt of lightning struck down from the heavens into the earth just behind her. The sound of it was immense, a physical thing that threw her off her feet and into Susan, who dropped the walking stick and caught her in her arms. They both went down, leaving only Jack and the cats to see what happened next.
The lightning bolt didn’t vanish, as they normally did. This one stayed anchored to the earth, whipping and cracking all along its length, thin horizontal channels rippling up and down, connecting to the house, the tree, even Jack himself. He flinched but it had locked onto him before he could move, sending a weird fizz of energy down his body, from his ears to the soles of his feet. It lasted a second and left him smelling faintly of fireworks. Ari batted at it with his foreclaws, but the lightning was undeterred. Kleo stood stiff-legged and stiff-tailed, with eyes tightly closed, and shivered when it had passed.
There was a boom so loud it made the ground shake.
Then the lightning was gone, leaving a long purple afterimage from the top of Jack’s vision to the bottom.
“Jaide!” said Susan. “Are you all right?”
Jack was at his mother’s side instantly, helping Jaide upright. She brushed the hair from her eyes and blinked rapidly.
“I’m fine,” she said. “In fact, that was almost fun.”
“Fun?” said Susan. “You’re lucky to be alive. Inside, this minute, both of you.”
“I agree with your mother,” said Kleo. “The weather looks highly irregular.”
Behind them came the sound of a clearing throat.
“Hello? A little help here?”
They spun around. Jack’s vision cleared just enough to make out a teenage boy standing in a blackened circle in the center of the yard. His hair was dark and tightly curled, and although it was hard to tell exactly how old he was, or even how tall he was, he seemed about the same age as the twins. His legs were buried to the knees in the soil, which still sparked and shimmered with the force of his arrival.
