House of Secrets (17 page)

“And one is
Savage Warriors
, and one is
The Fighting Ace
,” said Eleanor, “so we’re just looking for the third.”

“That’s right!” said Cordelia. “That makes sense!” When they weren’t fighting, it was amazing what the Walkers could accomplish. “The problem is we have like fifty more books to go through. But at least we know we’re trapped in a world that fuses books.”

“Like a Denver Kristoff mash-up,” said Brendan.

They went back to reading, but after five minutes Brendan couldn’t take it anymore. “Deal, can you take over
Savage Warriors
? It’s getting terrifying, and I need a break.” Now that he had done it once and hadn’t spontaneously combusted, he was more comfortable admitting to his sisters when he was scared.

Cordelia took the book. She knew how important it was to know it from front to back. Every sentence could potentially hold the secret to the Walkers surviving, or even getting home. When Cordelia looked up, Brendan was gone.

Meanwhile, at the front door, Will watched the shadows of the trees lengthen. He had to stay focused on every snap and rustle in the woods, every smell and sound. Guarding was hard work.

“Will!” shouted Brendan. “Can I relieve you?”

“Absolutely not,” said Will. “You just want to get your hands on my gun.”

“That’s not true. I want to get my hands on your Webley Mark Six.”

Will sighed. “Why are you so eager for one of these, Brendan? You think it’s a toy like your little technological games?”

“What you call a toy, I call a simulator.”

Will shook his head. “There’s no simulation for firing a gun. It bites back. Cuts into your hand. It’s hot and nasty . . . and that’s if you
miss
your mark. Think what happens if you hit.”

“What?”

Will leaned close. “People don’t flash and disappear. They lie on the ground and bleed.”

“C’mon! I thought you were my friend!”

Will smiled. “I appreciate that. Since I found out I’m only a character in a book, I’ve been wondering if any of my old acquaintances—Frank Quigley, Thorny Thompson—even count as friends. But you still can’t have the gun.”

Brendan sighed. “What about the knife?”

Will scrunched his lips. “I don’t think so—”

“Come on. I use a knife when I eat dinner!”

“That is true—”

“And I don’t need a license for a knife.”

“You do not.”

“So what’s the big deal?”

“Here, then.” Will handed Brendan his Sheffield bowie knife. “Take guard, and treat this
very
carefully. Understand? I’ll just take a small break.”

“Thanks, Will!” Brendan couldn’t believe his good fortune. But then he realized something. “Let’s say we got attacked by someone really big. Then the knife wouldn’t be much help.”

“Possibly . . . How big are you talking about?”

“Say, eight hundred feet tall?”

Will laughed. “If we get attacked by something that big, nothing will help.”

“I agree. But your grenade might.”

“My grenade? How do you know about that?”

“I know pilots in the Great War sometimes carried grenades. I don’t want to get you worried, but I read some stuff . . . and I have a feeling that we’re being hunted by something that’s pretty freakin’ big, something only a grenade might be able to stop.”

“Very well,” Will said, pulling an oval-shaped hunk of metal out of his jacket. Brendan’s mouth dropped open.

“Seriously?”

“Yes. Pull the pin, count to three, and throw. I assume you can throw?”

“Four years of Little League, starting shortstop!” said Brendan. In response to Will’s blank expression, he added, “Baseball?”

“Just keep safe, Brendan. And if you see anything out of the ordinary,
call me
.”

Brendan gave Will his knife back and left, tossing the grenade up and down in his palm.

W
ill went inside to find Cordelia and Eleanor. They had moved from the library to the living room, following the sun so that they could keep reading Kristoff’s books. “Your brother has taken over guard duty,” Will told them.

Cordelia closed
Savage Warriors
. From the moment Will had entered, she’d seen him with her peripheral vision, but she wanted to make it clear that he was less important to her than her book. “You trust my brother with our lives?”

“For a little while anyway. Have you found any clues?”

Eleanor explained their theory about being in a mash-up of three Kristoff books and showed her progress with
The Heart and the Helm
—she had made it to page 50.

“Wow!” Will said. “You’ve gotten very far!”

“Well,” Eleanor said, embarrassed, “I’m not reading
everything
. Reading is hard for me. So I just read a little on each page and skip ahead.”

“But she’s doing great,” said Cordelia.

“Not that great,” said Eleanor, “because nothing in this book can help us.”

“Then take a break,” said Will. “We need to stay sharp.”

“Good idea,” said Cordelia.

“Yeah!” Eleanor jumped up. “I’m going to play with my American Girl dolls in the dumbwaiter!”

“Wait, Nell, don’t climb in—” Cordelia started, but her sister was already out of the room, leaving the book flipped over on the couch. Cordelia sighed, smoothed out the pages, and replaced the dust jacket. “We have to be respectful,” she explained to Will. “These are rare books, and obviously very powerful. If we’re trapped in them, maybe one wrong crumpled page could cause a typhoon. Or an earthquake.”

“Have you finished the book about me?” Will asked.

Cordelia looked away. “I did,” she admitted.

“Well, then . . . shouldn’t
I
be permitted to read it?”

“No. That would be like meeting yourself in a time-travel movie,” Cordelia said. “Besides, we think your fate has changed now.”

Will gave a slight smile. “In other words . . . I die at the end.”

Cordelia stayed stone-faced.

“And do I fall in love?”

Cordelia stammered, refusing to answer. She didn’t want to tell Will about Penelope Hope.
If his fate really has changed, then this is a good test.
Eventually she said, “You do a lot of heroic things.”

“Like fight? That’s not so heroic,” said Will. “It’s the war. Everyone fights. D’you mind if I sit?”

“Absolutely—I mean, no, please do.”

Will sat next to her on the couch, but not too close. He left enough space between them for a phantom person to occupy. He surveyed the room. It was still full of rubble. The coffee table lay splintered in a pile of glass next to the piano. On the wall was a dark stain: Mrs. Walker’s blood.

“I imagine this was once a beautiful room,” Will said.

“It was. And my family just moved in, too! We didn’t even get a chance to really live here.” Cordelia thought of how gorgeous Kristoff House had been when she’d first stepped inside it.

“Shall we clean up the mess?”

“Right now?”

Will nodded.

“I don’t know if I have the energy. . . . I mean, we can leave it for a while. . . .”

“I see,” said Will. “If the room remains in tatters, you can pretend this is all just a bad dream that you’re waiting to wake up from. But if it’s back to normal—”

“It reminds me of my parents,” finished Cordelia. “And if I think too much about them—”

“It makes you weak. You worry that you may not be strong enough to go on.”

“It’s impressive how well you can read people.”

“Have you ever heard the expression ‘You learn a lot by listening’?”

“Sounds like something from a self-help book. Did you read that somewhere?”

“No. I heard it from Frank Quigley.”

“Who?”

“RFC captain. One of the aces of Squadron Seventy. Canadian, too, so I wasn’t inclined to listen to him, but he had real presence. During mealtimes, even though he was a popular chap, he never uttered a word. Once I asked him why, and he told me an expression that he said had helped him immensely: ‘You learn a lot by listening.’ So I try to do that with you Walkers. And I’ve learned that
you
, Cordelia, bear the burden of responsibility.”

Cordelia nodded, transfixed.

“Your siblings look to you. They respect you. And that puts pressure on you. To lead, to find the answers . . . to get their
lives
back. That sort of pressure can be overwhelming.”

Cordelia sighed. “All true.”

“Well, I’ve been in the Great War. Sometimes you
can’t
get your life back. Sometimes you have to
take
it back.”

Will stood and offered his hand. Cordelia took it.

“The fact is,” Will said, “we may be stuck in this house for a long time. It’s all we have. There’s no point in letting it fester around us. We’re going to have to start catching our own food, washing our own clothes, getting regular exercise . . . ”

“And cleaning this room,” Cordelia said.

“I’ll start with the heavier items,” Will said, indicating the legless piano. “You take care of the busted bits of wood.”

They began to clean up, Cordelia glancing every now and then at Will, unable not to. The few times she caught his eye, his smile was an expression of comfort, something a father or teacher would offer a youngster.
He still thinks I’m a kid. Maybe it’d be better if he didn’t think anything at all. . . .

Meanwhile, outside, Brendan hadn’t detected any suspicious activity to guard against, but he had become slightly obsessed with the grenade. He wanted to blow something up.
It’s crazy,
he thought.
I’ve seen so many explosions in movies and games, but I’ve never set one off in real life. And besides, I’ve been through a lot today. I even almost died a couple of times. I deserve to have some fun.

He left his post at the door. The forest was feeling a little safer now; he hadn’t seen the wolf or any nasty dragonflies or heard any hoofbeats. He headed into the woods past the downed trees that the Wind Witch had left. He wasn’t going far. Just far enough.

As he walked, Brendan wondered how he had ever been scared of the forest. It was a beautiful day full of bright air and fresh smells . . .
like being in a shampoo commercial,
he thought. He came to a small cliff, a twenty-foot rock face that rose out of the forest floor to meet the top of a slight hill. There were trees above the cliff and beside it, but nothing on its gray surface.

“Perfect,” Brendan said. He remembered, years ago, being fascinated on a family trip to Colorado as his dad drove along a treacherous mountain road. Their car had been inches away from a cliff! Brendan had asked his father, “How’d they put the road
through
here?” And his dad had said, “See those little hollowed-out cylinders in the rock? That’s where they put the dynamite.”

Now Brendan was ready to do some dynamiting of his own.

He pulled the pin on the grenade. He threw it at the cliff. He spun behind a tree, shut his eyes tight, put his hands over his ears—

BOOM!
Even through his flesh, his eardrums felt almost pierced.

Inside the house, Cordelia and Will abruptly stopped cleaning when they heard the sound.

“What was that?” asked Cordelia.

“Uh-oh,” said Will, dashing out of the room, “I knew I shouldn’t have given him the grenade.”

“
You gave Brendan a grenade?
” shouted Cordelia, running after Will.
“Are you completely insane?
”

Outside, Brendan slowly opened his eyes and peeked at his handiwork. He had a blown a hole in the bottom of the cliff. Shards of stone were scattered around as if pointing to it. The hole didn’t go deep—it was about the size of a fireplace—but as the smoke cleared, Brendan saw something inside.

A book.

No way,
he thought, but as he approached, it came into focus:
The Book of Doom and Desire
. Sitting right there in the hole.

Because I did something for myself.
Because I listened to my own selfish desires.

Brendan remembered that he had warned Cordelia about this book, that finding it for the Wind Witch was an obvious trap . . . but none of that mattered now. It was right there. Just one look at it told him it was magical, more magical than anything he had seen in his life. It wasn’t its shape or its size; it was something he couldn’t put into words.
Power
was the closest word.

What’s inside? If it’s blank, then what in there is so powerful?

Brendan ran to the book. Grabbed it. The ground around his hands was hot and smoking. He was about to open it—