House of Secrets (33 page)

The ex-one-armed skeleton, who appeared to be the leader, approached Cordelia. The others followed. The skeleton nonchalantly kicked Eleanor out of its way. The others handled Will, lifting him and tossing him toward the stained-glass window as he continued to rifle through spell scrolls, still trying to find the right one.

“Wait—hold on—can’t we negotiate?” Cordelia asked the skeletons.

“Negotiate
what
?” Brendan whispered to his sister. “
This
was your big plan?”

“It was all I could think of!”

The skeletons surrounded Cordelia and Brendan and raised their weapons. Cordelia couldn’t believe it: After everything she’d been through, was she really going to get killed by these stupid dead things?

“C’mon!” she snapped. “If we hadn’t eaten that food, we’d have ended up looking like
you
—”

“Maybe you shouldn’t insult their appearance,” said Brendan.

The skeletons extended their weapons toward Brendan’s and Cordelia’s faces. Both Walkers gasped as they saw the circular gathering of blades around their heads.

“They’re going to give us a three-hundred-sixty-degree skewering!” shouted Brendan.

“We’re sorry—
please don’t
!” Cordelia screamed, shutting her eyes as the blade tips got closer. The skeleton leader’s only reply was to click its teeth, a behavior quickly mimicked by its followers, who snapped their jaws faster and faster, as if anticipating the moment when they would simultaneously stab the two siblings. Brendan and Cordelia thought of their eyes rupturing and dribbling down their cheeks, their brains being penetrated from every conceivable angle, blood and brain matter oozing everywhere. . . .

“Duck!” Will yelled. Brendan and Cordelia did. Then they heard the pilot call,
“Inter cinis crescere fortissimi flammis!”

A tremendous fireball roared out of the back of the room and slammed into the skeletons.

It was as big as a small car: a whirling sphere of orange flame that scalded the Walkers’ arms and singed the backs of their shirts as they planted their faces on the ground. The fireball knocked the skeletons over like a set of bowling pins—but when it hit the wall at the opposite end of the room, it disappeared, leaving only a charred crater in the wood.

For one quiet second the skeletons were scattered across the room, just piles of bones with smoke coming off. Then they started stirring and grabbing their weapons.

Will pocketed a few of the spell scrolls, grabbed the cutlass, and led the Walkers to the cabin’s broken window.

“It’s us they want, because we ate the food!” Cordelia said. “You go. We’ll handle them!”

“No,” said Will. “If I’m to be captain, I must take care of my mates.” He peeked out the window and saw a small ledge that a person could stand on. He showed it to Cordelia. “Ladies first.”

Cordelia stepped out. The ocean spray made her draw in her breath. The sound of the waves under her and the cawing of seabirds made her dizzy for a moment. It was still dark, and she was terrified. But she stayed calm and looked at the stern of the
Moray.
The thick beam that she stood on ran the length of it. She could escape by turning her feet sideways and clinging to the back of the ship as she shimmied along the beam.

Cordelia went for it; Brendan followed, and then Eleanor. Will brought up the rear, carrying the cutlass in case any skeletons followed.

“What do we do?” asked Eleanor.

“I really did have a plan, guys,” said Brendan, nodding to the ropes that connected the
Moray
to Kristoff House. “But to make it work, we have to get across those and back to the house before dawn.”

Cordelia glanced at the horizon. A faint pinkish blue bled into the sky. She couldn’t believe it. It was rising like on every normal, boring day: the sun.

“I thought I’d never see daylight again!” Cordelia told Brendan as they moved carefully along the beam.

“Might be the last time,” he said, pointing back. The skeletons were climbing out the window, following. One moved too fast, slipped, and fell into the sea. The rest learned from their cohort’s mistake and moved with creeping persistence, holding their weapons in their teeth.

“Take a rope!” said Brendan. They had reached the ropes that led back to Kristoff House.

Cordelia shook her head. “My arm! I could barely hold a pencil.”

“Just use one hand; I’ll help,” said Brendan. As Cordelia gripped the rope with her good arm, Brendan lifted his sister’s feet while clinging to a metal bolt on the side of the ship. Cordelia laughed as she started to move toward Kristoff House—there was no other response to the pain of struggling with one arm and two feet to climb across a rope.

Brendan waited for Eleanor next. Behind her was Will, and behind him, the skeletons were closing in.

“I can’t!” Eleanor pointed to the rope and nodded to her bandaged shoulder.

“I know,” said Brendan. He took the rope and offered Eleanor his back. “All aboard?”

Eleanor wrapped her good arm around Brendan’s neck and locked her legs around his stomach. Brendan dipped out over the sea just ahead of Will, who had to struggle against the pain in his recently operated-on shoulder to grab the rope and start moving. Seconds later, the lead skeleton, which now had a blackened skull, buried its sword into the side of the ship where Will had been standing.

Eleanor closed her eyes, clinging to Brendan like a baby koala. The two of them followed Cordelia. The rope sagged toward the waves.

“Keep moving!” Will ordered from behind. The lead skeleton was climbing onto the rope now, wrapping its bony phalanges around it. The others were watching. Learning.

Will and the Walkers reached Kristoff House without a moment to spare. They collapsed on the roof and hurriedly scrambled into the attic window. They heard the spidery sound of the lead skeleton landing outside.

“Okay,” Cordelia said, staring out the window. The water had flooded the second floor; now the attic was the only thing above sea level. “T minus fifteen seconds. What’s your plan, Bren?”

“C
’mon.” Brendan pulled everyone across the attic to a far corner, then panicked. “Where’s the rollaway mattress? It was here before—”

“The pirates probably took it,” said Cordelia.

A rattle came from the window. The lead skeleton was climbing into Kristoff House, bending its bony limbs at angles that were slightly too sharp for living humans to muster.

“This way!” Cordelia said, nodding to the hole in the attic floor, under which water now filled the upstairs hallway.

“Not without the mattress!” Brendan said. “That’s the plan—”

“There!” Eleanor pointed. The mattress was perched on one of the rafter beams. “It must’ve flown up there when Fat Jagger dropped us!”

The lead skeleton was halfway across the room now, sword out. Its brethren were making their way through the window two at a time. In a flash, Brendan grabbed Will’s cutlass—
“Hey, now!”—
and tossed it at the mattress.

The mattress wobbled and fell off the beam, landing with a thump directly in front of the lead skeleton. The skeleton clicked its teeth angrily before walking across it, headed straight for Brendan.

Brendan leaned down, grabbed hold of the mattress, and pulled hard. The mattress zipped out from under the skeleton, causing the creature to flip in the air and slam into a pair of its bony followers. The three skeletons fell, and their limbs became hopelessly intertwined—but Brendan knew it wouldn’t be long before they were back on their feet. He dragged the mattress to the edge of the attic hole and jumped into the water below.

“Come on, guys!” he yelled, bobbing up, sputtering seawater. “Get down here! Will . . . you go last and close the hole with the mattress!”

“A mattress isn’t going to stop these knobby numskulls!”

“It won’t have to stop them for long—” Brendan started to argue, but the skeletons provided a more convincing argument by slashing at Cordelia. She jumped down next to Brendan in the flooded second-story hallway. Eleanor followed; Will came last with his cutlass, tossing his spell scrolls to the floor of the attic so they wouldn’t get wet. (He figured the skeletons couldn’t read, let alone read Latin.) He pulled the mattress over the hole above him.

“Okay, now everybody grab hold!” shouted Brendan. “Keep it in place!”

They all tore a hand into the underside of the mattress, securing it over the hole, sealing themselves off from the skeletons.

“Now what?” Eleanor asked.

For a second everything was quiet. The Walkers and Will treaded water in the hallway as their hands clasped springs in the bottom of the mattress. But they found it extremely difficult to tread water using only one arm each—and in Will, Cordelia, and Eleanor’s cases, their arms were injured anyway. As if that weren’t enough, there was only a foot of space between the water’s surface and the ceiling. And the water . . .

“The water’s rising!” said Eleanor. “How are we—”

Suddenly a sword slashed through the mattress, directly in front of Eleanor’s nose. This was followed by a spear, piercing swiftly down, just missing Will’s shoulder.

“They’re turning this thing into a pincushion!” Cordelia yelled.

And that wasn’t all: the mattress had started to move, inching to the side as the skeletons began to push it away from the hole.

“Hold steady!” Brendan said. “And watch out!”

The skeletons sent more swords, spears, and daggers plunging through the mattress. Many of the blades got stuck, trembling as the skeletons tried to pull them out again. The Walkers ducked and dodged the avalanche of weapons. . . .

And the water continued to rise.

Now it was less than six inches from the ceiling. “I can’t bloody breathe!” Will yelled. “We’re running out of air!”

“Only a few more seconds!” Brendan said. “Until the sun comes up!”

“Then what?”

A sword slashed down directly in front of Brendan’s chin, popping his zit.

“Owwwwww!”
He grabbed his chin. “Then they turn into something we can kill.”

“That’s so gross on your face!” said Eleanor. “But I get it. You think the sun is going to change the skeletons back into people, like with the bat. And Penelope.”

“Exactly.”

“And who’s going to kill the blighters once they become human?” Will asked. “You?”

“Uh . . . sure,” Brendan said, dodging more weapons coming through the mattress.

“And you’re prepared to do that?” Cordelia asked.

Brendan hesitated. He wanted to be brave. “Look, not all of us get to be in a history-changing war like Will. But if I was born in a different place, in a different time, I might already be out having big-time adventures, fighting Nazis, hunting wild animals . . . being a man! So once those skeletons get turned back into normal pirates? Yeah! I’m gonna be the first one through that hole, and I’m gonna kick every one of their flabby butts! Now, are you with me or not?”

Everyone stayed quiet. Unbeknownst to them, the sun had come up.

“What?” Brendan said.

“Either the skeletons were enthralled by your rousing speech, or something else happened, because they’re not moving,” said Cordelia.

It was true: The hollow rattling sound of bones was gone from the attic. No more weapons slashed through the mattress.

“Does that mean it worked?” Eleanor asked.

“Not a moment too soon,” said Will, spitting out seawater. “My arm has just about had it. Besides, I don’t know what’s worse, the fishy taste of this water or the smell of you three.”

“Ironic,” Cordelia said. “An Englishman complaining about hygiene. Don’t you guys only bathe on Sundays?”

“And Wednesdays!” protested Will.

Brendan moved the mattress aside, reexposing the attic. “I’m going up.”

“No. I’ll go first,” said Will. “You may think you’re a killer, but I don’t believe you have the guts for it. And you haven’t a single weapon on you.”

Brendan responded by snatching the sword from Will’s hand.

“Hey!”

Brendan quickly hoisted himself into the attic, the sword dripping wet between his teeth. Cordelia was worried he’d be cut down—

But Brendan said, “Come up, guys! You’re going to want to see this!”