Riley Clifford (2 page)

Amy Cahill was living in a madhouse.

Why had she never realized this before? The signs had been there — the running in the halls, the abundance of junk food, the crazy brother. But it was only at that moment, armed with a trash bag, that she realized just how far they had fallen. Anthropologists could come study her living room to learn about what the world would look like after the demise of modern civilization.

“Dan!” she yelled. “Why are your dirty socks in a bag of chips?!”

“They aren’t!” Dan hollered back, running into the room. He had a plastic lightsaber in one hand and a dustpan in the other.

“Dan, I’m holding the proof in my hands right now,” Amy said. She pulled the crumpled socks out of the chip bag, holding them between her forefinger and thumb. Boys were so gross.

“That’s not a bag of chips,” Dan said, poking at the bag of Doritos with his lightsaber. “That’s an
empty
bag of chips.”

“It’s still gross,” she said.

Just then, Atticus came running into the room. He held a mop and had a bath towel knotted around his neck. Amy was glad to have Atticus visiting — he was Dan’s friend, and Dan needed all the friends he could get. He’d been so changed after the Clue hunt, like he didn’t know what to do with himself anymore. Having Atticus around gave him someone to entertain, someone to be himself around. Plus, Atticus was a genius, which made him incredibly interesting to talk to.

Still, there was a line. She could be pleased that Dan had a friend. She could be equally displeased at dirty socks in bags of chips.

“Calceum amissum dabo ultionem meam!”
Atticus roared, coming at Dan with the mop.

“No way, dude!” yelled Dan, leaping backward and lifting his dustpan like a shield.

“
Dan
,” said Amy, shaking her trash bag at him. “Are you going to help at all?”

“Why are you cleaning in the first place?” Dan asked.

“Because we have company coming,” she said. “I’m throwing out this bottle rocket.”

“No, wait!” Dan said, reaching for it. “It hasn’t been set off yet. Don’t waste it, Amy. And we don’t have
company
coming — we have Ian Kabra coming. And I know you want to totally impress him and take him to the movies and stare dreamily into his eyes —”

“I do not,” Amy said, too quickly.

“Oh, Ian,” Dan said, pressing his lightsaber to his chest and batting his eyes. “Tell me again about your shiny, shiny shoes.”

“You’re such a dweeb,” said Amy, pitching the empty bag of chips into the trash bag.

Something about the scene in her living room struck her as strange — and then she realized why: It felt normal. Entirely normal. Right then, she was just a big sister, yelling at her little brother because he was a mess. Was this how the rest of the girls at school spent their time? When Amy had signed herself and Dan up for the Clue hunt, she hadn’t known how much her life would change. Before, she had just been a normal eighth grader with an annoying kid brother. But since the Clue hunt began, her life had been full of foreign countries and near-death experiences — being lost in the catacombs in Paris, flying to the top of Mount Everest, surviving that final gauntlet.

And now, at sixteen, she found herself wealthier than she knew any person in the world could be, and in possession of the key to the Cahill family’s ultimate power. Her life was, to be blunt about it, insane.

Ian’s visit was just another example of that insanity. He was rich and cultured and . . . ridiculous in a charming, interesting way. He wasn’t like any of the other boys at Amy’s school.

Like a magnet, the thought of school zapped Amy’s thoughts toward one boy in particular. On the list of boys that Amy wanted to clean her living room for, Evan Tolliver was right at the top. The thought of him made her ears go hot, which probably meant they were bright pink, too. It was a strange thing, to be excited about one boy coming to visit while blushing over another.

“Ego regis spatium exterum cedo!”

“Not if I have anything to say about it, dastardly fiend!”

“Don’t jump onto the ceiling fan!” Amy yelled.

Honestly, what was the point of being the leader of the most powerful family in the world if you couldn’t even get your little brother to behave like a human being?

Dinnertime at the Kabra mansion had never been a particularly cozy affair. It was hard to have a family dinner when the table was as long as a swimming pool and the water glasses were made of real crystal.

Still, the night before Ian flew to visit the Cahills was the stoniest he could remember. Natalie sat silent and icy. Every clink of her fork against the china reverberated through the room like a gong.

Ian couldn’t take it anymore. Natalie had been fuming ever since Ian had told her he would be going to see Amy. “Natalie,” he began, but she cut him off before he could get any further.

“I can’t believe you’re going,” she snapped. “I honestly can’t believe that you are going to Boston to see the Cahills and that you are leaving me here alone. What am I supposed to do if she . . . if she . . .” Natalie’s face screwed up like she was trying to shove an awful thought into the back of her brain. “What if she comes here and it’s just me? Didn’t you think of that? Didn’t you think of me at all?”

Ian paused, and when he opened his mouth, he spoke slowly. “She can’t . . . she can’t leave America, Natalie. That would go against her parole. I’ve made sure. I checked.”

“Oh, right, because she’s clearly so good at obeying the law,” said Natalie. She pushed her plate away. “If you go, and if she comes here, I’ll never forgive you.” She stood up and stomped out of the dining room, slamming the door hard enough to make the Waterford chandelier rattle on its chain.

Ian looked down at his plate. The filet with béarnaise sauce and fingerling potatoes had been prepared by a classically trained chef, and yet it tasted like sawdust to him. He felt a creeping, distasteful thing sneak up on him — sympathy. Those wretched Cahills. They’d changed him over the course of the Clue hunt, and now their unwanted effect lingered. Having a conscience was such a nuisance.

He’d have to make up with Natalie before he left. He didn’t blame her at all for being nervous about Isabel leaving prison. He was nervous, too, and he wasn’t even the one their mother had shot.

Ian picked his napkin out of his lap and followed Natalie out of the dining room.

“Natalie?” he called down the hall. But she wasn’t there. And she wasn’t in the gallery or in the theater or in the kitchen or the library. She wasn’t in the conservatory or the study or her bedroom.

He was on his way to the parlor, passing the door to the secret wing of the mansion — the Lucian wing — when he heard the sound of shattering glass. “Natalie?” he said, putting a hand on the door. The knob was cool, and it twisted easily when he turned it. He stood there for a moment, looking at the knob. He couldn’t imagine that Natalie would go in there. They’d had an unspoken agreement to avoid it since the Clue hunt ended — avoid looking at it, talking about it.

But
someone
was in there. So Ian opened the door.

As soon as the door opened, a flood of lights streamed on one by one down the short hall as the chandeliers lit up. The floor was paneled in ebony wood, and the walls were lined with paintings of Lucians doing amazing things — being crowned, winning battles, ruling the world. It smelled of close air and dust; not even the servants had been inside. Ian felt as if he were trespassing, breaking the rules, even though that was ridiculous. This was his house, and with his father hiding in South America and his mother trapped in North America, there was no one present to scold or forbid him.

Slowly, he made his way down the hall. “Natalie?” he called again. But there was no answer.

At the end of the short hall was another door. He opened that one, to another hall. It had never occurred to him before how strange a setup this was. It was as if the wing were designed to be difficult to transverse — a series of rooms to be passed through, one by one, to reach an end destination, rather than one long corridor with doors along either side. Down at the end of the second hall, someone turned to look at him.

Someone tall, and someone who was not Natalie. The figure was all in black, from boots to mask. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he was certain that the intruder smiled at him.

“Oi! Stop!” he yelled, taking off down the hall. The lights began to flicker, and the chandelier closest to his end of the hallway gave a shudder and then crashed to the ground, landing a few feet from Ian. Glass and metal shattered over the wood floors, spraying Ian with shards and splinters. If he had been any slower, he’d be buried under that mess, tangled in it like a grotesque knot in a skein of thread.

He half jumped, half skidded over the shattered chandelier and picked his way down the rest of the hall. But with a great groan, the second chandelier fell. Ian jumped out of the way, and continued his run down the hall, dodging the third and fourth chandeliers as their chains gave way and they slammed down to the floor.

Ian looked up at the last broken chain. A cable ran from the chain, along the ceiling, to the previous chandelier, and so on, until the cable reached the door. Something had triggered it; something had caused it to crash — the door opening. Someone had rigged the chandeliers to fall.

His spirit sagged down to his knees, dragging what felt like his lungs and all of his digestive organs with it. One of his parents had done that. Mother or Father, one of them — both of them — would rather have Natalie or himself be crushed by half a ton of glass and metal than have them make it through the wing and into the Lucian stronghold.

But there wasn’t time to dwell on it. There was someone in the house, in
this
wing, and they needed to be caught.

Ian shook glass from his hair. The intruder had disappeared by the time he made it past the chandeliers. He barged through the next door.

It was the room made entirely of mirrors. Ian thought that Isabel had had it built because she liked to look at herself. Now he knew better.

A single lamp hung from the center of the mirrored room. And then, there was movement. The figure in black was there, though he couldn’t tell where. He jumped at the reflection to his left, spun around to the one on his right. It was dark and the shadows tricked him; Ian could feel his heart pounding in his chest and his breath coming in quick bursts.

The intruder’s image was cast all around him, but Ian couldn’t tell which was the real person and which ones were reflections. The intruder was scrambling at one of the mirrors, clawing at the side of it as if trying to find a latch.

“Who are you?” he demanded. The figure in black spun around to look at Ian, and Ian finally thought he knew which way to go. He saw something that sparkled dangling from the intruder’s hand — a piece of jewelry? Glass? But then the intruder grabbed a thick bar from his trouser leg — a pipe or a crowbar, Ian couldn’t tell. He hesitated and stepped back, thinking he was about to be clubbed. But the intruder raised the bar and smashed the mirror. On the other side was a window that faced the garden. That was quickly smashed as well, and the intruder clambered outside.

Ian ran over, reaching out to try and grab a leg, an arm, something. They were on the top floor, and the intruder had already scampered up onto the roof.

There was no time to consider the three-story fall from the roof, or the fact that the intruder was apparently armed with at least a crowbar, or that Ian was supposed to be on a plane to America in a few hours. Ian grasped the window frame, put a foot on the ledge, and hoisted himself outside.

The night was cold for April, and it was much windier high up than it would have been on the ground. Ian’s heart climbed rapidly to his throat when he realized what he was doing, but there wasn’t any other way. By the time he found Bickerduff and had the police summoned, the intruder would be gone.

And if there was anything more important than catching them, it was knowing who they were. Anyone who was brave or foolish or desperate enough to break into the Lucian stronghold needed to be stopped.

Shifting his weight, Ian swung around and grabbed the gutter above him. It was slimy with rain, leaves, and grime, and the first realization that he could slip and fall hit him. But he bent his knees anyway, firmed up his grip, and jumped.

With a grunt, he swung one leg up above the gutter. He forced his weight into his stomach, pressing hard against the slick tiles. The figure in black was still trying to climb up the steeply pitched roof, and now that he heard Ian heaving himself upward, he scrambled all the harder.

He dug his fingers into the tiles, pulling his other leg up, and then he let himself have a moment to remember that he was still alive. But there was only time for a moment, and he was digging the toes of his Prada shoes into the roof to brace himself, to push higher and harder.

The wind whipped his hair into his eyes as he flung an arm out as far as he could to try and grab the intruder’s trouser leg. He brushed the fabric with his fingers, but the person in black kicked at him. Ian took it in the shoulder, and he lost his grip. The movement caused the intruder to lose balance as well, and they both began to slide.