Troubletwisters (26 page)

‘Ah, I expect that will be Susan,’ said Grandma X.

Hector looked at the door, indecision obvious on his face.

‘She can’t know what happened,’ said Hector. Grandma X nodded, and he hurried Jack and Jaide through the back door and into the yard. He stood with them for a moment under the trees and put a hand on each of their shoulders.

‘Now, that promise . . . I want you to do everything your grandma says, no matter how weird it sounds. Do you understand? I ask you both as your father and as a Warden. Your lives – and the life of our family – depend on it.’

‘So she’ll teach us about becoming Wardens?’ asked Jaide.

‘Yes, and you’ll teach her a thing or two, I bet.’

He smiled, but Jack wasn’t willing to laugh just yet.

‘I wish
you
could teach us.’

‘So do I, but having me around would only throw you off. And the lessons are hard to learn, and often the teacher has to be very strict. I’m not sure I have the stomach for it, to be honest. I’d want to protect you . . . both of you . . . and that’s not the way it works.’

He might have said more, but Susan’s car was already skidding to a sudden halt on the gravel drive.

‘Promise me!’ said Hector urgently.

‘All right,’ said Jack.

‘Jaide, what do you say? Quickly!’

She had never seen her father so agitated. ‘Yes, I promise, but —’

‘I love you both.’ He kissed the twins on their foreheads and backed away. ‘Remember that, and stay where you are. You might want to cover your eyes, too.’

Neither twin so much as blinked as their father pulled a pitted metal rod with a sharp end from his coat pocket. They both recognised it as the one they had found in his suitcase that fateful day when their Gifts had woken. Holding it in his right hand, Hector made several quick passes across his body, each of which left a pale blue line hanging in the air. The lines formed a complex sigil that, once completed, began to shimmer like heat haze. The purple glow returned. Hector Shield raised the rod above his head with both hands and braced himself.

‘Who in an orchestra is most likely to be struck by lightning?’ he called to his children. ‘The conductor. Get i —?’

He vanished into a flash of bright blue energy, and once again deep thunder rocked the town.

On the other side of the house, a car door slammed. The sound acted like a starter’s pistol for the twins. They sprinted back inside and up past Grandma X, the cats jumping aside to make room. They ran to the bathroom on their floor and stripped off their wet clothes, towelled their hair dry, and leaped into pyjamas.

‘Is that you, Susan?’ Grandma X’s voice floated up to them. ‘What’s going on?’

The cats came into the bedroom as Jack and Jaide hurled themselves into their beds and mussed up the covers.

‘She woke up when the ward was restored,’ said Kleo to the twins. ‘I didn’t have time to tell her everything.’

‘Are congratulations in order?’ asked Ari, his penetrating gaze darting from one twin to the other. ‘Or was it your father’s work?’

‘We did it, but there’s no time to tell you about it now,’ said Jack. He was more worried about his mother and what she might say to Grandma X.

Right on cue, Susan came in. She was wearing her emergency services uniform, and a radio squawked at her belt, but she ignored it. Grandma X followed her. Her feet were bare under her dressing-gown, and for the first time Jaide noticed she had silver rings on her toes.

‘Are you all right?’ Susan asked. ‘Was it . . . was it something to do with . . . did you make it happen?’

‘Make what happen, Susan?’ asked Grandma X. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You know very well!’ The words tumbled out of her in a rush. ‘They’ve declared a natural disaster in the town. Some kind of localised hurricane, they said, but I knew better.’

‘We’re fine,’ said Jaide. Jack nodded and gave a very unconvincing yawn.

Susan dragged them out of their beds into the middle of the room, where she drew them into a very tight hug.

‘I’m so glad you’re all right. I’ve been so worried. You don’t have to be afraid now. You’re safe.’

They returned the hug, feeling in its tightness the panic their mother had suffered. They wanted to tell her the truth, but knew she would never understand.

‘It’s okay, Mum,’ said Jaide reassuringly. ‘Just a big storm. We slept through most of it.’

‘Really, we did,’ said Jack, catching Grandma X’s eye over his mother’s shoulder. ‘It wasn’t scary at all.’

‘Really?’

Susan pulled back slightly and looked each child directly in the eye. They knew that procedure: she was looking for any sign of fibbing. It was only then that both twins realised that they
were
fibbing – to protect her from worrying, but also to stop her from taking them away from Portland and their grandmother, where they needed to be if they were ever to get their Gifts under control.

‘Honest, Mum,’ said Jack.

Jaide added, for the appearance of it, ‘You’re such a worrywart.’

‘I had no idea this morning, Susan,’ Grandma X said calmly, ‘that the weather would turn like this. Otherwise I would never have let the kids out of my sight.’

‘Of course not,’ Susan said, letting the twins go at last. ‘I heard they closed the school.’

‘Not to worry. I was happy to pick them up when Mr Carver called. Come to the kitchen, Susan,’ Grandma X said. ‘You look frozen through. I’ll make you something hot.’

‘Well, all right, but I can’t stay long. I’ve volunteered to help out the local squad. The flood has ripped up trees and washed cars away, and a couple of roofs have come off . . .’

The twins followed their mother, the cats and Grandma X to the kitchen. Grandma X turned on the radio, then bent to light the stove. The twins and their mother listened to a very excited voice reporting that an enormous pile of sea life had been deposited near the lighthouse by a freak waterspout.

‘I hope life isn’t always this . . . interesting . . . in Portland,’ said Susan with a weak smile.

‘The twins will be safe with me,’ Grandma X promised.

The voice on the radio carried on about the town’s sole missing person, who had just been found near the lighthouse and who, though apparently injured, had refused treatment before hurrying away. Jaide hardly registered the woman’s name, Renita Daniels, before Susan turned the volume down and gave her children another hug.

‘Back to bed for you, I think,’ she said to them. ‘I’m so glad you’re safe.’

‘I’ll fix you some hot chocolate, Susan,’ said Grandma X, with a knowing glance at the twins. ‘Good night.’

The twins kissed their mother and dutifully headed upstairs to the room they guessed they should now think of as their own. A dose of Grandma X’s memory-erasing potion might not ease their mother’s anxieties about Wardens and Hector and their house blowing up, but it would at least make her forget about that morning.

The less she knew about their new life in Portland, the better.

THE CATS FOLLOWED THE TWINS
back to the bedroom and jumped up onto the beds, Ari at Jaide’s feet and Kleo at Jack’s.

‘Don’t think you can go to sleep without telling us exactly what happened,’ said Kleo bossily.

‘We really would like to know,’ said Ari, in more conciliatory tones.

‘All right,’ said Jaide.

They were still talking when Grandma X tapped quietly on the door and then poked her head around.

‘Well done, troubletwisters,’ she said.

‘How are you feeling?’ Jaide asked.

‘Considerably better than I did earlier, thank you, Jaidith.’

Grandma X came in and picked up their dirty clothes, wrinkling her nose as she lifted Jack’s shirt.

‘That singed smell is so distinctive . . . It is such a pity Hector couldn’t stay. But that’s the way it must be.’ She pulled a regretful face, and the twins knew that she missed her son just as much as they missed their father. ‘Now, I see you have been in my antique shop.’

‘We only went in to —’ Jack began, but Grandma X held up her hand.

‘You did what was necessary, in the grand tradition of Wardens, and you did so in a very messy way, in the less grand tradition of troubletwisters.’

‘What happened to the music box?’ asked Jaide. The cats had already told her that when it had stopped, The Evil had attacked the house, but the rats and insects hadn’t got in before the ward was replaced.

‘It is now merely a very fine early eighteenth-century music box, and nothing more,’ said Grandma X. ‘So I will sell it on eBay.’

‘That crocodile skull took off the end of my finger,’ said Jaide, brandishing her bandage. She’d forgotten about it in the events of the night, but now it was starting to really hurt again.

‘The Oracular Crocodile is something of a trickster,’ said Grandma X. ‘You only need to give it a drop of blood, dripped from a spoon or the like. Never let it actually bite you. We’d best have that seen to in the morning, in case it festers. You might need a stitch or two.’

Jaide pulled a face. She was generally brave when it came to doctors, except where needles were concerned.

From the pocket of her dressing-gown, Grandma X pulled the brass compass the troubletwisters had played with in the drawing room the day she had tested them to see where their Gifts might lie.

‘I can also tell from this that there has been a change in the wards. Didn’t you get my message about the plaque?’

‘We did,’ said Jaide, ‘and we tried to fix it.’

‘But The Evil stopped us,’ said Jack, ‘and so we had to make a new ward instead.’

Grandma X raised her eyebrows. ‘Just like that?’

‘Well, we don’t really know how we did it . . .’

‘Only that we did,’ said Jaide. ‘Custer checked it and everything was fine. Did we do something wrong?’

‘Not at all, not at all. You simply did something very difficult, something that normally takes years of practice and an astonishingly well-matched pair of Wardens to achieve. It always takes two, you see, to ensure the new ward is completely secure.’

‘We’re twins,’ said Jack brightly. ‘That must be why it worked for us.’

‘Indeed. But in that regard you are not unique. All troubletwisters are twins, but not all twins are troubletwisters.’

Before Jaide could untangle that sentence, Grandma X produced something else from under her apparently inexhaustible nightgown.

‘Now, I have brought something else to show you, something that is normally kept safe in the blue room, where it cannot be interfered with by anyone.’

It was a huge blue folder the size of a very fat encyclopaedia. They flipped it open to reveal a great mass of different-sized pages loosely held together by a spiral binding. The pages at the front were modern computer printouts, but as Grandma X flipped the pages to the back, the paper got thicker and older, with some of it typewritten and some of it in beautiful, flowing handwriting. The pages right at the bottom were not paper at all, but vellum or parchment, and the writing was particularly ornate, with gilded capitals and little illustrations. There were also many other full-page drawings, maps and diagrams throughout the folder, the earlier ones hand drawn and the later ones obviously done on a computer.

‘Next time something like this happens, this is where you come first.’ Grandma X closed the folder and showed the children the spine, where a card had been stuck in the plastic sleeve. The whole loose-leaf collection was called
A Compendium of The Evil
.

‘Wardens have fought against The Evil for millennia, with varying degrees of success. This
Compendium
contains as much of our collected experience as has survived the perils of both The Evil and history in general. Every Warden in this current era has one. Use it as needed, and you will be wiser for it. But be aware that it will not always answer you, and you may not be able to find things you have just now glimpsed, for this is not as simple a pile of old papers as it seems, and there are things that troubletwisters should not know, or should be spared the knowledge of. But if ever you cannot ask me something for any reason, you may ask the
Compendium
. Think of what you want to know, browse through the pages, and if it is something you can be told, you will find the right paper.’

The twins nodded, sensing that with this small piece of advice their tutelage had properly begun. Where it would lead them they didn’t know, and what perils lay ahead they couldn’t imagine, but they were on the path now. At least they had a path.

‘I’m glad you understand,’ said Grandma X, ‘because tomorrow you’re going to write down everything that happened to you and put it into the
Compendium
yourselves. If necessary, it will illustrate your work —’

‘
It
will illustrate it?’ asked Jaide.

‘Well, it would be more accurate to say that it will find the Warden best able to illustrate whatever is required,’ replied Grandma X. ‘Perhaps one of you may have that Gift, of drawing the thoughts and writings of others. But apart from other Wardens, you mustn’t ever tell anybody else what you write about —’

‘Except for Warden Companions,’ said Kleo. ‘Like us.’

‘
Some
things may be told to Warden Companions,’ continued Grandma X with a quelling glance. ‘But secrecy is a matter greater even than life and death for us. We are part of an unending struggle against a terrible opponent. We risk our lives and fight great battles, but the rest of the world must not know of the existence of The Evil.’

‘Why not?’ asked Jack.

‘Because it is a sad fact of human nature that there are people who fall easily under The Evil’s sway,’ said Grandma X bleakly. ‘There are even those who would volunteer to join it, or work for it, or who would sell themselves or others for things The Evil can give.’

‘Oh,’ said Jack thoughtfully.

She studied him a second longer than was comfortable, then added, ‘Not even Wardens are immune.’

He looked away, hoping she was only guessing how The Evil had tried to turn him against her, and swearing that she would never know.

‘Did we really damage the East Ward?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘It was old and damaged by your father once, and your presence here might have weakened it to the point of failure. But it wasn’t something you did deliberately, and you did put things right in the end, didn’t you? I wouldn’t spare it another thought – except to listen to me when I tell you to be careful, in the future.’

‘Yes, Grandma.’ Jack couldn’t tell if she was telling the whole truth or being kind, but either way he did feel a bit better.

‘Will you tell us about the other wards tomorrow?’ Jaide asked. ‘And will you show us where they are?’

‘All in good time,’ their grandma said. ‘We have to get your Gifts under control first. You would not normally have learned of the wards so early in your development as troubletwisters.’

Jaide nodded. She was already firmly convinced of the need to get their Gifts under control.

‘What about school?’ asked Jack. ‘Do we really have to go back when it opens again?’

‘I’m afraid so. The rest of the world won’t stop while you learn what it means to be a troubletwister.’ She smiled fondly at them. ‘Now, I think it is time for sleep. Cats, you may retire, too.’

‘Good night,’ said Kleo to the twins. ‘You have done well.’

She jumped up and licked Jaide’s face, then leaped over to lick Jack, who was less keen. Ari followed suit, but he did not lick Jack, merely butting his head against him.

‘It is an honour to work with you, troubletwisters,’ said Ari gravely.

Grandma X watched the cats walk out, then came and kissed the twins herself.

‘You have done extraordinarily well,’ she said. ‘And I am proud of you,
grandchildren
.’

Grandma X turned out the light. A moment later they heard her soft tread on the stairs, so different from the sharp beat of her daytime boots.

‘I guess this isn’t turning out as bad as we thought,’ said Jack. ‘Apart from no television.’

‘I guess so.’ Jaide yawned. ‘But what was it she said about twins and troubletwisters?’

‘Hmmm?’ answered Jack. His thoughts were elsewhere. ‘You know, it would be so
cool
to travel by lightning . . .’

Jaide didn’t answer. She was already asleep, and within moments, so was Jack.