JAN had to mean January Society. “They’re at her house,” Eleanor said. “Or she’s stuck at the house?”
“Either way, we have to go get her,” Otto said, data and caution thrown aside with his friend in danger.
“We can’t take the roads if the Society’s out. They might see us,” Eleanor said.
“There’s a back way. A path through the woods. It’s a bit rough, but the bikes should be okay.”
There was no time to waste. They set off on their bikes, bumping over the uneven ground.
The dorms for resident students were on the other side of the athletic fields, but Pip stayed in her family’s house, and that was a little farther away. Down a road through the trees, tucked just out of sight.
When they were still a little ways out, they hid the bikes and crept forward on foot, staying well away from the road.
The ground-floor lights were on, but the curtains were closed. There was a small gap where the light leaked through, and Eleanor pointed at it. “I’m going to go get a look inside,” she whispered.
“Careful,” Otto urged her.
Careful had gone out the window when she’d left Ashford House, she thought, but she stayed low and slow as she approached. She crept up to the flowerbeds out front—packed with the purple flowers, so thick she could barely find a clear place to step—and listened. There were voices inside. Ms. Foster and someone else—Mr. Foster, she assumed.
“Seventeen minutes,” Ms. Foster said.
“You can’t make time pass faster by checking your watch,” Mr. Foster replied.
A sigh and the click of heels across the floor as Ms. Foster paced. “I just want to get this over with. The others are in position?”
“Or close to it. It needn’t be on the hour, Delilah. The children are asleep. Philippa is locked in her room. Twelve oh one or twelve fifteen won’t matter very much.” He sounded a bit exasperated.
“And Jennifer Barton and that big lunk she married won’t be a problem? She’s having contractions. She won’t be sleeping well.”
“It’s a big house, and the girl is on the third floor. I’m sure the team can handle the extraction,” he replied.
Eleanor sucked in a sharp breath between her clenched teeth. Pip was right, then. Her parents were evil. But at least Ben and Jenny didn’t know. She hoped Pip’s father was right, and they wouldn’t wake up. They’d be safe, as long as they stayed asleep.
She crept back to Otto and relayed what she’d heard. He looked queasy. “I gave her such a hard time,” he said. “I never really believed her. I thought her mom was just mean. Who would sacrifice their own daughter?”
Eleanor didn’t have an answer for him. “Where’s Pip’s bedroom?” she asked instead.
“This way.”
They crept around the side of the house. The bedrooms were on the second floor. Eleanor peered up. There were three windows, and she could tell which one was Pip’s without Otto’s help. The one on the far left had sports trophies lined up on the windowsill. Soccer, field hockey, horseback riding. A trellis covered in vines, withered with the fall, stood against the wall beside it. Eleanor tried it. She didn’t weigh much. It would probably hold her. Or it would break and dump her on the ground and make a ton of noise, but they didn’t have time for caution.
“I’ll go up. You keep a lookout,” Eleanor said. Otto nodded. Between the two of them, she was marginally more athletic, but that wasn’t saying much. They really could have used Pip right now. But then they wouldn’t need to be rescuing Pip, she supposed.
She hauled herself up one step at a time until she could lean out and knock on the window.
Nothing. She knocked again.
Pip’s face appeared in the window, pale and confused. When she saw Eleanor, her eyes widened. Eleanor gestured frantically. Pip opened the window a crack. “You came! Where’s Otto?” she whispered. “Is he okay?”
“He’s right below us,” Eleanor replied. “I heard your parents talking. You’re locked in?” She wobbled on the trellis.
“And they took my phone. I managed to delete the text first, at least,” Pip said.
“We’ve got to get you out of here.”
“The window doesn’t open any wider. It’s stuck,” Pip said.
Eleanor peered at it. There were nails driven into the frame, blocking the window from opening more than a couple inches. They’d been painted over a few times—they must have been there for years. Eleanor shivered, and not from the cold. The Fosters had been planning this a long time. “If I can get these nails out, maybe we can get the window open,” she said.
“Nails? Hold on,” Pip said. She ducked back inside. Eleanor leaned farther to watch. Pip’s room was a mess, covered in clothes and half-finished art projects. Pip stuffed some things into her backpack hastily. Stairs creaked somewhere deeper in the house, and she wrenched the zipper shut, then grabbed something from a drawer. She handed it through the gap. Pliers.
“Jewelry-making phase,” she explained.
It took several minutes of prying and pulling and it left her fingers cramping, but Eleanor managed to prize both of the nails out. The window was stiff, and it took both of them to force it up, but it opened all the way. Eleanor scrambled back down the trellis.
With her backpack over her shoulder, Pip flung herself over the windowsill, balanced for one moment with her feet dangling, and then kicked out and dropped.
She landed with a grunt and a thump, but the soft dirt absorbed most of the noise. She crouched beside Eleanor, panting a little, and she and Otto gave each other a hasty high five.
“I knew you guys would come for me,” Pip said. “How’d you get here?”
“Bikes,” Otto answered.
Pip nodded. “Mine’s by the garage. Hurry!”
They scuttled along the back of the house and darted across the grass to the garage, which stood apart from the rest of the house. In the gap between rested a shiny blue bike. It looked expensive. More importantly, it looked fast.
A light went on upstairs in the house. And then Ms. Foster shouted, the words indistinct but the tone furious.
“Run!” Pip said, but Eleanor grabbed her arm.
“No! Slow. Sneaky,” she said. She pulled Pip around the side of the house, Otto following close behind, and into the woods, deeper in the shadows where they couldn’t be seen from the house. Pip and Otto walked the bike between them, staying crouched as low as possible, as all the rest of the lights went on one by one.
They’d reached the spot where Eleanor and Otto had stashed their bicycles when an engine roared to life. They froze. They dropped to the ground at the same time. Eleanor grabbed Pip’s dark blue backpack and yanked it up to cover her bright red hair, then pressed her own face to the ground as the headlights of the car reached them. The car rolled forward slowly, like whoever was driving was searching the trees. Eleanor counted her breaths instead and forced herself to keep them slow.
Finally, the lights swept past them. Eleanor kept her head down until the sound of the engine faded. Then she sat up gingerly.
“They didn’t see us,” Otto said.
“I think we’re in the clear for now,” Eleanor agreed. Pip nodded. Her cheek was smeared with dirt, and there were tear-tracks running through it. “Are you okay?”
“I was hoping I was wrong,” Pip said, and burst into tears.
Eleanor wrapped her arms around Pip, and Otto did the same from the other side. Pip put her head on Eleanor’s shoulder and cried great hiccupping sobs that shook her whole body. Eleanor just made soothing noises and patted her back, meeting Otto’s eyes and feeling as helpless as Jenny and Ben must have felt all the time since they took her in. “Hey,” she said. “Hey, now.” You couldn’t hold in sadness like that. It made you sick. But Eleanor only cried when no one could see.
She was glad that Pip, at least, wasn’t alone.
Pip straightened up, scrubbing at her runny nose. Even in the dark Eleanor could see her splotchy cheeks. Pip gulped down a breath of air and shoved her hair back behind her ears. It tangled in a scraggly mess around her face, but that suited Pip. “Aren’t you going to say everything’s going to be okay, or something?” Pip asked.
“No,” Eleanor said. “People say that a lot to me and it never helps. It just makes me mad. Because everything isn’t okay. Even if it turns out better in the end, it’ll never be okay that this happened.”
“I just didn’t say anything because I have no idea what to say,” Otto confessed.
“That’s a first,” Pip said, and bumped her shoulder against his. He bumped her back. Pip took a deep breath. “Enough crying. Let’s get going,” she declared, and got to her feet.
Otto’s phone chimed. “Uh-oh,” he said “That’s the alarm. One minute to midnight.”
The air grew colder around them. The wind stirred through the trees. And Eleanor heard it: the tick tock tick of a clock. The clock, though they were miles away, though it was tucked inside the halls of Ashford House.
Thirty seconds. The wind howled, sending leaves scattering furiously around them, whipping at their hair and their clothes. Otto yelped in alarm. And then—everything went still. The wind ceased. The branches stopped their creaking. The leaves settled.
Ten seconds. There was only their breathing and that steady tick tock tick tock . . .
Tick . . .
Tock.
And then the chiming of the clock. One. Two. Three. Eleanor whispered, counting each of them out. Nine. Ten. Eleven.
Twelve.
A soft wind sighed through the trees, setting everything shivering. And the color went out of the world.
It happened slowly at first, and then in a rush, with Pip’s hair losing its coppery shine, Otto’s blue jacket sinking into dull gray, even the light of the phone in his hand turning spectral and wan.
The red-orange leaves of fall—gray.
The yellowish moon—gray and gleaming.
The green pine boughs above them—so dark a gray it was black, melding with the darkness of the sky.
“Happy Halloween,” Otto whispered.
“And a very happy birthday,” Pip replied, voice wavering with a poor attempt at humor.
None of them laughed.
Sixteen
They headed back the way Eleanor and Otto had come, along walking trails that zagged and zigged and climbed and fell. Otto’s and Pip’s bikes were made for this kind of riding, but Eleanor’s wasn’t, and the trip to Pip’s house had knocked something loose in the front wheel, making it rattle whenever she went downhill and groan whenever she went uphill. Sometimes she had to stop and walk the rickety old thing instead, which slowed all of them down.
“We’re close,” Otto said at last, as they pedaled along a smooth track between the trees. He’d promised that the place he had in mind would be a good spot to hide, at least while they rested—all of them were exhausted. Eleanor’s lungs ached, and she panted for breath, the cold air stinging her throat. Pip seemed like she could keep riding all night. “It’s just around—”
“Look out!” Otto yelled, as they rounded a bend in the trees.
The dog loomed out of the darkness, its glowing red eyes the only color since the gray seeped in. They clattered to a stop, Eleanor barely jumping free of her bike as it toppled and skidded, coming to a rest in front of the dog. It looked down at the bike and let out a rumbling growl, then shifted its gaze back to them.
Up close, the dog was massive. Bigger than the biggest dog Eleanor had ever seen. Its head was level with her chest, its brow blunt, its fur short and shining. It simply stepped over the bike and paced toward them. They scrambled back, Eleanor grabbing for the fire poker. It caught briefly against the zipper before coming free. She brandished it in front of her.
“Stay back!” she said.
The dog stopped, but it didn’t look terribly concerned. Its breath fogged the air.
But it wasn’t fog. It was breathing out smoke. Eleanor gulped. “Let us past,” she said.
“No,” the dog replied in a deep, male voice. Otto squeaked in surprise, and Eleanor realized she hadn’t gotten around to explaining about the cat-of-ashes or the whole “talking beasts” thing.
“Iron hurts you,” Eleanor said with confidence. The book had told them that much.
Instead of answering, the dog leaped at her. Eleanor yelped and stumbled backward in surprise. She tried to swing the fire poker, but the dog’s huge paws hit her in the chest and she flew backward, the poker sailing out of her grip. She hit the ground hard. Her vision filled with sparks, and when it cleared, the dog loomed over her, smoke spilling from between his yellow teeth, his red eyes boring into hers. One huge paw pressed down on her chest, pinning her.
“Little beast,” it said in a low rumble of a voice. “You are nothing. You are small. You are afraid.”
“Get off of her!” Pip yelled. She had the poker in both hands, and she swung it in a ferocious arc.
It hit the dog and kept on going, swinging straight through him and sending a cloud of black specks and bright sparks into the air. He howled and leaped back, shaking himself and shedding more sparks and ash. A red line glowed across his side where the iron had passed through him. It looked like an ember when you blew on it.
Pip stood with her legs planted and the poker gripped tight. “Field hockey,” she said. “Back off, buddy.”
The dog let out a snarl. He sank back on his haunches and then twisted, launching himself off between the trees. He knocked against trunks here and there, leaving the bark glowing and smoking, but then he was gone.
Pip stuck out her hand to help Eleanor up.
“Thanks,” Eleanor said. “That was really brave.”
“That was amazing,” Otto agreed.
“Don’t worry about it. I really wanted to hit something anyway,” Pip said, sticking out her tongue. “Now, come on! We should get out of here before it comes back.”
They pedaled down the last stretch of the track, which led right past Otto’s backyard. The omnipresent gray gave it an ominous look: the swing set loomed, the treehouse crouched among the branches like a hungry beast. There were toys scattered over the lawn, but they were oddly regimented, all lined up to face the same direction. The house itself seemed in a battle between disrepair and the cookie-cutter perfection of the town, everything just a hair off and giving the impression of someone extremely stressed and barely holding it together.
Their vantage point gave them a good view of the road out front and the three cars parked there—a beat-up red Honda in the driveway and two sleek black cars parked on the street. One of them was the car Eleanor had spotted earlier. The black cars definitely didn’t match the house with hearts painted on the back door.
“Looks like it was a good idea to get out of the house early,” Otto whispered.
Just then, the front door opened. Three figures in crisp black-and-white suits, two men and a woman, marched out to the cars. The woman got into the passenger seat of one of them, the men got into the drivers’ seats, and they pulled away.
“Let’s not stick around,” Pip suggested. Otto led them away, winding through the trees, until they came to an overhang, like a shallow cave. Otto had screened it off with branches and a sign that said OTTO’S PLACE (KEEP OUT! ESPECIALLY EMILY!). Inside he’d stowed a plastic storage box with some comic books and granola bars and a sleeping bag.
“We should be safe here,” Otto said. He winced.
“Nowhere is safe,” Pip said. “The colors are gone—something’s happening all over.” She sounded about as freaked out as Eleanor felt. It seemed like things turning gray should be the least of their problems, but instead of getting used to it, she was getting more and more unsettled. Like the whole world had turned dang
erous, and set its hungry eyes on them. She shivered, and caught Otto doing the same.
“Does anybody know this place is here?” Eleanor asked.
“Just Emily, and she’s off at college,” Otto said. “I think we should be okay for a little while, at least.”
“The cat-of-ashes said we would be in danger from midnight to midnight,” Eleanor said. They gave her blank looks. Right. She still hadn’t told them about the cat’s visit. She explained as quickly as she could, which still took a while, with both of them interrupting with questions and exclamations.
“So we’re in danger until midnight?” Pip said when she was done.
“Do you think we can stay hidden that long?” Eleanor asked.
“I doubt it,” Otto replied. “The graveyard dog could track our scent. And the rattlebird can fly. It probably can find us just by flying around.”
“So we can’t just wait it out,” Eleanor said, a little glimmer of hope going dim.
“The book told us how to fight the graveyard dog,” Pip said. “The iron worked. There’s got to be something else in there, right?”
“I’ve already looked it over a hundred times,” Eleanor said mournfully. “There are some things about the beasts, but there’s nothing about how to beat the curse or the People Who Look Away.” Still, she pulled the book out of her bag and opened it to the beginning, letting her gaze wander down the list of titles while Otto shone the phone flashlight for her.
The familiar titles were all there.
But there was another.
“‘The Thirteenth Key,’” Eleanor read.
“Well,” Otto said, “that wasn’t there before.”
“It’s about Jack,” Eleanor said, skimming quickly. “And the girl with backward hands, and the hedgewitch. ‘The heroes three.’ They go back to the kingdom from the first story, but it’s been a hundred and fifty years. Listen. ‘The kingdom was as perfect as the day the princess had been taken, not a leaf out of place, not a flower wilted. Yet it was gray—colorless and brittle, full of smiles but without joy. Its people were like marionettes, moving about their lives tugged along by the strings of habit. For the stranger who had blessed and cursed them had crafted from their joy twelve keys. Nearly all their joy had been stolen in this way, but there was a little left, and one key more to make. And should that key be forged, a door would open, and what lay on the other side was more frightening by far than any beast or calamity the world had ever known.’”
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