by Ally Carter
‘I went for a swim,’ April blurted when Sadie drew in a big breath as if getting ready to shout again.
Behind her, April could hear laughing and music. Light flickered through the crack in the doorway, and it was easy to imagine everyone snuggled up on couches with popcorn and fluffy blankets, waiting for the hero to save the day.
But April was proof that sometimes heroes end up half drowned and bleeding to death, needing heroines to do the heavy lifting.
And speaking of lifting …
‘So about that invention—’
‘Why would you go swimming? It’s freezing out there. Or, well, not technically freezing. By my estimates, it’s going to get down to one degree Celsius, but not until four a.m., and it’s only—’
‘Sadie!’ April snapped. ‘I need your help,’ she said again, and Sadie grew serious, focused. She had a look in her eye like April was a problem that needed solving. And Sadie wasn’t going to stop until she’d done it.
Behind April, a door must have opened and closed because, for one brief second, the hallway was bright, and Sadie’s eyes went wide as she looked down at April’s pale hands.
‘Is that blood?’
‘It’s not mine,’ April blurted.
‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’
‘I wouldn’t bother you.’ April felt like she needed to say it quickly – get it all out before Gabriel died or she collapsed, whichever came first. ‘But I really do need an invention.’
‘What kind of invention?’ Sadie asked.
April looked at her. ‘The kind that can move a body.’
For a second, Sadie pondered that, as if ‘body moving’ might be a totally underserved segment of the invention-making market, but then she seemed to really hear what April was asking.
‘I don’t have … I don’t make … I don’t know how to move a body!’
Then April felt someone behind her. She turned to see Tim say, ‘I do.’
April couldn’t have been inside the mansion for more than ten minutes, but the fog was thicker and the sky was darker and everything felt different when she climbed down the cliff than it had felt when she’d climbed up – probably because there was another set of feet crunching along behind her and a voice that kept saying, ‘You know, we could go tell Ms Nelson.’
April shook her head and glanced behind her, grateful she’d thought to grab a torch when Tim went to get his coat.
‘We can’t.’
‘Why not?’
Because he’s been hiding from her for weeks. Because the last time I mentioned Gabriel Winterborne’s name, she looked at me like I was a stain on her clean clothes. Because …
‘Because we can’t.’ April skidded down the cliff and stood on the rocky shore for a minute, trying to get her bearings.
‘OK. So where is this body?’ He sounded sceptical, like he’d been thinking all along that April might be lying, but April didn’t have the time or the energy to get angry.
Instead, she scanned the rocks and said, ‘He’s around here somewhere.’
‘OK. Sure.’
‘He is!’
‘We could call 911,’ Tim tried, but at that one, April had to laugh.
‘Something funny?’ Tim sounded more than a little offended.
‘We can’t call 911. He’d kill me.’ She walked closer to the water.
‘That’s not making me think this is a good idea, you know.’
He might have had a point, but April didn’t have time to care, so she threw up her hands and snapped, ‘I don’t mean literally. Or … well … I don’t know. I just … Just help me get him back to the mansion and then you can forget all about it, OK? Forget about him and forget about me. Please.’
She turned and scanned the shore again, while Tim mumbled something that sounded a lot like, ‘I can’t forget about you,’ but she couldn’t be certain. It might have been the wind. It might have been her head. It didn’t matter, though. Nothing mattered but finding Gabriel Winterborne.
She turned back to Tim, expecting scorn or ridicule or a fresh round of let’s-go-tell-a-grown-up, but he just looked at her like he’d never seen her before.
‘What?’ she snapped.
‘You said please.’ Tim’s voice was soft. ‘You don’t say please.’
‘Yeah. Well. I’m saying it now.’
‘What happened?’ he asked.
Carefully, April turned again, shining her torch over the shore.
‘He got beat up,’ she said. They’d already lost too much time. Gabriel might have already lost too much blood. He might be too cold. Maybe Tim was right and they should call 911 … Maybe—
‘Who is he?’ Tim asked.
April didn’t want to admit it, but if a guy is willing to climb a cliff and move a body, you kind of owe him the truth. So she said, ‘Gabriel Winterborne,’ and cocked an eyebrow, daring him to call her a liar.
There was a foghorn blowing in the distance. The water lapped against the rocks. But everything else was quiet as Tim stared at her. ‘Look, I said I’ll help you, but—’
‘There!’ April shouted as the torch’s beam fell across a lump on the rocky ground.
His face was black and blue and swollen, but he wasn’t even trembling despite the cold. He wasn’t doing anything. Maybe not even breathing. So when he groaned, it was the most wonderful sound April had ever heard.
‘He’s alive,’ she sighed, sinking to her knees.
But Tim was shouting, ‘There was a chance he wasn’t alive?’
April whirled and gave Tim a grin. ‘Yeah. Uh … he—’
‘Is that a sword?’ Tim gasped as the beam of April’s torch caught on the shiny piece of silver sticking out of Mr Winterborne’s shoulder.
‘I thought I should leave it in until I could stop the bleeding.’ She had been fairly proud of that decision, but Tim seemed to be stumbling over the whole sword aspect of the conversation.
‘Sure. That’s how I handle all my sword wounds.’
April was fairly certain he was mocking her.
She was even more certain she didn’t care.
She leaned over Mr Winterborne and gently gripped the handle of the sword.
‘I’m really sorry about this,’ April said, then pulled it free. His whole body seized from the pain, but his eyes stayed closed and his chest kept rising and falling. When she got the torch, she’d also grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and now she pressed it against his wounds and tried not to think about the blood.
Some lights still burned in the mansion, but most of the windows were dark. They were alone as they stood looking up at the steep steps that crisscrossed their way up the cliff face. Gabriel Winterborne had probably climbed them a million times, but April and the other kids were strictly forbidden from those stairs. They weren’t stable, Ms Nelson said. They were dangerous. People could get hurt.
Gabriel moaned.
People already were.
‘I could go get help,’ Tim said one more time, and April knew he wasn’t wrong. But April’s gut kept telling her he also wasn’t right, even when he cast a worried look at the stairs. ‘I don’t think we can drag him up those.’
‘We don’t have to.’
She whistled, the sound piercing the air as the fog lifted. The clouds parted. And the moon shone down on Winterborne House like a spotlight as the small door that Gabriel had left through swung open. April was so glad Sadie had found it, especially when a rope fell down, complete with pulleys and hooks.
‘Ready when you are!’ Sadie yelled.
Tim looked like he didn’t know whether to be impressed or terrified, but before he could say a word, Gabriel groaned again.
‘Come on,’ April said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
GABRIEL WINTERBORNE RETURNS
‘Is he drunk?’
April had never seen Sadie’s eyes get quite so wide or heard her voice sound quite so curious.
‘No. Not drunk,’ Tim said, dropping the sword to the cellar
floor. It crashed and clanged, but April didn’t care about the noise. Colin and Violet were surely in bed by then. Smithers was probably in the library with his nightly glass of port. Maybe Ms Nelson was back from Evert’s and maybe she wasn’t, but it felt like April, Tim and Sadie were the only three people in the universe. Four if you didn’t forget the unconscious man. And April couldn’t possibly forget about him.
None of them were even breathing hard, which meant Sadie could have a future in the body moving business, but now that Gabriel was back in his cellar, the problems seemed even bigger and bleaker and … well … bloodier than they had when he was lying on the rocks. Because getting him off the rocks was one thing. Keeping him alive was another.
‘Here.’ Sadie held up a lantern, sending soft yellow light across a mangled body.
His legs lay at a weird angle, and the bloody towel covered his chest. Had it not been for the ragged sounds his breath made, April might have thought that it was too late – that he was already dead. But he wasn’t. And it was up to April to keep him that way.
‘OK. We need something to disinfect the wound. And a needle and thread. Does Smithers have a first aid kit somewhere?’ April looked up and, numbly, Sadie nodded.
‘Great!’ April pressed against the wound because they had to stop the bleeding. ‘Great. I’ll go—’
But Sadie was already saying, ‘April, this man has been stabbed! We have to tell someone. He needs a hospital.’
‘No!’ April wasn’t shouting. It was just that the cellar was super echoey and the mansion was too quiet. ‘We can’t tell anyone,’ she said, calmer then.
On the crate, Gabriel winced and turned away from the light.
‘He could die,’ Sadie pleaded, because Sadie was rational. Sadie was smart and good and logical. So April needed a smart, good, logical reason why they shouldn’t do the obvious thing.
‘No. He won’t. He can’t die,’ April said.
‘How can you be so sure?’ Sadie pleaded.
Then Tim brought the light closer to the face on the floor and said, ‘Because he’s already dead.’
‘No.’ Sadie started shaking her head. Or maybe she was just shaking. ‘That’s … This is … He’s …’ Then she looked around the dim, empty cellar and lowered her voice like she didn’t want anyone to overhear. ‘That’s Gabriel Winterborne! You really found Gabriel Winterborne? You weren’t—’
‘No. I wasn’t lying.’
‘But you found Gabriel Winterborne! How? Where? How?’
April thought about the smoky museum and the way the dark figure had floated towards her like a dream. ‘It’s more like he found me. And then I tracked him down here.’
‘When?’ Tim asked, but April had the feeling it might have been a trick question. ‘Was that why you were out wandering around that first night? Is that why you left Violet alone?’
But April didn’t have time to deal with one mostly dead man and one half-angry boy. ‘He was hungry. I started leaving him food and stuff.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Sadie sounded hurt. But she wasn’t bleeding, so Gabriel was still their biggest problem.
‘He didn’t want anyone to know he was back, OK? I don’t know why, I just know—’
Sadie turned to Tim. ‘We have to go get Smithers. Now!’
There’s no way to know what would have happened next if a hand hadn’t flown through the air and grabbed Sadie by the collar, pulling until she was face-to-face with the not-quite-dead man.
‘Tell anyone I’m down here, and you’d better hope I die.’ Gabriel’s voice was raspy, but the words were clear, and Sadie’s eyes were the size of dinner plates as she watched him drift out of consciousness, his knuckles still white on her shirt.
‘See?’ April said softly. ‘He’s been in hiding for ten years. He’s been down here for weeks. He could have walked upstairs anytime, but he didn’t want Smithers to know. He didn’t want Ms Nelson to know. He was desperate that they not know. I think he’d rather die than tell them. You want to trust a grown-up, right?’ April asked, and Sadie nodded. ‘Well, I do too. So I’m choosing to trust him.’
‘But we can’t let him die,’ Sadie said one more time. ‘We can’t. We—’
‘We won’t.’ Tim sounded so sure. ‘He’s not going to die.’
‘You don’t know that. The sword could have cut an artery,’ Sadie said, but Tim was pulling back the towel. A little blood oozed out, but it wasn’t flowing like it had been.
‘April, did it bleed steady, or did it come out in bursts, like it was being pumped?’ Tim asked.
April had to think for a moment. ‘Steady.’
‘Then it didn’t hit a major artery. If it had, he would have been bleeding in time with his heartbeats. Besides …’ Tim started but trailed off, rethinking whatever it was he was about to say. Which wasn’t at all good enough for Sadie.
‘Besides what?’
Tim shrugged. ‘He’d be dead by now.’ Tim pressed the towel back into place. ‘So the stab wound won’t kill him, but an infection could. And we have to warm him up. Slowly.’
‘Tim, you don’t know that,’ Sadie said.
Tim was on the floor, balancing on the balls of his feet as he crouched over Mr Winterborne’s body. He didn’t look at Sadie as he said, ‘You two are good at sneaking food and making inventions. I’m good at sewing up people no one wants to take to the hospital.’
‘But how—’ Sadie started.
He pulled back the collar of his shirt, and even in the dim light, April could make out the ragged line on his shoulder, not far from where Mr Winterborne’s own scar would be. ‘Knife.’ Then he pulled up his jeans and pointed to the scars that covered his shins. ‘Broken bottle.’
When he reached for his sleeve and started to reveal yet another story that April knew he didn’t want to tell, she blurted, ‘Tim, stop. You don’t have to.’
He looked back at the man on the ground, and when he spoke, the words were low but heavy. ‘Not everyone has a parent who’s going to come looking for them, April. Some of us hope we’re never found.’
Then there was nothing but the sound of dripping water and the deep ragged breaths of the man who wasn’t quite as dead as he wanted the world to believe.
‘OK.’ Sadie looked at Tim. ‘What do we do?’
For the next hour, Sadie and April worked together while Tim went to get supplies. They had to cut off his coat, but his shirt practically fell apart under their touch, and Mr Winterborne moaned but didn’t fight them at all, even though he must have been in terrible pain.
‘I’ve never seen scars like that,’ Sadie said at one point, but April had no idea which scars she was talking about – there were so many.
Tattoos ran in a line down his side, words April couldn’t read. A puzzle she couldn’t solve.
‘What do you think they mean?’ Sadie asked, but April just shook her head.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where was he all these years? Why did he come back now? What’s he so afraid of ?’
‘I don’t know.’ April was shaking her head. She was so scared, but she couldn’t say it – couldn’t show it. She was still mad at him for breaking into their room and scaring Violet and taking her key. But she was going to be way, way madder if he died.
So April let Tim douse him with alcohol, then carefully sew the wound. She watched as Sadie rigged up a heater and covered Mr Winterborne with blankets. Together, Tim and Sadie nailed big sheets of plastic over the parts of the cellar where the draughts were the worst.
But April … All April did was hold Mr Winterborne’s hand.
And pray.
THE OTHER MR WINTERBORNE
‘How is he?’
Things are supposed to look better in the morning – that’s what people always said. But, in April’s experience, people lied.
A lot.
‘He’s worse,’ Sadie said even though the sun had come out and the air in the cellar felt crisp and clean, like new sheets
on a perfectly made bed.
Things should have felt better.
But the man on the makeshift pallet was sweating and shivering at the same time, and no matter how many blankets they covered him with, he shook like he was still submerged in the icy water. No matter how many times they brought the wet sponge to his lips, he drank like he was lost in a desert.
No matter how many times April prayed for him to wake up and yell at her for bringing two more pesky kids into the sanctuary of his cellar, his eyes stayed closed, and his cries stayed muffled, and his fever never did break.
Luckily, it was Saturday, which meant no French lessons with Smithers or maths lessons with Ms Nelson, and as long as they took it in shifts, no one asked any questions – yet. They had time, April knew. She just hoped Gabriel Winterborne could say the same.
‘He’s not waking up,’ Sadie said while she paced. ‘Why hasn’t he woken up?’
‘His pulse is strong, and his colour is better,’ April told her.
‘But he’s not waking up!’ Sadie shouted, then seemed to feel bad about it. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just worried.’
‘I know,’ April said. ‘Me too.’
‘It’s just … That’s Gabriel Winterborne. And I was raised that when you find a lost billionaire with a sword sticking out of him, you tell someone. Why is he here? Why didn’t he tell anyone he was back? Why—’
‘I don’t know,’ April said as Gabriel started tossing again. She tried to hold down his arm so he wouldn’t tear his stitches, but he fought against her, mumbling, ‘No. No. No!’
‘Shh. It’s OK,’ April told him, because that’s what mums always said in the movies.
‘Have to move,’ he said.
‘No, actually, you have to stay very, very still,’ April said, but he wasn’t listening.
‘Not safe. Never safe. Not safe. Never—’
The words were like a mantra – like a prayer – and when April told him, ‘You’re safe now,’ he finally stopped fighting. But that was probably just because he was, once again, out cold.
‘April?’ Sadie asked after a long time. ‘What happened last night?’
‘I don’t know,’ April said again, but the truth was, she did know. Not everything. But she knew about a key and a trip to the mini mansion. She knew the way he’d crouched on the rooftop as the moon glistened off of his blades. She knew how he acted whenever he heard Ms Nelson’s voice.