by E. G. Foley
“Oh, puke.” She scowled, thought about how that feisty little red-haired girl would want to punch her lights out for this, and yanked her hands free. Nixie strove for patience. “But, Jake, if you really loved me, you’d want to make me happy. Wouldn’t you?”
“Oh…” He considered this and still looked a little disappointed, but to Nixie’s relief, he must have seen she had a point and resigned himself to it. “Right! A mission for my lady. You stay here, my love, where you’re safe. Rest your poor hurt ankle. I will find it for you. Leave this to me! For I am your servant!”
With that, he raced off, the golden boy of the Order, careening through the woods to do her bidding.
Nixie rolled her eyes and shook her head, but couldn’t help laughing silently in relief. She leaned against a tree while he did the work.
“Found it!” he yelled several minutes later.
He ran back and helped to steady her, showing her the way up the path, solicitous over her every step. She kept her amusement to herself, but vowed she was never going to let him live this down.
“Here it is!” He presented the paintbrush doorway to her with a proud flourish. This one appeared as a rustic country gate leading into a sheep pasture on the far side of the woods.
“Ah! Good boy.” She reached to give him an ironic pat on the head, but to her surprise, he captured her hand and kissed her knuckles like some sort of revolting charmer.
“I deserve a reward, don’t I? Give us a kiss!” He started to pull her toward him, but she planted her feet with the stubbornness of a mule.
“Get away from me!” She arched back with a grimace as he leaned toward her, lips puckered.
Nixie shoved the idiot aside and bolted through the door.
“Come back, my princess!” he called after her, distraught, but thanks to his dart-induced infatuation, he followed.
And much to her amusement, the spell wore off as soon as he had walked a few steps into the next painting: a dim room.
Nixie glanced back over her shoulder at the sound of his mortified groan.
“Uh…what just happened?” Jake mumbled. “I don’t feel so good.”
She stopped and turned around. He was standing a few feet behind her, holding his head in confusion. She folded her arms across her chest, amused. “You don’t remember?”
“A little.” It seemed he could not bring himself to look at her. “Enough.” Another pained moan of embarrassment escaped him. “I am…so sorry about that. Please don’t tell anybody.”
“What, that you love me until death?” she asked pleasantly.
“But I don’t!” He glanced up, wide-eyed, and looked a little panicked. “I would never! Not when Archie—” He stopped himself abruptly.
Nixie arched an eyebrow. “Archie what?”
Jake lowered his head again, his forelock falling over his eyes. “Never mind. Not my place to say.”
Nixie felt a bit as if she had been grazed by a love arrow herself to think that Archie might have said something nice about her to his cousin. He really was the most interesting boy, and he looked so cute in a bowtie.
For now, she chuckled at Jake’s discomfiture. “Don’t worry, I know full well it was just the Cupid arrow talking.”
“Thanks,” he mumbled, then cleared his throat and struggled to regain his dignity, glancing around in a businesslike manner. The poor lad was obviously desperate to change the subject. “Right. So where are we now?”
“No idea,” Nixie said, but when she turned around and saw the scene on the other side of the large room, she quickly signaled for silence, a finger over her lips. She pointed across the dark background to where a richly dressed court dwarf and a royal lapdog in a jeweled collar were having their portrait painted.
They were both holding very still—and both looking very annoyed at the tediousness of this assignment.
Jake saw them, too, and nodded. Then they proceeded to tiptoe past, heading for the paintbrush lever on the far side of the room.
# # #
Isabelle did not know what made her glance up just then at one of the many masterworks hung around the stately parlor where the Queen received them. But the last thing she expected to see was her cousin and Nixella Valentine tiptoeing through the background of the painting.
In the presence of the Queen, the royal daughters, and the other nervous debutantes, she let out a small shriek of astonishment and sloshed her tea on herself.
Every pair of eyes in the room turned to her in startled annoyance.
“What is the matter with you, gel?” Her Majesty demanded in her no-nonsense way.
The royal princesses barely held back scornful titters, and the other debs gloated, seeing they had just moved ahead of her in Society’s great pecking order.
Isabelle gulped and looked down at her tea-stained gown. “Um,” she said haltingly, “I’m so sorry. I seem to have made, er, a little spill.”
Royal Victoria rolled her eyes. “Honestly, Miss Bradford, I fear that any gel who cannot manage a teacup may not be ready to join Society for some time yet.”
“No, Ma’am,” Isabelle agreed, lowering her head. “Sorry, Your Majesty.”
“Humph. Go.” The queen waved her off with a flick of her chubby, jeweled hand. “Run along, then, and do try to steady your nerves. You are excused.”
“Thank you, Ma’am. Sorry again,” she mumbled.
An attendant glided over and took Isabelle’s half-empty teacup and dripping saucer from her, handing her a napkin in exchange.
“Er, thank you.”
The other girls smirked as Isabel dabbed at her ruined pastel skirts in dismay, then popped up to her feet, sketched a curtsy, and started backing out. One did not turn one’s back on the monarch. At least she managed to remember that much.
As she walked backward slowly toward the door, trying not to trip and ruin whatever dignity she had left, she ran a furtive gaze over the art on the walls and held her breath when she spotted her cousin again.
How on earth had he got inside the paintings?
Oh, Jake, what have you done now?
He and Nixie had somehow found their way out of the background of the dwarf’s portrait and were now slogging with obvious difficulty across the gooey ground of a blurry, swirly, riverbank scene, in that radical new style known as Impressionism.
But dread filled Isabelle when she saw where they were heading next. No, don’t go that way!
She had no idea how they were traveling from one picture to the next, but the painting dead ahead of the river scene—the one they’d reach as soon as they turned the corner—was the giant, twenty-foot mural labeled The Last Day of Pompeii.
It showed the legendary catastrophe of Mt. Vesuvius erupting, spewing lava all over the Mediterranean like an ancient doomsday.
As she bumped up against the door, Isabelle had no way of signaling her cousin not to go there. Somehow at that very moment, Jake glanced into the parlor and spotted her there.
At once, he ran up to the frame of the picture and began waving his arms to make sure he’d got her attention. Oh, she saw him, all right, and the look of distress on his face told her he was desperate to get out.
She tried not to stare, worried that somebody else might notice her shocked gaze and also see him. There was no telling what sort of trouble he might get into with the Elders if they found out he was traipsing around inside the palace art collection. She did not know how to help him.
When the attendant opened the parlor door for her to leave, looking at her with a mix of pity and disdain for her blunder a moment ago, there was nothing she could do. She offered a hapless smile and stepped out; the door closed in her face.
She whirled around. I have to find the others.
Isabelle dared not waste any time trying to reason with adults right now. She had to tell Archie and Dani that Jake and Nixie were stuck inside the Enchanted Gallery. Her brilliant brother would surely dream up some notion of how to get their cousin and the witch out of the
magical paintings.
Sneaking past the room where the chaperones waited for their girls to return, she slipped down the opposite hallway. Unfortunately, this meant she had to go by the room where the vampire was pacing back and forth, waiting for his turn to see the Queen.
He pivoted on his heel and pinned her with his unnerving stare, letting out a small hiss as she hurried by. Isabelle met his gaze for a fleeting second as she fled, but fortunately, he made no move to follow her—not with two large Guardians posted by the door.
One could never be too careful with a vampire.
It wasn’t long before she rushed back into her family’s suite on the upper floor in Merlin Hall, bursting to tell the other two about Jake’s latest scrape.
“Archie? Dani?” she called as soon as she stepped into the apartment.
“In here!” Dani hollered back.
Isabelle rushed toward the girls’ room, opened the door—and screamed at the site of Dani O’Dell sitting in a bathtub full of blood.
“Calm down, it’s just tomato juice!” Dani said. “We got skunked.”
“What?” Isabelle clutched her chest and leaned against the doorframe, having been scared half to death. Lud, crossing paths with that vampire must have given her thoughts of blood on the brain. “You’re all right?” she forced out, trying to recover.
“Aye, just really stinky,” Dani said in disgust. “Archie said the only way to get rid of skunk smell is to take a soak in tomato puree. The gnomes gave us every can from the pantry. He’s in there, by the way.” She pointed toward the boys’ room. “Don’t have a conniption when you see him, though, he’s fine! We both are. And we figured out who took the Queen’s flag. You were right. It was the skunkies.”
“Lord Badgerton’s niece and nephews?” she clarified, still rattled as she went to check on her brother.
“That’s right, sis,” Archie drawled, his tone sounding unconcerned, but his appearance quite ghastly, in her view, as he sat up to his chest in blood-red tomato puree.
It was plastered in his dark hair and streaked across his freckled face, and the sight of it made Isabelle cringe.
“Afraid they got us good,” he admitted. “We were ambushed. But this isn’t over, believe me. Once we’re de-skunked, we strike back.”
“We just haven’t figured out how yet!” Dani agreed from the other room. Isabelle could hear in her voice that she had definitely got her Irish up.
Isabelle shook her head to clear it. “Never mind that. We’ve got bigger problems. Jake and Nixie Valentine are stuck inside the Enchanted Gallery.”
“What?” the two tomatoes shouted in unison.
“It gave me such a shock it made me spill my tea!” She explained what had happened and then rapidly concluded, “How they ended up in there, I have no idea, but we’ve got to get them out. Wash all that horrid red stuff off you and then we can start figuring out how to help them!”
They hurriedly agreed.
While the younger pair washed off the tomato puree with soap and water and then dried themselves and dressed in their separate rooms. Isabelle changed out of her fancy gown into a more ordinary walking dress, and then strove to rub the tea stain out of her skirt with some lemon juice before her governess saw it.
She had no idea what she was going to say to Miss Helena about the whole debacle—or to Mama, for that matter. At the moment, her social failure with the Queen seemed insignificant next to the problem of getting Jake and Nixie out of the palace artwork.
She hoped they were not getting turned into charred stone figures like those poor souls who had died so long ago in the famous ruin of Pompeii.
“Right, then. We need information,” Archie said, striding out of his room, adjusting his lucky bowtie and looking neat and tidy once more, though he still smelled faintly of skunk. “I’ll go to the library and dig up any clues I can on how to get someone out of the collection.”
“Well, if you’ve got that under control,” Dani said as she came out of the girls’ room in the middle of braiding her hair in two pigtails, “I’ll keep working on getting the Queen’s flag back from the skunkies. Hopefully by now they haven’t got rid of it to try to hide the evidence.”
“What exactly do you mean to do?” Isabelle asked, reaching to help finish her braids.
“Steal it back from them,” Dani declared, folding her arms across her chest while Isabelle worked on her hair.
“What if you get sprayed again?”
“I won’t.”
“You sound very sure.”
“Because I am. I’m gonna get those three if it’s the last thing I do. Disgusting little rats.” Brushing off Isabelle’s help, Dani finished tying the ribbon around her braid, then she set her fists resolutely on her waist.
It was then the rookery lass decided not to share with the genteel Bradfords the true extent of her Dark and Cunning Plan.
Namely, revenge.
Nobody skunk sprays me, Dani vowed to herself. This is war.
Those shapeshifter kids had made fools out of her and Archie by using their powers unfairly. She was sick and tired of being the only one around here with no magical abilities.
It was time to even the odds.
She knew just what she was going to do, too. She had thought it all out while sitting in the bathtub, and she was past caring if it brought her bad luck. She didn’t dare tell Archie and Isabelle what she intended, because she knew they’d only try to stop her, and there were times when an O’Dell simply couldn’t be stopped.
This was personal now.
Besides, she had promised Jake she’d help to clear his name, and Dani always kept a promise. She was getting that flag back, and then she was going to tell the Elders who the real thieves were.
Those skunkies were going to be sorry. This time, they had messed with the wrong redhead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Explosions
Jake and Nixie stumbled into the next painting and found themselves amid the end of the world. At least, that was what it looked like as Mt. Vesuvius belched fiery lava into the sky.
Hordes of fleeing people in togas raced past them, deafening them with their screams. Jake had never heard such a racket of men shouting, women weeping, babies crying, dogs barking. And all the while, the mountain rumbled in the distance like an angry, waking god.
Falling chunks of glowing-hot stone caught the buildings on fire as they punched through the roofs. Smoke lay as thick as the panic in the streets, choking Jake and Nixie as they tried to get their bearings. They were bumped and jostled to and fro, and had to hold onto each other to avoid being trampled or swept along with the stampede of evacuating townsfolk.
Shielding their mouths and noses to avoid breathing in the powdered ash that fell like snow, they struggled to figure out which way to go in the chaos.
“I think we’re in Pompeii!” Nixie cried over the chaos.
Jake nodded, glancing around. This part of the doomed ancient city was a maze of narrow, twisting lanes; the smoke crept thickly through the streets like a great grey serpent looking for someone it could squeeze the life from. “We’d better get out of here, fast.”
“We can’t just leave, we need to find the next paintbrush! It’s got to be here somewhere—” Nixie let out a sudden cry of pain as the surging crowd made her trip on her sprained ankle.
Jake caught her. Coughing a bit, he quickly helped her over to the side of the street, taking refuge in a sturdy spot between two houses. “Are you all right?”
She nodded, rubbing her leg, but he could see she was holding back tears of pain.
“Nixie, never mind the paintbrush for now. This city is doomed. We’ve got to evacuate while we can or we’re going to get killed.”
“All right.” She steadied herself. “Maybe we could try to get away in one of those boats?”
She pointed down the stone street to the sea-port, where Roman galley ships were filling up with desperate people trying to escape the flaming missiles from th
e volcano. It seemed a dodgy solution at best. The sea churned with violent waves from earthquakes in the seabed, helping to prime the volcano’s fury aboveground.
Even as Jake gazed at the port, weighing this option, one of the boats took a direct hit from a red-hot boulder, and everyone aboard it burst into flames.
“Maybe not.” He shook his head, torn about which way to go.
“Jake, I know we have to get as far away from this place as we can, but what if the paintbrush doorway is right here in Pompeii?” Nixie spoke up. “When the last big blast from the volcano comes, everything in this city is going to be destroyed. If the paintbrush is somewhere in the town, that includes our only way out.”
He gave her a grim glance. “Good point.”
“You’ve got to find it. Go,” she said. “I’ll only slow you down.”
“I’m not leaving you behind!”
“It’s all right! Get to higher ground and see if you can spot it. The paintbrush, I mean. If you can see it somewhere in the town, at least then we’ll know which way to go. If not, then we can evacuate. But we have to make sure. Hurry up and go. I’ll wait here.”
“Very well, but don’t leave this spot. We can’t afford to get separated. I’ll be right back!”
She nodded. “Good luck.”
Jake hated to leave her by herself in the middle of one of history’s greatest emergencies, but she was right. If the paintbrush was here in Pompeii, it would soon be destroyed and then they might never get out of Ancient Rome.
He did not intend to die inside a painting. Ducking into the abandoned stucco house they had been leaning against, he dashed straight up the clay stairs, taking them two at a time.
A moment later, he reached the top floor and stepped out onto a rooftop patio with a view of the sea. Its canvas canopy was singed and smoking, but still intact. Potted lemon and fig trees and tubs of colorful flowers were placed here and there, along with a stone statue of some ancient Roman god. But the people who lived there must have fled in the middle of supper, in terror for their lives. Their abandoned meal was still sitting out on the mosaic-tiled table, under an ever-deepening layer of snowy ash.