“It’s new on Morgan. It was me granny’s,” Colin explained. “I can pour ye some coffee to go if ye like. The pot’s already made.”
Mr. McAlister gave his tennis racquet a practice swing. “Some coffee would hit the spot, actually—provide a smidgen of extra energy on the court. I am hoping to make a good impression on this collector—”
“Mr. McAlister!” I interrupted, before a whole new round of chitchat could get started. “Did you happen to save the message from my mother? I’d like to hear it before I call her back.” So I can make sure it’s really her and not the crazy Queen of the Faeries who I’m supposed to dethrone, is what I was thinking.
“Yes, I believe I did.” As I saw him start to reach for the pocket of his white pants, I mouthed a silent “nooooooo.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed, folding his arms. “But how silly of me to leave my phone back at the cottage! I forget how portable everything has become. In my day, to make a call we had to physically enter these large enclosed booths—”
My zip it, big mouth facial expression must have been terrifying to behold, but Mr. McAlister simply shifted gears again and said, “Would you care to accompany me to the Tip of the Iceberg? I have a few minutes to kill before my court time.”
I glanced at Colin.
“Go ahead. I’ve got a bit more thinkin’ to do about those nasty computer problems ye’ve been havin’,” he said with a sly look. “Go hear what yer ma has to say, and then we’ll get started . . . with what we’ve got planned.”
“I’ll be back in a flash.” I smooched Colin quickly on the cheek and touched the locket with my finger. “Thank you for this. I love you.”
I dashed out of the cottage before Colin could answer, but I heard him calling—“Remember, Mor, it’s the middle o’ the night at yer parents’ house—”
mr. mcalister walked pretty fast for a guy who was well into his second century. When we were halfway to his cottage he turned, reached into the pocket of his silly white pants and retrieved the oPhone.
“I realize it’s none of my business,” he said, handing me the phone, “but if you and Colin are going to have a chance at real happiness together, you’ll have to learn not to be so skittish about retrieving your telephone messages in front of him.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I muttered, fiddling with the phone’s hand-forged cover until it opened. I stared at the touch screen, stumped. The icons didn’t look like any I’d seen before. “How do you get messages on this thing?”
“Look for the picture of the ostrich quill pen.”
“Got it.” I tapped the icon and listened. Please, I thought, let it be from my real mom and not Titania . . .
“Hello, this is Hel-en Raw-lin-son speaking. I’m the mother of Mor-gan Raw-lin-son, one of your ‘Special Admissions Candidates.’ ”
Whew. It was Mom, using her sweetest, o-ver-ar-tic-u-la-ted voice. The ass-kissing voice, as I liked to think of it.
“I’m so incredibly sorry to use this number, I know we’re not supposed to. However, my husband and I have reason to believe Morgan’s wallet may have been lost or stolen.”
My wallet? What was she talking about? My wallet was still in my suitcase, I hadn’t used it since—since—oh, fek—
“You see, her father went online to pay the bills and found a charge on Morgan’s American Express account that seemed suspicious. It was a rather expensive bus ticket to someplace in Wales; I won’t even try to pronounce it! But now we’re terribly worried, and we just wanted to make sure Morgan is all right and that her credit card hasn’t been purloined.”
Nice vocab word, Mom, I thought, rolling my eyes. Just because you think you’re talking to a college admissions office doesn’t mean you have to whip out your SAT Word-of-the-Day desk calendar.
“Please have Morgan call me back at our home number in the States. I would deeply appreciate it, since we don’t have any other way of reaching her. Thank you so very kindly!”
I snapped the cover shut.
“You seem displeased,” Mr. McAlister observed.
“No, I’m pissed!” I gave him back the phone. “It’s not easy to keep your half-goddess identity secret when American Express is ratting out your every move. Now my parents know I bought a bus ticket to Wales. How am I supposed to explain that?”
“That is inconvenient,” he said sympathetically. “Perhaps you can tell your mother your campus tour included a field trip: ‘Architectural Oddities of Great Britain.’ As the world’s leading, and in fact, only, expert on Castell Cyfareddol, I would happily write you a note.”
“It’s all Mr. Phineas’s fault.” I was too frustrated to listen to reason. “He’s the one who got my parents all worked up about me going to Oxford—as if that’s ever gonna happen. And basically I’ve been lying to everyone about everything, and when the truth comes out my family’s going to hate me, and Colin’s going to hate me, and I don’t even know who this Phineas guy is. Plus, I blew off doing my community service hours at the SmartYCamp!”
I knew I was getting off-topic, but I was so aggravated I just kept ranting. “Not that I really wanted to do them, but without them I won’t be able to get in to even the lamest of the lame schools, so now I’m going to end up being an X-ray technician and my parents will be so embarrassed they’ll probably move to New Jersey.”
I stood there, breathless and pouting. Mr. McAlister looked at me like I was a toddler having a tantrum, which was pretty close to my state of mind. Finally he spoke. “My dear girl, if you really want to apply to Oxford, no one is stopping you.”
“I’ve already stopped me, that’s what’s so pathetic! My grades suck and I have no extracurriculars. And get this: Last night the unicorns told me I had to get rid of Titania and become the Queen of the Faeries so I can save the human realm from getting all smooshed together with the magic realm.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “So that’s what they meant by saving the world. It’s quite a task.”
“Like I have time for that.” I threw up my hands. “It’s just nuts.”
“No doubt it is.” He twirled his tennis racquet thoughtfully. “But consider this, Morgan: In your heart, you don’t want the magic world to get ‘smooshed together’ with the human world any more than the unicorns do, correct?”
I touched the locket and thought of Colin. “Correct. But that doesn’t mean—”
“And you are still interested in pursuing higher education at a prestigious university of international reputation, are you not?”
“Well, yeah, but I don’t see where you’re going with this—”
“Morgan, think! Saving the world—surely that would have to count as community service hours, don’t you agree?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Would it?”
He shrugged right back. “I don’t know, either. Personally I think it would be a rather impressive ‘extracurricular,’ as you call it.”
Okay, now he had me completely mixed up. “So, wait. You’re saying there’s still a chance that I could get in to Oxford?”
He looked at me kindly. “Morgan, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my ridiculously long life, it’s that ‘unlikely’ does not mean anything remotely like ‘impossible.’ But your intentions must be clear—do you sincerely wish to attend? If offered a place in Oxford’s freshman class, would you enroll? Assuming a suitable financial aid package was made available, of course.”
Pull it together, you doofus, I told myself. He’s on the admissions committee, remember?
“Well, yeah, sure.” I felt kind of dumb all of a sudden, talking about my college plans when the world still needed saving. “I mean, why not? Oxford would be awesome.”
“And would you be willing to first perform this diffi cult yet urgent task that the unicorns have requested?” he pressed. “Community service, leadership, self-sacrifice—I do think it would make a significant difference in how your application is received.”
It was an interesting question: Could saving the
world be any worse than teaching long division to Monstrous Marcus at the SmartYCamp? Probably not.
And, since I was here in Wales and the SmartYCamp had already started without me in Connecticut, what choice did I really have?
“But Mr. McAlister,” I protested weakly, “I don’t even know how to do what the unicorns want me to do. Even they don’t know how I’m supposed to do it.”
“That’s what makes it such a challenge! But you really ought to have a campus tour before applying; it’s protocol. Let me make some inquiries.” He stroked his chin. “Perhaps something can be arranged. . . .”
mr. mcalister left for his tennis practice and i went back to the Seahorse. Colin was already nearly finished cleaning the kitchen. “How’s yer ma?” he asked, wiping his hands on a dish towel. “Everything okay on the homestead? They still think ye’re at Oxford, don’t they?”
No point getting Colin worried about stupid parent stuff. “Yeah, she’s just obsessing. I’ll call her later when they’re awake. Hey, you did all the dishes! You should’ve waited for me.”
He gave a low chuckle. “I’m not takin’ any chances with the housekeepin’. If Grandpap wakes up to dishes in the sink there’ll be a hue and cry like a thousand banshees wailin’. I can do without that, thank ye very much.”
“What’s a banshee?”
He looked startled, then laughed. “More Irish faery claptrap. In the old stories the banshees were beautiful faery women who’d come screechin’ and howlin’ around the house. If the banshees showed up, it meant someone was about to die.”
He folded the damp towel neatly and draped it over the faucet. “Now ye see why I never believed in any o’ that stuff. Most of it’s silly, and the rest is bloody morbid, if ye ask me. All right, we’ve got a big day ahead. Let’s have a cuppa and sketch out a game plan.”
Colin poured fresh coffee and we sat at the table. I half listened as he made flow charts diagramming the three different but possibly related mysteries we were allegedly trying to solve: a strange message scratched on the forest floor, a sighting of animals that looked suspiciously like unicorns and an e-mail received by me from Colin that apparently he’d neither written nor sent.
I say allegedly because the first two weren’t mysteries at all—at least not to me. But I did have a couple of burning questions of my own. The first: What were these Rules of Succession that the unicorns were so sure existed?
The second? When is Colin going to discover that I’ve been lying worse than a cheap rug from Ikea, and how much will he hate me when he does?
“The e-mail’s the easy one; I’ll get to the bottom of that sooner or later,” Colin explained briskly. “It’s shockingly simple to hack someone’s account. When I’m back at the computer lab at school I might be able to figure out who did it, or at least where the server’s located. Most of the serious hackers are based in Russia and China, but this could’ve been done anywhere.” He shook his head. “They did a decent job of writin’ in me own distinctive prose style, I’ll give ’em credit for that much.” He gave me a meaningful look. “They must’ve had a good time readin’ our mail.”
I blushed. The e-mails Colin and I had been exchanging during the past few months were noticeably steamier than they’d been before I turned seventeen.
“But—hmmm.” He frowned in concentration. “Even if they did read all yer mail, I hadn’t yet written ye about me trip to Wales. But I booked the ferry and cottage from me cell phone . . . I’d best give the company a call and see if the line’s been compromised. As fer Mr. Hacker pretending to be me tellin’ ye that something weird happened—well, that’s a generic thing to say. Probably just a coincidence.”
“Wow.” For a guy who didn’t believe in faeries, Colin had some wild imagination.
“Identity theft is serious business. I don’t mean to alarm ye, love, but there might be some con artist out there right now taking out student loans using your personal identification. Ye have to promise me to follow up on that. I’ll talk to yer da about it if ye like.”
“Oh, he works at a bank, I bet he knows all about that stuff,” I said quickly. “But I’ll definitely tell him.”
“Now, about the message in the dirt.” Colin smiled. “Let’s assume, fer the moment at least, that despite how warped the situation appears there’s nothing supernatural involved.”
I nodded, trying not to spit out my coffee.
“One theory I’ve been considering: Maybe it’s the work of a graffiti artist, ‘save the world’ bein’ yer basic feel-good type of message. And ‘Morgan’ could be a tag of some kind.” He gave me a teasing look. “A tag, ye know, that’s what them graffiti types call the names they sign on the walls.”
“I know what a tag is, silly.” Trying to follow Colin’s theory was like watching a game of Twister being played by a contortionist, though I was impressed by how many of the dots he’d managed to connect. “So you think there might be a graffiti artist on the premises who tags his work ‘Morgan’?”
“Why not? Ye’re not the only person named Morgan in the world, ye know.”
I rolled my eyes. “I know! Morgan Fairchild. Morgan Freeman.”
“How Grandpap loved him in The Bucket List,” Colin reminisced. “Though I preferred his work in The Dark Knight meself. Ye know, I might have it bollixed up, but now that we’re makin’ a list of Morgans, I could swear me granny used to tell stories about some old fairy-tale character named Morgan, or Morganne or some such. Wonder what she’s all about? P’raps we should look her up on Wikipedia.”
I almost upchucked my breakfast at that remark. Luckily Colin moved on to other topics. “Graffiti’s a common thing in Dublin. Some of it’s bloody artistic, in my opinion. But I’ll tell ye one thing—if there’s a tagger named Morgan wanderin’ Castell Cyfareddol, he—or she, I suppose!—is not goin’ to be content leavin’ his mark in the woods where hardly a soul will see it. It’ll be showin’ up other places as well.”
“In that case,” I said, thinking fast, “I propose that we take a look around and see if we spot any other marks or messages anywhere on the grounds of Castell Cyfareddol.”
I liked this plan for two reasons: It would keep Colin busy while I tried to figure out where the Rules of Succession might be written. And it kept us away from the forest, which at the moment was inconveniently infested with unicorns.
“Deal,” Colin said after a moment. “And later on we can head back to the forest and look for any unusual activity there.”
“Sounds good,” I said, while thinking, Would a herd of unicorns performing a halftime show count as “unusual activity” in Colin’s eyes?
Or would he find a way, no matter how convoluted and improbable, to explain that away too?
fifteen
colin puttered around gathering pencils and graph paper, and wrote a quick note to Grandpap telling him where we were going. Now that we had a “game plan,” Colin wanted to proceed in a scientific and methodical fashion, starting back at the hotel so we could survey the grounds of Castell Cyfareddol thoroughly, from one end to the other. Together we’d mark down everything we found that might have some relevance to the mysterious Morgan message in the woods.
We left the cottage, passing the jockey and his trusty steed (whom I now thought of as Seabiscuit, of course), and headed toward the boardwalk. Soon we reached the dragon statue. Colin stared at it curiously.
“How do they manage the iridescence in the scales, I wonder?”
“Scales?” Last time I’d seen the dragon it had been carved out of stone.
“I never noticed it before either, but there’s some kind of finish on the stone. Makes it look like the scales are catchin’ the light.” Colin reached up and ran his hand over the dragon’s enormous back. “See how it shimmers with all the colors o’ the rainbow? Must be the angle of the early mornin’ sun that’s makin’ it visible now.”
“Must be,” I said, while thinking, This is what the unicorns meant when they said the veil-slippage h
ad already begun. Colin stroked his hand over the scales again. A deep rumble shook the ground where we stood.
Oh fek, I thought. The dragon is purring.
“Wow.” I forced a weak laugh. “Earthquakes in Wales, who knew?”
Colin shook his head. “Probably some eighteen-wheel lorry makin’ a delivery to the hotel.” The rumble subsided. We walked on, and I glanced back over my shoulder. The dragon’s eye was the size of a basketball, with a feline metallic sheen.
As if someone had drawn it with a pen, an ink-black vertical slit opened down the center of the eye. The pupil widened slightly. Then the dragon blinked.
I whipped my head around so fast it was like I’d walked in on my parents making out. It’s already started, I thought in a panic. I’ve got to find these Rules, fast.
“If it’s feedin’ time at the conservatory we might want to stop in,” Colin remarked, as we waited for the waterfall to let us pass. “Watching the plants eat is bound to attract crowds. Perfect lure for a chap cravin’ attention, like our hypothetical tagger.”
I didn’t get it. “Why would feeding plants attract crowds? I’ve seen my dad do it. It’s just like watering, except you sprinkle Miracle-Gro in the water. Totally boring.”
Colin smiled. “Not at Castell Cyfareddol. It’s a carnivorous plant conservatory. The place is brimmin’ with bloodthirsty petunias.”
“Carnivorous? What do they eat, cheeseburgers? Oh my God, look!”
“What’s the matter?” Colin asked, worried.
“Oh, nothing.” I waved it off. “Just noticed the gargoyles had been moved, that’s all.” Up and down the boardwalk, the stone pillars were empty. Damp reptilian footprints led from the boardwalk into the shrubs beyond.
“Huh. They probably took ’em off fer cleaning and repairs.” Colin kept walking, a little faster than before.
What I Wore to Save the World Page 12