“Your go, Amy,” Lady Mairead prompted me from the head of the table. She’d just bought Park Lane and was busy counting a substantial heap of Monopoly money.
I rolled the dice and got sent to Jail. Great.
Alexis bought a railroad.
Lady Mairead was still counting her money. When she’d finally finished, she looked first at Alexis and then at me. Both of us were stone-faced. Then she slammed her wad of cash down on the table. “Fine,” she said. “Fine, fine, fine. There doesn’t seem to be much point in this. I thought playing a game might take your minds off things, but it seems I was wrong. So, what’s the matter with the two of you?”
“Nothing,” I said, scratching at a little blob of sauce on the tablecloth.
Alexis was silent.
I folded my arms.
Alexis put her head in her hands and closed her eyes.
Lady Mairead sighed. “You haven’t so much as looked at each other for days. Where are we, nursery school?”
I laughed out loud. Nursery school was very apt.
Alexis looked at me incredulously. “Amy, I told you—I can explain. Why won’t you at least listen to what I’ve got to say?”
I pressed my lips together.
“Would you rather carry on sulking like a five-year-old? Let’s clear this thing up.”
“What is there to clear up?” I snorted. “You’ve managed to get over Dominik at the speed of light? Great. You’ve fallen in love again? Great.”
“You know what—it is great!” cried Alexis.
“In love? What’s all this, Alexis?” asked Lady Mairead. “Here on Stormsay? With whom?”
Neither of us paid any attention to my grandmother.
“You could at least have told me,” I hissed. “I thought you trusted me. I thought we told each other everything.” There was bitterness in my voice. “But I guess I was wrong.” First my so-called friends in Bochum had betrayed me, and now my own mother! Was everyone I cared about conspiring against me?
Alexis blinked. “I … I wanted to tell you, but…”
“But you were too busy snogging, right?”
“Does this mean you’re going to stay?” inquired Lady Mairead. “Once the holidays are over? Are you going to get married, Alexis?” She looked as though all her dreams were coming true. “You could live here at Lennox House, of course,” she mused aloud. “Is it Henk? Or the ferryman?”
Alexis stood up. “I don’t know how to make you see, Amy. What I have with him is something special.” She walked around the table and laid a hand on my wrist.
“Oh yes,” I sighed theatrically. Even I could see how mean I was being to her, but I couldn’t help myself. “Young love,” I hissed. “Very young love.”
“Stop it,” said Alexis, angry now. “Stop embarrassing yourself.” She pulled me out into the hallway, away from Lady Mairead and her wedding plans. “Let’s talk about this properly, okay?” She put her hands on my shoulders, but I shook them off.
“I’d say you’re the one who’s embarrassing yourself,” I said. “Do you know what it looks like when you kiss him? He’s barely a day older than me!”
Alexis sighed and lowered her voice as if she were afraid my grandmother might be listening at the door. “He only looks young, Amy. Desmond isn’t a real person, he’s—”
“A book character, yes, I know. Will already told me. Blah blah blah! But even if he was a thousand years old, what about Dominik? I mean—how could you forget him so quickly? Do you even remember how upset you were two weeks ago?”
“Of course I do,” murmured Alexis. “And part of me is still upset, but on the other hand—”
“You found a passable replacement.”
“Would you stop interrupting me all the time?” cried Alexis. “I’m trying to explain.”
“Well, fine—please do. Because I really don’t understand.” My whole body was shaking now and I was finding it hard to breathe normally.
Alexis nodded, thought for a moment and then took my hand. “Come with me,” she said quietly. “It’s time you knew the whole story.”
“What whole story?” I stumbled after her.
“Come with me,” Alexis said again.
We climbed the stairs to the top floor of the house, but when we reached the corridor where our bedrooms were, Alexis led me straight past them and down to the end of the hallway, to a door hidden behind a wall hanging (which explained why I’d never noticed it before). Behind the door was a steep staircase whose boards creaked beneath our feet as we climbed higher and higher. We soon found ourselves peering into the dusty darkness of an enormous attic. Chests and assorted bits of junk were piled almost to the roof beams. But we still hadn’t reached our destination. Alexis now made for a rickety old chest of drawers from which she pulled several blankets, before directing me toward a narrow ladder that led up to a skylight.
Dust rained down on us as she opened the hatch. We pushed through a veil of cobwebs and out onto the roof, where we were met by the icy chill of the night air. I shivered. Alexis went ahead, wobbling across the ancient roof tiles toward a dormer window and spreading out one of the blankets on its flat, narrow surface. I slithered after her, trying not to look down. When I reached Alexis she draped a second blanket around both of our shoulders. Then we sat down and laid the third blanket over our legs. We were both out of breath from the climb, and for a while neither of us said a word.
Overhead, millions of stars glittered like diamonds in the black velvet of a jewelry box. Below us lay the moor, swathed in thick fog. In the distance loomed the silhouette of Macalister Castle. There were still lights on in some of its windows.
“This was my favorite place when I was your age,” said Alexis at last.
I nodded. “Because you can see the whole island from here?”
“Because your grandmother never thought to come looking for me here.”
“Mmm,” I said, wrapping the blanket more tightly round my shoulders. Something glimmered out on the moor, a little light. Or was I mistaken?
Alexis took a lock of my hair between her fingers, twiddled it for a moment and tucked it gently back behind my ear. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, little giraffe,” she whispered.
“But you did.” I kept my eyes on the moor, where the tiny point of light now appeared to be moving.
“The thing about Desmond is … I didn’t just throw myself at the nearest man I could find. And I did want to tell you about it, but I couldn’t. Desmond and I have known each other a very long time. In fact, he’s one of the reasons I left Stormsay in the first place.”
I turned to look at her. My mum suddenly seemed older. Nothing about her was lively or colorful now. Even her hair looked dull all of a sudden. I spotted little wrinkles in the skin around her eyes. “You and him—back then, were you…?”
Alexis’s eyes bored into mine. “Desmond…” she said slowly, as if it cost her great effort, “Desmond is your father.”
I looked out across the moor again. The little dot of light had vanished. I stared at the fog patches without really seeing them.
“Amy?” murmured Alexis.
I shut my eyes for a moment as what she had just told me sank slowly into my brain. Desmond was my father. It sounded absurd. I saw him in my mind’s eye. To all appearances he was barely older than me. A book character with burns on his face who’d been living in the Secret Library for generations. I was used to not having a father. The very idea of it felt wrong. I, Amy Lennox, did not have a father. That was how it had always been. Alexis couldn’t just come along and—
“Amy?”
I blinked. Alexis lifted her hand as if to stroke my cheek, but when it was halfway there she let it drop again.
“We never told anyone,” said Alexis. “Desmond and I always met in secret. We knew it was forbidden. A book jumper and a book character—the clans would’ve flipped. They would never have allowed it. If they’d caught us … Desmond and I loved each other very much, but we knew we woul
d always have to hide. And then there was the fact that Desmond doesn’t age—even at seventeen I knew our love couldn’t last. We meant the world to each other, but at the same time there was this constant fear. The fear that we’d be found out. And I was afraid I’d get old and Desmond would lose interest in me. And then when I realized I was pregnant…”
“I…” I stammered. “I thought you went away because of something that happened in the book world?”
Alexis smiled sadly. “Yes—that too. My practice book in those days was Anna Karenina and I found it difficult to watch as Anna’s love destroyed her and she threw herself under the train at the end. Anna and I were friends.” She cleared her throat. “And that was how I knew I had to do something about my own situation, if I didn’t want to end up like her. Sooner or later my love for Desmond would have destroyed me, too, I was sure of it. I realized I had to go away. I told my family I couldn’t bear to carry on jumping anymore.”
“But really you were leaving because you wanted to get away from Desmond?”
“I didn’t want to get away from him, but I had to. Mainly because I was afraid of how the clans would react to a baby that was … well, that was only half human.”
Only half human? It felt as though the roof had given way beneath me. My stomach lurched, and a thick fog filled my head. Only half human. Only half human.
Alexis was still talking, but all I could hear were those three words: only half human.
I’d always known I was different. But this different?
“… thought that if I left straightaway everyone would think your father was someone from the mainland.”
I looked at my hands, turning them this way and that in front of my face. They were human hands! There was no way I could be half fictional, was there?
“… have to keep it a secret, okay? Amy? AMY?” She shook me.
I let my hands drop. Out of my mouth came an unintelligible croak.
“Are you okay?”
“N-no.” I was shivering again.
Alexis put her arms around me and drew my face into the crook of her neck. She stroked my back. “Of course you’re not,” she said. “This must be a shock for you. I didn’t even want to have to tell you about all this, really—that’s why Desmond and I tried to keep it a secret that we were seeing each other again, but…”
I hung heavy in her arms as if turned to stone.
“I don’t think you’ve inherited all that much ‘literary-ness’ from him, you know,” Alexis went on. “Before your first jump I was very nervous—about how your body would react, about whether you’d even be able to use the portal, about whether you’d be able to get back on your own. But it looks like the only thing you’ve inherited from Desmond is the fact that you’re quite a talented book jumper, and other than that—”
“I can jump from anywhere,” I whispered into her hair. “I don’t need a portal to get to the book world.”
Alexis’s hand on my back stopped moving for a moment. I felt her breath catch in her throat, but then she seemed to force herself to carry on breathing normally. “That,” she began after a while, “seems pretty logical actually. After all, book characters don’t need a portal to get from the outside world back into their own stories. And since you don’t come from or belong to any specific story, you can probably just jump into any story you choose.”
I said nothing. I breathed in the scent of her organic shampoo, which reminded me of my childhood, and tried to make sense of the bombshell my mum had just dropped. Eventually, however, Alexis let go of me. “It’s getting a bit cold,” she said. “Let’s go to bed, shall we?”
I nodded. As Alexis bundled up the blankets, I looked again for the light on the moor. It had vanished. There was movement, however, on the grounds of Lennox House. There—wasn’t that a shadow flitting between the hedges? Something dark. Definitely not a stray sheep. It looked as though somebody was creeping along between the flowerbeds. Somebody with their hood up.
I squinted, but couldn’t make out anything distinct. So I clambered back across the roof after Alexis, lowered myself through the skylight, and climbed back down the ladder. Alexis put the blankets away in the chest of drawers, and we said good night outside her bedroom door. Then I muttered something about wanting to get a glass of water from the kitchen and rushed down the stairs, through the dark corridors of the mansion, across the entrance hall and out, at last, into the grounds.
The figure had been a little way away from the house. Somewhere over there, by the rosebushes …
Gravel crunched under my feet. I tried to move more quietly, intending to creep up on whoever it was … and stubbed my toe on a birdbath. Crap! I bit my lip to keep myself from yelping as I hopped around on one leg clutching my throbbing toe, spraying gravel in all directions. I fervently hoped it would sound like nothing more than one of the sheep having a nightmare.
Crouched low, I pressed myself against one of the neatly trimmed hedges and inched along it toward the next turning in the path. But the hedge seemed to go on forever. It felt like an eternity before I finally reached a break in the foliage and peered around the corner.
But there was nobody there. Roses twined, solitary and peaceful, around a metal archway. The lawn beyond glistened with dew.
“Thirty-three,” mumbled a voice behind me, so suddenly that it made me jump. When I turned around I found myself face-to-face with Brock, still wearing his blue dungarees and muttering numbers to himself. His eyes were trained on the path and his hair and beard were unkempt and dirty. There was no sign of a hood.
“Oh, hello,” I said, backing away a little. “Are … are you counting again?”
“Yes,” he grunted without looking up. “Brock likes counting at night.”
“Oh, okay—I’ll just let you get on with it, th—”
“Black pebbles,” he barked, pointing to a few isolated dark nuggets in among the light gray gravel on the path. “Pretty. Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven.” He carried on walking.
“Right, then. Enjoy,” I murmured as I headed back to the house.
* * *
I was dog-tired when I finally got back to my room and snuggled down under the quilt on my four-poster bed. But sleep was out of the question. My toe hurt and my head was buzzing. Desmond was my father! I was half fictional! And the thief was sneaking around somewhere on Stormsay under cover of night!
According to my phone it was already half past one. I had to be up for lessons in a few hours. But still I reached for the e-reader on my bedside table and scrolled through my library. I wouldn’t be able to sleep now anyway, that was for sure. And the prospect of spending hours tossing and turning and going over and over everything in my mind wasn’t particularly inviting. What I needed was an escape from reality. A little rest and relaxation in a benevolent world.
That ruled out thrillers and fantasy adventure stories for starters. I scrolled on past some soppy romances. I really was not in the mood for lovers slobbering all over each other. The children’s book section looked more promising. I browsed through some fairy tales and children’s classics and eventually clicked on Heidi. Yes—just the thing! A trip to an Alpine pasture, a carefree afternoon with Heidi and Peter: that sounded like the perfect distraction.
I selected a sunny, cheerful scene and laid the e-reader over my face. A moment later I landed in a brightly blooming mountain pasture.
A little girl was running toward me, barefoot, with an armful of flowers. She was laughing.
The knight mounted his horse. Tucked inside his boot was the princess’s dagger, and his saddle bags held provender, a map, and a thick, strong rope.
Thus accoutered, he rode out into the kingdom.
The princess waved farewell to him from the highest battlements of her castle.
She knew that he would stop the monster.
He would do as she had bidden him.
9
THE CHASE
I FELT AS THOUGH I’D BARELY had time to
blink and already it was morning. The ringing of the alarm clock on my phone jolted me from sleep after what had been little more than a two-hour nap and I dragged myself, head pounding, downstairs to breakfast. Alexis greeted me with a smile, no longer avoiding my eyes. Suddenly everything she’d told me yesterday came flooding back. The fact that Desmond was my father still felt hard to believe—especially when he appeared a little while later at the entrance to the Secret Library, just as lessons were about to begin, and told us Glenn had gone to Mainland to pick up a delivery of new books and had asked Desmond to stand in for him.
He was dressed, as always, in his monk’s habit. The web of thin scars on his face spread from the left-hand corner of his mouth across his cheek and up to his temple, where it disappeared into his blond hair. But in spite of everything he must have lived through, his gray eyes were still those of a young man. And so were the long slim hands emerging from the sleeves of his robe, with which he beckoned to us to follow him.
Desmond glided smoothly down the spiral staircase. My eyes were glued to the back of his head as I slithered—much less elegantly—down the steps. My neck ached as if every shelf in the library had collapsed on top of me, and my eyes were swollen from lack of sleep. I was limping a bit, too. Behind me, Betsy and Will (he had unexpectedly turned up to lessons this morning) were muttering something about the Laird, who had apparently flown into a rage the day before and made all sorts of wild threats to Will because he wasn’t jumping anymore.
I was longing to flop down on my chair, lay my head on the desk, and have a little snooze. But Desmond wasn’t taking us to the classroom. Instead, he led us deeper inside the library than I’d ever been before. He grabbed a cast-iron lantern, lit it, and strode on down ever dustier aisles of shelves, as if he’d been this way a hundred times before. He probably had, I reflected, over the course of many, many decades—perhaps even centuries. The shelves around us were so crammed with (increasingly moldy) books that they had started to sag. There was a smell of very old paper and our route took us continually downhill. The library seemed to be carving its way deeper and deeper into the bedrock of the island. At the same time it grew steadily darker all around us, with the passageways lit only by the odd lamp here and there. Eventually the lamps stopped altogether. The yellow light of Desmond’s lantern danced ahead of us and threw shadow patterns onto the rows of books and scrolls as we passed.
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