Covenkeepers

by Denise Gwen

  “You’re telling me we can get to the castle from here?” Bettina studied the drainage pipe with a dubious expression.

  Maddie grinned. “Oh, yeah. I found it out by accident one day when I was playing witches and warlocks with Marcus.”

  Bettina flashed her an upraised eyebrow. “Tell me you weren’t fooling around with Marcus.”

  “Okay,” Maddie said, “then I won’t tell you.”

  Bettina rolled her eyes. “He is such bad news. You do know that, don’t you?”

  Maddie giggled.

  “Dear me,” Bettina said, gazing with asperity down at the pipe. “Dear me. Of all the possible junior warlocks not to mess around with, Marcus is at the top of that list. As a matter of fact—”

  “We were hiding out from Nana one day, and so we ran down to the dungeon. And then—” About to say more, Maddie’s eyes filled with tears at the thought of her beloved nana.

  Maddie recalled a time when going to the dungeon meant playing games with the other young witches and warlocks. Many happy hours were spent down there, chasing after her friends, but no more; those times were long gone. Once Ezekiel arrived from Transylvania with his family, he took over their happy home and everything changed for the worse, and forever.

  Maddie shook her head with irritation.

  That’s enough wallowing in the past. It’s time to focus on the present.

  “Anyway,” she continued, drying her tears, “we were searching for a hiding place—”

  “I won’t ask you why,” Malamar snorted with derision.

  “—and I found this small passageway. Way too small for an adult to crawl through, but just the right size for a little kid. We followed it a good ways out and walked what felt like several ages, and just when we started to get scared, we saw a light in the distance. We kept on walking, and that’s when we found our way out here.” She gestured to the drainage pipe. “An awesome secret place to hide, let me tell you.”

  “Hm,” Bettina mused. “But you say it gets narrow at the entrance, just inside the dungeon?”

  Maddie scrunched up her eyebrows, thinking. “It’s been a long time since I’ve used this passageway. And like I said, just the right size for a little kid, but it may get a bit tight when we get closer to the castle.”

  A pensive frown flitted across Bettina’s features. “We can always shape-shift, but I’d rather not do that, especially not if we need to be ready to fight when we reach the dungeon.”

  “Why don’t we just try it,” Malamar suggested, “and if it looks like you need to shape-shift, you’ll do it when the time is right.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Bettina said. “Come on, let’s get going. We’ve lost enough time.”

  Maddie hopped down the embankment and slid directly into a squidgy pile of wet, slucky mud. “Yuck.” Slipping and sliding, she worked her way up to the concrete edge of the drainage pipe. “Eeew.” She wrinkled up her nose with distaste. “It stinks of cat pee.”

  “Not mine,” Malamar replied in a deeply offended tone.

  Maddie chuckled as she pulled herself up and onto the concrete ledge of the drainage pipe. She extended her hand. “You want a lift up?”

  “Sure.” Bettina scrabbled down the embankment with their brooms. She slipped and skidded a bit in the mud, then jumped up and clambered into the pipe. She panted hard as she stood at the lip of the pipe, brushing the mud off her hands. She let out a heavy sigh. “Okay, let’s go. We’ll leave the brooms here for now.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  A soft thud behind them; they turned to look and saw Malamar perched at the pipe edge. Roby hovered at the entrance.

  “All right, guys,” Maddie said. “Let’s go.”

  “Hold on a sec.” Bettina rummaged around in her knapsack, then produced two tapers. She handed one to Maddie, then lit both tapers with the tip of her wand. “Now we can go.”

  For the first leg of their journey, the sisters walked side-by-side and upright, their tapers lighting the way ahead. After what felt like a quarter of a mile, the lip of the drainage pipe finally disappeared from view behind them; if not for the tapers, they would’ve been cast in complete darkness. Every so often, their tapers caught the gleam of a pair of yellow eyes, and they heard the scratching of tiny feet scuttling away out of sight. But apart from that, the sisters found themselves entirely alone, and the pipe remained eerily still and silent.

  After a time, the pipe inclined upwards and started closing in on them. Maddie scraped her head along the top rim of the pipe and cried out in pain.

  In a hushed voice, Bettina whispered, “We’re getting closer.”

  The pipe grew narrower, forcing the sisters to walk single-file.

  Maddie stepped behind Bettina, expecting her to lead the way. Bettina hesitated, then turned to look at Maddie. “You lead the way. You know the pipe better than I do.”

  “Oh, okay.” With a tiny flutter of pride, Maddie took the lead.

  I can’t believe she let me go first. It makes me feel almost like a grown-up.

  The pipe narrowed further still. On the rare occasion when the sisters spoke, their voices sounded muffled, as if they were talking into fluffy pillows. As Maddie crouched down and scrabbled along on her hands and knees, she bumped her head on the concrete ceiling again. “Yow! I don’t remember it being this tight.”

  “You were just a little girl then,” Bettina said.

  At last, they reached a point where the pipe narrowed precipitously. Maddie stopped and stretched her hands ahead of her, feeling around the lining of the pipe. It felt slimy, wet, and narrow. She drew back her hands and cringed with revulsion; slick with scum and the detritus from years of backed-up drainage, her hands were coated in a stinky goo. She certainly didn’t remember it being this gross.

  “Do you think we ought to shape-shift?” she asked worriedly.

  “Do you think you can make it through without doing that?”

  “I think so, but I’m literally going to be crawling on my elbows.”

  “See if you can manage it,” Bettina urged. “I don’t know what’s waiting for us on the other side, and I want to make sure we’re prepared.”

  “Okay.” She shivered from the sludgy drippings falling off the scummy lining above her head and drew in her arms and legs as close to her body as she could manage. As she crawled forward on her elbows like a bug, she shimmied through the last bit of pipe. For one dreadful moment she thought she might get trapped—how long ago did she so gleefully crawl through this thing?—when she saw something up ahead that made her heart leap with relief. At the end of the passageway, she saw a wrought iron grate; she’d nearly reached the dungeon. Redoubling her efforts, she scrunched and shimmied her way up the passageway. At last, her nose pressed up against the grate; it felt cool to the touch.

  She craned her neck from one side to the other and saw the entire width and breadth of the dungeon. A cavernous, circular space, filled with eight enormous cauldrons—in olden times, when the building still served as a woolen factory, the factory workers boiled and dyed the wool in the cauldrons. In more recent times, the witches used the cauldrons for mixing potions. Ever since Ezekiel’s arrival, the cauldrons were put to a new, grimmer use. Maddie shivered with a tendril of fear.

  “What do you see?” Bettina asked from behind her.

  “Hold on a sec.” At the four corners of the dungeon, she saw the passageways leading to other parts of the castle; each passageway contained chambers on either side. It’d be only too easy for a sentry to hide in one of the chambers, or in the shadows of a passageway, lying in wait for some unsuspecting witch to wander along. Maddie decided not to be that unsuspecting witch.

  She listened intently as she scanned the dungeon hall from one corner to the next. The dungeon floor, made of marble, made it easier to detect the soft echoes, the footfalls of someone approaching. Maddie heard no noise, no sound; nothing to indicate a guard or a vampire patrolled the dungeon.

  Why is there a gua
rd here? After all, Ezekiel’s expecting us to enter through one of the official entrances to the castle. I’m sure it didn’t occur to him there might be some other way inside. I do believe we’re in luck on this matter.

  She deliberately avoided looking at the enormous brick of carbonite set against one stone wall; it was the carbonite freeze containing her father. She breathed a sigh of relief as she studied the small lights and buttons flashing on the control panel to the carbon block. At least her father lived, for if he’d perished, the lights would not be flashing.

  And Ezekiel certainly wouldn’t bother ordering his minions to maintain the carbon block if a victim had died; it simply wasn’t in Ezekiel’s nature to waste valuable resources on materials that were no longer of use to him.

  A cold wet nose pressed up against Maddie’s left arm. “Malamar,” she whispered, “don’t push.”

  “It’s not Malamar,” a soft voice purred.

  Maddie glanced to her left side and grinned. Bettina gazed at her in her shape-shifted form as a sleek black cat. Bettina knew all too well the complications of shape-shifting—a black cat, after all, can’t very well grab her wand and cry out an incantation or spell—but by the same token she loved it when Bettina transformed herself into the sleek little black cat now perched beside her.

  Bettina blinked her luminous blue eyes. “I changed my mind.”

  “It’s fine,” Maddie chuckled. “It’s fine.”

  “She makes a fine cat, doesn’t she?” Malamar asked, as proudly as if he were personally responsible for Bettina’s shape-shifting skills. He settled himself down beside her and licked the nape of her neck.

  “Do you see anything?” Bettina asked.

  “No,” Maddie mused. “Apart from Papa.”

  “How do you open this thing?”

  “Like this.” Maddie curled her fingers through the wrought iron reticules. She began to push the grate out and open, when she felt a restraining paw on her arm.

  “Look up,” Bettina whispered. “Something moved.”

  Maddie craned her neck, gazing up at the soaring arches of the dome-like ceiling. She gasped.

  “There, you see it?”

  Maddie shuddered. She knew what it—what they were.

  “This presents a problem,” Malamar whispered.

  “I suggest,” Bettina said, “that we move to Plan B.”

  “I didn’t know we had a Plan B,” Maddie said miserably.

  “We do now,” Bettina purred.

  And she smiled like a cream-fed cat.

  10

  Far above their heads and located at various points on the high-domed ceiling, clung thousands upon thousands of bats, their leather wings wrapped around their bodies, their heads tucked into their claw-like arms.

  “What are they doing up there?” Maddie whispered.

  “I don’t know. It’s far too early for them to be sleeping,” Bettina said.

  “What should we do?” Maddie said. “Leave them alone or get rid of them?”

  Malamar shuddered. “I say, let’s get rid of them.”

  Roby hooted softly. “They look yummy to me.”

  Maddie looked at her sister’s familiar with surprise. Roby rarely spoke.

  Bettina considered. She glanced around the dungeon, her sleek whiskers twitching. “If we kill them, we’ll certainly draw attention to ourselves, but if they notice us fussing with the anti-locking mechanism on Dad’s carbonite freeze, they’ll be on us in an instant.” She fetched a heavy sigh. “No matter how you look at it, we’re in trouble.”

  “So what do we do?” Maddie asked.

  Bettina shimmered back into her human shape, and the tiny space shared by the two sisters became claustrophobic, as Maddie’s face got pressed into the iron grate.

  “Watch it!” Maddie cried. “You’re pushing me up against the grate.”

  “I needed to shape-shift back.”

  “Give me more notice next time, will you?”

  “Look, we’re under a lot of pressure here.”

  “This is unbearable.” Maddie gasped, her cheeks pressing through the openings in the wrought iron curlicue.

  “Maddie, you need to focus.”

  “You try focusing with your face wedged between iron bars.”

  “Do you remember the incantation?” Bettina asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Only try to make it stronger.” Bettina drew her wand from her sleeve and held it at the ready. “Let’s join our wand beams together, and don’t forget, use the plural form, not the singular.”

  “All right,” Maddie said in an irritated voice. “I already knew that.”

  “Just checking.”

  “Come on, let’s get on with it.”

  Bettina glanced worriedly into the center of the dungeon. “To be at our most effective, we really ought to stand out there, to properly triangulate our wand beams.”

  “Then let’s get this grate open.”

  The girls put their fingers through the curlicues of wrought iron and pushed; surprisingly, the gate gave way almost instantly, but it’d been many years since small children used to dart in and out through it, for it screeched with a high-pitched, rasping sound as metal scraped against stone. The somnolent chamber echoed hollowly with the cacophony of the din. As the sound waves roiled upwards, the bats stirred and chattered excitedly.

  “Push!” Maddie cried.

  At the moment the grate finally released itself from its stronghold, it clattered to the marble floor. It sounded like the breaking of thousands of bone china plates.

  “You two could’ve made more noise,” Malamar noted dryly, “but I don’t see how.”

  “Be still,” Bettina hissed, placing a restraining hand on Maddie’s arm.

  Maddie felt curiously vulnerable. With all the noise they’d made, she could only imagine what might be happening in other parts of the castle. Did Ezekiel hear the horrific sound, and summon his lieutenants to investigate? Or did a spy lurk somewhere in a corner of this dungeon, secreted away in a dark corner, preparing at this moment to report back to the evil warlock? These thoughts filled her head, her heart and her bones; her heart thudded dully.

  She craned her neck upward to watch. The dreadful cawing and chittering of the bats high above their heads reached a terrifying crescendo, then, with a sudden explosion of noise, the bats released their perch-holds on the ceiling and swarmed the hall, raising a black cloud of dust and smoke.

  Bettina pulled on Maddie’s arm. “Come on. Let’s do it now.”

  The sisters scrabbled to their feet and, clutching their wands, ran into the center of the dungeon and ducked behind a cauldron. Bats swirled around them, making it difficult to see. If it weren’t for Bettina clutching her hand, Maddie might not know where her sister was.

  “Are you ready?” Bettina cried.

  “Yes!” Maddie shouted back. A bat landed on her head. She screamed in pain as tiny pinpricks of claws dug into her scalp. She shook her head frantically before tossing the bat off. A searing pain coursed through her. The bat had torn off bits of flesh. Before another one could land on her, she thrust her wand upwards.

  “Eviscerateus!” both sisters cried in unison, holding their wands aloft and pointing them upwards to the domed ceiling.

  A silvery stream of electric current shot from their wands, joined at a point a few feet above their heads, and gelled into a mighty river of electricity. The river pulsed and flowed, then exploded into a fireworks display of lightning bolts and fire, spreading to the farthest reaches of the domed ceiling. Staccato bolts of electricity shot from the fireworks of light and ripped through the writhing bodies of the vampire bats, killing them instantly. They exploded into pieces; bits and sections of blood, gore, and incinerated skin rained down upon their heads.

  In a matter of moments, dead bat bits littered the floor.

  “Disgusting,” Malamar sniffed, picking his way delicately across the marble floor to rub his head against Maddie’s shaking leg.

&n
bsp; Roby hopped ecstatically from one gruesome mess to another, picking out the best bits with his beak and gulping down raw bat intestine.

  Bettina shook out bits of dead bat bits from her hair. “My goodness, what a mess.”

  “You missed one here.” Maddie flicked a bat claw off Bettina’s ear.

  They jumped as a dull thudding sound reverberated through one of the hallways.

  “What was that?” Bettina asked.

  “I don’t know,” Maddie said. “But I think somebody knows we’re here.”

  “How could they possibly miss you?” Malamar said dryly, surveying the carnage at his feet. “You did everything except take out an ad.”

  Bettina gazed at Maddie, her blue eyes filled with fear. “What do we do now?”

  Again, Maddie was filled with the strange, lurching sensation in the pit of her stomach. A new wrinkle in her relationship with her older sister: Bettina asking for her opinion on matters. It made Maddie feel terribly grown-up and terribly frightened, all at the same time. She wondered if real grown-ups felt this way, too? Somehow, she’d always assumed that making decisions came easily to adults.

  She licked her lips. What was the best decision to make in this moment?

  “Do you think we ought to get Papa out?” Bettina asked worriedly.

  Maddie glanced at the carbonite freeze block sealing their father into an unyielding grave. “Why, yes, yes! That’s an awesome idea.”

  Relief flooded her older sister’s eyes, and Maddie knew she’d made the right decision.

  “Good thinking.” Bettina darted forward as Maddie followed, smiling wryly to herself.

  Bettina feverishly worked the controls located on the side panel of Papa’s carbonite freeze block, pushing buttons and turning levers. Maddie thought she might step forward and assist, when a roar behind her made her jump. More of a bellow, really, coming from one of the four passageways leading away from the dungeon; judging from the nearness of the sound, she suspected it came from the passageway closest to them.