Once Upon a Haunted Moon (The Keeper Saga)

by Thompson, K. R.

  The old man relaxed visibly, shutting his eyes as he leaned back in the recliner and let out a long breath, “Good…good.” He opened up his eyes, “Then what brings you here?”

  Nikki and I exchanged glances, and then we took turns, filling him in on what we knew.

  There was more life in his face now, as he took in every detail we could give him. When we finished, he sat, contemplating his next words.

  “The Spriteblood have strong magic. In the stories of our people, they have always been one of our most feared adversaries. When my grandson was born with his bright eyes, I knew she would come, though everyone believed Adam’s eyes came from his mother. But I knew. I taught Adam everything I could to prepare him. I hoped he would be strong enough when the time came. But that time has come now and she has taken my grandson. It is up to you to defeat her,” he gave us an even look, as if daring us to contradict him, then asked, “Did you find the other one? The sister?”

  “Wynter?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, we found her, and she talked in riddles. But her house has mysteriously burned down and now she’s missing, too,” I added dryly, “For all the clues she gave us, all we’ve found was a warning in an attic, and a newspaper clipping…”

  “…about the library at school!” Nikki nearly shouted, startling both the old man and me. She jumped up from the couch, “I think I know where to look for her!”

  Nikki left Adam’s grandpa sitting with a surprised look on his face as she ran out the door. I gave the old man a small, apologetic shrug, and then ran after her.

  We nearly collided with the rest of Keepers on the back porch.

  “What’s going on?” Erik looked startled as I plowed him off the last step, “We saw Nikki’s Jeep and came to check on you guys.”

  “We’ve got to get to the school. I think I know where Wynter is!” Nikki said.

  “School has already let out a few hours ago. It’s closed,” Tommy informed us, “and I’m too young to get a record for breaking and entering.”

  “Don’t call it ‘breaking and entering,’“ Michael elbowed him, and joked, “That sounds so negative. We aren’t going to break anything, we’re just going to talk to the librarian. They should be proud of us for being committed.”

  “Yeah, we’ll be committed, one way or the other,” Tommy frowned.

  “Zue took Tori, too,” I ignored the cousins, and told Erik. After all, since he was in charge, it was best if he had all the information.

  “Oh, man,” he groaned, “What did she want with Tori?”

  “We don’t know, but if we can find Wynter, we may be able to figure out where she’s taken them,” Nikki told him, then looked at the cousins, “Sorry, guys, but we’re heading back to school. I saw a door in the library for a restricted section. Wynter didn’t want me to see it when I was there before. She may be in there, or maybe we’ll find some other clue. Get ready, ’cause if we have to, we’re breaking and entering.”

  As luck would have it, we didn’t have to break anything. The hardest part was squeezing the six of us in Nikki’s Jeep to get there. But once we arrived, getting into the school was a snap. Ms. Mullins, the elderly school nurse, had forgotten and left a ground floor window half way open. With one quick shove, it slid all the way up, and we were all back in the school again, making our way to the library’s giant wooden doors in a matter of minutes.

  “You’re sure it’s here.” The dread hanging on his voice made it seem more a statement than a question. “I swear I’ve been in this library a thousand times and I’ve never seen any kind of door back there, just an old, paneled wall.” An uncharacteristic frown etched deep into Erik’s slightly-rounded face, making him look older and more mature.

  “I’m sure, Erik,” Nikki answered as we swung the big wooden doors open and stepped through.

  This room had always seemed charged with magic, but then I had never been there when the head librarian wasn’t in attendance. I always thought it was Wynter’s presence that had made the books come alive, shuffling around on their antique bookcases at her command. Even that took some getting used to, after years of seeing dour old Mrs. Graham sitting at what seemed the dullest place in the entire school.

  When we entered, though, I realized I had been wrong. It felt as if every atom of energy and magic in the room turned its attention to the big double doors and was watching us intently. The room filled with the echoing whispers of turning pages, and the huge, carved oak bookcases screeched against the marble floor as they turned to face us.

  Ed, Michael, and Tommy flanked us as we walked in a tight group across the large open area in the center of the room to the giant, black staircase that spiraled through the ceiling to the next level.

  “You guys go up and check it out up there. Stay together,” Erik said with a lowered voice to the cousins, who nodded in unison and vanished up the steps. The exact second they stepped off at the top, it shifted, clanking as the curves of the spiral contracted, squeezed, and then returned to normal. It looked like it had given a giant shrug to throw off anyone trying to climb it.

  “I’ve never felt it act this way in here,” Ed eyed the staircase critically. Up to this point, he was silent as he watched and listened to the rest of us.

  “Yeah, so much for your friendly school library. Whenever we find ye ol’ fairy queen, we’ll have to inform her that while she was on vacation and eating our leader, her books behaved themselves very badly,” Erik mumbled, folding his arms across his gray t-shirt with the huge tie-dye smiley face that looked much happier than it’s wearer.

  I was contemplating punching him for the crack about Adam, since Nikki stood right next to us, when Tommy called down, his voice wavering, “Uh…Erik?”

  “Yeah? Everything ok up there?”

  “Uh…no…well, what I mean to say is — there isn’t anybody up here, just more of those freaky books like down there, and stuff’s moving around…”

  “Okay, so get back down here,” Erik ordered, rubbing a hand through his short hair in exasperation, causing it to stand up in spiky black tufts.

  “We can’t. We’re stuck,” Michael’s voice came down succinctly and oddly calm — even if slightly breathless.

  Ed started toward them and was halfway up there, when suddenly the spindly wrought iron handrail stretched to twice its original length, towering above his head. Sensing danger, he sprang over the low side of the railing a split second before it clanged together, folding with the other side like giant, black fingers, crushing the steps beneath.

  Ed hit the hard floor beside us a snarling, ticked off wolf. Lips pulled back from sharp fangs, he growled, while his cream colored fur stuck up straight along the ridge of his back. Forgetting we were even there, he circled the stairs, claws clicking rhythmically on the marble, as he continued snarling, eyeing the stairs in contempt, jaws snapping at the metal banisters as he passed.

  “Cool it,” Erik told Ed, who totally ignored him, and continued circling. Erik shook his head, and then he leaned over as close as he dared to try to see the cousins. He looked over at me and shook his head again, “I can’t see them from here. Do you think you can get closer over there?”

  “Hold on,” I said, finding a better angle than he had to look up. I crouched on the floor, angling as close as I dared to the steps, until I finally caught sight of them.

  Where the handrail tried to kill Ed, it apparently liked Tommy and Michael somewhat better. It wrapped around them, and although it looked rather uncomfortable, being as they were squashed together, it gave the appearance of a large iron birdcage, “You guys doing ok up there?”

  “Yeah, just stuck,” Tommy echoed Michael as they stared back down at me through the spaces of their prison, then mumbled to his cousin, “I knew we’d get jail time for coming in here, but I still didn’t think something like this would happen.”

  “Yo, Eats Dirt Young Eagle, you’re the brains of this group, how ’bout coming back from Wolfy-ville and hel
p get us out of here?” Michael tried to joke as he caught sight of Ed pacing.

  At the mention of his name, Ed looked up, and (still walking) bumped into Nikki. He turned, and the next instant she was pinned on her back with a muzzle full of sharp fangs in her face. Nikki reacted faster than I could. She slapped him, hitting him square on his soft, black nose…

  Hard.

  For some reason, I expected him to rip her throat out, but instead he jumped off her in the exact instant that Erik tackled him, sending them both flipping across the floor in a tangled mess of arms, legs, and fur. They were coming close to landing against a bookcase, when it apparently decided that it didn’t want to soften their landing and scooted out of the way, cracking hard against the filing cabinet behind it. Loose papers exploded from the drawers, flooding the air with sheets of white, temporarily obscuring everything in sight.

  When the air cleared, Erik was in the process of untangling from Ed, who was lying on the floor, rubbing his sore muzzle with his foreleg. Now sure that he wasn’t going to try to eat anyone else, Erik gave him a reproachful look, “Seriously, dude. Chill out!!”

  Ed let out a high-pitched whine, then he buried his nose under his paws, but his dark brown eyes locked on Nikki for a moment, and I could tell he was sending her a quiet apology.

  “It’s all right, you didn’t mean to. This place is enough to make anyone act a little freaked out.” Nikki smiled her biggest smile, stretching it as far as it would go in an obvious effort to convey her absolute forgiveness. She showed more teeth than Ed had moments before, but he must have bought it, because his cream colored mist sparkled around him, and he shifted back to human, though he wouldn’t meet her eyes again.

  “If anyone is still alive down there, please hurry — this thing’s changed its mind, I think.” Panic edged Tommy’s voice. “It’s tightening up around us!”

  “It’s booby-trapped,” I said, taking an experimental step toward the stairs, “I think Wynter’s put a spell here to ward off intruders, the same way she spelled her house.” The metal steps groaned and clinked.

  Michael gasped, “Dude, step back. It doesn’t like you! At least her house didn’t squeeze us to death. Somebody do something, this thing is getting tighter!”

  “A spell,” Nikki mumbled, “I wonder…”

  She took a deep breath…

  “Answers found in pages past,

  “Listen always true,

  “For Death comes; she surely will,

  “Next, she comes for you.”

  “Man, that’s morbid,” Erik shook his head, then watched in awe as the stairs unwound its metal bars, freeing the cousins, who flew back down the stairway in record time, “Where did you learn that, Nikki?”

  “When I saw Wynter in the memory wall of my attic, she seemed to look right at me, and those were the words she said. I thought it was just a weird warning, but I guess she was giving us answers, instead. I’m glad I remembered it,” Nikki looked relieved as she watched a bookcase that had come up to tower behind us, move back into its original place.

  “May I suggest we find who or what we’re looking for before your counter spell wears off?” I asked, skirting around a squat filing cabinet that waddled back toward the corner as it busily shuffled and rearranged its files, “There’s still a lot of magic in here!”

  When we finally approached the spot Nikki had pointed to, the wooden accents in the wall behind the librarian’s desk were quite busy clicking and snapping into intricate patterns, which changed every couple of seconds. Sensing our arrival, it stopped making the pretty patterns, and chose the bold, crisscrossed shape of prison bars, overlapping layer on top of layer. The wood snapped and splintered angrily, making it well known we were not welcome to whatever secret it guarded.

  “Okay, now what?” Tommy asked uneasily, “If there’s a door here, I don’t see it and…”

  “…that wall ain’t acting too friendly,” Michael finished for him.

  The wall apparently heard them, and drew an outline of a door on top of the bars while small slivers of wood stenciled out a single, bold question in its center…

  Password?

  “Open! Says me!” Erik said to the door, whose only answer to the incorrect guess was to add another layer of bars across its front. Erik folded his arms across his chest, and rolled his eyes, “This could take forever! Nobody told me we would have to answer riddles!”

  “Wait, I may know this,” Nikki pushed her way around the cousins to inspect the wall closer, “It showed me a phrase when I was here before. Wynter was upset I had seen it. Let me see if I can remember how it goes…

  “Wise am I and ancient in all things.”

  The wood made a sharp snap in reply, then the bars shifted, wood realigning to form the frame around a door that appeared behind the desk. When the ancient oak accents had finished its new design around the edge, the door swung inward without so much as a creak.

  “Well…now that was interesting,” I said, observing as the magic in the wall finally stilled. I looked over at Nikki, “I’m glad you’ve got a mind like a sponge. There’s no way I could remember all of those weird rhymes and phrases that Wynter seems so fond of.”

  “Yeah, I’m surprised I remember them, myself,” Nikki smiled, still keeping her eyes on the open door.

  “Not all of us need to go in there. Someone should stay out here just in case things go south. Michael, Tommy, you guys keep a look out. That way if it traps us in there…” Erik broke off his instructions, expecting the cousins to know what to do.

  “…we can go home, ’cause we didn’t bring a tomahawk to chop you a way out and there’s no one else around here who will believe you’re trapped behind a magical wall in the school library,” Michael said in an unusually dry tone.

  “We’ll stay out here and watch, just don’t get stuck in there,” Tommy smiled encouragement to us as he nodded to the open door, “You guys probably should hurry up, who knows how long that invitation is good for!”

  “He’s right, let’s go!” Nikki started through the doorway before the rest of us could stop her.

  There were cobwebs hanging everywhere in the circular stone hallway on the other side. The four of us stuck together so close after we went through, that we kept bumping into one another in an effort to stay out of the webs. It was small. And it was dark. Ed, even though he was still human, started to growl. The sound reverberated, bouncing off the walls.

  “I’ve already told you once, man. You’ve gotta chill out! You’re not by yourself. We don’t like it in here, either!” Erik hissed, scowling at him.

  Ed managed to stop for a few minutes, long enough for us to make it down the dark hallway, without tripping over each other. We made it around a sharp curve, and the hallway widened, spilling us out into an enormous room with high walls. I knew the room had every bit as much magic as the library, because the wooden walls stretched higher than I had ever seen, so high I couldn’t see a ceiling. Millions of intricate patterns and symbols no bigger than an inch wide gleamed in the glossy wood of the walls that never ended.

  There weren’t any windows, but instead clear, round globes of light that floated above us, held up only by magic. I focused on one that floated over Nikki’s head. Each orb held a single, tiny flame that flickered with a soft light. There were thousands of globes. They bathed the huge room in candlelight.

  Even though this room looked a lot better than the hallway, it still looked like no one had entered it in a really long time. When it became rather apparent that we were alone, everyone relaxed, and we spread out just far enough that we kept from bumping into one another.

  There was only one thing in the room other than the lights. A type of podium that sat dead center, with something propped up in the middle of it.

  Ed started growling again as soon as he noticed it and switched back to his wolf.

  The closer we came to it, the stronger the scent became…

  A huge book hovered above the podium on an unsee
n current of air. It looked older than time, with a flaking brown cover, brittle-looking paper, and a strange black clasp that held its cover shut. We circled the podium to get a better look at it, most of us stopped to stare at it — but Ed kept circling and growling, keeping a wary distance from everything and everyone.

  The “clasp” was actually the leg of some large bird of prey that erupted from the center of the cover as if the bird were somewhere in the book, and only his leg had managed to break through. Three black, scaly talons spread around the girth of the book, claws curling to keep it shut.

  “Wow,” I whispered. The scent had gotten stronger now, a decaying, rotten smell, which I attributed to the dead claw, “That bird book really stinks.”

  “That isn’t the part that you’re smelling,” Erik’s voice dropped an octave, “It’s the cover. It’s skin.”

  “You mean leather, right?” I asked, daring to hope that I was only smelling a dead cow.

  “Huh-uh,” he shook his head as he crinkled up his nose, backing up a step from the podium.

  Nikki stood frozen, staring at the floating book, then said with an odd tone in her voice, “It’s human.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ella

  The Village

  November 25, 1774

  She woke that night. Nightmares were always her dark companion when the sun set. Before, she knew Bright Eyes would be there, waiting to sit with her through the night, so it had made them better. Just the knowledge that there was someone who loved her enough to sit with her through the darkness had made the difference.

  Now he was gone, and they were worse. She had no one. Crying softly, she rose and took a blanket, leaving the hut. She went out to her stump, hating the knowledge that she would be alone.

  She sat, staring into the sky, at the bright star and the Moon beside him. A mournful howl from up on the hill echoed through the still air. Ella realized she wasn’t the only one crying that night. She looked toward the sound, and spotted the huge gray wolf, pacing under the moonlight.