Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor

by Ally Carter

  “I don’t know,” April said as Gabriel started tossing again. She tried to hold down his arm so he wouldn’t tear his stitches, but he fought against her, mumbling, “No. No. No!”

  “Shh. It’s okay,” April told him, because that’s what moms always said in the movies.

  “Have to move,” he said.

  “No, actually, you have to stay very, very still,” April said, but he wasn’t listening.

  “Not safe. Never safe. Not safe. Never—”

  The words were like a mantra—like a prayer—and when April told him, “You’re safe now,” he finally stopped fighting. But that was probably just because he was, once again, out cold.

  “April?” Sadie asked after a long time. “What happened last night?”

  “I don’t know,” April said again, but the truth was, she did know. Not everything. But she knew about a key and a trip to the mini mansion. She knew the way he’d crouched on the rooftop as the moon glistened off of his blades. She knew how he acted whenever he heard Ms. Nelson’s voice.

  But, most of all, April knew he’d saved her. He’d saved her and then he’d told her to save herself and forget about him.

  “April?” Sadie asked again.

  “He stole my key,” April said before she lost her nerve. Her hand went to the place around her neck where it had hung ever since she could remember. “That key I always wear . . . My mom left it when she left me. It’s got the Winterborne crest on it, so I thought he could help me find whatever it opens. But he got real weird when I showed it to him, and then he broke into our room that night looking for it, and—”

  “He did what?”

  April hadn’t heard Tim enter, but there he was, looking at her like lasers were going to start shooting out of his eyes.

  “He . . . um . . .”

  April tried to talk—really, she did. But Tim was pointing at the man on the ground and shouting, “That’s who broke into your room?”

  “I mean, technically, he owns the whole mansion, so does he ever have to”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“break in?”

  “That man is dangerous,” Tim said, and April didn’t know how to argue. “He could have killed you.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t, and then he saved—”

  “He could have hurt Violet!” Tim shouted, because for him that was the only point that mattered. Then he was heading back down the corridor from which he’d just come.

  “Hey!” April called, but he didn’t even slow down. “Tim, wait.”

  “No,” he shouted back. “That man is dangerous, April. He could have hurt Violet. Or Sadie. Or you. He had a sword!”

  “He wouldn’t hurt me. He saved me!” April tried, but Tim didn’t listen. “Where are you going?”

  “To do what I should have done last night!” Tim shouted back.

  April knew she had to chase him down. Trip him. Tackle him. Pull a rug out from under his feet. She had to do something! Except a teeny-tiny voice in the back of April’s head was whispering that maybe Tim was doing the right thing. Just for the wrong reason. After all . . .

  Mr. Winterborne was sick.

  Mr. Winterborne might be dying.

  Mr. Winterborne needed a hospital and medicine and help, so maybe April wasn’t as fast as she could have been as she ran along in Tim’s wake. So maybe April didn’t do everything within her power to stop him as she followed him down the hall. Maybe she would have let him tell the world exactly who they had in the cellar except, in the next moment, the front doors flew open and Evert Winterborne yelled, “Where is he?”

  And then even Tim had to stop in his tracks. April and Sadie crept up behind him, peering over his shoulder as Smithers walked toward the open door.

  “Mr. Winterborne. How good of you to call.” Smithers’s voice was still fancy and calm, but there was an underlying edge to the words. Then Evert pushed his way inside.

  “Where is he?” Evert snapped, then looked around, as if expecting his nephew to pop out and yell boo. “I know he’s here somewhere. Where . . .” He started, then trailed off, and for a moment he just stood there, staring right at April—who had been caught by the men on Evert’s pier. April, who had been rescued by the man with the swords.

  It wasn’t hard to do the math. If Evert knew that Gabriel had been outside his house last night, then chances were he knew that April had been too. She waited for him to raise a finger and yell, Trespasser! But he didn’t say a word to April. He just gave her a look that was sharper than Gabriel’s sword and then he turned to Smithers.

  His voice was like frost as he asked, “Where is Isabella?”

  And then Evert was off again, charging past Smithers and down the hall, looking into every room. Tim started after him, but April grabbed his hand. “Wait,” she said, and for a second, Tim froze, staring at the way her fingers wrapped around his. “Please.”

  “April—” Tim started, but there were footsteps on the stairs and Colin was grinning down at them.

  “You’ve got to see this,” he said. A moment later, they were all rushing up the stairs and through the door and in between the dark shelves of books. Colin dropped to his stomach and crept toward the edge of the railing, silently looking down on where Ms. Nelson was working below.

  She was surrounded by a laptop and a half dozen newspapers and a notebook that was fatter than it should have been, bulging with Post-it notes and bits of paper sticking out from three sides. She looked as if the house could fall down around her and she wouldn’t even notice. Maybe that was why she wasn’t expecting the sound.

  “There you are!”

  Ms. Nelson jolted when Evert pushed into the library, Smithers not far behind.

  “Mr. Winterborne to see you, Isabella.”

  “Thank you, Smithers.” She smiled. She turned. And she, oh so casually, tucked that notebook beneath one of the newspapers before Evert got any closer.

  “Where is he?” Evert snapped, looking around like Gabriel might be under the table.

  “Who?” Ms. Nelson asked.

  “I know he’s back, Isabella. And I know you’re hiding him. Where’s Gabriel?”

  Even from the shadows of the second story, April could see all the color drain from Ms. Nelson’s face. She actually looked unsteady as she rose to her feet. “He’s back?”

  Gone were Evert Winterborne’s comically large scissors and his sad eyes. He looked like a man being haunted by a ghost. “If you’re hiding him . . .”

  She didn’t answer. She laughed. “Of course I’m not hiding him. Why would I ever . . . I want him found just as badly as you do. You know that.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Isabella. He’s here. I know it. I can feel him.”

  “So you’ll call the judge, then?”

  He looked confused. “What—”

  “If Gabriel’s back, he’s alive. And if he’s alive, then you shouldn’t get him declared dead, now, should you?” She raised an eyebrow, and the words might have been an arrow straight to his heart for how he reacted.

  “I thought we were on the same side, my dear.”

  “Of course we are.”

  When he turned his gaze on her, she froze.

  “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Isabella?”

  And at that, she finally smiled, but her voice and her eyes were cold. “Don’t you know, Evert? If Gabriel were back . . . I’d kill him myself.”

  It was always hotter on the second story of the library, but that wasn’t why April was sweating. She felt Tim shift beside her. She watched him start to push himself up from the floor.

  “Tim?”

  He froze, and for a second, their eyes locked and she could read his mind: five million dollars was a lot of money, but Tim would have handed over the man who broke into Violet’s room for free.

  Then, as if the thought had conjured her, Violet slipped through the doors and walked toward the banister where they all lay spying on the scene below. “What’s going on?”

  “Shh, Vi,�
�� Colin whispered. “Come down here.” He reached for her hand, but it was suddenly shaking. Her sketchbook tumbled to the floor, fanning out, page after page of thick black crayon over white paper.

  Page after page of the same thing: ruined bed curtains, broken windows, and light glistening off a shiny silver blade.

  “It’s the Sentinel.” Violet’s lip was trembling, but she didn’t scream or back away. She just kept her gaze trained on the floor below.

  Ms. Nelson was walking Evert to the door, saying, “You have my word. If we hear from Gabriel, you’ll be our very first call.”

  But up on the second floor, the kids were still and quiet, every eye locked on Violet as she pointed a finger at the man whose face she’d drawn on every page.

  “That’s him.”

  April had no idea how long they sat there, surrounded by stillness and the weight of about a billion different secrets. But the silence must have been too much for Colin, who smirked and said, “Well, I wonder what that was all about?”

  But April knew. On instinct, her hand went to the place her key should have been, and she looked up at Tim. “I was wrong. Gabriel didn’t break in and steal my key . . .”

  “It was Evert,” Tim filled in.

  “Yeah. And if Evert’s toting knives and breaking into rooms and stealing things . . . If he’s hiring men with guns to do stuff in the middle of the night . . . Tim, if he’s looking for Gabriel, then maybe . . .”

  “You think Evert would hurt him?” Tim asked.

  Sadie and April shared a look, and a cold chill seeped into April’s bones as she glanced at Violet. “I think he’d hurt anyone.”

  “Okay, what is going on?” Colin wasn’t smiling anymore.

  But Sadie only whispered, “You’ll see.”

  25

  The Short Con (Artist)

  “So this is where you’ve been running off to.” Colin looked around the drafty cellar—at the arches on the ceiling and the passageways that branched off, going who knew where. He didn’t seem at all concerned to have been led through a secret passageway and to a secret room with a very secret, very unconscious man on the floor. If anything, he only seemed upset that he hadn’t been invited to the party sooner.

  “So who’s the almost dead guy?”

  “Who do you think?” Sadie said, and Colin’s eyes got wide.

  “No way! You’re putting me on.”

  “Colin, Violet, meet Gabriel Winterborne,” April said.

  “Is he sleeping?” Violet asked, looking up at Tim, who hadn’t wanted to bring her down but had been even more adamant about not leaving her alone.

  “Yeah, Vi.” He tugged her closer. “He’s kind of sick, but we’re gonna make him better.”

  “How?” Sadie asked, because, really, that was the only thing that mattered.

  Colin leaned over Gabriel’s unconscious form, trying to get a better look. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Got stabbed with a sword, hit in the head, and thrown in the ocean,” April said simply.

  “That’ll do it.” Colin didn’t bat an eye. “Why’s he down here?”

  April could feel Tim’s gaze fall on her. Sadie’s too. And they weren’t wrong. The longer Gabriel was unconscious, the thinner the ice they were all standing on became, and the truth was, it’s one thing to tell a man you’re willing to let him die. It’s another to do it.

  “He’s hiding. We’re hiding him. But he needs medicine, and we don’t have any, so . . .” April trailed off, utterly unsure what came next.

  She was expecting anything but the sight of Colin’s shrug and the mumbled words, “I can get you medicine.”

  “You can?” Sadie asked, and Colin looked insulted.

  “Love, have we met?”

  * * *

  “Dr. Andrews? Smithers here, from Winterborne House. I believe we met at the hospital gala last—Yes, of course, doctor. So nice to hear from you as well.” The accent was smooth and cultured, rich and pure upper crust. The voice, on the other hand . . .

  “My voice? Yes.” Colin coughed a little too loudly in April’s opinion, but when the voice came again it was just right.

  “I believe I’ve caught a bit of a bug. We’ve recently begun taking in . . . orphans, you see,” he said as if it were a dirty word befitting even dirtier children. “Yes. I shudder to think what they might be bringing with them. I tell Ms. Nelson they need a good delousing when they get here, but no one listens to me.”

  Sadie threw out her hands in the universal signal for isn’t that a little much? but Colin waved her away.

  “Good of you to make time, my man, but I don’t think there’s any need to come in. I’ve had this before, and my London physician knew just what to give me. An antibiotic.” He looked down at the name of the drug that Sadie had researched and read it off. “Yeah. That’d be just the thing, you know. Just the thing.” He paused for a long time, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded even huffier. Almost like a warning. “Excellent. Tell me, is there a pharmacy that delivers?”

  And that was all it took. Just one eleven-year-old conman with a wider variety of British accents than anyone had realized, a “borrowed” credit card, and a plan to distract Smithers as soon as the delivery van drew up to the house.

  “Isn’t that illegal?” Sadie asked.

  “Yup,” Colin said.

  “Then how did you know he’d go for it?” April asked, and Colin looked at her like she might be the most naive girl in the world.

  “Winterborne House means money. Money means it’s just a phone call away.”

  “You mean it like medicine?” April asked.

  Colin shook his head. “It like anything.”

  April had stolen a lot of things in her twelve years: food from locked pantries, a pair of shoes from the lost and found, once even a puppy for a whole afternoon because it was cold outside and no one seemed to care how much the poor thing kept shivering.

  But listening to Colin, April wondered for the first time if it might be possible to steal another life.

  Sadie calculated the dose, and then they changed Mr. Winterborne’s bandages and brought down some fresh blankets.

  And then they waited.

  26

  Ms. Nelson’s Secret(s)

  FROM THE RECORDS OF SADIE MARIE SIMMONS

  9:38 p.m. The Patient exhibits sensitivity to light, noises, and Colin’s “talent” on the harmonica.

  11:45 p.m. The Patient seems to be thirstier. And sweatier. And stinkier. He is also, luckily, no deader than he was.

  2:22 a.m. The Patient has grown more restless and is mumbling in his sleep. So far we’ve learned ten new curse words. (We think. We just don’t know what language they are or what they mean yet.)

  5:15 a.m. The Patient isn’t sweating anymore, and he feels cooler to the touch.

  8:45 a.m. The Patient’s fever has broken, but he hasn’t woken up yet.

  11:00 a.m. No change.

  2:00 p.m. No change.

  6:00 p.m. No change.

  “How’s he doing?” April asked as soon as she reached the room they’d made for Gabriel. It was still a damp, creepy cellar, but it seemed homier somehow. There were lights now and pillows and a cot. A table with water and an ice chest filled with juice boxes. Someone had dragged in some folding chairs and a couple of laptops. It was like a real room in a real house, for a real family. Which made sense, April supposed. Kids like them were used to making homes out of anything—anywhere. She shouldn’t have been surprised they’d done it there.

  “He’s better,” Sadie said. “I think. The fever hasn’t come back, and his pulse seems stronger, and his color’s better. But . . .”

  “He still hasn’t woken up,” April finished.

  Sadie shook her head then glanced at Colin, and when she spoke again, her voice was timid and soft, and April didn’t like the sound of that one bit. “You don’t really think Ms. Nelson meant it, do you? When she said she’d kill him herself?”

  April ha
d been playing that scene over and over in her mind all day, but she still had to think about the answer.

  “No. I don’t think she’d kill him. But she could tell Evert, and . . .” April hesitated. “What if that’s the same thing? I mean, he broke into our room, and . . . I don’t like him.”

  She looked at Colin, who shrugged. “Uncle Evert gives me the creeps, and I was raised by professional criminals.”

  “I don’t like him either,” Sadie admitted. “But maybe she wouldn’t tell Evert?”

  But April was shaking her head. “She was there. At Evert’s house. When this happened.” April pointed down at Gabriel and the wound that had only barely started to heal. “Ms. Nelson was there. Meeting with Evert. While creepy dudes with guns did stuff under the cover of darkness and Gabriel skulked around with a sword. There’s just so much we don’t know!”

  “Okay. It’s just that . . .” Sadie and Colin shared a guilty look. Like they’d been up to something.

  “What?” April asked.

  “We translated his tattoos.” Sadie led her to the far side of the room where they’d set up the table and the laptops. “It was easy, really, once we identified the languages. There are six. Hindi. Korean. Chinese. Spanish. Arabic. And Russian.”

  “Okaayyy,” April said, drawing out the word. “What do they say?”

  “See this?” Colin pointed at a long string of numbers. “That’s an international phone number. As for the rest, well, that’s just it. They all say the same thing—the exact same thing,” Colin told her, then nodded at Sadie, as if he was willing to let her have the good part.

  “They all say ‘If I’m dead, tell Izzy I’m sorry.’”

  For a long moment, there was no sound in the cellar. It seemed like the critters stopped scurrying and the water stopped dripping and even their hearts stopped beating.

  “Sorry for what?” April asked.

  Sadie shrugged. “Something bad enough that he’d rather die down here than live up there.”