The Bad Luck Lighthouse

by Nicki Thornton

  Dex threw the boy over his shoulder and tore back up the beach as fast as he could.

  Angelique was sending out jets of blue light across the water, but they were falling a long way from the boat. Any bolts Tiffany was sending out of the firefly cage were also now feeble and badly directed.

  Alfie was safe, but the moonlight showed that Tiffany wasn’t even bothering to fight any more. She had picked up the oars again. She was nearly out of the cove and on her way to freedom. She was going to get away.

  44. We Do What all Sorcerers Do

  ‘ We can’t just let her go. We have to do something!’ yelled Seth.

  ‘We’ve no boat,’ said Angelique, sounding equally helpless, small glistening rocks scattered in her hair like diamonds. ‘No way of catching her.’

  Seth looked from Pewter to Angelique, hoping desperately to hear an idea, hardly able to watch as the determined figure in the small boat left the trivial waves of Gull Cove behind and hit the sea that surrounded Snakesmouth Island.

  ‘You two must be able to do something.’

  ‘We do what all sorcerers always do,’ said Pewter, softly. ‘We work with what we have. Don’t forget, she’s only using someone else’s magic – she has no power of her own, whereas we are four talented sorcerers. Come on, the game is not over yet.’

  Pewter started off up the beach. He might not yet have a plan, but he hadn’t given up. And four sorcerers? That meant Pewter was including Seth.

  Dex met them at the top of the cliff; Alfie must already be back at the lighthouse. The agent kept darting looks out to sea, and it didn’t take more than the sliver of moonlight they had to show he was tasting bitter defeat and not liking it one bit.

  ‘I must get Rendleton off the beach,’ said Pewter. ‘You three go on. If you go over the top of the island, I think we might still have surprise on our side. Work together. I’m counting on you. I will join you as soon as I have made Rendleton comfortable.’

  Seth didn’t need telling twice and started to run. They would be up high and in a good position to see Tiffany round the spur of Gull Cove. They must get in a good position before she rounded the point.

  The three of them stood there in the moonlight, buffeted by the wind. It was back to waiting.

  Dex and Angelique were poised at the top of the cliff, Angelique’s glossy hair blowing wild. They waited until, finally, the prow of the rowing boat came around the farthest rocky outcrop. Tiffany surely must be struggling and growing tired now, even though she was drawing most of her strength and power from the firefly cage.

  ‘She thinks she’s away. She already thinks she’s won,’ said Dex. He took out his dagger. ‘This is not over yet.’ This time, as he held his silver dagger aloft, it grew until it became a shining sword. Definitely not a letter opener.

  Angelique lifted her red cane.

  Out in the boat, Seth could see Tiffany put down the oars and lift the firefly cage in reply.

  As Dex gripped his sword in readiness, Angelique dropped her cane. ‘It’s too dangerous to mix too many different kinds of magic,’ she said. ‘We daren’t bring in too much, we’ll have no proper control over it, anything could happen.’

  Dex nodded, and waited not a second longer to blast Tiffany with a jet of pure blue. Seth watched her knocked backwards as the spear of light collided with the boat.

  The waves around Tiffany were pulling and tugging against her rickety boat. Her face, illuminated by another blast from Dex and mixed with the moonlight, showed a flash of fear. But that was quickly replaced with one of determination, as she once more lifted the firefly cage. A golden light started to build inside it. Seth sensed she was going to call on something new.

  There was an eerie silence, as though something was muffling even the sound of the wind and the waves. At the same time, they lost the light of the moon. A silent darkness was upon them, like a thick blanket thrown over everything.

  Seth realized with fear what it was, and the citrusy tang in the air confirmed it. ‘She’s been learning how to control the remnants of shadow magic on this island,’ he said in a warning voice. ‘Look out!’ he cried, spinning to try to see what was approaching, but he could see only darkness.

  He shouldn’t even have been able to notice the shadows arriving, but there was some peculiar quality to their darkness – they didn’t just blank out the light, but seemed to absorb it – that meant Seth knew that they were swarming.

  ‘We’ll need to hit the shadows with everything we’ve got, and we’ll barely see them coming.’

  But they could feel those dark shadows, cloying in the air, making it seem thicker and more dangerous.

  Seth braced himself and was suddenly struck again by Pewter’s words. Four sorcerers. He was a sorcerer too. And as the first tendril of shadow reached him, he had just enough time to remember his battle with them in the lighthouse. He slipped out the black book from under his tunic, and smacked it as hard as he could into the darkening air around him, hitting out again and again.

  Seth could just make out that Pewter had joined them. His hands were moving rapidly through the air. Seth wasn’t sure what he was doing, but unless he was imagining it, as Pewter’s hands moulded the air, the waves below were getting bigger.

  The inspector was concentrating on bringing Tiffany in to shore, and Seth knew he had to protect him from the shadows while he did so. Swiping the silently deadly air, he moved closer to Pewter. The inspector was standing firm on the clifftop, his long silver hair curling around him, his fingers flexed forward, making Seth think that he was standing side by side with the wizard Merlin, back in a time when everyone had known of and believed in the existence of magic.

  A shadow rope lashed out at Pewter, snaking itself around his neck, forcing him to grasp to free himself from the strangling rope. The waves dropped, the inspector’s hold on them broken.

  Angelique flipped the top of her red cane and zapped with a fierce blue light, narrowly missing Seth’s head as he battled on, using his black book as a cross between a club and a sword, ignoring anything coming for him and just hitting and hitting at the snake that was attacking Pewter.

  Dex tried to grab the shadows with his bare hands.

  ‘Use your dagger!’ Seth heard Angelique yell.

  ‘You said . . . too much magic about,’ Dex yelled back, wrestling with a shadow snake that was inching him backwards to the edge of the cliff.

  ‘I know what I said!’ growled Angelique. ‘Forget that!’

  Dex lifted his dagger, now shrunk back to its original size, and an intense light began to glow around him. It expanded to take in all four of them as they battled and blasted the shadow ropes.

  Dex then began to twist his dagger, and Seth could feel there was a loosening of the bonding power of the shadows. Dex started to draw them together, to control them. It was as if they were growing sticky and thick, less sure and slower-moving, as if the air was growing sluggish.

  The shadows were growing weaker, Seth could feel it as he struck out again.

  Finally Dex twisted, shook himself free and began to use his dagger to guide the shadows to him. He started to wind them around and around, waving the dagger through the air, twirling it again and again, gathering all the loosely bonded shapes together so the ball of darkness grew. The shadows started to look as innocent as candy floss.

  Then, as the shadow attack subsided, Dex put his hands around the ball and compressed it down and down. Soon it was so small that he was able to reach into his pocket, pull out a bottle and shove the whole lot inside, before sticking a stopper in the neck.

  He heaved a sigh of relief. ‘Told you I was pretty expert in darkwitching!’

  But they’d all taken their eyes off the boat. Seth looked out to sea, expecting Tiffany to be no more than a dark speck distant in the water, a determined figure drifting further and further from their reach, picked out by a channel of the palest moonlight. But he couldn’t even see her.

  45. Forget the Rules

&nb
sp; Seth’s insides clutched in crushing disappointment.

  He scoured the horizon. Pewter was at his side, his hands gesturing again to the waves. Seth could tell the inspector hadn’t stopped using his own magic; gentle, yet strong. He kept at it, but he’d never turn that tide. Tiffany would be far out to sea.

  Then the moon seemed once more on their side, and Seth was suddenly able to pick out the boat. The reason he hadn’t seen her was because he’d been looking in completely the wrong place. She must have been so busy using the firefly cage to control those shadows that she hadn’t had a chance to row. She wasn’t any further out at all; if anything, Pewter’s magic had brought her closer to the island. Was she still within their reach?

  ‘Forget the rules.’ Angelique said. She raised her cane, Dex his dagger alongside, and Angelique gave a short nod. ‘Just blast her with everything we’ve got.’

  Angelique rained bolt after bolt of blue light on the boat. The sea boiled. Dex’s dagger once again reformed to a silver sword and Seth could see, in the weird mix of moonlight and competing magical flashes, that the waves looked just like they had during the storm – angry, and as they wanted to hurt someone.

  Seth watched, wanting to do more than will his friends on, wishing more than ever that he had a spark of magic to offer. He clung to his black book, and suddenly it felt like someone was whispering. The words came to him and he yelled them into the wind at the top of his voice.

  ‘Yma nam-well!’

  The capturing spell from his mother’s book had come back to him like a thunderbolt.

  He did exactly as Pewter was doing; kept his arms outstretched, flexed his fingers, as if beckoning something to him. He raised his arms and said the words, repeating them over and over, yelling them out to sea.

  He felt his hands jerk.

  They seemed to snag, as if he had something on a hook. He felt something tugging back on his hands, getting stronger and stronger, and he had to lean backwards to control it. But he didn’t care. He didn’t care who was watching and if this ended in scorch marks and blasting and disaster.

  Then, just when it seemed as if they must be winning, that Tiffany was running out of anything to throw at them, there was another blast of light from the firefly cage and a shower of ice spears flew towards them.

  Seth was so focused on the tugging feeling in his hands that he didn’t want to move. He didn’t see the spear hurtling towards him, the pointed blade as sharp as a rapier.

  He did feel the impact a second later. Something had slammed into him from the side – Dex had flung himself at Seth, and they were both now sprawled on the ground. Seth sat up, winded. He tried to make out the tiny boat in the huge waves, tried to tell whether Tiffany was going to win, but then he saw that Dex hadn’t moved. He just lying flat out on the ground, blood on his face, his eyes closed.

  ‘We’re nearly there!’ yelled Angelique.

  Seth leaned over Dex, feeling for any signs he was still alive.

  He felt a pulse, enough for now. Seth stood, lifted his arms and it was as if the words of the summoning spell were ripped out of him again. He was barely aware of Pewter and Angelique, lost in a dark whirl-wind that blinded his eyes and clouded his mind. Yma nam-well.

  The boat was moving towards them, seemingly carried on the crest of a wave that grew quickly, draining all the water from the sea around it as it sucked and spewed and lifted the boat higher and higher, all to the sound of Tiffany’s terrified screams.

  The crest was level with the clifftop now, and Seth could see Tiffany was clutching the boat with both hands as the vast wave began crashing down on to the beach below them, water cascading in every direction.

  Pewter was running down the path to the beach now, but Seth was still repeating the words again and again, over and over – he couldn’t stop.

  The last of the waves splashed down on him, soaking him and Dex like a bucket of cold water. Seth finally stopped reciting the spell, and turned to see Dex shaking the water from his hair and getting to his feet.

  Seth staggered to the cliff edge and looked down. The tidal wave had gone. There was a spent flatness now about the water. The waves had subsided to a gentle ripple and there was a darkness to them that seemed bottomless.

  Of the boat there was no sign. Had it been swallowed by the endlessly dark and greedy sea?

  And there was no sign of Tiffany. They might have stopped her, but they hadn’t captured her. And that meant they had lost the firefly cage. It would be sinking to the bottom, past the fish and the weeds and heading slowly for the sand and the rocks.

  Seth ran down the path and edged nearer the water, picturing the firefly cage sinking slowly on its final journey. It was lost for ever among the creatures of the sea, taking with it his last hope of ever finding out if anything of the sorcerer’s spirit trapped inside it remained, any chance of freeing that poor soul whose power Tiffany had been stealing.

  ‘Get it, Seth,’ instructed Angelique’s voice sharply, right alongside his ear. ‘Get it.’

  ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘You’re close to it. You can get it.’

  ‘It’ll be at the bottom of the sea.’

  ‘Only you can do it.’

  Seth raised his hands again. He felt a faint tug, as if he had fish on the end of a line with one fight left in it.

  He stared at his fingers and reacted instinctively, moving his hands, lifting, reeling in, bringing the sea and the waves closer.

  And then, as if it truly was caught on a line, the firefly cage erupted from the water in a jet of white foam and flew into his hand. Pewter immediately sent out another bubble of magic and, just as expertly as he had done with Alfie, he scooped up a bubble containing Tiffany and brought her dripping and coughing on to the beach.

  46. Case Over

  It was tiny. So very small, even smaller than Seth remembered. Far too small to contain a whole human being. Perhaps he was wrong.

  Seth clung to the cage, still not quite able to believe it was in his hands and not at the bottom of the sea. But as he clasped it to him, there was no trace of warmth, of light, of anything that might give a sign that it was anything other than an empty cage made of flimsy twisted wire. It did not look the least bit powerful.

  He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, lost in the howling wind and the rioting waves – the sea was once again its own master, and seemed furious at having been manipulated. He was numb with cold, exhausted to his bones, and barely moved until he became aware of Angelique speaking in a low voice and trying to prise the firefly cage from him.

  He swiped it away from her, clutching it more fiercely – he would have started to run, but he could no longer feel his legs.

  He felt a warmth flood through him and it seemed to unfreeze his mind as well as his body. He could see Angelique, her face a picture of concern, putting out a hand to steer him along the path.

  When they reached the clifftop Dex was on his feet, grinning, despite his leather jacket bearing a significant scorch mark and a trickle of drying blood spoiling the side of his face. He was clearly dazed, and not fully aware of what had happened. ‘Well, that didn’t go quite as expected. Did we win?’ He scoured the raging sea, swaying a little.

  Pewter pointed to where Tiffany floated behind him, tugged along by a piece of twine, like a balloon. Her face looked serene, her cloud of blonde hair making her look like an angel, hovering above them. It was almost unbelievable that someone who looked so sweet could have such a rotten core.

  Alfie had described the ghost as an angel. Had he caught sight of her, perhaps sneaking down to steal food from the kitchen?

  ‘She’s under magical arrest,’ explained Pewter. ‘Keeps prisoners very quiet and easy to manoeuvre. Tricky one for the Elysee; they’re going to hate me bringing in someone non-magical for questioning. Nothing I ever do leads to a promotion.’

  ‘Non-magical?’ repeated Dex, wiping away the blood that still flowed from his forehead. ‘Could have fooled me.’

>   ‘All down to this little trinket,’ said Pewter. He’d taken the firefly cage out of Seth’s hands before he could even realize.

  Seth stood awkwardly in front of Dex. ‘Thanks, Stormforce. You . . . thanks.’

  Dex wiped another smear of blood from his handsome face. ‘Hey, blood spilled . . . does that make us like brothers now?’

  He grinned, and Seth shook his freezing hand.

  They made a silent procession back to the lighthouse. Seth’s heart felt like someone had put a hand inside his chest and was squeezing it.

  He felt sure that the power Tiffany had tapped into must belong to some poor sorcerer who had been trapped in the firefly cage. Now they’d got it back, what would they find? Would the sorcerer still be alive? Would there be even a spirit remaining?

  Ever since he’d understood that the evil magical device had been kept at the Last Chance Hotel, he’d felt a connection to it, a responsibility. He’d wanted to find Tiffany, get his revenge, make sure she was not able to seize the power of the firefly cage and wreak havoc. But he’d also wondered about that poor trapped soul.

  He kept his eyes locked on the cage, desperate to know if there was any chance of releasing someone alive from such a prison. The cage itself no longer looked alive.

  Seth didn’t know where the chair or the cup of tea appeared from. He vaguely remembered being guided into the kitchen and Pewter talking in a low voice, assuring Mina and Lark that Alfie was OK and that Rendleton would recover. He clasped the cup, feeling its heat between his fingers.

  Then he felt a comforting lump throw itself on to his lap, and a purring noise start up like a kettle boiling, and all he really wanted to do was put his head on Nightshade’s soft fur and sleep.

  ‘Well, five of you set off after Tiffany and only four came back. Rendleton didn’t make it?’

  Seth stroked her soft fur, the feeling bringing life back to his weary limbs, blood flowing to his fingertips. He reached for his scalding tea. ‘Think Rendleton has been taken to some sort of magical doctor by Pewter already.’