The woman behind the desk smiled at Dad. “Good afternoon, Warder Reilly.”
“Hello, Katie. Any messages for me?”
“No, sir.”
“Is Dorian in?”
“I think he’s in the monitor room with Warder Winters.”
Winters was Mum’s maiden name. Did she mean Mum? I guess having two “Warder Reillys” would get confusing.
“Thanks.” Dad headed off down the corridor and we hurried after him.
“Things seem very formal here,” said CJ. “Warder Reilly?”
“I’d be just as happy if they called me Doug,” said Dad, “but Dorian insists on formality. He’s very big on tradition.”
We came to an intersection, and a man in the cross-corridor called out.
“Douglas! There you are—just the man we need.”
He strode down the corridor and Dad stopped to wait for him. He wasn’t particularly tall, though taller than Dad—but everyone was taller than Dad. He looked a little older too; the hair at his temples was greying, though it was still dark everywhere else. He was good-looking for an older guy, with a strong, square jaw and a straight nose just the right size for the rest of his face. He wore a dark blue business suit with the ease of a man accustomed to nice clothing. Next to him, Dad looked rather rumpled in his grey trousers and faded polo shirt.
“Hi, Dorian. These are my daughters, Crystal and Violet. Girls, this is Dorian Kincumber, one of the warders.”
Dorian smiled, showing even white teeth. “Pleased to meet you. I’ve heard all about your little problem. Make yourselves at home. There’s a kitchen behind reception, and Katie can get you anything we don’t have in stock.”
Little problem? I bet he wouldn’t be saying that if he was the one spitting frogs. And there was no way I was going to sit in the kitchen like a good little girl. I wanted to be where the action was.
“Hopefully we won’t be here long,” Dad said. “The press are crawling all over our place. Thought we might come in and let the excitement die down a while.”
“Just what I was suggesting to Jane earlier,” Dorian said. “Forgive me for asking, but why the scarf?”
He caught at the loop hanging between our wrists and ran the silk between his fingers.
“The curse is negated when they’re touching each other,” Dad said. “The silk is the only conductor I’ve found that maintains that effect while allowing them some distance.”
“Interesting,” said Dorian.
“I hope I can find a more workable solution while we’re here.”
“I’m sure the young ladies would appreciate that.” He flashed that picture-perfect smile again. The man could have gotten a job in a toothpaste commercial. “Are you heading for the monitor room? I’ll come with you.”
He turned and walked with us.
“Any developments today?” Dad asked.
“Well, we sent a crew over to the Johnson house. No one was home, but they told the neighbour they were checking for gas leaks and she let them in. Full of complaints about the party, apparently. Said she didn’t get a wink of sleep.”
CJ and I exchanged a look. They weaselled their way into Josh Johnson’s house? How did they get away with stuff like that?
“Did they find anything?”
“Nothing unexpected. Strong traces of a Sidhe presence, but no sign of anything now. Whoever it was probably left as soon as the job was done.”
He glanced at us as he spoke. Did he mean the toads and diamonds spell, or whatever it was?
“Any ideas on who it was?”
Dorian shrugged. “We’re just stabbing in the dark here. There hasn’t been anything this big since the Cottingley affair.”
“What about the Johnson boy himself?”
“I’ve sent Simon over to the school this morning. He’s not back yet.”
We arrived at a set of double doors. Dorian opened the right-hand one and gestured us into the room.
“Wow,” CJ said.
I nodded. We both stopped just inside the door and stared. The room looked like something from a movie—maybe a space mission, or one of those ones where there’s a terrorist threat or some huge military disaster, and the president and all his advisors are gathered around a huge table, or in front of an enormous screen—you could take your pick, this room had both—while around them a hundred busy people do busy things on a hundred computers.
After a shocked moment I realised that there weren’t that many people here. Probably more like forty or fifty—but the impact was still enormous. Dad and Dorian hadn’t noticed we’d stopped, and kept going, still chatting. A couple of people looked up from their screens, but whatever they were doing was too serious to take much notice of two girls, however pretty one of them was.
An enormous screen filled the wall at the far end of the room. It was easily as big as the screens you get at the movies, maybe bigger, and even though this room was large, it dominated the space. On it was displayed a map of the world, with the continents glowing a soft green. All except Australia. It had little pinpoints of red light coming and going in a big clump right over Sydney.
“Hey, there’s Mum,” CJ said, and dragged me forward.
I hadn’t even noticed her standing in front of the screen until then. She turned as Dad and Dorian reached her, and waved to us. Everyone looked very serious and businesslike. It made me look at Mum and Dad in a new light. If I’d thought of them at work at all, I’d imagined them at a desk in some little cubicle, reporting to someone higher up the food chain. Now it seemed there was a lot more to the picture than that. Maybe there was no one higher up the food chain than Warder Winters and Warder Reilly.
“—definitely not a glitch,” Mum was saying. “Hi, darlings! Gretel’s run diagnostics on the whole system and Ronnie’s had the mainframe in pieces. Nothing. Isn’t that right, Ron?”
She called over her shoulder to a woman bent over the innards of a computer, who looked up and blinked like someone waking from a dream. “Sorry, Warder? Did you say something?”
“She asked about the mainframe,” said another woman, coming forward, and now it was my turn to blink. Just as well Ronnie had short hair and this one had a ponytail, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. “There’s nothing wrong with the monitors, Warders. The system’s running like a dream. Everything you see up there is happening in real time.”
She waved a hand at the giant screen and for a moment we all contemplated the slowly multiplying dots. Sydney looked like it was coming down with a bad case of chickenpox.
CJ was studying the twins with undisguised interest. They only looked a few years older than us. She’d always wished we were identical. It seemed so much sexier somehow, being an exact copy of another person, instead of just a random sibling who happened to have been born at the same time. I’d pointed out numerous times that her fantasy of having someone just like her was all well and good, but what if we’d both looked just like me instead? Bet she wouldn’t find that such an appealing idea. Yet it was still a disappointment to her, just as she longed for hair like Sona’s, that fell past her butt. It was hard for CJ, with all her physical advantages, to accept that there were some things she wanted that she just couldn’t have.
Ronnie’s twin noticed her stare. “Hi, I’m Gretel,” she said. “This is my sister Veronica. I’m guessing you must be Warder Winters’ daughters?”
“That’s right.”
We drifted closer, ignored by the three warders, who were discussing the map with worried frowns.
“I heard you had a little problem with a Sidhe curse.”
I hadn’t heard it called that before, but it was obvious what she meant.
“Yeah.” I held up my wrist, showing her the silk scarf. “If it wasn’t for this there’d be frogs jumping all over the place by now.”
“That’s terrible! Still, I bet if anyone can get it sorted your Dad can. He’s a whiz with the machines, Warder Reilly.”
“Wh
at do you do?” CJ asked, eyes bright with twin worship.
“Oh, Ron and I are in IT. Neither of us had the latency to be a seeker, and someone’s got to keep all these computers running.”
“What’s a seeker?”
She frowned. “You know, the ones who go out hunting for Sidhe artefacts and get them safely under lock and key before anyone does anything stupid with them.”
Artefacts? When we talked about artefacts in Ancient History, we usually meant everyday things like pots or bowls, jewellery or little statues. Basically remnants of lost civilisations that helped us piece together a picture of life in those times.
“Sidhe artefacts?” I repeated. Did she mean magical objects? What other kind of artefact would a race of fairies leave lying around?
“Mirrors,” she said. “Jewellery, lamps—the usual. Most of them are useless now the aether’s gone, of course, but sometimes the seekers find a live one, even after all these years. We can’t leave objects of power lying around for any idiot to play with, can we? Much safer locked up here in the vault.”
I nodded as if I knew what she was talking about, but I was completely lost. The vault? What, like a bank vault? Maybe I should ask a question where I had more chance of understanding the answer.
“What are all those red dots?” I gestured at the screen. “Everyone seems pretty concerned about something.”
Her expression clouded over. “Yeah. That’s measuring aether. Suddenly we’re leaking aether like a sieve, when there hasn’t been any to speak of for centuries. Everyone was hoping it was just the monitors going haywire, but we’ve double-checked and triple-checked, and it’s nothing that simple.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“Only place it can be—the other side of the wall. The Sidhe side. But how the hell it’s doing that, I don’t know. And neither does anyone else. That’s why they all look so worried.”
Before I could ask any more, two police officers came in. Even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, I felt a reflexive twinge of guilt. Was this about those black cars blocking the end of our street?
Dad turned around and saw them. “Simon! You’re back. How did it go?”
“The Johnson boy’s clean, sir.”
CJ and I exchanged a confused look. The guy looked like a policeman, but …
“Did you have any trouble getting access to him?” Dorian asked.
“No, sir. We told the principal we wanted to discuss reports of underage drinking at his party and she couldn’t have been more helpful. Even let us use her office for the interview.” He smiled. “That’s one kid who’ll think twice before breaking the law again.”
Gretel was staring at him as hungrily as if he were made of chocolate. I blinked. He didn’t seem that special: mid-brown hair, average height. Nice blue eyes, but that smile hadn’t been very pleasant.
“And you’re sure he’s who he says he is?” Mum asked.
“Absolutely, Warder. One hundred per cent human teenager. He doesn’t know anything about the Sidhe. Whoever impersonated him did so without his knowledge.”
“Good. Thank you, Simon.”
The two “policemen” left the room. Gretel sighed, a wistful look on her face.
“Those guys aren’t really cops, are they?” CJ asked her.
“No, that’s Simon and Kyle. They’re two of our seekers. They go out and get their hands dirty while people like me and Ron stay here and play computers.” She sighed again, still staring at the door the seekers had left through. “Still, we can’t all do the glamorous jobs. Someone’s got to keep the home fires burning.”
“Do you like him?” CJ must have noticed the way Gretel looked at him too, and she’d never learned not to ask personal questions. Usually she got away with it. There were advantages to being pretty.
“Who, Simon? He’s all right. Some of the seekers get big heads, think they’re something special. He’s okay.” Was her face a little redder than it had been?
“Ah—Warder Winters?” called a voice. One of the computer operators had popped up from her station like a meerkat. “We’re getting some unusual activity locally.”
“Put it on the screen, Angie.”
The picture on the screen zoomed in so fast it was like falling down a well. We zeroed in on Sydney with dizzying speed, closer and closer, until The Rocks and Circular Quay filled the wall. The building where we stood was marked HQ, and the hodgepodge of streets around it were neatly labelled.
I swayed to the right as the view shifted over to show the Botanical Gardens, the Opera House on its point, and the Domain. Some of these names were only vaguely familiar. The Domain looked like a big park—was that part of the Botanical Gardens? A big building in the middle of it was marked “Art Gallery”.
Then a huge splotch of red came into view, moving fast.
“College Street!” said Dorian, a note of panic in his voice. “Get a containment team down there now.”
“No!” said Mum. “I’ll go with them. Let’s see if we can catch them this time. We need some answers.”
Dorian opened his mouth to object, but she was already out the door, running like Usain Bolt going for gold.
CHAPTER TEN
The room exploded into action. Half of them suddenly had urgent places to be, including Dad.
“I’ll have to rig something up in the vault,” he said. “You three, come with me.”
Three rather startled technicians obediently followed him to the door. I thought he was just going to leave us there, but at the last minute he stopped.
“Gretel, can you set up a video feed from the vault back to Jane’s office? No sense all of us being exposed.”
She nodded, so she must have understood what he was talking about. Then his eye fell on us and he frowned, as if he’d only just remembered we existed.
“Take the girls to the library on your way, would you? I’ll see you later, girls. Just try to stay out of everyone’s way for now. There’s plenty to keep you occupied in the library.”
“Bet they don’t have wi-fi,” CJ muttered as we followed Gretel out.
“Or TV.”
Not that I didn’t like reading. I did. But there probably weren’t going to be any of my kind of books in an office library, even if it was a very peculiar kind of office.
“What was all that about?” I asked as Gretel hurried us out into the corridor. “Where’s Mum rushing off to in such a hurry?”
“That big red spot on the map,” she said. “It was moving. Aether doesn’t move in big clumps like that—unless it’s contained in something. Or someone.”
I frowned. “People can have aether inside them?”
“No.” She looked worried. “Not normally. Only Sidhe. Looks like we have an escapee out there.”
CJ was frowning too, but it turned out her mind was running down a different track altogether.
“I’ve never met any identical twins before,” she said, as if she hadn’t even heard that there was an escaped fairy loose on the streets. Possibly she hadn’t. She was like Dad in that way, very single-minded.
“Really?” Gretel seemed eager to change the subject to safer ground. Bet she wished someone else had scored babysitting duties. “There’s another set working for the Council, but they’re stationed in Perth. We have quite a lot of twins, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
Gretel looked a little surprised. “Well, because twins tend to run in magical families.”
It took me a minute to follow that to its logical conclusion. “Do you mean that everyone here is from a magical family? Not just the warders?”
Now she looked almost shocked. “Didn’t you know that?”
“Until yesterday we didn’t know any of this existed,” CJ said. “Mum and Dad never told us anything about their jobs. I bet they still wouldn’t have if we hadn’t managed to get cursed somehow.”
She sounded sulky, like a child who’d just discovered a wonderful playground that everyone else had b
een playing in for years.
“I’m sure they had their reasons.” Gretel seemed uneasy now, and she picked up the pace. With my shorter legs I had trouble keeping up.
CJ looked like she wanted to argue, but all she said was: “Who else is a twin here?”
“Umm … who have you met? There’s Katie, on reception. She has a twin brother in operations. Darrell and Hamish—they were the two guys sitting next to Ronnie. Oh, and Simon—but don’t tell him I told you that.”
“Why not?”
“His twin didn’t make it. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“You mean he’s dead?”
“No! God, no. He just can’t work for us.” She looked uncomfortable. “You should ask your parents. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this stuff.”
Not if they hadn’t told us themselves. She didn’t need to add it; I could tell that was what she was thinking. I guess no one wants to get into trouble with their bosses.
“Here’s the library!” She smiled brightly. “Make yourselves at home.”
She opened the door to a large, comfortable room and waved us in. It felt reassuringly familiar after the strangeness of the monitor room, just like the library at school. Books were still books, whatever the subject, and they had that wonderful, slightly musty smell of old paper that promised hours of wonder lost in other lands and strange stories.
There were comfy chairs scattered about, and big arched windows on one wall that let the sunshine stream in. Opposite the door was a glassed-in room.
“That’s the restricted section.” Gretel indicated the glass room. “It’s locked, though. You can read anything you like out here.”
“Are there spell books?” CJ asked, with visions of Hogwarts dancing before her eyes, no doubt. She’d been a big Harry Potter fan when she was younger.
Gretel smiled. “No. Most of this is more of a historical collection—the works of regular humans concerning the Sidhe world. Some of them are surprisingly accurate. We even have Shakespeare.”
“Shakespeare?” CJ looked like she’d swallowed something nasty.
“You bet. He had quite a lot to say about witches and fairies in his works. Ever read A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”
The Fairytale Curse (Magic's Return Book 1) Page 9
