Peering closer, Rachel noticed two things: the girl Sigfried was recalling was Asian, and she was wearing a black and white bow in her hair.
That was her!
Rachel leaned forward, amazed. Was that how she looked to others? She might not be as womanly as her classmates, but as much as she was reluctant to admit it, she looked adorable.
Maybe Gaius really did want to date her.
• • •
“That’s all, Mr. Smith? Very good.” Agent Darling stretched, leaning to the side. “Rachel, your turn.”
Sigfried took several steps backward, away from the glass and wiped his forehead. “Phew! That was hard, Lucky! Good thing my superlative master-control of my own intellect allowed me to suppress all memory of the thousands of murders, acts of arson and vandalism, not to mention looting the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London, for which I am solely responsible. Oh, and the Hindenburg Disaster, World War One, and the extinction of the dinosaurs. I did that, too. It was quite a strain to hold those things out of my otherwise perfect eidetic memory.” He paused and then asked vaguely, “Who are you people, again?”
“Move over, Sigfried Smith.” Rachel pantomimed rolling up her sleeves. “Let me show you how it’s done.”
She stepped up next to the mossy stone wall. Agent Standish drew a magical connection between her and the thinking glass with the oré cantrip. Rachel’s lips curled into an eager, impish smile. She would show them everything in crisp and perfect order.
In gratitude, they would answer her questions.
She had so many questions. They swirled in her mind like a tornado of embers, scorching her. It was because of this ceaseless yearning for answers that she had chosen her goal of wishing to know everything.
Not knowing was too painful.
“Ready?” Agent Standish crossed his arms, his voluminous cloak and half cape nearly brushing the ground.
She laid her hand against the cold, smooth glass and closed her eyes. The noise of Siggy’s feet scuffing the straw that covered the stone of the floor seemed suddenly loud. A warm breeze blew against her face. Perhaps it had been there all along, but she only noticed it now.
“What do you wish to see?” she asked, her eyes squeezed shut.
“Why not begin at the beginning?” Agent Standish suggested, his voice deep and sonorous.
Rachel chewed on her lip thoughtfully. She recalled Mortimer Egg, a mild-mannered man with his hair drawn into a pony-tail who was dressed in an Inverness cloak with his false Agent’s medallion around his neck. He stood on the dock at the foot of the staircase that led to Frances Bannerman’s castle, behind which lay the path to Roanoke Academy.
Gasps rang out in the belfry. Rachel’s eyes flew open. The gathered company was staring intently at the image on the glass.
“It’s so clear!” the princess declared, a hand pressed against her chest.
“Amazing!” Agent Standish breathed. Clicking the heels of his green boots together, he bowed toward Rachel. “You have your mother’s gift.”
“Is that a memory?” Agent MacDannan tapped the mirror. From her shoulder, her rat sniffed the mirror, peering at itself sideways. “Are we sure this isn’t a looking glass?”
“It’s my memory,” Rachel replied simply. She stabbed a finger at the thinking glass. “That’s the man who tried to kill Valerie Hunt.”
“But that’s—” Agent MacDannan bit off her comment, unwilling to reveal more.
“Mortimer Egg, a clerk at the Wisecraft offices in New York City,” Rachel finished, a note of censure creeping into her voice.
“We cannot comment on the identity of suspects,” Agent MacDannan replied coolly.
Anger seized Rachel. It offended her that the Agents knew the identity of the villain and did not immediately rush off to warn as many people as possible. What if Mortimer Egg tried to kill someone else, and they were not on notice to avoid him?
Taking a deep breath, Rachel made herself calm and returned to the matter at hand. Proceeding in order, she recalled Mr. Egg’s attempt to give Valerie the hexed scarab brooch, Sigfried and Lucky’s attempts to save Valerie, and the brooch’s eventual destruction by the imposing Prince of Bavaria. Jumping ahead, she remembered how the princess had touched Lucky, been transported into a vision, and physically brought water and cherry petals back from a Japanese landscape.
Later, the princess had explained how, after touching upperclassman Joshua March, she met a creature of incomparable beauty with wings of smoke called the Lightbringer. In the vision to which Nastasia had been transported, the Lightbringer had been torturing an older version of Joshua March. Aided by the red-eyed Raven, this Lightbringer had visited the princess’s dreams. Since Mordeau and the students in Drake Hall already knew this secret, Rachel also showed them Zoë Forrest walking out of nowhere as she stepped out of the dreamland in her silver-soled sandals.
Rachel then showed them the infirmary, where—after no adult would believe them—she and Sigfried had faced the wraith that had been consuming an older girl. She showed them how Lucky had become a dumb animal when the Raven flew by, but how he had remembered himself and returned in time to defeat the wraith, with the help of the Dare Vampire Hunter’s Club.
Next, Rachel leapt to earlier this very afternoon, when she found Valerie Hunt in the girl’s bathroom, bleeding from the effort of fighting a geas. She recalled everything that followed, except her private conversation with Gaius in the infirmary.
The Agents watched as, warned by the princess’s vision, Rachel and Sigfried stopped the young proctor, Mr. Fuentes, from killing Valerie Hunt, while he was under the control of the geas. Then, the four of them—herself, Sigfried, Nastasia, and their fellow student Joy O’Keefe—stopped the events depicted in the princess’s second vision—which had included the victory of Dr. Mordeau and the deaths of Gaius Valiant, William Locke, and Vladimir Von Dread.
In the thinking glass, Sigfried saved the P.E. teacher, Mr. Chanson, from being killed by an invisible Dr. Mordeau; Rachel crashed through the window of the alchemy classroom to rescue Mr. Fisher from a geased girl wielding a bloody whip; and Mordeau’s creepy student assistant, Jonah Strega, was prevented from stabbing Joy O’Keefe with his huge cruel knife when Lucky breathed fire on him, burning his face.
Finally, she recalled the end: the fight between Dread and Prince Remus Starkadder in the summoning chambers below Drake Hall, how Dread brought the incoming flood of moat water to life, and the final battle behind Roanoke Hall between Dean Moth and Dr. Mordeau, who had transformed herself into a dragon.
“And that was the end of the battle,” Rachel concluded. The image of Dr. Mordeau’s unconscious body lying partially under the conjured meteor that struck her larger dragon form appeared both in the thinking glass and in her mind. “Anything else?”
“Thank you, Miss Griffin. That was a great deal of information.” Agent MacDannan blinked and ran a hand through her bushy ginger hair. Her black-and-white rat chattered and scuttled up onto her head. She brushed at it absently. “If we have questions about what we saw, we will be certain to ask.”
“Glad to be of service.” Rachel bobbed up and down, curtseying.
She loved having an opportunity to put her perfect memory to use. Helping the agents was almost as satisfying as reporting to her father had been—before he rejected her help, ordering her to stop noticing things and be an ordinary student.
Only, ordinary students did not get spied on by giant ravens with blood-red eyes. They were not led to bleeding friends by miniature talking lions. They seldom came upon china dolls dragging the unconscious bodies of the girls who owned them to the infirmary. Ordinary students did not remember everything in such detail that they felt their lives were wasted if there was no one with whom to share their recollections.
“I must say, I am impressed.” Agent Standish bowed low. “The three of you and Miss O’Keefe saved the lives of Mr. Chanson and Mr. Fisher, as well as those of a number of students. The Dean should decla
re a holiday in your honor.”
The princess inclined her head regally. “No reward is required. We did as duty dictated.”
Siggy snorted. “Duty, smooty! We fought the bad guy and won! We deserve to be heroes. I’m thinking a national monument, but a holiday in our honor is okay. Maybe a park named after Lucky. Or a dormitory here at school! Kids could live in Dragonslayer Hall! That’d be a good start!”
Rachel, meanwhile, blushed and shyly lowered her gaze. She hated having to take credit for good works. It made her feel unpleasantly exposed—as if, without doubt, the next thing she did would be the wrong one. Perhaps, if she stared at that particular piece of straw hard enough, everyone would forget she was there.
“You three did an excellent job.” James Darling knelt down and scratched Pyewacket behind her ear. The cat purred. “That was astonishing work! As impressive as anything the members of the Young Sorcerers League did in my day! And we were much older. College students, for the most part.”
“And after only a week of school.” Agent MacDannan looked grudgingly impressed. “Many freshmen can’t cast even single spell until well into their second or third month.”
“First saving a young woman from a wraith, then saving the whole school from Dr. Mordeau and her geased henchmen.” Darling turned to Sigfried. “And you, Mr. Smith. I hear that only a day or two before, you saved a group of students from a flying, flaming skunk. Seems you are quite the hero.”
Siggy merely grinned and bowed, accepting his accolades with gracious aplomb. Rachel yanked her hand away from the thinking glass, lest a more accurate version of that particular event be displayed from her memory. Watching Sigfried, it took all the dissembling training she had received from her mother to keep her face expressionless. It amazed her that he could accept praise so unabashedly, when he himself had conjured the skunk, lit it on fire, and sent it flying.
“It’s time we deal with the students in the foyer.” Agent MacDannan started toward the stairs. “Some of them are still under the geas.”
“Before you go!” Rachel grabbed her sleeve. “You said we did rather well and we deserved a heroes reward. We don’t need all that, but you can repay us by answering our questions! I am sure Siggy and the princess must have some, too, but to start—” She drew a deep breath and plunged, speaking rapidly in her excitement. “Do you know why Mr. Egg wanted to kill Valerie? Is he the secret boss Mordeau spoke of? Did you know Mordeau’s boss was from Outside—from another world? Who is the Lightbringer? Have you heard of him? Is it true that he captured the princess’s father? If so, can anything be done?”
“I am sorry, Miss Griffin,” Agent MacDannan dismissed her questions with a crisp shake of her head. “We aren’t able to answer questions about an ongoing investigation.”
“But…I showed you so much! Everything I know.” With tremendous effort, Rachel kept her voice calm. “We’re not yet safe here. We need to know more!”
“You can leave the investigation to us.”
“B-but…” she repeated, stuttering. She glanced at the other two Agents, begging. “You said we should receive a proper reward! There must be something you can tell us!”
Agent MacDannan shook her head. “I am sorry, Miss Griffin. Good day.”
It was going to be like her father all over again.
It was so unfair. Were they really going to rob her of her carefully-gathered secrets and give her nothing in return? The Agents were not facing the Raven of Doom and the evil fire-breathing dragons. They were not the ones whose lives were at stake, whose future might depend upon being properly informed. She and her friends were the ones who were, to quote her alchemy tutor, on the front lines.
Only Mr. Fisher had not been referring to Rachel and her friends when he used that phrase. He had been speaking of another group of students who had faced terrible odds—students led by an intrepid boy who had understood that sometimes the young were called upon to fight evil where adults could not. That boy had grown up to be an Agent.
As if a heavy yoke had been removed from her, Rachel’s heart lifted. Her shoulders relaxed, and she breathed more easily. James Darling understood what it meant to be young and on the front lines of the battle. He was the one adult she could trust.
The ginger-haired Agent headed down the stairs, her footsteps a series of quick beats. Agent Standish tousled Rachel’s hair fondly and then strode off after MacDannan, his cheetah at his heels. As Agent Darling rose to follow, Rachel stepped in front of him.
“Please, Agent Darling. May I speak with you privately?” she asked.
It was always wise to speak to people privately about important things, especially people in any position of authority.
“Of course, Rachel.” He gestured at the far side of the belfry. “How about there?”
The two of them circled around the giant lantern. Agent Darling’s tricorne hat brushed against the lowest of the giant chimes, setting them jangling. They had a deep sound, deeper than the bells that marked the change of classes, more like those rung at the temples of Osiris in London.
They crossed to the North window, between the blue walking glass and the cracked purple mirror. Rachel sat on the sill of the arch, her hand resting on the moistness of the moss on the stone wall. She breathed in the damp earthy scent and gazed out at the forest beyond. The dark green of hemlocks stretched away like a jagged carpet. Beyond, in the distance, rose the bare peak of Stony Tor, where the storm goblin, the Heer of Dunderberg, and his lightning imps were imprisoned. The tor had been rumbling with thunder all afternoon. Rachel wondered if the Heer could sense the chaos Mordeau had caused.
Agent Darling leaned against the stone wall, one hand on his tall fulgurator’s staff. “What can I do for you, Rachel?”
Rachel’s courage faltered. Looking at him, as he smiled down at her so kindly, she was reminded of the young man with the cocky smile in the painting of the Six Musketeers. This was that James Darling, the hero. The tension in her throat eased.
“Mr. Darling,” she addressed him without his title, as she did when he was a guest at Gryphon Park, “you know better than anyone what it is like to be the ones on the front lines.”
The smile disappeared from his face. “I do.”
“My friends and I—we are the ones facing the dangers. The Lightbringer and the Raven are still out there. Mordeau and Egg may have more allies. We cannot defend ourselves if we are not informed. We need answers.”
An expression of pain crossed his handsome features. “I am sorry, Rachel. But this is an official investigation—involving members of the Wisecraft. My hands are tied.”
She leaned forward, her eyes intent upon his face. “No one will know. Just answer a few of my questions. Even one? There must be questions you can answer without…Please!”
He shook his head.
Oh! If only she had refused to answer questions until they agreed to answer hers.
Rachel reined in her impatience and tried another tack. “Don’t you want our help figuring things out?”
He looked at her sharply. “Do you know something you didn’t tell us?”
“No.”
“Then, we know everything you know. You’ll have to trust us to take it from here.”
Rachel’s questions burned so fiercely that not receiving answers was causing her physical pain. As she rubbed her temples, it occurred to her that the question she most wanted answered was unrelated to this matter. Relief flowed through her.
She blurted out, “You can answer questions that are not about this current matter, right?”
“Of course, Rachel.” He smiled at her very kindly.
Rachel drew a ragged breath. “Okay…during her fight with the dean, Mordeau said something about my gra—”
He held up his hand, cutting her off. “I am sorry, Rachel. Anything to do with Dr. Mordeau is related to this matter. You must understand that.”
“But this wasn’t! I just wanted to know—”
He shook his head firmly.
“I cannot help you.”
Rachel cringed. She hated feeling pathetic.
And to think that she had feared that Gaius would be the one to humiliate her.
“But…I…I showed you everything! I could have kept secrets back—the Raven, the Lion, the vision the Lion showed me of the great tree—but I didn’t!” Her voice rose piteously. “You, of all people…”
He flinched as if she had struck him. She saw it in his face, the moment he remembered—remembered what it had been like, remembered being the boy on the front lines, with no one to protect him, remembered being the last defense against the coming of the night. He had been where she was now. He knew it.
A light shone in his eyes, mischievous and fierce. It made him look younger, as if the youthful James Darling lived again, the troublemaker who had inspired the comics and saved so many lives. He leaned toward her with a conspiratorial grin. The motion made the Agent’s medallion on his chest jangle.
He paused.
Lifting the medallion, he traced his thumb over the lantern and stars, the symbol of the Wisecraft—of his current life, of the promises he had made, the oaths he had sworn, the duties he had undertaken. Closing his eyes, his body bent like an old man’s, he leaned on his fulgurator’s staff, as if he could not stand without its support.
When his eyes opened again, the light was gone.
He put his hand on her shoulder. “I do understand. I do. But I can’t.”
Rachel nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She swallowed convulsively. Agent Darling gave her a last, apologetic smile and hurried down the stairs after his companions.
Several steps down, he paused, looking up at her across the straw-strewn floor. “Rachel, the paralysis spell that helped Dean Moth capture Dr. Mordeau—it seemed to come from the forest near where you were standing. Did you notice who cast it?”
The Raven, The Elf, and Rachel (A Book of Unexpected Enlightenment 2) Page 5
