by Alex Bell
“That is a pity,” Scarlett said with a sigh. “I had hoped, as an ice princess, you might see things more reasonably. But if it’s not to be the case, then you must understand, of course, that I can’t possibly permit you to leave. The Phantom Atlas Society has to remain secret, and you know far too much.”
Stella snatched up the Book of Frost and took a few steps back. “So, what are you saying? That you’ll take us prisoner?”
Scarlett slowly shook her head. “This is no prison,” she said. “And I’m no warden. Prisoners require care and attention and time that I simply don’t have. I’ll make an exception for you on account of the fact that you may be useful to me later. No human can understand a gargoyle, so they’re irrelevant. But your companions will have to be destroyed, I’m afraid.”
Stella could see in the other woman’s eyes that she meant what she said, and what’s more, she didn’t feel any uncertainty or guilt about the idea of hurting young explorers.
She recalled the soulless look in Eli Sauvage’s portrait out in the hall and thought Scarlett must have had a very strange upbringing, living with only her murderous father for company in this lovely house. Really, it was no wonder she saw the world in such a peculiar way.
Her eyes went to the staff and she made a desperate lunge for it, but Scarlett was much quicker. Moments later, the Collector had the sorcerer’s staff gripped in her long-fingered hands, and the stone at the top glowed a deep, bloody red as she pointed it straight at Stella.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
YOU MAY NOT APPRECIATE it yet, but this is the defining moment of your life,” Scarlett said, still pointing the staff at Stella with a calm, steady hand. “It’s also the biggest mistake you’ve ever made. One day you will look back on this and wish desperately that you had joined me when I gave you the chance.”
Stella tightened her grip on the book, raised her chin, and said, “You’ve got it all backward. Threatening my friends is the biggest mistake you’ve ever made.”
“Friends!” Scarlett scoffed. Her lip twisted into a look of contempt. “You can’t really imagine that they’re truly your friends? That they care about you in any way? People like you and I are the villains in the story. We don’t have friends. That’s why we have to look out for ourselves. The gates downstairs will have opened by now. I expect they’re already fleeing.”
Stella shook her head. There had been a time once when she’d worried the four of them weren’t really friends. She’d mistakenly thought that Shay, Ethan, and Beanie had left her at the ice castle, the captive of stone trolls and a magic mirror. But actually they had been trying to save her all along. And since then they had been through so much together—first in the Icelands, then on Witch Mountain, and now on the Black Ice Bridge. And Stella felt so sure of the love and friendship from the three young explorers—and she knew with such certainty that Scarlett was wrong—that it made her heart glow warmer than it ever had before.
Her hands tightened around the Book of Frost. “You’re wrong,” she said. “They would never leave without me.”
Scarlett’s eyes narrowed. “How are you doing that?”
Stella followed her gaze down to the Book of Frost clutched in her hands. She saw little ribbons of gold were spreading from her fingers across the front cover, blazing brightly beside the ice.
Scarlett shook her head impatiently. “No matter.” She reached into the pocket of her flight jacket and drew out a snow globe. Stella saw that it was empty, and suddenly she knew what the Collector meant to do.
Everything seemed to slow down as Stella spun on her heel, running for the open door, which looked impossibly far away. At the same time, she drew a great breath and gave a shout for help, as loud as she could, hoping it would reach the boys on the ground floor. Scarlett had said their gates would open soon and Stella knew they would race to her aid as soon as they were free.
She had time to scream for help only once, however, before Scarlett Sauvage spoke her full name in a clear, quiet voice.
And then the doorway before her vanished. And so did the room itself.
Stella staggered, trying to keep her balance on the pale white floor that was suddenly beneath her feet rather than the tiles of the Collector’s house. She turned around and saw that Scarlett was gone. Everything was gone. There was just a white space about the size of a room, and beyond that an ivory-colored fog. Stella recalled what Melville had said about a fog pressing in around his island and that they couldn’t get through it or see anything except for the occasional blur of movement from the other side. Then Stella knew, with a shiver of dread, that she had been trapped inside a snow globe.
She felt her heart speed up in her chest as she turned around in the empty white space, looking for a way out that didn’t exist. Her breath came in quick gasps as she saw a cold, lonely future stretched before her as a prisoner inside a magical snow globe, frozen there for years and years, like Melville had been. But the gentleman flamingo had escaped. Ethan’s magic had somehow plucked him right out of his prison. Which meant that it had to be possible to get out.
Stella closed her eyes, held tightly to the Book of Frost, and concentrated on slowing her breathing. She couldn’t think if she was panicking, and she really needed to think right now.
“I will not be a prisoner here in this snow globe,” she whispered to herself. “I will not!”
She opened her eyes and tried to peer through the fog swirling at the edges of the room, but she couldn’t see past it. When she reached out her hand, the fog felt cool to her touch. She took a step back and looked down at the Book of Frost. Perhaps there was a spell in there that might break her free. She dropped down to her knees, put the book on the ground, and opened it, riffling desperately through the pages. But she couldn’t see anything that might be helpful for breaking out of magical prisons, and at the back of her mind she couldn’t help thinking that Scarlett was too smart to have given her the book if there was a spell in it that would get her out of the snow globe.
Stella closed the book and sat back, frustrated. Then her eyes fell on the front cover, and she saw that the gold ribbons she’d noticed earlier were still there, and in fact they were twisting and spooling together until finally they froze into a small, solid shape no bigger than her little fingernail.
Stella leaned forward, staring down at the gold object that had solidified on the cover of the Book of Frost. It was quite clearly a heart—shining and bright amid the sparkling ice. It looked just like the gold heart charm Stella had seen in the paintings of Queen Portia back at her castle.
The thought had just occurred to her when something brushed against her wrist, making her look down at her own bracelet. The silver fairy charm was moving. Its wings fluttered gently as the fairy’s delicate silver fingers reached into the pocket of its dress and drew out a tiny gold object attached to a thin silver chain. It was so small it just looked like a little ball to Stella, but then the fairy deftly clipped it to her charm bracelet and the golden thing grew bigger and bigger until it was the same size as all the other charms. And now Stella could see that it was a golden heart, exactly the same as the one on the Book of Frost.
The silver fairy charm had frozen once again, so still and lifeless it was hard to believe it had ever moved. And yet there was the golden charm on Stella’s wrist, exactly the same as the one Queen Portia had worn in her paintings. Stella touched the charm and found that, unlike the others, it was warm to the touch, and the heart on the Book of Frost was the same.
She pulled the book into her lap and noticed that suddenly it felt heavier. She saw there were pages at the back that hadn’t been there before, edged with gold rather than frost. Opening the book, she flicked to the first golden page and saw that it contained a title:
The Warm-Hearted Volume
And beneath this there was a paragraph that read:
Herein lies the warm-hearted volume, which will reveal itself only to the snow queen who possesses a warm heart. This section will appe
ar when the book senses that warmth but will disappear again at any time should the queen’s heart become frozen.
Stella eagerly flipped through the golden pages and saw that they contained more magic spells. And they were indeed different from the others—softer and lovelier. There was one for healing frostbite, another for creating an ice-cream forest, and another for making frost fireworks. She carried on flicking through the pages, and her eyes suddenly fell on a drawing of a snow globe.
She stared down at the page. The snow globe looked exactly like the one she was trapped in, with its ornate frozen base. The only difference was the one in the book held a single blue rose instead of a human prisoner. There was writing beneath the picture, describing how to create a snow globe, which it seemed had originally been meant as a kind of vase in which to store and preserve flowers.
The elegant script explained that unscrewing the glass from the base would enable a person to change the flower inside whenever one wished, but there was also a brief postscript at the end:
If one should accidentally become trapped inside a snow globe, it is a simple enough matter to free oneself. Simply touch the golden heart charm on one’s bracelet and count to three in order to release the safety mechanism.
Stella looked back down at her bracelet and felt hope rising like a balloon inflating inside her chest. She could get herself out of this! She hadn’t lost quite yet.
Without delay, she scrambled to her feet.
“One,” she said, hugging the book close to her chest.
“Two.” She made sure her feet were planted firmly on the floor, ready to run or fight.
A small glow of triumph rushed through her. The president of the Jungle Cat Explorers’ Club, and the newspapers, and Gideon Galahad Smythe, and all those others had been wrong. She did not have a frozen heart, and this proved it.
She closed her eyes briefly, and the final number came out as a whisper.
“Three.”
There was a faint pop and a showering of broken glass and the white space inside the snow globe disappeared. Stella was back in the Collector’s house once again. Only she was no longer in the same room as before. Now it was darker, and she could hear shouting, and the floor wasn’t flat. She staggered as she tried to keep her footing and heard Scarlett let out a shout somewhere close by, and then she was falling.
Falling back and back as she saw too late that she was on the staircase. During the time she had been in the snow globe, Scarlett must have started to make her way downstairs. Luckily, she’d been almost at the bottom, and Stella fell only the last couple of steps before hitting the wooden floorboards with a thump that knocked the wind out of her.
“What in the world?” Scarlett exclaimed.
Stella propped herself up on her elbows and saw that the Collector was standing a few steps above, a shower of broken glass at her feet and trails of blood running down her free hand. Stella realized the snow globe must have been in her hand and had cut her when Stella escaped. The Collector’s other hand, though, was still tightly wrapped around the sorcerer’s staff as she stared down at Stella.
“There’s no way you should have been able to do that!” Scarlett hissed. For the first time, she looked uncertain. “What are you?”
Stella’s eyes went to the fiery-red tip of the magic staff and she knew her troubles weren’t over yet; there was still plenty of danger and no obvious way out of it, yet she couldn’t help a tiny burst of pride as she looked up at the Collector from where she lay sprawled on the floor and said, “I’m an ice princess with a warm heart.”
She could hear her friends calling out to her from down the corridor, obviously still trapped within the Explorer Room. She couldn’t make out what they were saying because they were all shouting at once, but amid the noise she distinctly heard Shay call out Koa’s name. And the next moment, the shadow wolf appeared at the top of the staircase behind Scarlett.
Stella guessed Shay must have released Koa from the snow globe in the hopes that she would be able to help. She was still partly a shadow wolf after all, even if she was rapidly becoming a witch wolf as well. Indeed, she seemed to have more white fur than black now, and Stella felt a thrill of worry about what that might mean for Shay.
But the wolf was there now and was baring her teeth at Scarlett in a way that made her look quite terrifying.
“Warm heart?” Scarlett repeated, her lip twisting into an expression of disgust. “Then what use are you?”
She began to raise the staff as Stella scrambled to her feet, wondering what on earth she could do. Scarlett had been right, after all—fire melted ice, and Stella didn’t even have her magic tiara. She began to raise the Book of Frost, hoping that it might act as a shield somehow. At the same time, Koa leapt from the top of the staircase, her sleek body flying through the air straight toward the Collector.
The wolf moved silently, but Scarlett must have sensed her somehow because she spun around at the last moment, raising the staff. There wasn’t time for her to point it at Koa, although it still succeeded in protecting her because the shadow wolf bit down on the staff rather than Scarlett herself.
Stella heard the crunch of wood, and Scarlett cried out as the weight of the wolf knocked them both from the staircase. They landed on the floor at Stella’s feet, and a blast of fire shot from the red tip of the staff, scorching the opposite wall.
Koa released the staff with a yelp, and Scarlett scrambled to her feet. Her hair was tangled and her eyes were wild as she pointed the staff straight at Koa.
“What trickery is this?” she gasped. “Is that… a shadow wolf or a witch wolf?”
“Right now, she’s kind of both,” Shay called.
Stella looked behind her and saw that the grating must have finally risen, because Shay, Ethan, and Beanie were all hurrying down the corridor toward her, with Melville bundled into Ethan’s sweater.
“Are you hurt?” Beanie asked, gasping for breath as he stopped beside her.
Stella shook her head, relief flooding through her that she was no longer facing the Collector alone.
“Enough of this,” Scarlett said. “You should never have come here. You have only yourselves to blame.”
She raised her staff, and dancing fire shot from the end of it once again, but Koa’s bite had clearly damaged the staff because the fire didn’t shoot in a clean, straight line. Instead it blasted out sporadically, first in one direction, then another, randomly scorching floorboards and maps and even the ceiling. It was obvious that Scarlett wasn’t in control of the staff at all.
“Get back!” Ethan cried as a ball of fire burst straight toward them.
The other three dived sideways and the magician threw up his hands to re-create the shield they’d seen on the Black Ice Bridge. It hovered in the air before them, proudly displaying the crest of the Ocean Squid Explorers’ Club, and it seemed it was more effective against flame than ice because although Scarlett’s fire blasted straight into it, the shield stood firm, barely scorched.
The next moment, Scarlett let out a shriek of pain, and when Stella peered around the edge of the shield, she saw the Collector’s sleeve was on fire. The staff fell to the floor as she frantically struggled out of the jacket, dropping it in a heap, where it extinguished itself. But Scarlett must have hurt her hand because she hunched over it protectively as she snatched up the staff from the floor and then dashed into the library’s open doorway.
Ethan collapsed the shield. “Should we follow her?” he asked, glancing around at the others.
But before anyone could reply, Shay reeled back, clutching both hands to his head, and Stella saw that both his eyes had turned silver colored this time.
“Let her go,” Stella said. “We’ve got more important things to worry about.”
Koa had shrunk back when fire was going off everywhere, but now she was pacing toward them and she didn’t look at all friendly. In fact, her teeth were still bared, and Stella didn’t think she even recognized them as friends. Shay m
ust have sensed her mood too because he tried to speak soothingly to her, but the wolf hardly seemed to be aware of him and the next moment she leapt straight at Beanie, who was nearest to her. She clearly meant to sink her fangs into him, but Shay jumped in front of her and the wolf slammed into him instead, sending them both to the floor.
“Koa, no!” he gasped, but more of the shadow wolf’s fur was turning white by the second, and Shay was forced to wrap his hands around her snout to prevent her from biting him.
Stella dropped to her knees, slammed the Book of Frost on the floor, and began riffling desperately through its pages, trying to find the spell for unfreezing a heart that she had seen earlier.
“Come on, come on,” she muttered.
Koa seemed so enraged by Shay’s attempt to restrain her that Stella was afraid she might break free at any moment. She also knew that the more of a witch wolf she became, the harder it would be to do the spell. In fact, it may not even be possible at all. They were running out of time, and fast.
Finally, Stella found the page she was looking for. Most of it focused on freezing a heart, but there was a short spell there for if you changed your mind or froze the wrong person by mistake and wanted to undo it. The page also suggested you should touch the star charm for extra power, so Stella squeezed her fist around the cold, spiky charm and read the spell in the book aloud.
“This shard of ice shall be no more,
“Revert to how it was before.”
A surge of icy, crackling power raced down her arm to her fingers, leaving a tingling feeling like pins and needles. She opened her hand just as a beam of silver light shot from her fingertip and hit Koa directly in the middle of her shoulders.
The shadow wolf immediately ceased struggling in Shay’s arms. He let her go, and she took a couple of paces back, shaking herself as if not quite sure what had just happened.
“Look!” Beanie cried, pointing at Koa’s back. They saw that the spot where Stella’s magic had hit was now back to its usual dark color, and the fur around it was turning black too. Not only that, but the wolf was becoming a little softer around the edges as she lost her physical form. Eventually she was dark once again from head to toe, except for a few white hairs on her chest, and when Shay reached out his hand, it passed right through her like it always had before.
