Authors: Kerstin Gier
“Immortal, but not invulnerable,” said Gideon. We all jumped and looked at him in surprise. He’d come into the apartment unnoticed
and was now leaning in the doorway with his arms folded. He was still wearing his eighteenth-century outfit, and as always, my heart did a painful little thump at the sight of him.
“How’s Charlotte?” I asked, hoping the question sounded as neutral as I’d intended.
Gideon wearily shrugged his shoulders. “I guess she’ll have to take a few aspirins tomorrow morning.” He came closer. “What are you
all doing?”
“Making plans.” Lesley had her tongue wedged in the corner of her mouth as her pencil moved fast over the paper. “And we mustn’t forget the magic of the raven,” she added, more to herself than anyone else.
“Gid, who do
you
think the count’s secret accomplice among the Guardians could be?” Raphael was biting his nails. “I suspect Uncle Falk. I always thought he was very odd, even
when I was little.”
“Nonsense.” Gideon came over to me and dropped a kiss on my hair before plopping into the well-worn leather armchair opposite. He propped his elbows on his knees and put a strand of hair back from his face. “I can’t get what Lucy said just now out of my mind. About the count losing his immortality from the moment when Gwyneth was born.”
Lesley tore herself away from her diagrams
and nodded. “
But beware: when the twelfth star shows its own force, His life here on earth runs its natural course
,” she quoted, and I was annoyed, yet again, to find that the silly jingle could send a shiver down my spine. “
And if youth is destroyed, then the oak tree will stand, To the end of all time, rooted fast in the land.
”
“Do you know all that stuff by heart?” asked Raphael.
“Not all
of it. But many of those verses sort of stick in the mind,” said Lesley, slightly embarrassed. Then she turned to Gideon. “This is how I see it. If the count swallows that powder in the past, he becomes immortal. But only until the twelfth star rises, meaning … er … until Gwyneth is born. Then it’s good-bye to his immortality; he’ll age like anyone else. Unless he kills Gwyneth to stop the process
in its tracks. But before that, she has to make it possible for him to get hold of the elixir in the first place. And if he never gets the elixir, he won’t get to be immortal either. Am I making sense?”
“Sort of,” I said, thinking of Paul and the subway systems being built in our brains.
Gideon slowly shook his head. “But suppose we’ve been making a mistake all along in our reasoning?” he asked
thoughtfully. “Suppose the count got his hands on the powder long ago?”
I almost said, “What?” again, but I managed to stop myself just in time.
“That’s not possible, because in one of the chronographs the Circle of Blood still hasn’t been closed, and I hope the elixir from the other is hidden somewhere safe.”
“Yes,” said Gideon, still slowly. “Yes, right at this minute it is. But it doesn’t
necessarily have to stay that way.” He sighed as he saw our blank expressions. “Think about it: it’s possible that at some point in the eighteenth century, the count—by one means or another—did take the elixir, and it made him immortal.”
All three of us stared at him. I came out in goose bumps all over, without really knowing why.
“Which in turn would mean that he may be alive at this very moment,”
Gideon went on, looking me straight in the eye. “He could be going around out there somewhere, just waiting for us to take the elixir back to him in the eighteenth century. And then looking for his chance to kill you, Gwyneth.”
For a few seconds, silence reigned. Then Lesley said, “I don’t say I entirely follow you, but even if for some reason you two change your minds and you do take the count
the elixir … wouldn’t he have one tiny problem?” At this point she laughed happily. “He
can’t
kill Gwenny.”
Raphael made his pencil spin on the table like a top. “And anyway, why would you change your minds, now that you know the count’s real intentions?”
Gideon didn’t answer at once, and his face was almost expressionless as he finally said, “Because we could be blackmailed.”
* * *
I
WOKE FEELING
something damp and cold on my face, and Xemerius said, “Your alarm clock will go off in ten minutes’ time!”
Groaning, I pulled the quilt up over my head.
“There’s no satisfying you! Yesterday you complained because I
didn’t
wake you.” I seemed to have hurt Xemerius’s feelings.
“I hadn’t set my alarm clock yesterday. And it’s horribly early,” I muttered.
“You have to make a few
sacrifices if you want to save the world from an immortal megalomaniac,” said Xemerius. I could hear him humming as he flew around the room. “The megalomaniac you’re due to meet this afternoon, in case you’d forgotten. Come on, rise and shine.”
I played dead. Which wasn’t very difficult, because immortal or not, I
felt
just about dead. However, Xemerius didn’t seem much impressed by my efforts.
He fluttered cheerfully up and down in front of my bed, churning out old wives’ sayings along the lines of
the early bird catches the worm.
“The early bird’s welcome to all the worms it likes,” I said, but in the end, Xemerius got his way. Irritated, I rolled out of bed, and as a result, I was at the Temple Tube station on the dot of seven in the morning.
Well, strictly speaking, it was seven
sixteen, but the time on my mobile was a little fast.
“You look as tired as I feel,” groaned Lesley, who was already waiting for me on the platform where we’d agreed to meet. There wasn’t much going on in the station at that time of a Sunday morning, but I wondered how Gideon expected to get into one of the underground tunnels from here unnoticed. The platforms were brightly lit, and the place
was full of CCTV cameras.
I put down my heavy traveling bag, which was packed full of stuff, and cast a sour glance at Xemerius, who was flying in and out between the columns in a headlong slalom race. “It’s Xemerius’s fault. He wouldn’t let me use Mum’s concealer because he said it was so late. And he wouldn’t let me stop off at a Starbucks on the way here either.”
Lesley put her head on one
side, with an interested look. “You slept at home?”
“Yes, of course, where else?” I asked rather impatiently.
“Well, I thought the pair of you might have taken a break from making plans after Raphael and I left.” She rubbed her nose. “Particularly as I spent ages saying good night to Raphael, on purpose to give you time to move from the sofa to the bedroom.”
“On purpose?” I asked slowly. “Wow,
how self-sacrificing of you!”
Lesley grinned. “Yes, wasn’t it?” She didn’t even blush. “But don’t change the subject. You could have told your mum you were sleeping over with me.”
I smiled wryly. “To be honest, I’d have done just that. But Gideon insisted on calling a taxi for me.” I added, a little unhappily, “I obviously can’t have looked as seductive as I thought.”
“It’s only that he has
a sense of—er—responsibility,” Lesley consoled me.
“You could call it that,” said Xemerius, who had finished flying the slalom. Breathing hard, he came down on the floor beside me. “Or you could call him a bore, slow off the mark, a scaredy-cat”—he stopped to get his breath back—“a shirker, a guy with no guts, just plain chickening out.…”
Lesley looked at her watch. She had to shout to be heard
above the noise of an incoming Central Line train. “And he’s apparently not particularly punctual. It’s already twenty past.” She looked at the few passengers getting out of the train. Then, all of a sudden, her eyes lit up. “Oh, there they are.”
“That morning, the two eagerly awaited fairy-tale princes had left their white horses in the stable for once and traveled by Tube,” declaimed Xemerius
unctuously. “At the sight of them, the eyes of the two princesses shone, and when the two concentrated sets of young hormones collided, expressing themselves in the form of embarrassed kisses and silly grins, the clever and incomparably handsome demon unfortunately had to throw up in a garbage bin.”
He was exaggerating outrageously—we none of us had silly grins on our faces. At the most, we were
smiling blissfully. And no one was embarrassed, except perhaps me, because I remembered how Gideon had unwound my arms from around his neck last night, saying, “I’d better call you a taxi now. We’re going to have a strenuous day tomorrow.” I felt a bit like a burr that had to be picked off a pullover. And the worst of it was that at that very moment, I’d been getting ready to say “I love you.”
Not that he hadn’t known that for ages, but … well, I hadn’t actually said it yet. And now I wasn’t quite sure whether he really wanted to hear it.
Gideon briefly caressed my cheek. “Gwenny, I can do this on my own, you know. I only have to intercept the Guardian on duty while he’s on his way to the Lodge and get the letter away from him again.”
“
Only
is good,” said Lesley. Although we were
still far from having any really brilliant ideas up our sleeves, the four of us had worked out what Lesley called “a rough plan of action.” In any event, we had to see Lucy and Paul again, and we had to do it before we met the count this afternoon. We also had to do something about the letter that Gideon had taken last week to the year 1912, saying where Lucy and Paul were hiding. On no account must
it fall into the hands of the Grand Master of the time and the de Villiers twins. As the time we could spare for secret travel by private chronograph was, we calculated, an hour and a half, maximum, if we didn’t want to risk doing ourselves physical damage (for instance imitating Xemerius and throwing up), how to make good use of every minute was going to be a problem.
At first Raphael had seriously
suggested that we could smuggle the chronograph into the Guardians’ headquarters and travel straight back from there, but even his big brother didn’t have nerves strong enough for that.
As an alternative suggestion, Gideon had taken some rolled-up papers out of one of his bookshelves, and from between
The Anatomy of Man in 3-D
and
Structural System of the Human Hand
, he conjured up a map of the
underground passages running through the Temple district. That map was why we were now meeting at the Tube station.
“You want to do it without us?” I frowned. “But we agreed that in future we’d do everything together.”
“Exactly,” said Raphael. “Otherwise you’ll end up saying you saved the world all by yourself.” He and Lesley were to stand guard over the chronograph, and although Xemerius, slightly
offended, had said he could do the job just as well, it was comforting to know that they could pick it up and take it away with them if we were forced to travel back to somewhere else.
“Anyway, you’re sure to be in deep trouble without us!” Lesley snapped at Gideon.
Gideon raised his hands in the air. “Okay, okay, I get the idea.” He picked up my traveling bag and looked at the time. “Right,
pay attention. The next train arrives at seven thirty-three. After that, we have exactly four minutes to reach the first passage before another train comes through. Don’t switch your flashlights on until I say so.”
“You’re right,” Lesley whispered to me. “He’s addicted to ordering people about.”
* * *
“
MERDE!
” Raphael’s curse was heartfelt. “That was close.”
I could only agree. The beams
of our flashlights passed over the tiled walls and lit up our pale faces. The carriages of the train were rattling through the tunnel behind us.
Four minutes, we now knew, was a very small window of time to climb over the barrier at the end of the platform, jump down, and run along the tunnel, keeping well away from the electrified track. Not forgetting the time spent as we caught up with Gideon
after the last fifty yards and stood gasping for breath and helpless in front of the iron door that let into the right-hand wall of the tunnel, while he took a kind of skeleton key out of his pocket and set about picking the lock. That was the moment when Lesley, Xemerius, and I had begun screeching in chorus, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!” to the accompaniment of the noise of the approaching
train.
“It looked closer on the map,” said Gideon, glancing at us apologetically.
Lesley was the first to pull herself together. She shone the beam of her flashlight into the darkness ahead, lighting up the wall where the passage came to a sudden end four yards farther on. “Okay, this is the right place.” She checked the map. “That wall hadn’t been built yet in 1912. The passage goes on beyond
it.”
As Gideon knelt down, unwrapped the chronograph, and entered the settings, I took our 1912 clothes out of the bag and prepared to take my jeans off.
“What’s the idea?” Gideon looked up at me, obviously preoccupied. “Are you planning to run along these passages in a long dress?”
“I just thought … I mean, on account of authenticity—”
“The hell with authenticity,” said Gideon.
Xemerius
clapped his claws. “Too right, the hell with it!” he said enthusiastically. Then he turned to me. “Keeping bad company rubs off on you. And about time too.”
“You first, Gwenny.” Gideon nodded at me.
I knelt in front of the chronograph. It was a little odd to be disappearing before the fascinated gaze of Lesley and Raphael, but by this time, I realized, the whole thing followed a familiar routine.
(Any time now, I’d probably be popping off to the last century to get fresh rolls for breakfast.)
Gideon landed beside me and shone his flashlight ahead. Sure enough, there was no wall there in 1912; the beam of light went on until it was lost in a long, low passage.
“Ready?” I asked with a grin.
“Ready when you are,” he replied, grinning back.
I didn’t know that I was really ready. The Tube
tunnel had been scary enough, and if I stuck around here long, I might need psychiatric treatment for acute claustrophobia.
The farther we went, the lower the ceilings of the passages, and the more they kept branching. Here and there, flights of steps went on down, and once we found ourselves facing a passage where the roof had fallen in, and we had to turn back. There wasn’t a sound except for
our breathing and the faint
tap-tap
of our footsteps, plus now and then the rustle of paper when Gideon stopped to consult the map. I imagined I also heard rustling, tripping sounds from somewhere else. There were probably whole armies of rats living in this labyrinth, and—still imagining things—I thought that if I were a giant spider, this would be an ideal place to live and go hunting.