The Lost Heir (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 1) (10 page)

Staring at the keys, his eyes burned with his fierce concentration, his skin grew hot, and his hand shook with the power of the tiny currents of air that vibrated forth from his fingertips.

Slowly, the inexplicable force from his mind flowed down through his outstretched hand and vibrated across the other side of the corridor, finally reaching their intended target. The tips of the heavy iron keys began to swing ever so slightly.

Jake did not take his attention off them. The low jangle they made when they moved might have caused the sleeping boys to stir, but he did not even look over to check. Nothing broke his attention, not even the growing crowd of curious ghosts who gathered around to see what he was doing. A bead of sweat ran down Jake’s face as he concentrated on using his mind to slide the ring of keys up the peg without them making too much noise. By the tiniest degrees, the key ring slid up the peg, inch by inch, and suddenly slipped over the edge.
Yes!

The whole heavy key ring cleared it, suspended in midair, but now came the hard part. Jake brought up both hands now, redoubling his concentration.

The keys floated slowly through the air as if one of the ghosts were carrying them.

His heart pounded with excitement; one of the boys turned over in his sleep, startling him. The keys dropped down a few feet in the air, but did not hit the floor.

They hovered at knee-level.
Whew
. That would’ve been loud. Jake quickly regained his focus, giving the task his all until the keys had floated close enough so all he had to do was bend down and pluck them out of the air.

His fingers closed around the solid iron of the keys in jubilation. At once, all the ghosts began applauding and cheering at his feat.

“Well done! Bravo! Good show, m’boy!”

“How’d you do that?” the Cockney ghost-thief demanded.

“Why, no prison cell can hold ‘im!” the dead highwayman commented in awe. “If I’d had your talents, I’d have been a criminal king.”

Jake glanced at the ghosts uncertainly. It was the first round of applause he had ever received in his life. He gave them a curious half smile, blushing slightly, and nodded at his cheering audience of dead criminals in thanks, but he said nothing, careful not to wake his sleeping cellmates.

Wasting no time, he went over to the door, tried a few different keys, and finally found the right one.

The ghosts gathered around him, watching eagerly, as he claimed his freedom. “Young man, how did you do that?” one of the duelists inquired. “Was it by science or magic?”

“What’s the difference?” drawled the pirate.

“Who are you that you should have such skills?” the other duelist asked him, narrowing his eyes.

“Never mind all that!” the ghost-thief interrupted. “Plucky lad got himself out of his cage, that’s wot matters! So now, why don’t ye do the same for us?” The ghost turned to him. “If you’ve got magic or whatnot, you must know something about how we can get out of ‘ere.”

“No, I don’t. I’m sorry.” Jake stepped out of his cell and closed the door again, locking the rest of the dangerous boys in to finish out their sentences.

“Please!” They crowded round him, making the hairs on his arms stand on end with their tingly coldness.

Jake thought fast. “Well, to be honest, I don’t think you even need to be here,” he whispered back.

“What do you mean? We haven’t been able to find a way out of this prison in ages!” the highwayman said.

“But how can these walls hold you?” he asked. “You’re not solid.”

“How rude!” the gentlemen duelists cried in unison, equally offended.

“Well, you’re not! You’re dead, mates. These walls can’t hold you anymore. All you have to do is float away!”

“Well, yes, but then what?” asked the pirate.

“How should I know?” Jake shrugged. “Go to heaven?”

“Who, us?” They all laughed heartily. “We’re criminals, lad! The devil’s own! Condemned!”

“No, that can’t be true,” Jake protested in a whisper so as not to wake the rest. “There must have been
something
good about you in life. If you were all bad, wouldn’t you be already—you know—down
there
?”

He pointed meaningfully toward the floor.

They thought this over. “You really think there might be hope for us?”

“Aye, why not? Look, I’ve nicked my share of this ‘n’ that,” Jake admitted, still stung by the magistrate’s mockery. “I’m no expert on right and wrong. For all I know, some of you might be rotten to the core, but you don’t seem all that bad to me. Maybe the lot of you are still here because of, I don’t know, unfinished business or something.”

The ghosts glanced around at each other uncertainly, then began to talk amongst themselves, arguing over what to do. “Dashed impertinent of him to suggest we could leave anytime we liked.”

“But what if he’s right? What if there’s hope? What then?”

“There’s no hope.” The highwayman leaped off his ghost-horse angrily and turned away. “Life’s not fair, and death, neither.”

Jake looked around and sincerely wished in that moment that he could not see ghosts, for these ones were as frustrating as any living people.

“I’m trying to tell you maybe there’s something you
can
do about your situation!” Jake informed them.

“Like what?” the highwayman asked, glancing coldly over his shoulder.

All the ghosts floated closer, eager to hear his advice. Jake thought hard. “Find the people you did wrong to when you were alive, the ones you went to jail for, and try to make it up to ‘em somehow.”

“What? Make it up?”

“You need to try to make resta…resti—” Jake struggled to think of the word. Dani would have known it. “Resta—”

“Restitution?” the pirate captain suggested.

“Aye, that’s it!”

The ghost-thief frowned. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“Make restitution to those we wronged, hmm?” the highwayman echoed. His ghost-horse’s ears had pricked up. “An interesting notion. But where would I begin?”

“Sounds preposterous to me,” the shorter duelist grumbled.

“Why?” Jake asked.

“What if the people we wronged are dead, lad? Then what are we supposed to do?”

“I don’t know! Find their descendants or something. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but that’s the only advice I’ve got,” Jake said crossly. He really had no time for this and was even more annoyed by the guilty thought that perhaps he ought to take his own advice: Harris the Pieman and plenty of other people he’d stolen from in his illustrious past career as the best boy-thief in London.

Which he swore was behind him forever after tonight.

He turned away from the ghosts, grumbling under his breath. “Seems like common sense to me, but hey, I’m just a kid. What do I know? Stay here and haunt the jail for a few more centuries for all I care. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to break somebody out of here.” As he walked away, moving down the corridor to try to search out Derek Stone’s cell, he could hear the ghosts debating his advice.

Then he paused and whispered, “Say, where do they keep the prisoners who haven’t yet gone to trial?”

“Men or women?” the ghost thief clarified.

“Men.”

“North!” the pirate captain rumbled, checked his pocket compass, then pointed to the left. “That way.”

“Thanks, Cap’n.” Jake hurried off while the highwayman decided to try the experiment. He aimed his horse straight for the thick fortress wall, worked up to a thunderous gallop, and suddenly vanished through the stones.

The others gasped and cheered, and they, too, began passing through the mighty walls of Newgate, apparently floating off to try to find the people to whom they owed some sort of restitution for their crimes.

For his part, Jake was glad to part ways with the unruly crowd as he tiptoed down the next corridor, past cages full of sleeping prisoners—the living kind—a snoring collection of cutthroats, murderers, smugglers, arsonists, burglars, forgers, embezzlers. These were scarier than the ghosts. To complicate matters, his head began to pound from having used his powers to fetch the keys.

It made him slightly dizzy; the dim corridor ahead seemed to sway as if he was walking down the narrow galley passage on that pirate’s ship.

He shook off the seasick feeling as best he could, but when he spotted an exit door to the outside world, he was sorely tempted to make a run for it and leave Derek Stone behind. But of course, he would do no such thing.

Aside from the grudging respect he felt for Derek, more importantly, Jake wanted answers.

Taking another deep breath to steady his wobbles, he pressed on, sneaking deeper into the prison with the keys in his hands. All he had to do was find the warrior’s cell. Then they would leave this place together, and as soon as they got clear of it, he was going to make Derek Stone tell him everything he knew about his father.

Sneaking through the dark labyrinth of Newgate, Jake hadn’t gone far when the bluish orb of another ghost appeared ahead at the far end of the corridor.

The moment it saw him, it zoomed toward him up the dank stone hallway, but even before it arrived, Jake noticed the specter was in the throes of a pity party.

“Oooooo! WOE! Woe, woe is me!”

“Oh, brother, what now?” he muttered.

The wide glowing blob stopped in front of him. Jake paused in his hunt for Derek, hoping it would go away.

It didn’t, hovering before him.

Then the orb spoke, its eerie whisper stirring his hair slightly.

“Jacob…Everton,”
it breathed.
“I know you.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Haunted

The orb floated closer, rising a few feet higher, as if it were studying him.

Jake backed away. “Why did you call me that?”

Chills tingled down his spine to hear that name again. The same wrong name Derek Stone and the underwater lady had called him.

“I knooooow you…Everton!”
The spectral voice bounced strangely off the stone walls so that it seemed to come from all directions, unpredictably.

It gave him the creeps. “What do you want with me?” Jake forced out, dry-mouthed.

“I didn’t do it, Jacob,” the orb moaned.

“Do what?” he whispered, staring at it in apprehension.

“I didn’t…kill you.”

Kill me?
Jake swallowed hard.

“On my honor as a gentleman, I never would! It was just an empty threat. I intended to apologize. But I never got the chance.”

“Show yourself!”

Slowly, the sad ghost materialized into the shape of a portly country squire in fine clothes, with a hangman’s noose trailing from his neck. It floated out behind him.

“Spirit, why do you say you killed me? I’m alive, as you can see.”

“But I
didn’t
kill you, Jacob! That’s what I’m trying to say!” The ghost became agitated, hardly paying attention. In its own world, it began pacing in the corridor, insofar as a spirit without solid legs could pace. Back and forth it, or rather,
he
floated in a state of wild distress. “I didn’t do it! Why will nobody listen? I had nothing to do with your death!—

‘Oh, but all Society heard you insult his lady right in the middle of a crowded ballroom!’” the ghost answered his own remarks, as though mimicking some annoying person.

“‘What choice did he have, as a gentleman, but to challenge you to a duel?’ I hate lawyers, hate ‘em!” the ghost snarled in an aside to Jake.

Then he went back to imitating whatever some lawyer must have said to him while he was still alive. “‘You were too much of a coward to meet a noted marksman like Lord Griffon on the field at dawn, so you murdered him in cold blood, didn’t you!’ But I didn’t! I swear!”

Lord Griffon? That chap who claims to be my uncle?
Jake wondered. But that didn’t make any sense.

His murderous uncle was alive and well.

Still, Jake stared at the ghost with gooseflesh creeping over his skin, as though someone had just walked across his grave. “Explain yourself,” he prompted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Foul injustice!” With an angry look of disbelief, the ghost ran his hands over the frayed ends of the rope wrapped around his neck. “I am no murderer! Hot-tempered, maybe! Very well, that much is true. I do like a fine French brandy now and then, and I admit, it makes me a tad ill-tempered. But a killer, I? No, nay, never! Not I!

“Kill a man and his family? Wife and child? A neighbor? Shoot him in the heart? No, I say! Most unlike me. I’m very sure I never, ever could. I am sure…aren’t I sure? I don’t…But I would never hurt Elizabeth…”

“Who’s Elizabeth?” Jake whispered fiercely.

“So beautiful, so kind…sweet Elizabeth…so lovely…”

Jake was riveted, but still confused. “Who exactly did you kill?”

“Nobody, man! That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” he roared without warning, sending a great gust of wind down the corridor. “And yet they hanged me for it! A crime I didn’t commit! Oh, woe, woe is me! I am an innocent man!”

He started floating away, moaning to himself and fingering his rope. “Innocent! On my honor, I am most unjustly accused, hanged for a crime I didn’t commit…”

“Wait! Come back!” Jake strode after him. Suspicions had begun forming in his head, and he wanted them either confirmed or denied. “Tell me, spirit! Who were you unjustly accused of killing?”

“Jacob Everton!”
it thundered, spinning and turning back into an orb and then shooting around the stone walls like an angry glowing tennis ball, ricocheting everywhere.

When the ball stopped, it was just the squire’s head, staring Jake belligerently in the face. “False witnesses swore they saw me do it! Oh, yes, yes, I despised that arrogant braggart, so handsome—Lord Perfect, indeed! I could not stand the sight of him! But to kill him? No! Never. Not if I drank all the brandy in the world!” The ghost’s chubby face saddened again as the rest of him appeared again. “Killing him would hurt Elizabeth. Losing her stupid husband would have broken her sweet, gentle heart.”

“Who is Elizabeth? Please,” Jake whispered, but deep down, he feared he already knew.