Now I understood a little better. I’m not particularly brave — except maybe when it comes to rescuing people or animals other than myself, and often by the time I get around to it, I’m too late. But I had to do something. I couldn’t call the police, because there weren’t any police in the Underworld. I had no idea how to get hold of John, since he hadn’t given me one of those tablet things, and I certainly didn’t know his number, if he even had one, to call him from my phone … which only seemed to play videos of my cousin trapped in a box, anyway. And I wasn’t going to wait for whatever it was that was out there to come in and get me.
I grabbed a heavy gold candlestick from the mantel. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but if someone was going to hurt me first, I’d definitely act in self-defense.
Holding the candlestick baseball-bat style, I stepped cautiously up to the arch where I’d seen the shadow. The material of the curtain was sheer enough that I could make out some tall shrubs and even the outline of the fountain through it.
Any of those shapes could be a Fury waiting to pounce, I warned myself. Demons came in all sizes. The satyrs on the tapestries in John’s bedroom proved it.
My heart in my throat, I reached out to pull back the curtain, ready to swing the candlestick at anything that moved….
Nothing did, though. I saw only the courtyard, with its gloomy stone pathways and droopy-branched trees, along with the fountain, at the middle of which was a stone statue of a beautiful woman in a long dress, pouring water from an amphora that seemed never to empty.
I couldn’t understand it. Something had been out there. I was sure of it. The bird — maybe even my diamond — had told me so.
Lowering the candlestick, I stepped through the curtain and out onto the gravel path. The moist, chilly air clung to me as if we were long-lost friends, the burbling of the fountain eclipsing all other sound.
Until a figure darted out from behind a shrub.
I screamed and whirled around in time to see him duck through the closest arch. I followed him back inside only to encounter Hope, swooping from her perch to check on me. Her wings got tangled in the gauzy curtain, causing it to balloon out over my head. This made me cry out a second time, and throw my arms over my face to protect my eyes. When I finally untangled us both, I saw that he’d gotten away.
I’d also seen that he wasn’t any kind of otherworldly creature like the ones depicted on the tapestries. He wasn’t a satyr or a walking skeleton or even a man. He was a child, a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old.
He was also dressed in the strangest clothing I’d ever seen. And that was counting the dress I had on.
When I caught up to him, he was racing down the hallway … or at least as fast as he could race, considering he was carrying a silver tray with some of the breakfast things from John’s room — or our room, I guess I should say.
That didn’t seem to stop him, however, from speeding away as fast as a water bug.
Once I got over my initial shock, it occurred to me that it was highly unlikely that a ten-year-old boy who was running away from me intended to do me harm. Especially since he was dressed in what must have been the height of fashion in the 1840s — black pants that cut off at the knee, white stockings, huge clumpy shoes with silver buckles; an oversized blue velvet jacket covered a shirt that might once have been white, but had seen better days.
If he had shown up in that ensemble anywhere else — except possibly a Renaissance fair — he’d have gotten the snot kicked out of him. In the Underworld, he actually fit right in.
“Wait,” I cried. For a child carrying about twenty pounds of silver, he seemed exceptionally mobile. He was already halfway down the hall. “Come back!”
“Sorry.” He didn’t even slow down to look at me. “We’re not supposed to speak to you.”
“What?” I had to break into a jog — and lift my long skirt — in order to catch up with him. “Who said you couldn’t speak to me? Who’s we?”
My mind was spinning. John had said nothing about additional occupants of the castle. Furies, maybe, but not people. He’d said only that he’d told his “men” that if they saw me anywhere I wasn’t supposed to be, they were to bring me straight to him.
This was no man … and no Fury, either. When I looked down at the stone at the end of my necklace, I saw that it had gone gray again. The threat of danger had passed. Unless the only danger there’d ever been was the one threatening Alex….
The boy, meanwhile, kept walk-running. The sconces up and down the hallway hardly cast enough light to see by, sending flickering shadows everywhere, including along the deep red velvet curtains that hung on either side of every door — all locked. I’d tried them earlier — that lined the corridor. I had no idea where he thought he was going.
“What were you doing out there in the courtyard?” I demanded. “How long were you there?” I had a sudden, horrifying thought. “Were you spying on me?”
That got to him. He paused long enough to turn a pair of huge blue eyes up at me. “No,” he declared, indignantly. “I was gathering your breakfast things to return them to the kitchen. But then you came back and wouldn’t stop playing with your magic mirror. So I had to hide because the captain said we weren’t to talk to you. I wasn’t spying.”
“Oh,” I said, flummoxed by this response. He’d reeled off a string of unfamiliar names and objects — Who was the captain? What magic mirror? — so I hardly knew how to respond.