The other kids at school already had enough ammunition against me without knowing I liked to sketch pictures of them, not to mention benches and gardens around Redhood.
“What about Mom? Or Dad? He likes museums, I guess.”
As crazy talented and smart as my family was, not a single Redding could call him or herself an artist. The only exception was maybe Nathaniel Redding, a second cousin once removed, who wrote the New York Times best-selling book The Lost Longship. It was an incredibly popular story about time-traveling Vikings and the conspiracy to cover up that they had killed off the real Pilgrims from the Mayflower in a bloodthirsty rage.
I thought it was pretty awesome, but Grandmother just about went supernova when she read the first few chapters. Dad had bought a copy for Mom as a joke, and they had laughed together as he read passages of it aloud. And laughed. And laughed.
So I didn’t need to imagine the look on my parents’ faces if I were to show them my sketchbook. I didn’t need to tell them I liked art. I already knew what their reaction would be. When you and Prue are old enough to help us run the Foundation, Dad would say, then we’ll really change the world. Then Mom would smile, and talk about how the most important thing in the world was to help others. And then the only thing left in my head was the realization that art was something I loved, but it didn’t do anything for the world, did it? It just made me happy.
So I kept my sketchbooks closed, until I was sure no one was looking.
I shook my head, my face turned down. “Can we just hurry? We’re already late.”
“Then let’s go this way.” Prue turned off the leaf-splattered road, and I felt a chill slither down my spine.
There was a small patch of dark forest between Main Street and the Cottage. I knew it pretty well, seeing how I’d spent all twelve and a half of my years trying to avoid it. It might have been a good shortcut, but it didn’t make me feel any better as I slid down the soggy hill.
The woods made me feel like my skin was shrinking around my bones. There was a strange light there that turned the bright fall leaves to gray mulch. A little less than four hundred years ago, a terrible fire had torn through the area, and it was clear the trees never really recovered. Their trunks had grown a splotchy bark to hide the scars, but their bodies were twisted. They leaned away from the center of the forest, like they had tried to pull up their roots and run from the flames.
Sometimes, when the rain cut through their bare limbs, I thought I could hear the echo of the trees screaming. Don’t be stupid, I’d think, but the sound stayed in my ears for days. The place was damp, freezing, foggy, or some combo of the three, even in the summer. Even squirrels didn’t like it, which is saying something.
“Prosper,” Prue said suddenly. “Why does Wickworth give you so much detention? I thought you were feeling better….”
I shrugged. “I just doze off sometimes.”
“Pros—”
“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” I picked up my speed, running harder, pulling ahead of her. Anger and frustration made my head feel like it was boiling inside. “My teachers are just boring. I hate school.”
That wasn’t really true. I sort of liked school, aside from homework and tests. It was just that every few nights I had these dreams….This enormous dark cat would come stalking toward me, eyes glowing like emeralds. Sometimes it would just watch me from behind a flickering line of fire, pacing back and forth and back and forth, teeth clattering in anticipation. Other nights, it would be cleaning meat off bones, licking the blood off its teeth. And always, just before I woke up, I’d hear the same words snarled over and over again: Awaken the singing bone.
I’d read that dreams, even nightmares, are our brains’ way of trying to work out a problem, or remember something we’ve forgotten. So clearly this was my brain trying to tell me that my grandmother was going to try to peel off my skin and eat me one day.
It was nothing. Compared to what Prue had gone through, it was less than nothing. I didn’t want my parents to have to worry about me even more than they already did.
Prue opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again. She reached over and punched me lightly on the shoulder. “Whatever you say. I’m always up for a rescue.”
That was the problem. I didn’t want her to rescue me. I just wanted her to like me again.
“We’re here,” I announced, tucking my chin down against my chest, waiting for her to lead. As always. Prue darted forward, only to stop dead in her tracks.
“What the—?” The words seemed to drop off my lips.
At the base of the hill was the start of the Cottage’s long driveway—and dozens upon dozens of people, familiar and strange, were waiting there.
For us.
It wasn’t that me and Prue hated our grandmother. It was just that we thought she might be the Devil in a dress suit.
She was our only living grandparent after Mom’s parents, Grannie and Pa-Pa, were killed in a terrible car accident, and Grandpa Redding died of a heart attack. You think we’d all be super-close since we only lived a few streets away, huh?
Yeah. Right.
She didn’t try to hide the evil lurking beneath her jewelry and expensive clothes either. She would skin a puppy if she thought it would make a good hat. Besides handing out fake money to the homeless, electing herself mayor of Redhood for ten consecutive years, and once forcing a gardener to continue pruning her roses after he had fallen off a ladder and broken both arms because she was hosting a party that night, Grandmother was also responsible for my name.
In the 325 recorded years of Redding family history, there had only ever been two sets of twins: Prosperity Oceanus Redding and Prudence Fidelia Redding in the seventeenth century, and Prosperity Oceanus Redding and Prudence Fidelia Redding in the twenty-first.
I don’t know how she talked Mom and Dad into it. Maybe Mom was still out of it or something, or Grandmother bribed the doctor and nurses to let her fill out the birth certificate? And, okay, I get that there are worse Puritan names in the family we could have inherited. Be-Thankful, Help-on-High, Diffidence, and Obedience, to name just a few of the awesome options. Let me tell you, though, there is a special kind of awkwardness that comes from being surrounded by cousins with names like David and Josh.
And both David and Josh were waiting for us on the driveway below.
“What the…?” Prue squinted down at them.
It felt like someone had head-butted me in the chest. “Oh my God,” I said, dropping my schoolbag. “Something happened to Mom and Dad.”