“Okay, stay calm,” she murmured. “Walk fast, but not too fast.”
“How fast is that?” I whispered, hating the tremble in my voice. It was too soon—they couldn’t take me back, not before we got Alastor out and proved to them I wasn’t wandering around with a fiend bent on their destruction inside me.
I closed my eyes, and all I could see was the silver knife in Grandmother’s hand, glowing in the candlelight. I stumbled through the mud.
“I see hundreds of kids every day,” the janitor was saying.
Nell hooked her arm to mine, forcing me to match her pace.
Flee! Alastor was shouting. He comes for us!
“Nell? Cornelia?” the vice principal called, fiddling with his ghost-themed tie. “Can you come here for a moment and speak to this gentleman?”
“I’m going to miss the bus—” Nell protested.
“They’ve been instructed to wait ten extra minutes,” the vice principal said. “It’ll just take a moment.”
“Stay here,” she muttered under her breath. “Don’t forget the glamour. He won’t know it’s you unless you reveal yourself.”
As I watched her walk over to them, I realized that while I hadn’t revealed myself, I’d given the other family members who weren’t Mom or Dad a possible lead. Uncle Barnabas was right—my grandmother had enough tricks up her sleeve to find out about a wrong-number call made to Mom’s private, fiercely protected cell-phone number. One of their security guards must have reported it as suspicious to Grandmonster, and she’d sent Rayburn here on the chance it had been me.
Sorry, Mom, I thought. I’d almost ruined their plan in a single moment of carelessness. At least the glamour was still in place.
For now, Al said helpfully.
“Nell and her father run a haunted house that sees many tourists and guests,” the vice principal explained. “She might have seen the boy you’re looking for.”
The vice principal held the photo out for her to see, and she made a big show of looking it over, considering my face.
But the butler was only looking at me.
“Mr. Matthews!” the vice principal called, stalking over to where a kid was about to break his neck skateboarding down a wet rail. He turned around only to hand the photo back to Rayburn. “Do not attempt that!”
Rayburn pointed a bony finger at me. I could barely hear him over the rain. “—boy matching his description…phone…Witch’s Brew…”
Sweat poured down the back of my neck with the rain. I knew I was panicking, even with the magic mask Nell had placed over me.
“Child, yes, I am speaking to you!” One wraith-like hand reached out and gripped the collar of my fleece, turning me back around with surprising strength just as I started to run. “What’s the hurry, young man? Is there something you wish to hide?”
I shook my head.
“The owner of the coffee shop told me about a young guy matching your description making a few phone calls. Did you, perhaps, accidentally use a wrong number?”
Behind him, Nell looked both angry and exasperated.
I shook my head.
“Is that so?” Rayburn asked. “And are you sure you weren’t hired by another child to place a call? Say, this one?”
He held out my horrible fifth-grade portrait. I tried not to wince.
“Young man,” he said, letting go of my collar. “This child may be in danger. If he asked you to make a call for him—”
“I didn’t do anything,” I interrupted.
In all of Nell’s warnings about not revealing myself to anyone, in all of her explanations of how the glamour worked, I had never once thought to ask her if the glamour also changed my voice.
Now I had my answer.
Rayburn’s face fell, then screwed up in confusion. He turned me back around, leaning in close. “Pros—?”
Nell was suddenly next to him, reaching into the outer pocket of her bag. She gripped his arm to get his attention, and the second he looked down at her, she blew a small burst of pink dust in his face.
Rayburn coughed and tried to wave it off, but it was no use. I stood frozen until I saw that his hand had gone lax and I could finally pull away. Eventually he just sort of…stilled. His whole body relaxed as his shoulders slumped.
“You didn’t find anyone here,” Nell said, rubbing the dust off her palm against her dark pants. “Prosper wasn’t here. Go back and tell them that.”
She didn’t wait for him to respond. He stood there frozen as she shoved past him to get to me. “Let’s go.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about the voice thing?” I demanded as we left. “Nell? What gives?”
Perhaps she was hoping you might reveal yourself after all? This time Alastor only sounded as confused as I felt.
“I—I forgot, okay?”
“What was that stuff you used on him?”
“It’s dizzy dust,” she whispered, yanking me along after her, dragging us through the mud to the waiting buses. If she had slowed down for even a second, I might have run for the nearest garbage can and thrown up everything in my stomach.
“What’s dizzy dust?” I dared to ask.
“Herbs and crystals and a bunch of other stuff,” Nell said, finally letting go of my arm. We slid down a hill that was slick with orange and red leaves and weaved through the trees, running to the bus just as its doors were shutting. She and I took the only available seat left.
“My mom created it. It disorients a person and lets you influence their memory,” she whispered, resting her forehead against the seat in front of us. The windows were fogged over with condensation, hiding us from view. The whole town was wrapped in thick, churning mist. “But—don’t tell him, okay? Don’t tell Barnabas I had it, or what happened. If he knows, then we’ll have to stay in the house. He won’t let us leave.”
Dread ran a cold finger across my throat. “He wouldn’t.”
She turned slightly, looking up at me through her fogged-over glasses. “You don’t know him. Just promise, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, hating that it felt less like a secret and more like a lie.
There were a number of things to consider as the day wore on, and Prosperity and the little witch ventured home. Alastor stayed silent, considering how close he and the boy had come to being returned to Redhood. Playing the scene out in his mind again and again.
This close. He had come this close to being taken back to Redhood.
It was fear that had made Alastor yell for the boy to flee. Pure, disgusting fear for his own life, which was tied to the boy’s. He hated it, every bit of it. The feeling that he was still far too weak. The smell of the boy. The knowing that if they were to return to Redhood now, before Alastor regained his full powers and cut himself free, anything the Redding family did to the child would affect him.