“Giovanni, look who it is!” His mother’s voice chimed over the crowd. “Charles and Peter are here!”
Mr. Grey, looking even snootier than usual in a pearl-gray suit, murmured something that Van couldn’t catch. He and Van’s mother clasped hands and kissed each other on the cheeks. Peter turned away from the kissing, looking mildly ill.
Van swayed on his feet.
Peter Grey. Peter Grey and his father. Here. Tonight. Along with Pebble and Mr. Falborg and—hopefully—a bunch of incoming Collectors and an ancient wish-eating monster. Van felt as though he’d just swallowed a week’s worth of meals at once.
“What a joy to see you again so soon!” Van’s mother went on. “I had no idea you would be here!”
Mr. Grey smiled back at her. “Thought we saw an opening for separating you two.”
No, thought Van. He couldn’t have said that. He must have said something about opening performance and surprising you two. Still, the look Mr. Grey was giving his mother made Van want to dive between them and do some separating of his own.
“I’m so glad I’ll have company for the performance!” his mother exclaimed. “I can’t convince Giovanni to attend with me. He would rather sit in our rooms and read comic books.” Her eyebrows rose. “Perhaps Peter would enjoy that too! Peter, would you rather spend the evening with Giovanni than be stuck with a bunch of stuffy old adults?”
Peter’s face brightened.
“No!” Van shouted.
His mother and Mr. Grey turned to look down at him. Mr. Grey looked annoyed. His mother looked stunned.
The expression that had lightened Peter’s face disappeared in an instant, leaving it as cool and hard as a marble floor.
“That’s all right,” said Peter, before anyone else could speak. His eyes stayed away from Van. “I want to see the opera.”
“Oh, you’ll love this production.” Van’s mother rushed to cover the awkwardness. “The choreography is simply sublime . . .”
“Mom?” Van interrupted desperately. “Can Peter and I go get a lemonade?”
“Of course!” his mother sang. “Enjoy yourselves!”
Van grabbed Peter by the sleeve. He dragged him to a far corner of the tent, feeling—strangely—more like Pebble than he’d ever felt.
“I’m really sorry,” Van said, once they stood face-to-face in the quieter spot. “It’s not that I don’t want to be with you. It’s just . . . I have something else I need to do tonight.”
“Another dangerous secret you can’t tell me about?” Peter’s voice was chilly. “Fine. I took your message to that weird office, by the way. As soon as I got back to the city. And I didn’t open it, if you were wondering.”
“Thank you,” breathed Van. “And I wasn’t wondering.”
Beyond the walls of the tent, the sky was beginning to dim. Lengthening rays of sun seared the gardens with gold, and the fountains glittered, scattering droplets that winked like burning sparks. Along the paths that wound toward the open-air stage, strings of fairy lights began to twinkle on.
“I’d explain everything if I could,” Van rushed on. “It’s just—they’re not my secrets. They’re somebody else’s. I—”
But as Van spoke, a change swept through the tent. Operagoers set down their glasses and surged toward the lighted paths. Peter turned away.
“Wait. What is it?” Van asked, grabbing Peter by the sleeve again.
“They played the fanfare,” said Peter. “Didn’t you hear it?”
Without waiting for an answer, Peter turned and strode off.
Van scanned the receding crowd. His mother was leaving the tent on Mr. Grey’s arm, the two of them beaming at each other like this entire party was for them. The instant they were out of sight, Van spun around, ducked underneath the tent wall, and bolted for the woods.
Ahead of him, the puff of Pebble’s dress glowed against the shadows. As Van raced closer, he could see that she had already demolished her shiny bun and pulled her hair into its usual sloppy ponytail. Bobby pins and tiny white blossoms lay scattered in the grass around her.
“He did it,” Van panted, jogging to a stop. “Peter delivered the message. The Collectors should be coming.”
“. . . guess we’ll see,” said Pebble shortly. “Come on.”
They plunged into the trees.
The path from the Fox Den to the well was far longer than the one from the Falborg mansion. The sky darkened above them as they ran, turning from deep blue to murky violet. The first tiny stars appeared, glimmering in gaps in the canopy, their light too weak to press through.
Van kept his eyes sharp, scanning the trees on every side, watching Pebble’s ponytail bob ahead of him. The hem of her dress was already splotched with mud. Her sandals had gone from white to brown. Van pictured her, locked for years inside Mr. Falborg’s fancy homes, buttoned into fancy clothes, forced to live as a girl named Mabel, when the real Pebble must have been there all along.
A gust of cold, damp air slid down his back. Van glanced around. There was nothing behind him. But a few feet away, a branch swung back and forth too forcefully to have been pushed by the wind.
Van scrambled closer to Pebble.
They passed the Falborg mansion, keeping deep within the trees. The peak of its tower loomed above them, thrusting like a knife into the sky. Without speaking, they ran faster.
But the night fell faster still.
By the time they reached the clearing, the sky was blue black. They stumbled onto the grass, gasping.
The well waited for them. Dampness shimmered on its stones. Moss blanketed its roof, and tiny white mushrooms glowed all around it like the crumbs of fallen stars. When Van stood still, he could feel it: the faint, trembling motion of something far below. Something alive.
Pebble dove through a patch of ferns and pulled out an armload of flashlights. She passed Van two of them.
“Now what?” Van asked as Pebble switched on two flashlights of her own.
His heart was thumping too hard and Pebble was too out of breath for him to catch her answer, but it sounded like up. Or, maybe, hope.
Pebble aimed her flashlight beams at the sky. Van did the same. The sky was so vast and so deep, their little lights seemed useless—like four tiny arms trying to stir the ocean. But Pebble didn’t stop. So Van didn’t either. He glanced over at her, watching her profile against the thickening shadows for a moment, before looking up again.
A small, dark blot had appeared in the sky.
Van stared at it. At first it was so small and so dark that he couldn’t see it at all, but only the sky that disappeared behind it. Then it began to grow, dropping lower, until he could make out a dense, casketlike shape—like a black train car without wheels. Above the casket, lashed to it by strands that glinted in the starlight, were two more shapes. These were huge and silvery, half hidden in swathes of net. But Van could tell two things.
They were alive. And they were coming fast.
Pebble touched his arm. “. . . the carriage,” she breathed.
The flying shape loomed closer. It blotted out a patch of stars that grew and grew, like a widening hole, until at last the dark thing itself came plummeting down into the clearing.
Van and Pebble staggered back. Van stumbled on a lump in the ground, dropping his flashlights as he caught himself. They rolled off into the grass.
The dark shape landed just inches away. It hit the ground so heavily that its edges sank into the earth. Up close, in the shaking beam of Pebble’s flashlights, Van saw that it did look a lot like an unwheeled train car—one made of black metal, with narrow, glassless windows lining its sides. A hatch jutted from its top, where three drivers controlled a mass of iron spikes and glinting ropes. And above the carriage, bound by spiderweb nets and prodded by those spikes, were two monstrous Wish Eaters.
The drivers dragged the Eaters downward until they hovered just above the grass before the carriage. Then they drove iron stakes through the loops of rope, pinning the beasts to the ground. The Eaters howled.
A door in the carriage burst open.
A man stepped out.
His hulking shape filled the doorway. His black leather coat swept the grass. Straps of glinting metal hooks crossed his back, and silvery ropes coiled over his shoulder. His sharp black eyes—one of them twisted slightly by the deep scar that curved from his eyelid all the way to his jaw—fell on Van.
His face split into a warm smile.
“Well,” said Razor, the master of the Hold. “It’s a good trip that ends with finding you two.”