Sloane Osburn dove behind a gravestone.
An acorn whizzed through the air where she’d been running only a fraction of a second before. Instead of smashing against her forehead, it chipped off a piece of another headstone. Granted, the slab was almost two hundred years old and fragile. But some of Sloane’s body parts were fragile too, if not nearly as old.
No doubt another acorn had already been loaded into the slingshot, waiting for Sloane to scamper out from behind the stone. Like this was some sort of carnival game, with millions of dollars’ worth of Victorian jewels as the prize for the winner.
“Sloane! Sloane!” her friend Amelia Miller-Poe called from the scrubby weeds on the other side of the cemetery. “Have you been hit, Sloane? Are you dying? It would be terribly tragic if we died together!”
As she huddled against the cold limestone, Sloane sighed in relief. If Amelia could talk dramatically about dying, then she was definitely okay. When Amelia stopped talking like that, you needed to worry.
“You’re not dying, Amelia!” Sloane risked a peek around the edge of the stone.
She’d picked the wrong time to look. An acorn clipped her ear. Clapping a hand to the side of her head, Sloane jerked back behind the gravestone.
“She might be dying,” the voice of their attacker called cheerfully. “You won’t know unless you come out to see!”
“Don’t do it!” Amelia cried woozily (but still dramatically). “I shall sacrifice myself nobly! Don’t worry about me, Sloane! Save the long-lost Cursed Hoäl Treasure!”
The treasure. Amelia wasn’t wrong about it being cursed. Who would have thought anyone else would really be looking for it over a hundred years later?
Who would have thought this whole school project was just a setup? To use the brains of middle-school kids to solve a riddle no adult had figured out in years: Whatever happened to the lost Hoäl jewels?
True, she and Amelia had figured it out. But a little too late.
Still, none of this would have happened if they hadn’t been forced to work together. If Sloane and Amelia ended up stoned to death by acorns, it was going to be the school’s fault for requiring group projects.
Bitterly, Sloane hoped everyone would be happy then. Why did teachers never listen to students when they said it was evil to force kids to work with people who weren’t their friends?
Because this group project was definitely evil.
Or, at the very least, it had been organized by an evil person.
And that person wasn’t going to stop until they got what they wanted.