“I need an invention.”
To Sadie’s credit, she didn’t look at April like she was crazy. It was more like she was . . . concerned. And intrigued. April couldn’t blame her. After all, one and a half movies ago, April had been safe and warm and dry. And now April was . . . not. At all.
But there was also a not-quite-dead billionaire lying on the rocks with a sword sticking out of him, so April was trying really hard not to take it personally that Sadie was looking at her like maybe she was an experiment that had gone horribly, horribly wrong.
“Are you wet?” Sadie asked.
“Yeah. I—”
“Is that seaweed?” Sadie exclaimed, picking a piece of the long, stringy stuff off of April’s black coat.
“I went for a swim,” April blurted when Sadie drew in a big breath as if getting ready to shout again.
Behind her, April could hear laughing and music. Light flickered through the crack in the doorway, and it was easy to imagine everyone snuggled up on couches with popcorn and fluffy blankets, waiting for the hero to save the day.
But April was proof that sometimes heroes end up half drowned and bleeding to death, needing heroines to do the heavy lifting.
And speaking of lifting . . .
“So about that invention—”
“Why would you go swimming? It’s freezing out there. Or, well, not technically freezing. By my estimates, it’s going to get down to thirty-four degrees, but not until four a.m., and it’s only—”
“Sadie!” April snapped. “I need your help,” she said again, and Sadie grew serious, focused. She had a look in her eye like April was a problem that needed solving. And Sadie wasn’t going to stop until she’d done it.
Behind April, a door must have opened and closed because, for one brief second, the hallway was bright, and Sadie’s eyes went wide as she looked down at April’s pale hands.
“Is that blood?”
“It’s not mine,” April blurted.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“I wouldn’t bother you.” April felt like she needed to say it quickly—get it all out before Gabriel died or she collapsed, whichever came first. “But I really do need an invention.”
“What kind of invention?” Sadie asked.
April looked at her. “The kind that can move a body.”
For a second, Sadie pondered that, as if “body moving” might be a totally underserved segment of the invention-making market, but then she seemed to really hear what April was asking.
“I don’t have . . . I don’t make . . . I don’t know how to move a body!”
Then April felt someone behind her. She turned to see Tim say, “I do.”
April couldn’t have been inside the mansion for more than ten minutes, but the fog was thicker and the sky was darker and everything felt different when she climbed down the cliff than it had felt when she’d climbed up—probably because there was another set of feet crunching along behind her and a voice that kept saying, “You know, we could go tell Ms. Nelson.”
April shook her head and glanced behind her, grateful she’d thought to grab a flashlight when Tim went to get his coat.
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
Because he’s been hiding from her for weeks. Because the last time I mentioned Gabriel Winterborne’s name, she looked at me like I was a stain on her clean clothes. Because . . .
“Because we can’t.” April skidded down the cliff and stood on the rocky shore for a minute, trying to get her bearings.
“Okay. So where is this body?” He sounded skeptical, like he’d been thinking all along that April might be lying, but April didn’t have the time or the energy to get angry.
Instead, she scanned the rocks and said, “He’s around here somewhere.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“He is!”
“We could call 911,” Tim tried, but at that one, April had to laugh.
“Something funny?” Tim sounded more than a little offended.
“We can’t call 911. He’d kill me.” She walked closer to the water.
“That’s not making me think this is a good idea, you know.”
He might have had a point, but April didn’t have time to care, so she threw up her hands and snapped, “I don’t mean literally. Or . . . well . . . I don’t know. I just . . . Just help me get him back to the mansion and then you can forget all about it, okay? Forget about him and forget about me. Please.”
She turned and scanned the shore again, while Tim mumbled something that sounded a lot like, “I can’t forget about you,” but she couldn’t be certain. It might have been the wind. It might have been her head. It didn’t matter, though. Nothing mattered but finding Gabriel Winterborne.
She turned back to Tim, expecting scorn or ridicule or a fresh round of let’s-go-tell-a-grownup, but he just looked at her like he’d never seen her before.
“What?” she snapped.
“You said please.” Tim’s voice was soft. “You don’t say please.”
“Yeah. Well. I’m saying it now.”
“What happened?” he asked.
Carefully, April turned again, shining her flashlight over the shore.
“He got beat up,” she said. They’d already lost too much time. Gabriel might have already lost too much blood. He might be too cold. Maybe Tim was right and they should call 911 . . . Maybe—
“Who is he?” Tim asked.
April didn’t want to admit it, but if a guy is willing to climb a cliff and move a body, you kind of owe him the truth. So she said, “Gabriel Winterborne,” and cocked an eyebrow, daring him to call her a liar.
There was a foghorn blowing in the distance. The water lapped against the rocks. But everything else was quiet as Tim stared at her. “Look, I said I’ll help you, but—”
“There!” April shouted as the flashlight’s beam fell across a lump on the rocky ground.
His face was black and blue and swollen, but he wasn’t even trembling despite the cold. He wasn’t doing anything. Maybe not even breathing. So when he groaned, it was the most wonderful sound April had ever heard.
“He’s alive,” she sighed, sinking to her knees.
But Tim was shouting, “There was a chance he wasn’t alive?”
April whirled and gave Tim a grin. “Yeah. Uh . . . he—”
“Is that a sword?” Tim gasped as the beam of April’s flashlight caught on the shiny piece of silver sticking out of Mr. Winterborne’s shoulder.
“I thought I should leave it in until I could stop the bleeding.” She had been fairly proud of that decision, but Tim seemed to be stumbling over the whole sword aspect of the conversation.
“Sure. That’s how I handle all my sword wounds.”
April was fairly certain he was mocking her.
She was even more certain she didn’t care.
She leaned over Mr. Winterborne and gently gripped the handle of the sword.
“I’m really sorry about this,” April said, then pulled it free. His whole body seized from the pain, but his eyes stayed closed and his chest kept rising and falling. When she got the flashlight, she’d also grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and now she pressed it against his wounds and tried not to think about the blood.
Some lights still burned in the mansion, but most of the windows were dark. They were alone as they stood looking up at the steep steps that crisscrossed their way up the cliff face. Gabriel Winterborne had probably climbed them a million times, but April and the other kids were strictly forbidden from those stairs. They weren’t stable, Ms. Nelson said. They were dangerous. People could get hurt.
Gabriel moaned.
People already were.
“I could go get help,” Tim said one more time, and April knew he wasn’t wrong. But April’s gut kept telling her he also wasn’t right, even when he cast a worried look at the stairs. “I don’t think we can drag him up those.”
“We don’t have to.”
She whistled, the sound piercing the air as the fog lifted. The clouds parted. And the moon shone down on Winterborne House like a spotlight as the small door that Gabriel had left through swung open. April was so glad Sadie had found it, especially when a rope fell down, complete with pulleys and hooks.
“Ready when you are!” Sadie yelled.
Tim looked like he didn’t know whether to be impressed or terrified, but before he could say a word, Gabriel groaned again.
“Come on,” April said. “We’ve got work to do.”