Chapter 19

“You know HP?” Gregory blurted out.

“She’s bluffing, Gregory,” Cordelia said. “She only wants us to think she knows something we don’t.”

“I wouldn’t need to bluff for that,” Elizabeth snapped. “Since what you know isn’t enough to fill a thimble. You don’t even have the right initials.”

Cordelia stared. Elizabeth rolled her eyes so hard, Cordelia was surprised they didn’t turn backward.

“Look again,” she said, returning the note to Cordelia. “That isn’t an H. It’s an N. See? It’s obvious if you compare it to the H in ‘Hello.’ They look completely different.”

She was right: the difference was obvious.

“It’s an N,” Elizabeth went on. “And see here? This bit of ink before it?”

“The comma?” Cordelia asked, when Elizabeth pointed.

“It isn’t a comma.” Even though Elizabeth didn’t add an obviously, Cordelia read it in her facial expression. “Who signs initials directly after a ‘Sincerely’ or ‘Best Wishes for a Successful Abduction’ or ‘In Anticipation of Revenge’? Initials go below the closing salutation.”

“I know how to write a letter, thanks,” Cordelia said, before Eizabeth could start explaining how to count to ten.

“Just not how to read one,” Elizabeth fired back. “That squiggle? It’s the lower half of an S. S-N-P. See? You had the wrong initials all this time.”

“S-N-P,” Gregory repeated slowly, puckering his mouth around each new letter.

“Okay, fine.” Cordelia stuffed the note back in her jacket pocket. “We had the wrong initials, and now we have the right ones. But right or wrong, initials don’t get us very far.”

Gregory still had a funny look on his face, like he was chewing on something he didn’t quite like the flavor of. “Why do I know those initials?”

Elizabeth looked at him pityingly. “Probably because you’ve seen them on about a thousand signs around Boston,” she said. And then, turning back to Cordelia, “SNP stands for the Society for National Protection. They’re the ones,” she added, when Cordelia only stared, “who chased the goblin out from our cellar and tried to kill it.”

Cordelia felt a yank of nausea that had nothing to do with the motion of the basket—although the basket didn’t help. “To . . . kill it?”

“Well, what did you think they would do? Ask it for a Bundt cake?” Elizabeth snapped. “After you found that—thing—living under our garden, we had the SNP camped outside our house for days.”

“That’s right.” Gregory’s expression cleared up. “They had signs all over the stations, too, and wormy volunteers rooting out the strays and vagrants and don’t-belongers.”

“They even accused us of breeding her,” Elizabeth said, with an exaggerated shudder. “As if we’d grown her like a potato plant. The neighbors threatened to burn the house down. Why do you think we had to move from the old house?”

“I’m sorry,” Cordelia said. “I never knew—”

“You never asked,” Elizabeth fired back.

“Maybe because you stopped speaking to me.”

“Oh, sorry. Maybe it was because I was dealing with the goblin living under my house—”

“You could have asked for help—”

“You could have offered it—”

“How about both of you pin it,” Gregory interjected, before Cordelia could respond. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry.” Then, turning to Elizabeth, “You said you know where to find these SNP lugs?”

“Their headquarters is in Worcester,” Elizabeth said, with a little sniff of distaste.

“Worcester, as in Massachusetts?” Cordelia burst out. That was only an hour outside of Boston. “You mean we came all the way to New York for nothing?”

“At least we know who HP is now,” Gregory said, and then he frowned. “Who SNP is, I mean. Seriously Nasty People.”

It was as good a theory as any—and the only one they had. Still, Cordelia hated to admit it. “Bring us down,” she said exasperatedly. “We can talk about it once we’re on the ground.”

That wiped the smirk from Elizabeth’s face. “Yeah . . . um, about that . . .”

Cordelia stared at her. “You do know how to bring us down, right, Captain?”

Elizabeth at least had the grace to look guilty. “Not exactly.”

“You said you knew how to drive this thing!” Cordelia cried.

“I didn’t say I knew how to land.”

“We’ve got another problem,” Gregory said. He was peering over the edge of the basket. “There’s no more land to land on.”

Elizabeth and Cordelia rushed to join him. Cordelia’s heart sank.

Gregory was right. While they’d been arguing, the basket had left the city behind. Beneath them was a smooth stretch of black water.

They were heading directly into open ocean.

There was nothing to do but wait until morning and hope they had not gone too far astray.

And hope, too, it didn’t begin to storm.

Cordelia hadn’t anticipated how cold it would be this high up. She, Gregory, Icky, and Cabal huddled together in the center of the basket, while Elizabeth sat several feet away, staring distastefully at both monsters and swatting at the dragon whenever he happened to swoop near her. The wind rocked the basket gently back and forth and caused the flame beneath the swollen balloon to sputter and spit. Cordelia didn’t want to think about what would happen if the flame went out. They’d go plummeting to earth and splatter, like grapes hurled from the air by a giant.

They shared a dinner of hard seed bread and jerky, which Cordelia had thankfully transferred from her rucksack into her jacket pockets on the train. The jerky was as knotty as a tree branch and just as difficult to chew. Elizabeth managed only a few bites.

“That’s disgusting,” she said.

“Go hungry, then,” Cordelia said.

After that, Elizabeth ate without complaining. And although she made a face when the dragon—who had inexplicably taken a liking to her—curled up next to her feet, she didn’t pull away.

“He won’t light me on fire in his sleep, will he?” Elizabeth asked. When the dragon snored, small bits of steam issued from his nose.

“That depends,” Cordelia said. “Are you flammable?”

Gregory nudged her and whispered, “Be nice.”

“Impossible,” she whispered back.

Gregory lay down. Cordelia was sure she would never sleep, suspended in the air with no idea where they were going or how they would get down. She couldn’t stop thinking about what Elizabeth had said about the Society for National Protection. Had they really intended to kill the old goblin? What possible danger could it have been to them? Goblins and people had coexisted peacefully for millennia, and for many centuries had even intermarried without a problem. And the goblin they’d found beneath Elizabeth’s garden was so old, she was missing her teeth. All three sets of them.

But she curled up beside Gregory anyway. They had no blanket, but once the filch had settled down at their feet and Cabal had folded himself next to their heads, Cordelia began to warm up.

Elizabeth was lying on the other side of the basket, shivering so much her teeth chattered together.

“She’ll freeze,” Gregory whispered.

“So much the better,” Cordelia whispered back.

“Cordelia,” he scolded her. “You don’t mean it.”

Cordelia swallowed a sigh.

“Lie next to us, Elizabeth,” she said, attempting to be pleasant and succeeding only in sounding gruff. “We’ll keep each other warm.”

“I’m fine,” Elizabeth said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Cordelia said. “It’s colder than Cabal outside.”

“I said I’m fine.”

But after another minute, Elizabeth inched closer to Cordelia. Another minute passed, and she came closer again. Another minute, another inch—until by the time Cordelia drifted off to sleep, Elizabeth was lying directly beside her, and Cordelia was breathing in the smell of her hair.