When the Finleys and their friends emerged from the manhole, Paladin and Vyka were waiting for them. The road was littered with bone fragments, beaks, claws, and heaps of black feathers. Paladin was quick to explain that the group had missed an immense battle between the valravens and the owls, which the owls had obviously won. All the bones wriggled, like pieces of some immense jigsaw puzzle attempting to reassemble itself.
“It’ll probably take them years to get back together,” sneered Septimus.
On the way to the subway station, they passed a group of reporters and photographers clustered around squad cars with lights flashing. The police and several detectives held up a plastic bag containing a dazzling array of diamond jewelry.
The white-haired commissioner stepped forward to speak: “I’m happy to report that the stolen diamonds are recovered!”
“Who recovered them?” replied a reporter. “Your crack team of detectives?”
“Er, no…it was owls,” replied the commissioner.
The reporters all laughed as the bristling detectives stalked back to their cars.
On the subway ride home, Adam and Tabitha sat together, arms around each other, deep in conversation. Gabriel and Pamela had their ravens perched on their shoulders while they spoke with Abby, Somes, and Cassius.
“Okay,” said Somes. “One thing has been bugging me about this visit to Aviopolis.”
“What’s that?” replied Gabriel.
“I’m very suspicious of Mr. Coffin. How did he know to give me a hook to open a manhole cover? And why did he tell us how to navigate a maze? I think he was up to no good.”
“Somes,” said Gabriel, smiling, “he’s my aunt’s boyfriend. Whatever he was up to, I think he’s on our side.”
“I’m not so sure,” murmured Somes. “He’s given me the worst grades of all my teachers. Maybe he was just trying to steer us to our doom.”
“But he didn’t, Somes,” argued Abby. “It all worked out in the end, so I think your theory is ridiculous.”
“Look,” said Gabriel, “I’m sure Aunt Jaz knows the truth about him.”
His friends laughed, because they were all aware that if Aunt Jaz (or anyone else in the Finley house) did know the truth, it might be a secret for many years.
The group parted ways on Fifth Street. Abby and Somes hugged the others and headed back to their homes. Septimus went grumbling down the hill, annoyed at having nothing to show for his dangerous journey. Pamela led Cassius and Tabitha Finley up the block toward the Finley house, while Adam lingered for a moment beside Gabriel.
“One thing, Gabriel,” he said. “What was that terrible explosion? I thought I might have lost you forever. You can’t imagine how relieved I was when you appeared at the end of the tunnel.”
Gabriel explained that he and Abby had spotted the pistachio shells and found Pleshette in the chamber. “Anyway, I managed to destroy the last rune.”
“And Corax? The torc? The chamber?”
“It’s all over, Dad,” said Gabriel with a weary smile.
Adam gave a sober nod. “Well done,” he said. “Well done indeed.”
Trudy was in an agitated state when the family arrived home. “Oh, Pamela! Adam! Gabriel!” she sputtered. “Where have you been? And who are all these people?”
Adam knew he had some difficult explaining to do. “Trudy! At long last, Tabitha is back from Iceland…,” he began. “She lost her passport twelve years ago. You wouldn’t believe how complicated it was to get a new one. But here she is, and she brought her nephew!”
“Twelve years to get a new passport?” said Trudy. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.”
“And that is exactly what I told the man at the passport bureau,” said Adam. Then he turned to Cassius and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “I would like you to meet my nephew. This is Cassius.”
“Cassius?” Trudy repeated. The moment she set eyes on him, she recognized his resemblance to Pamela—his long, curly dark hair, his brown eyes, and something else, lost in some foggy, forgotten region of her memory. She put her hand to her heart and stared at him with tender astonishment.
“Have we met before somewhere?” she asked the boy.
Cassius felt it, too. He smiled back at her. “A long time ago, maybe?”
“Oh, my goodness,” she whispered. Trudy’s cool stare became glossy with emotion; she uttered a gasp and suddenly hugged the boy very tightly. “What a special, special day!”
There was so much that needed to be explained to Cassius, but it could wait. The boy had found himself in a welcoming family, and after so many years of dark solitude, he was drenched in love, light, and more companionship than he had ever had before.
Although their school days now settled into a calmer routine, Gabriel and his friends often sat on his stoop and looked back over the adventure of the past month, pondering some of the mysteries they had never quite solved.
Abby, for example, brought up something that bothered her. “Gabriel?” she said. “Don’t you think it’s strange that the valravens never attacked your house before? It would have been so easy. The robin could have commanded them to do it a month ago.”
“I think I know the reason,” said Somes. “The robin used to peek in Gabriel’s windows, so he must have seen Trudy, which means Corax saw her, too. He probably wanted to protect her.”
“So you think Corax still loved her?” said Abby.
“Definitely,” said Gabriel. “I think that was the only human part of him left—the part that loved Trudy.”
They were curious about Pleshette, and took a detour on the way home from school one afternoon, expecting to find his shop boarded up or sold. Instead, they saw his shaved head glowing beneath a single lightbulb; he was doing crosswords at the counter and sipping tea from the magic samovar. There were no cages to be seen, and the monkey’s urn was gone. They guessed that Punch never dared return after Pleshette tried to force him into the ring of fire.
As for Cassius, Mr. Finley had to fill out a stack of papers to get him enrolled in school. On the first day of class, Gabriel led his new cousin along a hallway crowded with students, and everybody seemed to notice something different about him. Students spun around, feeling his presence. Teachers forgot what they were saying when he entered the room. Maybe it was just his deep gaze, or perhaps there was a little bit of something else that made him different from any other human.
Late in the evenings, if they didn’t have homework, Pamela and Gabriel would call to their ravens and paravolate. They flew a grand loop around the city, just to make sure all was well, swooping over Coney Island, past the glittering lights of the big rides and Tillie’s lunatic grin.
They circled the hilltop cemetery, anxious to see if any yellow-eyed phantoms were lurking, but all they saw was a robin, pacing back and forth, back and forth, upon a statue of an angel.
And when they were all tired out, they flew back to the Finley house, where the stove always prepared hot chocolate for them. Tabitha Finley would hear it making its bonking noises and pad downstairs to listen to the children describe their adventures. She believed in talking birds, merging with ravens, and magic of every kind—after all, she had survived twelve years in the Chamber of Runes. Then, after everyone trudged to bed and all the lights were out, the Finley house appeared to be at peace.
Except for this.
Occasionally, on those moonless nights when the sky was especially dark and not a soul was on the street, a solitary black bird sprang from the window of that brownstone on Fifth Street and soared above the rooftops of Brooklyn. Not even the great horned owls went near this creature, for it was larger than any raven or owl and its bright yellow eyes glowed in the dark—just like a valraven’s.