Susan dropped off Rodeo Dave and Ari at the Book Herd, then turned the car around and drove across town to the hospital, where she parked under a chestnut tree whose spreading arms easily covered the car, and several others besides. The hospital was an uninspiring single-story building with none of the glamour and excitement hospitals sometimes had in movies. It seemed completely full of old people. Even the nurses were old.

Susan walked up to the nurses’ station. “Is she … ?”

“Very restless this afternoon, Sue,” said a stout RN with a beard that looked far from sanitary. “Doctor Witworth prescribed a stronger sedative. It’s probably taking effect now, but you can go through and see how she is.”

Susan nodded and led the children deeper into the hospital until she reached a closed door with a low bench outside.

“Wait here,” she told them. “I’ll just check.”

She ducked through the door, leaving Tara and the twins standing awkwardly outside. None of them said anything. Jack and Jaide strained to hear what was going on inside the room, but could hear only mumbled voices.

Susan returned. “Go on,” she told the twins. “She’s a bit groggy but awake.”

Jaide took a deep breath and walked through the door. Jack followed more hesitantly. He didn’t know what to expect. Would Grandma X look as she usually did, or would her head be bandaged? Would there be horrible bruises … or worse?

In the end, she looked unchanged, apart from the fact that she was in a hospital gown and was lying propped up in a hospital bed, with her pure white hair spread out on her pillow. She looked much smaller than usual — and that, somehow, was far worse than anything Jack had imagined. The room was dimly lit and smelled of antiseptic. It looked like a place someone went to die, not get better.

“Come here, dear troubletwisters,” Grandma X said, waving them closer, one each on either side of the bed. She hugged them tightly, her arms just as strong as ever. “The doctors, blast them with a thousand curses, insist on keeping me calm and relaxed, not realizing that keeping me here is having the exact opposite effect. I’m sorry your studies have been interrupted. I hope there have been no” — she glanced at the door — “unexpected catastrophes?”

They assured her there hadn’t been. And apart from the matter of one small bridge, that was the entire truth.

“We’ve been out at the Rourke Estate with Rodeo Dave,” Jaide started to say.

“Really?” Grandma X said. “Kleo sneaked in earlier but she didn’t say anything about that. She tells me you’ve been in the blue room, helping our feathery guest to sleep.”

Jack hadn’t thought of it that way, but he supposed it had been exactly like that.

“I like her,” he said. “Can we keep her?”

“I don’t think so, Jackaran. Technically she belongs to the estate, and when the lawyers agree on who will inherit what, we should really let her go.” She went to pat his hand, but missed. “I hope you’ll understand.”

“Have you spoken to Dad?” Jaide asked.

“Yes, of course, dear.” A nurse they hadn’t seen before entered the room and fussed about, tightening the sheets and adjusting the pillows whether Grandma X wanted them so or not. “He’s very busy.”

“So it’s okay if we … go back tomorrow?” Jack persisted. It was impossible to talk openly with someone else in the room, but they had to try. There was no way of knowing how long they had before Susan took them home again.

“I don’t see why not,” she said. “David will look after you. You can trust him completely.”

“He doesn’t seem very happy about us being there,” said Jaide, remembering Rodeo Dave’s moody silences on the way back from the estate.

“I think he’s just sad about Young Master Rourke,” Grandma X said. “David was the closest friend he had — perhaps George’s only friend. At the funeral on Friday, he’ll be delivering the eulogy, and that’s a very hard thing to do. Particularly because it would have been George’s birthday.”

She looked sad, too, for a moment, and then brightened when the nurse left the room, as though consciously willing herself to do so.

“Kleo says the weather has been odd,” she said. “Storm clouds and rain and yet no lightning, all confined to one area. It strikes me as altogether strange.”

“Could it be The Evil?” asked Jaide, still wondering if the car crash had been the work of their grandmother’s ancient enemy. “Like that storm, the first time?”

“I don’t think so. Wardens are trained to recognize The Evil in many forms. This doesn’t feel like any of them. It does have a familiar flavor, though — one I haven’t felt for some time. If I could only remember what it was….”

Her voice trailed off and her eyelids drooped closed. The silver ring she wore on her right hand, with the moonstone tucked safely into her palm, looked dull and tarnished in the room’s yellow electric light.

“Is she asleep?” Jack whispered after a minute’s silence.

“If she is, she’s not snoring.” They sometimes heard their grandmother at night, even though separated from her by several walls and an entire floor. On a quiet night she sounded like a medium-size jet aircraft having trouble starting up.

“What do we do now?”

Jaide sneaked a look at the hand-scrawled sign above the end of the bed, but instead of a name there was just a Patient Number with seventeen digits.

“Beats me. Leave her, I guess?”

The twins went to step back from the bed, but suddenly Grandma X’s eyes flew open. She lunged for them, catching their forearms in an alarmingly tight grip.

“Something is going on, troubletwisters,” she said, in a voice that lost none of its power for being barely a whisper. “I don’t know what it is, but it started the night Young Master Rourke died. The wards will protect you, as they have these last weeks, but I want you to be … to be … very … care …”

Her fight to stay conscious was taking its toll. The grip on their arms was already weakening when a lab-coated doctor entered the room, followed by the same nurse who had fussed with the bed before.

“I think that’s enough excitement for one night,” said the doctor, a woman in her fifties with gray hair pulled back into a tight bun. Her name tag said WITWORTH. Her voice brooked no dissent. “If you’ll step outside, please.”

The twins retreated, dismayed by the sight of their grandmother in such a confused state. Or was she confused? What if everything she said was right? The twins had never had reason to mistrust her judgment before. If she was worried about something going on in Portland, maybe something was going on in Portland.

But what?

Susan and Tara were waiting for them outside. The doctor followed them, and took Susan by the arm to talk to her privately for a moment. Tara surprised both Jack and Jaide by taking their hands and giving them a squeeze.

“I remember when my Po Po was sick,” she said. “There was a lot of hanging around hospitals as well, watching grown-ups talk in whispers.”

“What happened to her?” asked Jack. “Did she … get better?”

“Oh yeah. She comes to visit every year and makes my life miserable.”

Her grin was infectious, and it made Jaide feel a little better.

“Off we go,” said Susan, indicating that it was time to leave. Doctor Witworth nodded as they passed, not smiling, as though glad to see the back of anyone under forty.

“She’ll be okay,” said Susan in the car. “She’s had a nasty knock on the head that would leave anyone a bit muddled for a while. We’ll have to take it slowly. And so does she. Some people just don’t have the patience to be a patient.”

“How long until she can come home?” asked Jack.

“Doctor Witworth doesn’t know. A couple of days, maybe. Longer, if the swelling doesn’t go down.”

“Swelling?” said Jaide, alarmed.

“Don’t fret about the details. The important thing is that she’s getting better.”

They swept up Watchward Lane with a rattle of fallen leaves. Susan parked in the Hillman’s usual spot. Susan had dinner ready to roll: homemade hamburgers and fries, which was something she could actually cook well, with chocolate ice cream to follow. That was what she usually cooked on her last night in Portland before going on shift. The twins knew she was spoiling them a little, and they were grateful for it.

Over dinner they gave their mother a more comprehensive but still edited account of their day, lavishly describing the suits of armor, the rooms full of sheet-shrouded furniture, and the apparently endless corridors, but leaving out anything to do with Professor Jasper Frederik Olafsson.

“I’m a little jealous,” said Susan with a smile. “I’d love to take time off work and explore a haunted old castle.”

“I don’t think it’s haunted, Mom,” said Jaide, wondering if a talking death mask counted. “And most of the rooms are locked.”

“Still, it’s good of you to help out,” she said. “Mr. Smeaton might even pay you, if you do a good job.”

“He could pay you in books,” said Tara. “He has enough of them.”

Dinner was soon over, and so were the dishes, which it was somehow their turn to do yet again, but with two sets of hands to dry it wasn’t so bad. Ordinarily the twins liked having Tara over rather than doing their mother’s version of math homework, but tonight they had other things on their mind. Foremost among them was the knowledge that their father would call at nine. Luckily, Tara’s father came long before then, and it was something of a relief when they waved off their friend and ran back inside.

In their room they conferred quickly and quietly. Their mother was tidying her room, just up the hallway.

“We have to get back into the blue room tonight, after Mom’s asleep,” said Jaide, “and search for a skeleton key.”

“What does it look like, do you think?”

“I don’t know. A key, I guess. Probably not much like a skeleton. Let’s ask the Compendium.”

“All right. Cornelia will still be there. Maybe she’s ready to tell us something about the night Young Master Rourke died.”

Jaide nodded. They froze at the sound of their mother walking past their door, then heading down the creaky stairs.

When she was gone, Jaide shut the door and checked the phone. The time was almost nine o’clock.

“Dad will call soon,” she said.

“I hope so. If only we had the number of the phone he’s calling from, we could call him instead of waiting.”

They fidgeted in silence until the phone rang. The number was hidden, but who else could it be? Jaide pounced on it and put it close to her ear, so Hector Shield’s voice was as clear as it could be.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Jaide. Is Jack there, too?”

There was the sound of heavy rain in the background again, clouding Hector’s voice, but it wasn’t as distracting as it had been the previous night.

“I’m here, Dad,” said Jack, listening in as best he could, his head close to his sister’s.

“I’m relieved,” Hector said. “I thought the phone had been discovered when I hung up on you earlier.”

Jack supposed it had been, technically, but not by anyone who mattered.

“We didn’t find the card,” Jaide confessed. She wished she had better news. “We looked in all the obvious places, but it just wasn’t there.”

“We’re going back to the castle tomorrow,” Jack said.

“Well, that’s good.” He sounded disappointed. “I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier about a skeleton key. You should definitely look for your grandfather’s. But there’s something else you should look for, too, something I thought of after we talked. It’s a witching rod — like a divining rod for finding water, but it finds artifacts special to Wardens instead.”

“Like Grandma has for The Evil, except the other way around?” said Jack. “Cool.”

“What does it look like, Dad?” asked Jaide, nudging Jack away. He had gotten to talk to Hector last time, and now it was her turn.

“Use the Compendium like you did last night. Let it guide you. I’ll call you again tomorrow to see how you got on.”

“All right,” she said. “But Dad … we could go with Tara to Scarborough for the day so you can come into the wards without affecting our Gifts. Wouldn’t that be easier?”

“It would, but there’s no way your mother would let you skip school just to have fun, and we can’t wait as long as the weekend. If the card was lost or fell into The Evil’s hands before then, that would be a disaster.”

“How would The Evil get through the wards?” asked Jack.

“I saw Custer on the estate,” said Jaide. “Ari said he was picking up something weird.”

“Jack is right,” Hector said. “The Evil would know that the wards are being closely monitored after your grandmother’s accident. The slightest open attack would be noticed immediately.”

“How would it know about the accident?” Jaide asked. “Would it sense it somehow?”

“Grandma says that some people work for The Evil without being taken over by it,” said Jack. “There could be someone like that in town right now.”

“There probably is,” Hector said, “and you would never know. There’s no way to tell until they act against you. The Evil has even been known to plant sleeper agents that lead an ordinary life for years, decades sometimes, before they’re activated to work against the Wardens. Ideally, it would be someone who’s around a lot and completely trusted by everyone. Someone harmless and easy to overlook.”

That was a creepy thought.

“It could be anyone,” said Jack with a shiver.

“It could be the person who drove Grandma off the bridge!” exclaimed Jaide.

For a moment there was nothing but the drumbeat of rain over the phone, and both twins feared that the call had been lost. But then Hector’s voice came through.

“That’s true,” their father said. “Don’t be frightened unnecessarily, though. All most sleeper agents do is watch and report. Just be careful who you talk to … and find the card as soon as possible. You’ll do that for me, won’t you? You’ll have good news for me tomorrow?”

“We will,” they promised over the thickening hiss.

“Good. And now, children, I must go.”

“Already?” protested Jack. They hadn’t talked about Grandma X or Professor Olafsson yet. Even over the phone, though, he could feel his Gift growing restless. The shadows were lengthening and growing darker, and Jaide’s Gift was scooting dust bunnies around the floor.

“I’m afraid so,” said Hector. “Be careful, both of you. You’re very brave.”

“We love you, Dad!” said Jaide.

But the call was already over. She lowered the phone and held it in her lap for a moment, unwilling to let go of the tenuous connection to their father it provided.

“We’d better charge it,” said Jack. “The battery’s getting low.”

Jaide forced herself to move. The charger was in a drawer. She plugged it into an outlet near her bed and connected it to the phone.

“I wonder if Mr. Carver is a sleeper agent,” she said. “That might explain the nose flutes and everything.”

“That’s weird but it’s not actually Evil. And Dad said it would be someone easy to overlook. He’s impossible to ignore.”

“Someone who’s been around for a long time,” Jaide mused. “Someone harmless and trusted.”

“The only person who sounds like that is Rodeo Dave,” Jack joked, “and it can’t be him because …”

He stopped because Jaide wasn’t laughing and he couldn’t think of anything to follow because.

“No way,” he said. “He can’t be. Can he?”

“Why not? He’s all Dad told us to look out for.”

“Yes, but … but …” Everything Jack wanted to say came back to the criteria of a sleeper agent. But Grandma trusts him. But he’s been around forever. But he’s just a funny old bookseller.

And then there were other things that occurred to him as the horrible thought took root in his brain.

“The van,” said Jaide. “Grandma was knocked off the bridge road by a van. Rodeo Dave drives a van.”

“And you remember at school when we found out? Grandma was cut off when she was trying to talk to us, and suddenly he was there.”

“And he was surprised when Mom said that she was awake.”

The twins stared at each other, shocked by the possibility. Rodeo Dave had given no signs he knew anything about the Wardens or The Evil, so could he really be a traitor, lying low in Portland and biding his time? How could he just pretend to be Grandma X’s friend, and the troubletwisters’ friend, too, while planning to betray them all along?

The thought was an awful one. So, too, was the thought that they would be stuck in the castle with him all day tomorrow.

“We should tell someone,” said Jaide. “Custer, or Kleo —”

“What if we’re wrong? We don’t have any actual evidence. Remember when we thought Tara’s dad was Evil, and it turned out he was just a property developer?”

Jaide did, and that cooled some of her desire to leap up and take action. Grandma was always telling them not to be so impetuous. Perhaps she should think it through, first, before making any wild accusations.

“If Grandma knew, she’d be furious,” she said.

“If we were wrong, she’d be furious at us.”

“I know. I guess we’ll have to keep an eye on him tomorrow and see if he does anything suspicious. When we know for sure, we’ll have to do something about it then.”

They agreed by bumping their fists, but neither felt reassured. Worst of all, Jack thought, was the possibility that Grandma X already knew about him. That would explain why Kleo supposedly lived at the Book Herd, to keep an eye on him. It might also be why Rodeo Dave didn’t know Rennie was the Living Ward, even though she was living and working there. But why would Grandma X put the twins into his hands so readily, without even warning them?

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered.

“In Portland, nothing ever seems to make sense.”

The sound of footsteps outside the door interrupted them again. Jaide swung into action, throwing her backpack over the phone so their mom wouldn’t see it.

The door opened and Susan leaned in.

“Time for bed.”

She ushered them toward the bathroom, where they brushed their teeth. Jack cleaned his much more carefully than usual, since he thought that it might be his breath that was putting Cornelia off him.

“I’ve changed my shifts so I’ll be around in the evenings all week,” said Susan as she tucked them into bed. “That’s one good thing to come out of all this,” she added, brushing an errant hair out of her daughter’s eyes. Both eyes and hair were the same color as her own, and although Jaide had the shape of her father’s face, it would be clear that they would resemble each other closely when Jaide was grown up. “I miss you terribly while I’m away. You know that, right?”

“Yes, Mom,” Jaide said. “We miss you, too.” On an impulse, she added, “Do you think Dad will be able to visit Grandma soon?”

“I don’t know, dear,” Susan said, dropping her eyes. “You know how … how busy he is right now … how difficult it is for him to come home. It’s not something I have any control over. But I wish he would come back. I wish it could be the way it was when we were all together and everything was … normal.”

Both twins wanted to tell her that he was just outside the bounds of Portland, but even if they could have told her that, there was no way they could ever be normal again, not in the way their mother meant. That was the deep and abiding truth Susan still wrestled with, under the veil of reassurance that Grandma X had cast over her. Susan rarely thought about what had brought them to Portland — the explosion of their home in the city, the truth about her husband’s work, and the legacy her children had been born into — but even with Grandma X’s clouding of her mind, the facts still swam to the surface, and there was no hiding from the more painful truths of their new lives.

Susan blinked and shrugged off the dark mood that had fallen across her. She had two wonderful children and a job she enjoyed. She was even making friends, in town and at work. Life could be so much worse.

“Sweet dreams, Jack and Jaide,” she said, giving them both a kiss. On the way out she only half closed the door behind her, so the room wouldn’t be completely dark.