The Alchemists Academy: Stones to Ashes Book 1 (14 page)

It occurred to him that they weren’t staring back at him any more. Instead, they were busy watching a figure that had somehow managed to walk halfway up the drive to the house without Sparks noticing. Sparks couldn’t blame them. The figure wore what could only be described as a robe, the cowl up and obscuring their face. Sparks was so surprised by the arrival that he didn’t say anything until the figure was just a couple of feet away.

“Hi. Are you lost?”

In answer, the hooded figure held out a hand. It took Sparks a moment to notice that there was an envelope in it. Sparks took it without thinking. It was an odd kind of envelope, jet-black and sealed in a very old-fashioned way, with a blob of red wax that had a seal pressed into it. The seal formed a capital W. A very familiar capital W, since Sparks had seen it online practically every day for months now.

He ripped it open and read the contents in one go, then looked up to ask the hooded figure about it. Sparks found himself staring at empty space. Well, not exactly empty. There were still the cows. There were always cows. There just seemed to be a complete lack of any gray robed figures to go with them.

This
apartment was a lot smaller than any ranch, and there certainly was not room for any cows, except possibly in the refrigerator. There was hardly space for Rio, his little brother and his grandmother. Sometimes, especially when his grandmother started saying things like “Riordan Roberts! What trouble have you got yourself into this time?” he thought that there might not even be enough room for all three of them.

Or at least not for him. The dark hair and olive skin he’d inherited from his mother were fine with his grandmother, but the piercing blue eyes he’d got from his father weren’t so ok. Not after what happened. It didn’t strike Rio as very fair that she’d bring it up whenever there was trouble, especially when it was never Rio’s fault. Well, not most of the time, anyway. It certainly was not down to him that practically everything in East LA seemed to be trouble in Nana’s opinion. As far as Rio could see, taking a few things for Nana and Tomas shouldn’t really count. He was only looking out for them.

Currently, he was sitting in front of about the only luxury the apartment had, a tiny computer that Nana had insisted the two of them should have for their schoolwork. For once, Rio was using it for just that, and not the Game. He looked up at the sound of soft footfalls behind him, expecting to see Tomas. It was not.

“Hey, who are you?”

The figure in gray didn’t say anything, and Rio lunged forward to try and wrench the hood of the robe back. If someone was going to break in, he wanted to see their face. He got a brief glimpse of a face almost completely hidden by wraparound sunglasses, before the robe pulled out of his hands, leaving Rio trying to keep his balance and failing. He looked up from the carpet, and the figure was gone. All that was left was a black envelope left precisely on the floor in front of him like the figure had known where he would fall.

It occurred to Rio that, in Grams’ book, this would
definitely
count as trouble.

Somewhere
in the blare of music that was her bedroom, Kat was taking a lot of trouble over her appearance. Her hair was already right, or at least it was a chin length bob of dark hair with streaks of blue and red that her parents tried very carefully not to disapprove of, but the rest of it hadn’t been easy. There had been the red and black plaid to pick out to go with her combat boots, along with exactly the right amount of black makeup. It had taken ages to get right. The makeup aged her a year older than her sixteen years, but didn’t help fill out her slim figure.  She had even cut short her session on the Game to work on it more.

Let’s see Them think I’m ordinary now,
Kat thought. She always thought of her parents as Them, especially when they insisted on calling her Katherine instead of Kat, which they did a lot.  They seemed to have evolved a policy of ignoring the more extreme things Kat did, in the hopes that eventually she would fit in, or that she would become the Katherine Kipling they wanted her to be. Well fat chance.

Kat surveyed the results of her efforts in her bedroom mirror. Despite her Dark Girl outfit, she still looked like a pixie or what people think pixies should look like, the child-like Tinker Bell version.  An independent observer might have suspected that black eye shadow, and black nail polish,
and
black lipstick was probably overdoing things a bit, or was at least a look better suited to someone tall and brooding, not petite and, frankly, cute. Kat loved it.

She was so busy admiring it that she almost didn’t notice the reflection of the gray cloaked figure- the one who laid an envelope on the edge of the dressing table but vanished the moment she looked round. It could almost have been a dream, except that the envelope was there, sitting rather smugly, Kat thought, as though it knew exactly how worrying its sudden appearance was.

Still, Kat recovered enough to think after a moment, at least the black went with her nail polish.

Up
in Jackson Zusak’s home in Alaska, things were a little brighter, mostly because his parents insisted on filling the place with the color that the cold tended to leach away outside. Some days, he could hardly get to his computer for the brightly colored throws and coverings that his mom kept leaving around the place.

He was not at his computer now, for once. Instead, he was sitting in an armchair busy reading a book on the history of the Vikings. That had amused his mom and dad when they had seen it before heading off to the store to buy groceries.

“You could be a Viking yourself,” Jack’s mom had said. “You’ve got the red hair.”

They had all laughed at that, because even Jack knew that the image of his small, scrawny figure setting sail across vast oceans just didn’t work. Besides, they didn’t have glasses back then, and a Viking who wandered into things, as Jack tended to do when he lost his, probably wouldn’t do very well.

“You’re only fifteen,” his mom had said, hugging him. “You’ve still got time to grow to be Viking-sized.”

Jack hadn’t pointed out that, because people tended to be shorter in the past, he was probably already Viking-sized, for much the same reason that he didn’t tell his dad the answers to the crossword before he’d officially given up on it. Thinking of which…

Jack found the newspaper in its usual crumpled up heap, smoothed it out a little, and finished off the crossword in a couple of minutes before returning to his book. He’d forgotten to mark his place, and it had closed on the arm of the chair he’d been sitting in. He went to open it again, and almost dropped it when the black envelope fell out. Out of the window, Jack got a brief glimpse of a gray robed figure, hurrying away too quickly to catch.

Gemma
James caught the sound of the doorbell just as she was finishing an assignment for her private school. She was pretty sure she’d aced it. She thought about ignoring the disturbance to go through it once more, but then remembered that there was not anyone else home in her family’s Manhattan house. It might be a delivery, and since her dad was a lawyer, there was every chance that it might be something important that she would need to sign for, assuming that they’d take a sixteen-year-old’s signature.

Sighing, Gem stood up and made her way through the place’s expensive furnishings, pausing automatically to check her appearance in the hall mirror. It was one of those habits she had picked up from cheerleading, because you never knew when the universe might have found ways to make you look a mess. As usual, she looked perfect, not a hair of her long blonde hair out of place as it framed a face with porcelain skin and deep green eyes. She smoothed out her skirt, then checked the door’s spy hole, because appearance was not the only time you couldn’t be too careful.

There was not anyone there. Or rather, there was not anyone standing at the door. There was someone walking away, dressed in the kind of robe that didn’t make sense unless Franciscan monks had started making deliveries, but he was gone in a second or two. Gem waited a moment longer before opening the door. She looked around, and found no one there, so she looked down. When she saw the envelope, she smiled very slowly, because some moments deserved to be drawn out, then she picked it up, ripped it open and read it so quickly that it probably set some kind of record.

Chapter 1

A
s the car that had been sent to the airport crunched its way up the estate’s gravel drive and rattled over the drawbridge, Gem found herself quietly surprised. Even though the invitation had said that she and her fellow winners would be staying in the castle at the heart of the Wordwick game, and even though her father, who’d been there on business, had confirmed that it was very much a real castle, she hadn’t really believed it. She’d gone online and looked into English castles, only to find that most of the really big ones were publicly owned, or had been ruined in the various wars since the Middle Ages, or both.

She’d expected that the “castle” would just be a manor house with a few battlements tacked on, so her first sight of Henry Word’s home left her open mouthed. It was everything its online presence promised; a huge, sprawling circle of stone walls almost totally ringed by a moat and themselves surrounding a square bailey keep at one end, along with outbuildings, gardens, and what looked very much like a maze. From above it would probably have looked like a lopsided archery target.

Parts of the castle had obviously been updated, such as the ground floor entrance to the keep that the car pulled up to, but mostly it looked like it had stayed untouched for hundreds of years. Except that if it really hadn’t been touched, then the stonework would be crumbling and the whole place would have been overrun with plant life. Someone had obviously put a lot of effort into looking after it.

Gem got out of the car wondering how Henry Word had managed to get his hands on the place. She knew he was rich- her father had done enough work for him that she had a pretty good idea of just how rich- but even so, it seemed hard to credit. Places like this weren’t in private hands, were they? Maybe he still let visitors in. The ramp for wheelchair access to the front door was the kind of thing that they always had for visitors, was not it?

The driver handed Gem her bag and wished her a pleasant stay, but she was not really listening. She was too busy staring as she stepped through the doors and into the keep’s lobby. Her private school was quite old-fashioned in its tastes, full of wood paneled walls and old paintings, but this had it beaten easily. There were expensive looking rugs thrown over the flagstone floor, and tapestries on the walls that blazed with color. They were interspersed with painted shields, and displays of swords or fragments of armor that looked like they really were hundreds of years old. Great oak doors branched off from it through small stone arches. It looked like the kind of thing that might result if someone had told a set designer to make everything look as medieval as possible, and then given them the contents of a museum strong room to use for decoration.

Gem was so busy taking it all in that for almost half a minute she didn’t notice the four other people standing in the hallway, and she started when she noticed them. All four seemed to be around her own age. The one girl among them looked to Gem like she had gone out of her way to look as shocking as possible, and she frowned when she saw Gem. Of the three boys, the red-haired one with the freckles seemed even busier looking at the place than Gem had been, while the olive skinned one wearing torn jeans gave her a suspicious look that quickly turned to a smile. The third, who Gem had to admit was good-looking in a far too clean-cut, sure of himself kind of way, strolled over to her.

“Hi, I’m Stieg Sparks,” he announced in a Texas accent. “Most people call me Sparks. You’re here for the week?”

Gem nodded, then cocked her head to one side. She had heard the tiny note of surprise in that, and she knew the way jocks like this thought.

“What? Don’t you think I should be?”

“No, it’s just…”

“It’s just that you don’t look much like a gamer,” the girl with the multi-hued hair said.

“And who are you?” Gem demanded.

“Katherine. Most people call me Kat.”

She stuck out a hand like a challenge, and seemed surprised when Gem took it.

“Gemma,” Gem replied. ‘Everyone calls me Gem. You’re British?”

“From London. North side of the river. I suppose someone’s got to be.” She paused, looking Gem up and down. ‘So what are you doing here? Daddy buy you a way in?”

“Ignore Kat,” the boy who had given her the suspicious look said. “It will be nice having someone so good-looking around. I’m Riordan Roberts. Rio.”

Gem started to roll her eyes to Kat at that line, but the other girl’s expression was not entirely friendly. Kat nodded to the remaining boy, who stood there looking like he couldn’t make up his mind whether to say anything. “Since we’re doing introductions, that’s Jack, which is apparently short for Jackson.”

Gem smiled at the red-haired boy.

“Hi. Where are you from, Jack?”

“A-Alaska. Did you know that this place was built some time in the twelfth century?” The second half of it came out in a rush, as if to make up for the nervous stutter at the start.

“Some time after 1141, following a charter of King Stephen, to be more exact,” a voice said. “It’s nice that you’ve done your research, Mr. Zusak.”

Gem recognized the voice instantly as that of Henry Word. After his online announcements, she was hardly going to forget. He must have come into the hallway through a side door. She turned to greet him with the others, expecting to look up into the already half-familiar face, and had to adjust the direction of her gaze when it turned out that Henry Word was sitting down.

He was sitting down because he was in a wheelchair.