The Second Spy: The Books of Elsewhere: Volume 3 (21 page)

At first Olive was sure she was dreaming; her own imagination was bringing her friends to save her in the nick of time. Then she noticed that Rutherford was holding two small pistols. A third pistol was clamped between Leopold’s teeth. A fourth was strapped to a miniature holster that was belted across Harvey’s chest. Even Olive’s imagination would not have done
that.

As Olive stared, Rutherford aimed both his pistols at the mass of thorns. She gritted her teeth and prepared for a bang. Instead, all she heard was a soft hiss.

She looked up. “Water pistols?”

Rutherford glanced down at her, still spraying. “Filled with paint thinner,” he explained. “And a mixture of my grandmother’s herbs.”

Harvey leaped onto the dripping stems, smearing them wildly with both paws. “Take that!” he shouted. “And that! Don’t try to tangle with Agent 1-800!” The fresh paint, coated with sparkling liquid, rapidly began to dissolve, sending rivulets of melting black and red down the side of the pit toward Olive’s toes.

“Grab my hands!” said Rutherford, leaning over the cleared space and reaching into the hole. Olive grabbed. Before Rutherford could begin to pull, Horatio clambered up the ladder made by their bodies and perched on the hole’s edge.

“Come on, Olive,” he urged. “Climb!”

Hanging on to Rutherford’s hands, Olive struggled up the wall, her numb feet slipping in the streams of paint. Leopold’s paw caught the fabric of her shoulder, Harvey’s teeth closed around a hank of her hair, and suddenly, Olive was crawling out of the pit, knocking Rutherford backward and blinking in the gray daylight.

“Arm yourself, miss,” Leopold commanded, dropping a spare water pistol beside her hand. His eyes caught on her streaked skin. “Don’t get any of the ammunition on yourself,” he warned.

“Where’s Aldous?” asked Rutherford, turning away from the half-melted thorn hedge.

“In the woods,” Olive panted, barely able to breathe for the stinging in her legs. “But he’s coming back.”

“We have to get Olive out of here,” said Horatio to the others. “It’s been dangerously long already.”

Olive tried to get to her feet, but her legs refused to hold her. She crashed back to the ground, her palms scraping the rocky earth. The water pistol slipped out of her fist and bounced away into the bracken. “I can’t get up,” she said through gritted teeth.

“We’ll have to help her,” Leopold ordered. “Harvey, put down that gun and get over here.”

Rutherford and the three cats had just managed to help Olive balance on her numb feet when, from the bracken behind them, there came a snap.

The snap was followed by a deep, soft chuckle.

The three cats froze as though someone had disconnected their batteries. Olive turned around, falling to one knee. Rutherford took a startled step back.

As Aldous McMartin strode gracefully across the flowering hillside, the clouds began to thicken. Darkness poured across the landscape. Gathered around Olive, the three cats gave small, frightened jerks.

“I disposed of your painted assistants, Olive,” said Aldous, stepping closer. “A piece of flint, a bit of fire.” He smiled that same twisted, predatory smile, and
Olive felt her stomach plunge toward her big toe. “There are even simpler ways to get rid of
these.
”

While Olive teetered on her numb hands and knees, searching desperately for the lost water pistol, Aldous made a motion with his hand—a gesture so small that it almost didn’t exist—and whispered something under his breath.

Leopold fell first. His long black body hit the ground and curled into a ball that jerked and writhed, then stretched out all four legs as though he were trying to run away from himself. He let out a howl that Olive had never heard before.

“
NO!
” she screamed, forgetting the lost water pistol and lunging on all fours at Aldous. But her rubbery limbs wouldn’t hold her. She collapsed to the ground, much too far away to reach him. Twin jets of pain raced up her legs.

Harvey was the next to fall. His yowl joined Leopold’s, which was already dying to a whimper. Rutherford watched from a few feet away, clutching his water pistols and jiggling desperately from foot to foot.

On her numb hands, Olive hauled herself across the ground. “Don’t hurt them!” she begged. “Please! You can have anything! Just don’t hurt them!”

Aldous’s leonine face split with a smile. “But I already have everything I want,” he replied. “This house is mine. Elsewhere is mine. These disobedient
beasts”—he twitched his hand and Horatio fell to the earth—“
useless
as they may be—are
mine
.”

“Please, stop!” Olive pleaded, dragging herself closer.

Rutherford made a move as if to jump in the way, but Aldous’s eyes flicked up, seeming to freeze the boy in place. “Would you care to be next?” he asked.

Rutherford didn’t answer.

Aldous looked down at the three twitching cats. “As a matter of fact…” he said softly, “I’m not quite sure that I
do
want them anymore. They’ve been far more trouble than they’re worth. I can always conjure a new familiar once I’ve reclaimed the house.” The smile twisted again, turning Aldous’s face from handsome to monstrous. “…So I may as well dispose of these.”

Olive turned toward Rutherford, gasping. No words found their way out of her open mouth. Rutherford was frowning intently, his eyes jerking from Olive to the cats to Aldous’s face.

“Let me show you how to destroy a familiar, Olive,” said Aldous, gliding closer to Leopold. “It’s much easier than you might think.” His hand made a graceful circle in the air. An instant later, another circle, this one made of strange, deep blue flames, appeared around Leopold’s weakly twitching body. Leopold’s fur began to smoke.

Frantically, Olive hauled herself across the brush.
Her hands were numb; so numb that she barely felt the scratches that should have drawn blood, though no blood made its way through her painted skin; so numb that she hardly noticed it when her palm hit something hard—something plastic—which was just the right size to be grasped in her fist.

“Stop,” she commanded, raising the water pistol. “Or I’ll shoot.”

Aldous’s eyes left Leopold. They fixed on Olive’s hand, wrapped around the water pistol. In spite of the numbness, Olive could almost feel a pinprick of ice where his gaze landed. Aldous raised his hand, about to make the magical sign that would rip the pistol from her fist, just as Annabelle had once ripped away her flashlight. And as Aldous stepped closer, his yellowish eyes honed on Olive’s fist, Rutherford finally got his chance. With both water pistols raised, he leaped over the three fallen cats and squirted Aldous McMartin directly in the face.

Aldous halted. Behind him, the circle of blue flames disappeared, and the three writhing cats fell silent. For a moment, Aldous looked vaguely surprised, as though he’d heard someone far away calling his name. He brushed at his face with one hand. Then he paused again, and the vaguely surprised look became much less vague. His eyes traveled slowly down his arm to his hand.

Where five long, bony fingers had been, nothing remained but five pale smudges. His cheek, where he had rubbed it, was now only a blurry gap, revealing a splotch of the golden forest behind him.

“What have you…” he whispered. But before he could finish the question, Rutherford fired again, and Aldous’s words became only a gasp.

While Rutherford squirted both pistols, Horatio got unsteadily to his feet, followed a moment later by Harvey. The two cats threw themselves at Aldous, yowling, claws out, teeth bared. At last, Leopold pulled himself up onto his paws as well. With wisps of smoke still trailing from his fur, he charged into action, flying straight at Aldous’s chest. His furious hiss echoed away across the hillsides.

Olive lay in the bracken, pinned to the ground by pain. Her legs sizzled. Her hands refused to grasp the water pistol; she felt it slip out of her fingers once again. Holding herself up on her elbows, she watched the battle unfold.

Aldous’s streaked skin dripped. Each time he moved, his body blurred a bit more, like the tip of a melting icicle. The bracken below him grew smudged and muddy. The cats and Rutherford surrounded him, Rutherford still squirting both guns, the cats hissing and smearing and scratching at him with their paws.

Soon Aldous stopped trying to fight off his attackers. He raised his arms to protect his face, and his cuff wiped away the edge of his chin. Through the whirl of circling cats, Olive watched Aldous’s features disappear. The sharp line of his jaw dissolved into his shirt collar. The reddish waves of his hair ran down his shoulders, dripping like rain onto the ground. Horatio slashed with one paw, and Aldous’s yellow eyes vanished, first into a streak of paint, and then, with another paw-slash, into nothing.

Before she quite believed what she saw, all that remained of the young Aldous McMartin were a few smeared spots on the bracken, a mud-colored puddle where the dissolved paint had pooled, and a mess on each of the cats’ paws.

The cats stood, spattered with paint, breathing hard, in a tight and wordless circle. They glanced at one another, and then at themselves, checking for any lasting injuries.

“Ugh,” said Horatio at last. “I would like to wash myself.”

“Use your tongue,” said Harvey, who was busily taking his own advice.

“I am
not
going to use my tongue,” said Horatio.

Rutherford, panting and posing like a victorious knight in his paint-splotched pajamas, turned around to look at Olive. The pride on his face drained swiftly away.

“Olive?” he called.

But Olive couldn’t answer.

If she opened her mouth, all that would have come out was a scream. The red-hot pins and needles had traveled all the way to her shoulders. When she tried to bend her legs and get back to her feet, her knees sent shock waves of pain through the muscle and bone. She could barely keep her eyes open.

In a pin-pricked, burning blur, she saw her friends gather around her. She let out a stifled squeal as Rutherford raised her arm and wrapped it around his shoulders. Then came the funny sensation of being lifted, of having her legs hoisted and her pajama cuffs raised in someone’s teeth, and of floating along just above the brambly ground, until she was sliding back out of the painted hills and into the darkness of the house.

25

V
OICES HISSED AND murmured around her like sounds made behind a locked door. Olive could hear them, but they seemed far off and unimportant. They had nothing to do with her.

“Where should we take her?” asked one voice.

“To her bedroom,” whispered another. “Lift, men!”

Olive felt her heels dragging along the hallway carpet. Rug-burn shot up her legs, mingling with the pricks of a million red-hot pins, but she couldn’t lift her feet. She couldn’t even lift her
eyelids
. Then, suddenly, she was falling backward, and something much squishier than the bracken of the painting was catching her. Tendrils of pain spiraled through her limbs. She squinted up through the darkness, trying to focus on the three pairs of bright green eyes and the single pair of smudgy lenses that floated above her.

“Maybe I should get my grandmother,” Rutherford proposed.

“This isn’t your grandmother’s sort of magic,” said Horatio.

“Should we wake her parents and take her to the hospital?”

“And explain this
how?
” Horatio demanded in a whisper. Everyone was quiet for a moment. “There is nothing a hospital can do for her,” said Horatio at last. “Doctors are not trained to treat injury by magical paints.”

Leopold’s voice spoke up. “She’s going to make it,” he said firmly, although Olive could hear the hint of fear under his words. “We got her out in time.”

Something warm and fuzzy pressed itself against Olive’s chest.

“I hear a heartbeat,” Horatio whispered.
“Olive.”

Olive blinked. Horatio’s wide orange face hovered in the slit between her eyelids. “Olive, you must keep moving. You need to get the blood flowing.”

Olive tried to swat Horatio away, but she couldn’t even raise her hand. A zing of pain shot down her arm.

“That’s it, Agent Olive!” said a voice from somewhere near Olive’s feet—or where her feet had been when she last remembered feeling them. “Target practice!” Harvey urged. “Try to kick me!” His paw prodded her ankle. “Come on!”

Weakly, Olive wiggled her foot. She had learned
what frostbite felt like several years ago, while building a snow fort with bare hands, and she still remembered that burning, aching pain. Now she felt as though her whole body had been rolled in a snowbank. She sucked in a breath through her teeth.

“Is that the best you can do?” taunted Harvey.

Olive wiggled and winced again.

Harvey executed a barrel roll across her ankles. “A good agent thinks three steps ahead of the enemy,” he whispered. “Come on, Agent Olive, take aim, and—”

Olive booted Harvey off the end of the bed.

A zing of pain shot upward from her toes. “Ow!” she groaned.

“Excellent shot, miss,” said Leopold.