++Yes, yes,++ gloated The Evil. ++Come closer and together we will open the way for good.++
“Blow the man down!”
The cry came from behind Jaide. She ducked as a pair of royal blue wings flapped overhead, scattering the insects that were attacking her. A curved black beak snapped at the clumps bothering Tara and Ari. With a snap of her wings, Cornelia the macaw swooped to help Jack, who had staggered backward into the earthen wall, struggling against two attacks at once.
Before Jaide could rally her Gift, a beam of silver light shone down the ramp, issuing from the moonstone ring of a stiff-backed, white-haired woman dressed in jeans, a white linen shirt, and cowboy boots, with Kleo, her Warden Companion, trotting at her feet. The light scattered the insects crawling over Jack, and sent them swirling in a panic.
“Grandma!” Jaide ran to her side and hastened to explain. “It wasn’t our fault. The Evil came out of nowhere. I don’t know how —”
Grandma X shook her head. “Let’s deal with it first. We’ll talk after.”
++You will never defeat us,++ The Evil intoned. The swarm had taken on the shape in which it had first appeared, and it rose up on three spindly legs and spread its arms wide to face this new challenge.
“It’s not our job to defeat you,” said a soft voice. “Just to contain you.”
Jack felt a firm, wooden hand come down on his shoulder. “Rennie?” he said.
“I’m here,” she said, and some of Jack’s panic evaporated, even though he still couldn’t see. The living parchment absolutely refused to come away from his face. When he tugged at it, it stretched like rubber, then snapped back exactly as it had been.
Jaide watched the Living Ward of Portland, one of four wards charged with keeping The Evil at bay, do something with her one human hand. A translucent bubble formed around The Evil, turning the whiteness of its eyes to myriad tiny rainbows. The Evil reached out to pop the bubble with one bug-claw but it only bulged slightly, spreading circular ripples out in waves.
Rennie’s hand moved again, and the bubble began to contract.
++We will return,++ The Evil vowed. ++We have found a way. We are coming.++
The bubble shrank and the bug-thing crouched to avoid touching it. Eyes blinked and rolled as The Evil folded in on itself, becoming a shapeless swarm confined to the size of a basketball, a football, a tennis ball….
++We are coming!++
Soundlessly, the bubble collapsed to nothing, and the eyes went out. Instantly, the swarm was released, unharmed, and the air was full of buzzing insects.
Jaide grinned in relief and Tara clapped her hands.
“What’s going on?” asked Tara’s father. He and the workers, released from the gloom Jack had cast over them, swatted at insects and looked at the sudden crowd on the work site with suspicion. “It wasn’t a cave-in, was it?”
“Termites,” said Grandma X, raising her moonstone ring a second time. “You called Rennie here for a second opinion.”
Rennie, in her former life, had been the town’s handyperson.
“Looks bad,” she said. “You’d better go call an exterminator.”
Martin McAndrew blinked three times and nodded.
“You’re right,” he said. “That’s a good idea.”
He reached in his pocket for his mobile phone.
“You’ll want to do that somewhere else,” said Grandma X, with an unbending gleam in her eye. “Reception is bad down here.”
Tara’s father and the workers headed obediently up the ramp.
“A little help here?” said Jack, his voice muffled by the parchment.
Jaide hurried to him, horrified that she hadn’t noticed that he was still under attack. She had simply assumed that all of The Evil had been expelled by Rennie and Grandma X.
“What is it?” asked Tara, as together Grandma X and Rennie helped Jack peel the living parchment from his face. Cornelia circled above, offering encouraging squawks.
“I think … yes.” Grandma X held up the parchment by it its top corners while Jack and Rennie held the bottom two. “Okay, easy,” she told it in a reassuring voice. “We have you now.”
The paper became still.
“It’s a message,” she said, “of a kind that Wardens send one another sometimes. Living mail, if you like, only I’ve never seen one as determined as this. It must have been sent a very long time ago, and held up somehow, desperately trying to get through.”
“What does it say?” asked Jack, eyeing the paper resentfully. It had better be something really important, given it had almost smothered him in its quest to make sure it was noticed.
The paper seemed blank at first. Then ink swirled around the edges and sent fine filaments across the page. Letters formed, then words, written in an unsteady hand.
We’re here and we are trapped. Please help us!
It wasn’t signed.
“What does it mean?” asked Jaide. “Who’s it from?”
“Where are they?” asked Tara.
“How do we help them?” asked Jack. Cornelia landed on his shoulder and cocked her yellow head.
Grandma X’s face had gone very pale. She folded the parchment into four and clutched it tightly in her hand.
“Tell me how you came by this,” she said.
They explained about the brassy tube buried in the bedrock under the house and the mysterious way their Gifts had woken as they came near it.
“It’s a cross-continuum conduit constructor, isn’t it?” said Jaide.
Grandma X nodded.
“And these aren’t really termites,” said Tara, pulling one of the wriggling bugs from her hair. It had four wings, five body segments, and no less than ten legs.
“Did they come from the same place as the message?” asked Jack.
Grandma X nodded.
“How?” asked Tara.
“The cross-continuum conduit constructor opened a small hole inside the wards,” said Rennie. “That’s how it got into Portland. The Evil followed the message through.”
“So it was our fault,” said Jaide, feeling a pang of guilt.
There were many places in the world where The Evil tried to break in, places where the fabric of reality was weak. Each was protected by four wards, and each ward had a different nature, as depicted in a simple rhyme that every troubletwister learned by rote:
SOMETHING GROWING
SOMETHING READ
SOMETHING LIVING
SOMEONE DEAD
The Something Read Ward was a piece of romantic graffiti scribbled on the town lighthouse by Jack and Jaide’s parents. Rennie was Something Living. What the other two wards were, the troubletwisters didn’t know. The Evil was always trying to get around the wards and the Wardens who maintained them. Jaide hated the fact she had helped it find a new way in.
Grandma X stirred from her deep thoughts.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she told Jaide in a firm voice. “Don’t ever believe what The Evil tells you. It only means to frighten you or put doubts in your head. It saw an opportunity, that’s all … an opportunity the message provided.”
“Does that mean the message came from the same place as The Evil?” asked Jack.