Читать книгу The Longest Halloween, Book Three: Gabbie Del Toro and the Mystery of the Warlock's Urn - Frank Wood - Страница 16

“What are you doing, Gabriella?”

Gabbie looked up into the scowling face of Neville LeGrand, he of the early rising, her next door neighbor and the only one of her friends who called her by her full name. “Neville! You scared the spider juice out of me!”

“What were you doing in there, in what I’m sure was a private conference?” He put her down.

“Neville, you’re not going to believe what I just heard.”

“You’ll have to tell me on the way to class…we’re both late, after all.”

“That’s right, we are,” Gabbie realized, remembering that she had seen him earlier that day in the front of his house. “What’s your excuse?”

“I got a late start this morning,” Neville returned, flipping a strand of dark hair back on his normally immaculate coif. “The Goon Brothers are staying with us and the older one snores like a freight train.”

In addition to his work with the Night Guard, Neville’s father made a living as a gravestone manufacturer. He could fashion any gravestone on demand, from the heavier cement and granite ones to the light foam ones that were popular around Halloween. He sometimes took on apprentices that he would put up in the house for long periods of time. Neville often joked of his brother or brothers of the day, referring to his dad’s latest apprentices.

Inasfar as Neville himself was concerned, Gabbie knew that his dad had ambitious plans for him to be a chancellor or a baron. Though right now, Gabbie thought, regarding her friend’s tall frame, he looked anything but. He was unusually undone today and not his typical GQ self, which was saying a lot, as Neville LeGrand was the fashion plate of Ghoul School, bar none. “Neville, you’ll never believe who may be infiltrating our school,” Gabbie said.

“Who?”

“The Warlock Sentry.”

“Really? Whatever for?”

“They think there may be persons of interest lurking about the school grounds…who possess intimate knowledge of what went on at the Pumpkin Hill Plunder.”

“I think we all know what went on, Gabriella.”

She stopped abruptly midstride. “Since when have we all known such a thing?”

Neville paused and his tone softened. “I’m sorry, Gabriella, you know I am. But the evidence against Uncle Barister appears to be quite strong.”

Gabbie felt her eyes fill. “I thought you were loyal, Neville!”

“Gabbie, you know I am. I do want to believe in your father and I want that evidence to be ruled fraudulent, I do!”

“Oh, skip it, Neville. You don’t have to pretend any more for me or for my father. As a matter of fact, you don’t even have to go on calling him ‘uncle’ if it’s too much for you.”

“Gabriella, I’m not pretending. Your father, Uncle Barister,” he emphasized, “has always been there for me and I shan’t forget it. I’m not like the others, Gabbie, I don’t scare easily. I want his innocence with all my heart. Anyone could have planted his cloak at the scene, I suppose…”

“They’ll prove it was planted, Neville, just you wait and see!” Her eyes started to swell, as they did whenever she was emotional.

“Of course they will, Gabbie,” he said in a gentler tone and with a smile. “I truly am sorry,” he said, producing a lilac-colored handkerchief.

Gabbie knew it to be so. There was much more that bonded her and Neville than separated them. Both had been the victims of the collateral damage of the times. Neville’s mother and young uncle had met grisly ends at the hands of those who warred against the current normal—his mother at the hands of members of Lord Jinn Dread’s assassins, and it was said that she was driven mad by them—and his uncle at the hands of Jinn Dread’s younger loyals. It was in that last skirmish that Gabbie and her family had lost Efrian, the horror of that time serving to bond her and Neville deeply. And though their fathers, who had been like brothers, were not on speaking terms, due, Gabbie suspected, to her father's present situation, she and Neville remained close. Neither father made any overture to discourage their relationship, which for Gabbie meant that there was still hope that Barister and Niall, Neville’s father, would one day reunite. She dabbed her eyes with his handkerchief.

“And really, it’s not as if we don’t have enough to worry about around here, with geometry and concoctions!” Neville went on to say.

“Good point.” Gabbie smiled.

“Come on,” he said with a smile, “no one’s looking—let’s sparkle!”

“Neville, I’ll be in such trouble! My cache is already spent and the school year’s only just begun.”

“Oh come on! We’ll put it on mine,” he said, disappearing into a bright, sparkling purple burst. Gabbie grinned and did the same. The two bursts darted through the halls to their next class.

“I told you it wasn’t something you needed to wear, not for what we had to do that night!” Linda McTavish was fussing with her husband Landon, shortly after the meeting adjourned. “Now you’ve possibly cost us discovery!”

“You need to speak with a civil tone, woman, I’m not a child,” Landon growled back.

If Linda McTavish was rattled by her husband’s tone, she did not show it. “Losing a button from a garment is more childlike than anything I can imagine, husband.”

“Don’t worry, let the Warlock Sentry have their look. They won’t find anything, I can guarantee that.”

“Hmmm, they better not,” Linda said, “we’ve already risked too much as it is.”

As the McTavishes went their way, their oldest son Oliver—teaching assistant that he was, hence his reason for being in the administrative tower that morning—watched his parents head to their various classrooms from one of the overhanging balconies.