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Guilt began to stir inside her as she realised that her first thought was how this was going to affect her – what would people think? Would all the prestigious colleges she hoped to get into somehow find out that her dad spent time in treatment? Cordelia had always focused on her future, doing everything the “right” way and trying to be the best. But now she saw her dreams quickly fading in the face of this news. Did kids with addict fathers actually get into places like Harvard and Yale and Stanford?
“Dad is going away?” Eleanor asked, her voice breaking. The thought of potentially losing Fat Jagger and her dad in one night was more than she could stomach.
“Don’t worry, baby,” Mrs Walker said, pulling an arm around Eleanor and trying to force a smile. “It’ll just be for a little bit, and we can visit him this weekend. And when he gets back, everything will be so much better. I promise. You kids are so strong and independent, you always have been. I know you’ll … we’ll get through this, together.”
“But what will we do for money?” Brendan asked.
“Brendan!” Mrs Walker said, glaring at her son. “Is that all you can think about right now?”
Brendan hesitated, perhaps a moment too long, before finally shaking his head no, feeling bad that he was more worried about family finances than his own dad’s mental health.
Of course, there was always the Nazi treasure map they’d brought back from the book world. But that was a long shot. According to the red X on the map, the treasure was hidden somewhere in Europe. Which, the last time Brendan had checked, was a long way away from San Francisco. Plus, they still had no idea if the treasure would even be there in the real world at all. It might only exist inside one of Denver Kristoff’s fictional books.
“In the meantime, I am more than capable of taking care of our family,” Mrs Walker continued, struggling to sound positive. “Which is why I will be starting a new job in the shoe department at Macy’s tomorrow.”
Just a few weeks ago the family lived in a beautiful Victorian home overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and had a ten-million-dollar bankroll. Now they were moving into a tiny apartment with virtually nothing to their name. Well, except the embarrassment that their father, Dr Walker, had brought by losing his medical licence and then gambling away all their money in just a few short months. The family still had that to their name, of course.
Brendan suddenly felt horrible giving his mom such a hard time about money. None of this was her fault, after all. She was the one Walker who was probably least responsible for any of the family’s recent and ongoing problems.
“Well,” Brendan said, “if you need your first customer, I’ve got some birthday money saved up. I always wondered what I’d look like in a pair of red heels.”
In spite of the sombre mood, all of the Walkers laughed. The sound of their laughter almost seemed to lift some of the darkness draped across Sea Cliff Avenue that evening. As if the moon had suddenly switched to a higher setting.
“I think I would actually pay to see Brendan in heels,” Mrs Walker laughed, hugging them all. “I love you guys, you know that? No matter how bad things get, you always find a way to make me smile. Anyway, you won’t have time to shop for shoes tomorrow.”
“Why not?” Cordelia asked.
Mrs Walker then delivered what Brendan and Cordelia thought to be the worst news of the evening so far.
“Because you’ll all be going back to your old schools tomorrow morning.”
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Later that night, Eleanor tossed and turned in her tiny bed inside her tiny room that she shared with Cordelia in the tiny apartment they had moved into. Nightmares haunted her sleep. Nightmares of Fat Jagger fighting off massive great white sharks in the dark waters of the San Francisco Bay. Nightmares of Fat Jagger getting caught up in a fishing net and drowning. Nightmares of Fat Jagger getting discovered and then hunted by men with giant harpoons in whaling ships. And in all her nightmares, there was nothing she could do to help him.
Brendan, however, was not even trying to sleep.
He was sitting at the small desk in his room with his head in his hands, thinking about having to go back to his old school and seeing all of his old friends and teachers. They would all ask him why he had to transfer out of private school and come back. He’d have to tell them the truth. That his dad gambled away all their money and they got kicked out of their home. It’d be especially hard to face them after the way he’d left – admittedly (now) a little too cocky over how much better his new private school was going to be “than this dump”.
This reality somehow filled Brendan with more fear than most of the crazy book adventures he had been on. He realised death was almost easier to face than total humiliation – which was a startling and sobering revelation.
Brendan distracted himself by switching on the fifty-five-inch TV that he’d brought with him from his not-quite-a-man cave in the Kristoff House attic. They could take away his cool attic bedroom and his old school and the money and his chauffeur (which was probably his favourite part of their old life). But nobody was getting their hands on the TV he bought with some of the money Eleanor had wished for using The Book of Doom and Desire. He and the TV had been through a lot together already, including the Giants’ most recent World Series victory. He’d been so excited on the final out, that he almost accidentally threw his half-full can of soda right through her beautiful and flawless screen.
Brendan flipped through the channels, looking for the reruns of Family Guy or South Park that always seemed to be on late at night. He was just about ready to settle on ESPN as a consolation, when a headline on a news channel caught his eye. For a second, he figured maybe he was watching a parody news show, because there was no way the headline could be true.
But the channel was CNN. The news story Brendan watched play out on-screen was most definitely real. And it caused him to literally fall out of his bedroom chair and land on the floor with a sickening thud.
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At the other end of the Walkers’ apartment, Cordelia was in the middle of the strangest dream of her life. In fact, it didn’t feel like a dream to her at all, but more like reality, with actual sounds and smells and textures. If it weren’t for the fact that what was happening in her dream was impossible, she would have believed it was really happening.
Cordelia was back in the book world. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she was certain of it. Perhaps it was partly because the sunshine seemed a little too bright as it poured through the narrow windows lining the walls of a huge castle. The slivers of sun lit up her feet as she moved through a long, vast stone hallway.
Except that her feet didn’t look like her feet. They seemed … bigger, but also lighter somehow, almost as if they were capable of floating. But they were her feet; they had to be, since Cordelia could feel the coldness of the stone floors through strange, thin leather shoes.
She entered a large room at the end of the extensive hallway. It didn’t take long to recognise the lush tapestries on the walls and large windows. The massive bone and amethyst throne at the end of the red silk carpet was the surest giveaway of all.
Cordelia was back at Castle Corroway from Denver Kristoff’s book Savage Warriors. She was inside the evil Queen Daphne’s throne room. Even as the royal guards knelt before her, Cordelia knew it couldn’t be true. But yet, it clearly was. And somehow she was the new queen.
But still she pressed on, almost as if something was driving her besides her own free will. Cordelia marched up to her throne like she truly belonged there. She sat down and surveyed the room. She had guests, it seemed. But they were certainly not ordinary guests.
Before Cordelia’s throne stood the most bizarre array of creatures and people that had likely ever assembled inside a castle, fictional or otherwise. Krom was there, from their first adventure, as the new leader of the band of Savage Warriors who carried out Queen Daphne’s most vicious orders. Next to him stood a familiar German general who looked exactly like the only other German general Cordelia had ever met, the Nazi cyborg, Heinrich Volnheim, Generalleutnant of the Fifteenth Panzergrenadier Division from Kristoff’s book Assault of the Nazi Cyborgs. But it couldn’t have been Volnheim himself, because she’d watched him get blown to bits on a snowy mountainside by a tank cannon. All of the cyborg generals must look exactly alike.
Next to the Nazi cyborg stood a very stereotypical-looking vampire, complete with a pronounced widow’s peak in his slicked black hair, pale skin, a black cape with a high collar and protruding bloody fangs. There was also Ungil, the slave gladiator from Emperor Occipus’s Roman Colosseum, German pilots most likely from the World War One adventure novel, The Fighting Ace, a group of Prohibition-era mobsters, military officers from what looked like virtually every major war, a few hideous purple aliens with tentacles, and a vast array of other creatures and characters that Cordelia didn’t recognise.
They were all staring at her expectantly. So Cordelia began to speak, surprising herself with the authority and confidence of her words.
“Welcome!” she said. “Thank you all for joining me. As you know, I’ve been trapped here for months. But now our time draws near. The worlds are ready to converge. As we speak, more of us are finding ways to break through, slipping past the barriers that separate us from the outside, from the place that is truly ours. And once we finally break through, nothing will be able to stop us.”
The creatures and soldiers cheered. More words spilled from her mouth, almost of their own accord. Cordelia could feel that she meant what she was saying even though each word that came out shocked her. It was almost like talking on the phone with someone and hearing an echo of your own voice.
“The only person who could have stopped us is now dead!” Cordelia announced excitedly to the crowd. Except that by now she suspected she was not really herself, and she had a sinking feeling she knew precisely what was happening. “The old man’s magic is broken, decaying like his rotting corpse inside the cold ground. So now the time has come for us to act. We must make our plans accordingly and prepare for the moment when …”
Suddenly Cordelia was torn violently from her dream. She was being shaken and there were voices whispering harshly into her ear.
“Cordelia, wake up!” the voice said. “They’re coming through! They’re going to kill us all!”
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Cordelia Walker sat up quickly at the sound of Brendan’s panicked voice and her head slammed into the metal frame of the top bunk. She cried out in pain, suppressing the urge to curse loudly.
“Ouch! What’s the matter with you, Bren?” Cordelia asked as she rubbed her aching forehead.
“Sorry about that,” Brendan said. “I maybe got a little excited there, but I swear it’s super-important. You’re gonna want to see this right away. Both of you.”
Cordelia was used to having her own room and her own queen-size bed. But their apartment by Fisherman’s Wharf only had two small bedrooms and a den. And so now Eleanor and Cordelia had to share a room. The movers had brought back their old bunk beds from storage that evening.
“Are you OK, Deal?” Eleanor whispered.
“Yeah, there’s no blood,” Cordelia said, still holding her sore forehead and trying not to take it out on her sister. She knew it wasn’t Eleanor’s fault that they had to move back into the bunk beds.
Eleanor climbed down the ladder from the top bunk as Cordelia groaned and dragged herself out of the lower bed.
“This better not be a collection of your toenail clippings again, Bren,” Cordelia said. “That wasn’t even funny the first time you did it!”
“No, this is for real,” Brendan said. “And, by the way … that was hilarious.”
A few years ago, Brendan had told Cordelia he had something extremely urgent and awesome to show her. He’d sold it so well he even managed to get her to pay a one-dollar entry fee to get into his room. Then he’d proudly shown her a collection of toenail clippings that he’d arranged into the phrase Cordelia = Nerd across his desk.
“Took me two years to collect enough toenails,” Brendan said, smirking at the memory.
“Eww, Bren, let’s just go see whatever it is you want to show us,” Cordelia said, making a face.
They followed Brendan out into the dark hallway of the apartment. The door to their parents’ room was closed and the light was off. The silence was broken only by the creaking of their footsteps down the hall towards Brendan’s room at the front of the unit. His “bedroom” wasn’t technically a bedroom at all. It was really a den that they had converted into a room for him.
Cordelia held her breath as she slowly pushed the door. The hinges creaked as it swung open. The room was dark, but a pale blue glow splashed across the bed like they were in a garishly lit horror movie.
It took Cordelia’s eyes a few seconds to adjust to the light, and then she gasped in shock. She stared at Brendan’s TV in silence. Her mouth hung open, her dream almost completely forgotten for the moment. Brendan pushed past her and sat down on the edge of his bed.
“Insane, right?” he said.
Eleanor shuffled around Cordelia so she could get a better look at the TV. This was another of those frequent moments when she hated being the youngest and smallest. She could never see anything!
She stepped into the centre of the room and finally got a clear view. Eleanor gasped, just like Cordelia had.
How could this be possible?
Eleanor stood there shaking her head, as if it could make what she was seeing go away. It turned out that Fat Jagger wasn’t the only character to cross over into the real world from one of Denver Kristoff’s books.
A CNN headline scrolling across the bottom of Brendan’s TV read: “Real Abominable Snowman Gunned Down in Santa Rosa, CA”.
Eleanor quickly recognised that the dead beast displayed on the screen wasn’t merely an abominable snowman. It was one of the deadly frost beasts that she and the gladiator Felix had battled in Kristoff’s book world alongside Wangchuk and his order of monks. One of the surviving frost beasts had not only crossed over into the real world … it had made its way to California!
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The three Walkers watched the TV in silence for several minutes. Grainy footage from someone’s mobile phone showed three local sheriffs posing next to the dead creature. One of them crouched on top of the massive, furry chest, holding an automatic rifle in his hand. Even with the poor video quality, the kids could clearly see a gaping bullet wound on top of the beast’s head, right at its fontanel – which was the frost beasts’ only weakness.
The news footage then cut to an interview with one of the sheriffs.
“Well, at first he wouldn’t go down,” the young deputy said into the camera, clearly struggling to keep a wide grin off his face. “But we just kept shooting, until the monster fell to its knees. Then I stepped up and put one right in his head and he dropped dead. Just like that.”
Brendan hit the Mute button.
“What’s going on?” Brendan asked. “Are we going to see Nazi cyborgs storming the White House next? Or giant dragonflies snatching up dogs off leashes in Central Park?”
“No!” Eleanor nearly shouted at the thought of poor dogs getting eaten by giant bugs. She clamped her hands over her mouth, worried that she might have accidentally woken her mom.
“My dream wasn’t a dream at all,” Cordelia said softly to herself. “It was … real.”
Eleanor and Brendan looked at each other and then turned their confused faces towards their older sister. Cordelia shook her head; her eyes were wide with a mixture of fear and disgust. It was the same look she had on her face when she’d discovered they were all direct descendants of the Wind Witch.
“What dream?” Eleanor asked.
“My dream, it was actually real,” Cordelia repeated as if in a trance. “Which means all of this is really happening. And it’s only going to get worse. The Wind Witch knows how to make it all worse somehow …”
“Hello-ooo, Deal?” Brendan said, waving a hand in front of her face. “You want to clue us in on what you’re talking about, please!”
Cordelia finally looked up and met Brendan’s worried eyes. Then she glanced down at Eleanor, wondering briefly if her little sister could handle what she’d just figured out.
“Maybe you should go back to our bedroom while Bren and I talk?” Cordelia suggested gently.
Eleanor cocked her head indignantly, scowling.
“I’m not a baby,” she said. “You don’t have to protect me. Anything Bren can hear, so can I!”
Cordelia looked at Brendan, who merely shrugged. Perhaps she was right, somewhere along the way, they were going to have to stop treating Eleanor like a helpless toddler. Especially after everything they’d been through together.
“When you woke me up … I’d been having this dream,” Cordelia began. “Except that it wasn’t like any dream I’ve had before. It was like I was inside someone else’s mind. And I think I actually was!”
She gestured towards the ongoing news story of the slain frost beast.
“Maybe you just banged your head a little too hard when you woke up,” Brendan said. He held up two fingers in front of her face. “Maybe you got a concussion. How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Two,” Cordelia said, slapping Brendan’s fingers away. “It was real! I’m linked to someone for ever, remember? And when I was sleeping, I somehow became her, I saw what she saw, said what she said. I became another person.”
“Who?” Eleanor asked, even though both she and Brendan feared they already knew.
“The Wind Witch,” Cordelia said. “I was the Wind Witch.”
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“How is that even possible?” Brendan asked.
“Remember back when I read our great-great-grandmother’s journal?” Cordelia said. “The Wind Witch was somehow able to read it through my eyes. It must work both ways; sometimes she sees what I see, and I see what she sees.”
“Great,” Brendan muttered, “my sister is synched up to an evil she-devil like some sort of supernatural Wi-Fi network.”
Cordelia shot him a look that could have killed someone less healthy.
“What happened in the dream?” Eleanor asked.
Eleanor and Brendan sat and listened quietly while Cordelia explained what she’d experienced earlier that night. About seeing all of the characters from Denver’s different books gathered in one place: Castle Corroway.
“It’s hard to remember which characters were all there, exactly,” Cordelia said, frowning. “Even though it felt real, it’s still like a dream in that I can’t remember all of the specific details.”
“It sort of sounds like it was a gathering of the Dark Avengers,” Brendan said. “Like an all-villain supergroup.”
“Yeah, it almost would have been funny to see Dracula sitting between a Nazi cyborg and Krom if it weren’t for the fact that they were definitely plotting something horrible,” Cordelia explained. “I said … or, I mean, the Wind Witch told everyone that even though they thought they were trapped inside the book world … they really weren’t. She said there was a way they could escape, a way they could all get out into the real world. She said the seams between the two worlds are frayed and getting worse with each passing day. Something about the magic being weakened. One of the last things she said before I woke up was that the only person who knew how to stop her was dead.”
“Denver Kristoff!” Brendan said under his breath. “That old bag of rotting goat guts.”
Cordelia nodded. “It makes perfect sense. After he died, we were able to bring an artefact from his books back with us into San Francisco—”
“The Nazi treasure map,” Brendan said.
“And then Fat Jagger somehow crossed over,” Eleanor said.
“And now a frost beast,” Brendan added.
