The Black Reckoning by John Stephens

Author:John Stephens
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2015-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Witch’s Secret

“Listen, please—”

“She’s dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead!”

“You don’t have to do this—”

The man inched his chair forward, straining against the ropes, trying as best he could to place his body between the sweating, wild-eyed, knife-wielding figure and his wife, who was tied to a chair beside him. The man’s name was Richard Wibberly. His wife’s name was Clare. On this night, neither had seen their children in more than ten years.

“Killing us does nothing—”

“Nothing?! It does nothing?!” The wild-eyed man lurched forward, pressing the knife against his prisoner’s face. “It makes you dead, is what it does! And hurts them! That is enough!”

The blade flashed, and a long, bloody line appeared on Richard’s cheek.

Clare screamed and unleashed a string of curses and threats.

The couple’s captor pushed Richard roughly to the floor and stepped toward the woman.

Only he never made it, for just then the door burst in and an enormous man, one of the largest men either Richard or his wife had ever seen, stepped into the room. He wore an old cloak, and the handle of a sword jabbed upward from a sheath on his back. He had long black hair and a vicious scar running down the side of his face. Everything about him spoke of purpose, power, and a fearsome violence.

The fury coming off him charged the air all around.

The couple’s captor shrieked and swung the knife, but the intruder knocked it away, lifted the man into the air, and threw him out the window. There was a shattering crash, a half breath of silence, and then the thud of a body striking the ground twenty feet below, followed by the dull tinkling of broken glass.

The enormous man stood there a moment; then his shoulders dropped, his body relaxed, and he gave off the impression of someone who had put down a burden that he had been carrying for a long, long time.

He righted Richard’s chair, took the discarded knife, and cut his bonds.

“Who are you?” Richard asked, rubbing the grooves the cord had dug into his wrists, watching as the man cut his wife’s bonds.

“My name is Gabriel. I am a friend of your children.”

—

It had taken Gabriel less than three hours after leaving Kate and Michael in the giants’ city to find the Secretary, but in some ways it was the culmination of a fifteen-year search.

A decade and a half earlier, after the events in Cambridge Falls, the Countess’s Secretary had disappeared, and Dr. Pym had tasked Gabriel with finding the man. “He knows much. He has been a party to the Dire Magnus’s most secret plans. The enemy will hunt him, to punish him for the witch’s betrayal. We must find him before they do.”

And so, for years, Gabriel had trekked all over the globe, following whatever clues, whispers, or desperate hintings he could uncover, combing through the dredges of the magical and nonmagical worlds, arriving always a day, an hour, a moment too late. He had found traces of the

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