Battle of the Beasts Read online

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen Walkers!” he said. He always said that. “We ready for school? Mr. Brendan! Looking sharp! What is that? A Mastermind diamond backpack? Aren’t there only a hundred of those out there?”

  “Fifty.”

  “Fifty?!” shouted Angel. “The girls are gonna be swarmin’ all over you, dude!”

  Brendan raised an I told you so eyebrow to his sisters as they piled into the car, where magazines were laid out next to that morning’s San Francisco Chronicle and fresh bottles of water. Brendan and Eleanor cracked two bottles; Cordelia ignored them, listening to her music, and turned up the heat in the backseat.

  “What are you doing?” Eleanor asked. “It’s gonna be like eighty today!”

  Cordelia pulled her earbuds out. “I’m freezing,” she said.

  “It’s not cold!”

  “Yeah,” Brendan said. “Maybe you need to eat more, Deal.”

  “Both of you leave me alone,” Cordelia said.

  Brendan and Eleanor gave each other a look, but then Eleanor said, “It’s fine. Put it at whatever temperature you want. I’m going to read my new book.”

  Eleanor pulled out an Encyclopedia Brown book her mother had given her. She was very proud of how she could read Encyclopedia Brown now. She could usually solve the cases, too—Probably because of all the mysteries I had to solve on our adventures, she thought. To try and get her in a better mood, she showed the book to Cordelia.

  “Look how close I am to being done. Today I’m gonna finish!”

  Cordelia stared at the book, shrugged, and looked out the window, ignoring her sister. Eleanor’s face fell.

  Brendan noticed. “Hey, Deal, what’s your problem?” he asked. “Angel? Could we please have some privacy?”

  Angel raised the dark glass panel between the front and back seats. Now it was like the Walkers were in a private, rolling chamber.

  “Deal,” Brendan said. “What’s up with you? You haven’t been acting like yourself. You’re not reading, not even about Will in Kristoff’s books. Is that what this is about? Will? I know you miss him.”

  That got Cordelia’s attention. Will Draper was a World War I fighter pilot, a character from Denver Kristoff’s novel The Fighting Ace. He had collided with the Walkers when their house got banished during the first Wind Witch attack . . . and, to be completely honest, he’d had a bit of a crush on Cordelia. And vice versa.

  “Why should I read about Will?” Cordelia said. “He clearly isn’t thinking about us, or he would have been in touch. Maybe we imagined him. Maybe we imagined all of it.”

  Brendan sighed. Losing Will was the hardest thing the Walkers had faced after their adventures. When they went back to San Francisco, they brought him with them, and he had promised to meet Cordelia at her school the next day—but he never showed up.

  That was six weeks ago.

  The Walkers did everything they could to find Will—searched the internet for reports of a confused man who thought he was a British pilot, put up posters depicting a sketch of him—but nothing had come of it. Cordelia had gotten sadder and sadder as days passed and she never heard from him, and then her sadness had turned to anger. She didn’t like the idea that someone had the power to make her feel so bad.

  “Maybe he drifted magically back into The Fighting Ace,” Brendan said, “and he’s there now. We know Kristoff’s books are weird, cursed things. Maybe they can absorb a character if he gets out.”

  “I just hope he’s okay, wherever he is,” Eleanor said.

  “Yeah,” Brendan agreed. “He was kinda like the older brother I’ll never have.”

  “I miss his corny jokes,” Eleanor continued.

  “And the way he held my hand when we—” started Cordelia, who quickly stopped herself, realizing that Brendan and Eleanor were staring at her.

  “I thought you said he wasn’t real,” Brendan said.

  “I shouldn’t have,” said Cordelia. “I know he’s real.”

  They all thought about Will for a moment, about how great it would be if they had one more person they could talk to about the things in their lives that they couldn’t talk about with anyone else, when the car screeeeeeked to a halt.

  “Hey!” Angel yelled from the driver’s seat, so loud that they could hear him through the panel. “Are you crazy? Crossing in the middle of the street?”

  Brendan powered down the window. Cordelia was the first to speak: “Dad?”

  “Mr. Walker?” Angel asked, suddenly worried about his job. “I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you!”

  Their father would have been hard for anyone to recognize. He was wearing a ski jacket, torn jeans, loafers without socks, a tattered San Francisco Giants cap, and aviator sunglasses, with a plaid scarf wrapped around his neck. He was crossing the street in a hurry, headed for a deli, while a double-parked cab waited across the way. Mr. Walker saw Angel and put on a smile.

  “Kids! Hey! Angel, don’t worry about it.” He walked to the rear passenger window. Cars honked at him. He looked like he’d been up all night.

  “Mom said you were out for a run,” Brendan said.

  “I was working. Your mother tries to shield you from the amount of work I do. But I’m really trying to get my old position back, and that means doing time-consuming research.”

  “We understand,” Eleanor said. “We love you, Dad.”

  “What kind of research?” Brendan asked, concerned about his dad—and wanting to believe him.

  “Medical research. Blood flow and reward centers in the brain. Look, I’m grabbing a sandwich and going home. You kids have a great day at school. I love you.” He kissed his hand, reached through the window, and patted each of their heads.

  Then he was off, into the deli. The Walkers looked at one another.

  “Maybe he’s going insane. Maybe the book cursed him,” Cordelia said.

  “Or maybe he’s just got too much money,” said Brendan.

  “Maybe I should have wished for like half as much,” Eleanor said guiltily.

  They rode in silence the rest of the way to school.

  Bay Academy Prep was situated on a sprawling campus with a duck pond. You had to drive through a gate and up over a hill past the pond—which was home to a few cute ducks and more than a few big, dirty seagulls—until you arrived at the main building, which resembled a red sandstone cathedral. It was listed as a San Francisco landmark. It had been very impressive to the Walkers at first, but now it was just school.

  The Walkers gave one another fist bumps and went their separate ways.

  Eleanor headed left, down a path where she was joined by other kids her age. The third graders had two forces acting on their bodies as they walked to class—the weight of their backpacks, which pulled them back, and their desire to play with their phones, which hunched them forward. Eleanor texted her mom on her starter phone as she walked in. There wasn’t much else she could do on the phone, since it couldn’t go on the internet. Eleanor didn’t mind; she was just happy to be able to text her mom when she needed her.

  I miss you mom

  Is everything okay?

  Before Eleanor could answer, she realized that two girls were walking beside her, one on either side: Zoe and Ruby. Not the nicest girls. Both taller than Eleanor, and (she had to admit) prettier. But they’ve each got models as moms—what are they supposed to be, short and ugly?

  “Hey, Ruby, did you see what I posted last night?” Zoe asked, speaking right across Eleanor as if she weren’t there.

  “Oh yeah!” Ruby said. “It’s awesome! And did you see? I just Instagrammed the funniest picture of my French bulldog.”

  Ruby held out her phone directly across Eleanor’s face, so Zoe could see the photo. Eleanor realized they were showing off their phones.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Eleanor said, rolling her eyes. “You don’t have to be so obvious. I know my phone’s not as good as yours.”

  Ruby looked at Eleanor like she was surprised to see
her there. “We’re not doing anything. We were just talking.”

  “You think you can make me feel bad, but you can’t. I’ve done a lot of amazing stuff that you would never ever understand. I’ve taken down a real witch.”

  “A real witch?” asked Zoe.

  “What are you talking about?” said Ruby. “You got in a fight with Ms. Carter?” There was a rumor going around school that Ms. Carter, who had dreadlocks and a skull tattoo, was actually a witch.

  “No, I—” Eleanor started to explain, but then realized that if she told them any more of the story, she would sound completely bananas. So she just muttered under her breath: “Forget it.”

  Ruby put a hand on her shoulder. “You need to calm down. You’re not, like, so important that we just gang up on you to make fun of you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Zoe said. “But you should probably get something better than a grandpa phone.”

  Ruby laughed, just a little, and the two girls breezed past Eleanor into school. Eleanor’s head was spinning. She looked back at her phone, at the question “Is everything okay?”

  She wanted to get into how Cordelia was mean on the ride over, and how they’d run into Dad and he looked terrible, and how these two girls were making fun of her and she almost spilled the beans about the Wind Witch, and how she just wanted things to go back to normal, the way they were before . . . but instead she wrote to her mom:

  Everything’s fine

  She had a feeling that was the way grown-ups handled it.

  Brendan, meanwhile, was in the building that had classes for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, and he was rocking his backpack. It wasn’t just an accessory; it was like a force field that let him walk in a different way, with his chest jutting out, looking at everybody. Because what if they look back? What’ll they see? One of the best backpacks in the world, that’s what.

  The bell rang; Brendan was late for class. But so what? I can’t walk fast wearing this. This is a backpack for strutting in. He went to his locker and fiddled with the combination without even noticing the guys behind him: Scott Calurio and his posse.

  “What do you think you’re wearing?” Scott said.

  Scott was Brendan’s own personal bully, a junior-varsity wrestler, beady eyed and muscular, with meaty hands and a neck wider than his head. He had curly blond hair, which Brendan thought was a big reason he got away with so much. Nobody suspected a bully with cute, poofy hair. Scott targeted people he felt were different, stupid, and poor, and he had a bunch of wrestler friends who helped him in this mission.

  “It’s a skull backpack from Japan. With real diamonds on it.”

  “Where’d you get it? Off eBay?”

  “None of your business . . . why are you even bothering me? What did I do to you?”

  “You’re walking around like you just scored a winning touchdown, which we all know could never happen in this universe,” Scott said, sharing a laugh with his group. “And hey . . . I’ve been wondering . . . what happened to your ear?”

  “I got shot,” Brendan said, touching his left earlobe. Scott and his cronies laughed, but it was true. Brendan’s missing earlobe was a small souvenir from his adventures in Kristoff’s books—the pirate Gilliam had blasted it off. Brendan didn’t miss it too much, but it was pretty sad that for the past six weeks, his parents hadn’t even noticed it, because they were caught up in their own problems, and now here was Scott Calurio pointing it out.

  “Yeah, right,” Scott scoffed. “Your cat probably licked it off!” His goons all laughed—and then they grabbed Brendan and pushed him to the ground. He fought, kicking and clawing, but he couldn’t get any leverage—there were too many of them.

  “Hey! Stop! Help—”

  “Shh,” Scott said. “We’re not gonna hurt you. We’re just gonna take a closer look at this.”

  Scott pulled off Brendan’s backpack and squinted at it. The diamonds gleamed under the fluorescent lights. Brendan struggled but it was no use; he tried to scream but a hand covered his mouth. I could bite, he thought, but then I’d get made fun of as the kid who bites people.

  Scott palmed the inside lining of the backpack until he found a tag. He tore it out and held it up for Brendan.

  “What’s that say, huh? I’ll read it for you, in case you’re dyslexic like your little sister. ‘Old Navy.’ Old. Navy. Now why would a backpack from Japan have an Old Navy tag on it? I’ll bet these aren’t diamonds either. I bet they’re made of glass!”

  And with that, Scott ripped six or seven “diamonds” off the backpack, put them in his mouth, and . . . chewed them up! When they were ground to a fine powder, Scott spit them in Brendan’s face.

  “Told you!” growled Scott. “You can’t chew real diamonds. This backpack’s fake. Like you. Like your stupid family that came out of nowhere.”

  Scott threw the backpack down onto Brendan. People were passing him in the halls while all this was happening, pointing and taking pictures on their phones. The teachers were no use; they were in their rooms drinking coffee, which was probably better because if a teacher saved you from a kid like Scott, that was even more mortifying than being targeted in the first place. But the worst part? Scott’s right, Brendan thought. I am fake.

  “Hope you didn’t spend more than ten bucks on that,” Scott said, before walking away down the hall with his minions. The ambient noise of the building took over. Brendan got up and stuck his head far inside the shadows of his open locker. He didn’t want anyone to see him crying.

  Cordelia was feeling a lot better than Brendan. In fact, since she’d started going to Bay Academy Prep, she found that she was happier at school than she was at home, which was a little sad but which she didn’t mind. She looked at the place as an opportunity to reinvent herself; at her old school, everyone knew her as the girl who was reading all the time or the quiet girl or “Brendan’s older sister,” because Brendan had such a personality—but not here. Here Cordelia was the person who had started the Student Tutoring Program.

  It hadn’t been so hard, and it had come together quickly. In her first two weeks at Bay Academy, Cordelia noticed that a lot of freshmen and sophomores were getting tutors outside the school, which seemed silly, because there were very smart juniors and seniors who could tutor them just fine. And those juniors and seniors wanted extracurricular activities for their college applications, so Cordelia thought: Why not start a program that turns older students into tutors for younger students?

  She went to the Student Union Office to talk about the idea. There she met Priya, student body treasurer, who liked it and liked her. That was how Cordelia found herself participating in student government—or “school politics,” as people called it, but for her it really wasn’t about politics; it was about helping. She set up the Student Tutoring Program in two weeks and it was a big success, with twenty pairs of tutors and students already signed up.

  Maybe helping people is what I’m supposed to do, she thought now as she passed the Student Tutoring sign-up board in Douglas-Kroft, the building that held high-school classes. Help people. It feels good, and it makes me stop thinking about myself, or Will, or what I’ve been through. Priya had suggested to Cordelia that maybe she should run for class president next year. It was an idea that scared Cordelia and excited her—or maybe it excited her because it scared her.

  Cordelia went into her first class, history, with Mrs. Mortimer, and sat in the middle of the room. She tuned out her thoughts and got into the work of school, which was something she always had the ability to do . . . until she felt someone looking at her.

  It was a nasty, prickly feeling. Cordelia had felt it a few times in the last few weeks, at school and at home, and she always stopped what she was doing to try and catch the watcher. This time was no different. She sat stock-still and moved only her eyes. Was one of her classmates looking at her? She dropped her pen to give herself an excuse to look behind her. No, it wasn’t any of the students—but it was someone!
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  Suddenly she saw somebody—out the window, moving away. She couldn’t see the person’s face, just a long black body that quickly disappeared.

  She stood up, aghast, but stopped and sat back down.

  Something was happening to her hands.

  It started with the veins. Below her skin, which was fair, her veins were not things she paid much attention to. But she knew she didn’t have veins on her fingers. Who had veins on their fingers? Old people.

  And yet: She had them now. They were dark, and thick, and rising to the surface of her skin.

  It was like she was seeing it from outside her body; the veins were stretching, fattening, and the skin around them was shrinking, becoming paler and paler, drying up as if it were going to flake off, like she had a disease, or . . .

  Like I’m getting old, Cordelia thought.

  This is a nightmare. It has to be. I’m not really even at school. My mind is sabotaging me. I’m not here at all. She flipped her hands around—her palms had deep lines. Her nails were growing, turning orange, becoming dirty underneath. As she looked at them, a piercing cold hit her side, like a frozen bullet biting into her. Cordelia wrenched over in pain, biting her lip to keep from crying out.

  Her hands were curling now, becoming like tangled, dead-gray roots. She remembered something she had learned about foot binding in social studies, how when Chinese people used to foot bind women, the goal was to make their toes turn inward, to make a “golden lotus,” the most beautiful kind of foot there was, a foot you couldn’t even walk on, and that’s what her hands were turning into—a dead lotus, cold inside—

  She screamed.

  Everyone in class turned to her. Cordelia quickly hid her hands beneath her desk.

  “Cordelia? Are you all right?” Mrs. Mortimer asked.

  “May I please be excused,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She shoved her old-woman hands inside her bag, got up, and rushed from the room, using her elbow to open the door. Mrs. Mortimer protested as kids behind her gave one another looks and started laughing.