The Knaveheart's Curse Read online

  “You can’t take back what you gave,” said Hudson. “That would be very babyish of you.”

  “But look, my uncle had it monogrammed for me!” squealed Dakota. “Gertrude Dakota Underhill!”

  “Wrong. The letters on the cane stand for ‘Grrr, Don’t Use,’” said Hudson, but he looked at Maddy, who shrugged. It had been a good on-the-spot lie, but not a great one. “Gertrude Dakota Underhill?” Hudson repeated, making a face. “What a lame name.”

  “Yeah, I prefer what you’ve been calling me,” Dakota said shyly.

  “Say no more, Susanality,” said Hudson. “I’m happy to relieve you of your name shame, especially since you’re Maddy’s very first non-imaginary friend. But now answer this. Why would your uncle give you a cane?”

  “Because it’s not a cane,” Dakota explained. “It’s a didgeridoo. No ordinary one, either. Uncle Godfry is Dad’s brother. He specializes in making special didgeridoos that can contact the afterworld. He told me he’d send me one if I ever got lonely in New York.”

  “Is he, um . . .” Maddy cleared her throat. It was almost too good to be true. “A higher authority?”

  Dakota’s eyes met hers. “I believe so.”

  Maddy felt awful. A ghost-summoning didgeridoo was a way better present than a chintzy, used clarinet. Unfair swap. Luckily Dakota seemed so happy to have it back that she wasn’t holding a grudge. She lifted an end of the instrument to her mouth and blew.

  From its opposite end came a familiar twanging, humming, droning noise.

  Maddy’s ears perked up. “That’s the same noise that we heard outside on the way over here. It must have been the wind blowing through the whatchamacallit that made those haunting sounds.”

  “Not a whatchamacallit, a didgeridoo!” Hudson looked excited. “Also known as a drone pipe. It’s an ancient Aboriginal wind instrument. Wow, I never saw one in real life before.”

  “There’s more to this didge than music,” said Dakota as she blew again.

  Was it Maddy’s imagination, or had the cellar become exceptionally freezing cold? She began to tremble. Something was happening.

  And now Maddy didn’t feel so alone down here anymore.

  Ghosts materialized one by one. Dressed in the burial clothes from their various centuries, they walked through the walls and seeped in under the windows.

  As each appeared, the ghost spoke his or her name clearly.

  “Nita Naldi.” From a woman in an ermine-trimmed dress with sweeping, caterpillar eyebrows.

  “General Frances J. Herron.” The mustached man was dressed in Union Army splendor.

  “Ignatius Lupo. Call me Lupo the Wolf.” This man wore high-waisted flannel slacks and had a face that was mean as a pit bull. He spat a wad of ghostly chew on the floor.

  “Giulio Risseto.” The boy’s voice was clear as his eyes. As he became visible, he smiled at Maddy. “You used my tombstone recently to reset your shoulder. How is it?”

  “Almost healed,” she told him. “Thanks.”

  “Lucas Underhill. Call me Dad.” As Dakota’s dad strode out of the mist, Maddy could hear the faint clank of his foot, eternally stuck in a paint bucket. Otherwise, he looked battle ready.

  “Dad!” Dakota hopped with excitement.

  “Mr. Underhill’s a special visitation. The rest of us are here compliments of our final resting place, the Queens Calvary Cemetery,” General Herron announced with a crisp salute and a tap of his heels for Dakota’s dad.

  “We’re glad you all came, because we need your help.” Dakota’s father quickly explained the situation. “We’ve got to haunt out the humans.”

  “Haunt?” Nita Naldi looked nervous. “I thought we’d been contacted to provide companionship for a lonely dryad. I’ve never been much for a haunting.”

  Maddy was upset. “There’s got to be at least a million ghosts in the Calvary Cemetery. Why don’t you go exchange yourselves for some spirits who like to haunt?”

  General Herron looked offended. “Well, we’re here now. We’ll have to do.”

  “I’m ready to haunt.” Lupo cracked his ghostly knuckles.

  “It’s just . . . most ghosts tend to be scared of Knaves,” added Giulio.

  “So that means you can’t do anything about Zelda?” Maddy’s voice wobbled in despair. “We Livingstones moved all the way here to the New World so that we didn’t have to be eternal anymore. Now my poor sis is on her way to suffering one thousand years of Knav-ish immortality. In September, Lex should be starting high school. She’s been looking forward to high school for almost four hundred years.”

  The General looked limp. “We’ll give it our best.”

  “Okay, first things first. We don’t know what we can or can’t do until we get out of this dungeon,” reminded Dakota.

  Dakota’s father extracted a large white handkerchief from his jeans pocket. “Okay, everyone ready? Follow me.”

  With Maddy and the others on his heel, he flowed up the cellar steps. They watched as he dissolved through the door.

  He then pushed the handkerchief back underneath the space at the bottom of the door, with the key resting on top.

  “Cool trick.” Maddy snatched it up.

  “Spirits, ready yourselves!” commanded General Herron.

  Phantom arms! Just like the poem, thought Maddy as she slid the key into the lock.

  19

  LULLABY SHOWDOWN

  Hybrids and ghosts streamed from the cellar into the ballroom.

  “This place is dead. I seen better parties in my prison cell block,” declared Lupo.

  “And the music—so out-of-date,” agreed Nita.

  “That reminds me.” Hudson nudged Maddy. “Remember Princess Zellandine’s sweet sixteen at the Château D’Usee in Villandry, Old World?”

  “Sure.” A few hundred years ago, birthday girl Zellandine had pricked her finger on a spinning wheel’s needle, prompting a curse that caused all the mortals to fall asleep. Only Lexie, Maddy, Hudson, and Carabosse—the thirteenth godmother—had been immune to the spell. A birthday party of sleeping guests had not been much fun, but at least there’d been plenty of cake.

  “A sleep spell’s what we need here,” Hudson noted. “Some way to clear the humans out of the action.”

  “That’s where we come in,” said Giulio. “You go deal with your Knave. We’ll take care of the rest.”

  He and the three other ghosts glided onto the ballroom floor, where they began to tip and sway with the dancers. The humans were instantly befuddled. “Did someone step on my toe?” “Who just blew in my ear?”

  “Oh, of course!” Hudson whispered. “The humans can’t see the ghosts.”

  “Brr! It’s cold!” the women complained as they pulled tighter on their wraps.

  Creeping over to the orchestra pit, Dakota’s father blew the music sheets so they scattered. Musicians looked around, frightened and confused, as the music broke off awkwardly.

  “My dad’s a seasoned haunter,” Dakota said approvingly. “He’s got the gift.”

  “Well, I’m a seasoned slayer,” said Maddy, “and now it’s time to challenge our Knave.” She picked up a small drinks tray. “Try to blend in.”

  They inched, unseen, toward the back of the ballroom, where the Elcris family, along with Lexie and Zelda, was watching the raffle in progress while drinking from crystal goblets.

  “Eeyucchh, I bet that’s not wine. They’re drinking rat-blood gazpacho.” Dakota scrunched her face.

  “I can’t tell one girl from the other.” Maddy’s eyes darted from Zelda to Lexie and back again. Heart pounding, she approached the table. If this didn’t work, all would be lost. “Fed fest, hva?” she asked the twins.

  “Hva,” replied one of the green-eyed twins, nodding.

  “Da ty’de kæmper til dit skød; thi med ham lynte skræk og død,” said Maddy.

  “Fra vallen hørtes vrål, som brød den tykke sky,” answered the other twin.

  Quickly, Maddy served the glas
ses of water, gave a slight bow, and returned to the others. “Lexie’s the one on the left,” she whispered.

  “How do you know?” squeaked Dakota.

  “Because Zelda only learned phrase book Danish. Lexie, on the other hand, knows doomed poet Danish. Her favorite poem, ‘The Death of Balder,’ is by Johannes Ewald. I spoke a meter of one of his best lyrics, and she jumped right in—she couldn’t help herself.” But Maddy’s triumph faded in a pinch as the twins jumped up from the table and moved to the dance floor, where they grasped hands and started to spin each other around and around.

  “Ooh!” Dakota’s eyes widened. “Now Lexie’s on the right. No, the left! No, the right!”

  “The Knave did it on purpose.” Hudson looked sick. “They’ve mixed themselves up again. Now what?”

  Maddy’s fingers worried the beads of the von Krik necklace, as she drew it from her pocket. “Fear not, my dear Crudson,” she whispered, although she knew she was betting her last trick. She waited until the dancing was over and the twins had collapsed back into their seats before she reloaded her tray with glasses of ice water. “All that exercise must have made you thirsty,” she murmured as she pulled Nicola von Krik’s necklace out of her pocket. “Here—from an admirer.”

  Both twins made a swipe for the necklace, and both caught it by their spindly fingers. Their green eyes glittered greedily.

  “For me?” asked one.

  “For me?” asked the other.

  “Why don’t you each try it on and decide who wears it best?” Maddy suggested, then smoothly slipped away to join the others before the twins could refocus their concentration.

  “Me first!” cawed a twin. Maddy, Hudson, and Dakota watched as she clasped the necklace around her throat. Instantly, the beads muddied to black.

  “Now me!” The other twin snatched it off and reclasped it around her own throat. The beads mutated to a rainbow of pinks, greens, and blues.

  “No, no!” Zelda shrieked. “Take that off!”

  “Why? Are you jealous?” cackled the twin Maddy now knew to be her sister.

  “Mads, what’s going on?” Hudson hissed. “The colors are so bright. Almost unreal!”

  “I think the colors of the beads reflect the blood of the wearer.” Maddy blinked. She saw so little Old World magic these days that its beauty astonished her. And to think she had nearly traded that necklace away. “The beads don’t know what to do with Lexie, because she’s a shifter,” Maddy said. “As long as it stays around her neck, Lexie can’t be transformed. Like the poem says, Glass-eyed ring should freeze this spell / Restore X from an outer shell. If she’s frozen in the spell, then she can’t—” But it was Hudson’s face that had frozen as he stared at something just past Maddy’s shoulder. She turned.

  Zelda towered behind her, teeth bared to show her fangs, yellow as cheese and hard as steel. “I should have slayed you in the cemetery,” she hissed, pointing a menacing finger so that it grazed Maddy’s nose.

  “Ninth Knave, relinquish my sister,” Maddy snarled back.

  “Not a chance, you beastly hybrid.”

  “Don’t you know it’s rude to point?” Quickly, Maddy drew the guitar pick from her pocket and sliced Zelda’s fingertip.

  “Ahhh!” Zelda jumped away as she licked the black blood that welled up at the cut. In the next moment, she’d recovered, and with some Old World mutterings plus a snap of her bloody fingers, she had transformed the Elcris family into four seething rats—though still very Elcris-ish. One sniffed nervously, one was bald, one had extra-beady eyes, and one had a freckly nose. They made a clawing, tail-twitching circle around Zelda, guarding her.

  “Eee! Rats!” screamed a woman.

  “Rats and ghosts! This dance is officially awful. I’m outta here!” cried the music conductor, throwing down his baton. A human stampede beat it out of the ballroom.

  “Ghosts, stay put!” commanded General Herron.

  “Some trick, Zelda.” Maddy sneered. “It’s easy to transform the Elcrises. They were so ratty already, with all that gazpacho you were feeding them. I’ve got the Old World recipe book, too, you know.”

  For the first time, Zelda lost the smug look on her face.

  “Ghosts, charge the rats!” cried General Herron.

  Each ghost now swooshed on the snarling rat pack. The fight was on—and the biting began. Ghosts bit rats and rats noshed ghosts.

  “O dastardly dance! Please let the ghosts win,” wailed Hudson, “or we are so doomed.”

  It didn’t look good. Lupo the Wolf was first to retreat, after a hard bite on his vaporous arm. “Knave-pack rats? No, thanks. I know when I’m outmatched!” he yelped, and sprinted off.

  “Rats give me the willies,” fretted Nita, turning on her heel. The general followed, and they whisked away hand in hand.

  “Don’t leave,” cried Giulio just as the freckle-nosed rat charged in with a bite on the elbow that made him yelp in pain.

  Rat-Adam grinned. “Ghosts down. Hybrids next.”

  Giulio bounced back with a ghostly bite into Adam’s tail. “Yowch!” Adam jumped back as Giulio rushed off in the opposite direction, and now Dakota’s dad was the only ghost left.

  Maddy gulped. One ghost, a dryad-girl, and a couple of other hybrids against four rats and a Knave. The odds weren’t good.

  Loud as a crack of thunder, the glass door shattered into a blizzard of shards as the beast leaped through.

  “A dingo!” shrieked Dakota.

  The rats cowered as the beast crouched, his breath heaving, his claws digging welts into the slippery ballroom floor.

  Maddy hauled up the didgeridoo like a baseball bat. “What Knavish monster are you?” she called. “Prepare for combat!”

  “No, Maddy,” Hudson murmured. “Put down the didge, and look into his eyes.”

  But the wolf’s eyes now had targeted Zelda, who let out a terrifying cry. In the next second, she’d morphed into a black rat and was racing for the window. Quickly, Dakota’s dad stuck out his paint-bucketed foot, tripping and flipping the rat over on her back. And now the wolf lunged, his lips drawn back over his gums, to tear a bloody bite into Zelda the rat’s side.

  “Ahhh!” Screeching, Zelda flipped back onto her feet to transform once more, into a Knaveheart vampire bat. Wings unfurling, fangs like knives as she exploded into her full strength. She shot up to the roof’s rafter, then honed in on the wolf, bearing down on him like a bullet.

  Maddy acted quick. She blew as hard as she could into the didge, blasting the noise straight into the Knaveheart’s extra-sensitive bat ear. Shocked, Zelda veered and dipped low.

  Once again, the wolf leaped.

  Maddy covered her ears as she heard the sickening rip of bat wing. With a strangled cry, the Knaveheart flew out the window.

  “She won’t get far,” muttered Hudson. “A bat is not uni-wingular.”

  Dakota gagged at the bloodied scrap of wing that had splatted onto her foot. “Get it off!”

  Brave Maddy picked it off and flung it to the side.

  “Thanks.” Dakota sagged with relief.

  “That’s what friends are for,” said Maddy.

  They all ran to the window and watched as the bat began to list before she dropped into the holly hedges. They heard a soft plop and a sizzling noise followed by a scorched odor, like burning bacon—the most anti-vegan smell in the odor spectrum.

  “Ugh.” Maddy pinched her nose.

  As the smell drifted into the ballroom, Lexie exhaled long and deep as the trance released. Everyone stared as her ears sprang back through her now iron-straight hair and her nose took on its usual pointy pinch. Her dress became baggier and baggier as she slowly shrank to her previous Lexie size.

  Maddy watched in wonder as her sister’s gaze, sharp and dark once more, found the wolf. She flew across the room and threw her arms around his neck.

  “You!” she cried, burying her face in his neck ruff. “You wonderful wolf! Thank you, Pete!”

  Pete the wolf
licked her face sloppily.

  By this time, a few brave humans had straggled back to the ballroom, only to find a wolf in their midst. Again they screamed and scrambled. “Wolf! Wolf! Somebody kill him!”

  “I’ll handle this.” Mr. Elcris, reshaped into human form, grabbed for a pair of ice tongs and charged the wolf.

  But he was too slow and no match besides. His work complete, Pete had already leaped through the broken doors and back into the night.

  20

  RUNNING WATER

  Of course you all saved me,” said Lexie as she sprinkled paprika on her famous shredded carrot salad.

  “But you have to agree, my save was the most dramatic,” added Pete. “It’s part of the deal when you’re a werewolf.”

  “True. Everyone loves a good swashbuckling rescue.” Lexie’s voice was too goopy, in Maddy’s opinion, and her eyes too dewy as she let Pete test the salad but then swatted Hudson’s hand away.

  It was exactly one week later, and the Livingstones were celebrating the release of their parents’ new album by hosting a lunch party. Everyone had been invited, and it wasn’t long before the dining room table was crowded with Dead Ringers band members, Wander Wag dog walkers, Candlewick Café staff, and a handful of ghosts from the Calvary Cemetery. Though none of the mortals could see the phantoms, it was a good party mix. Even Dakota and her parents were here, as well as Carlyle Blake, dapper as ever in a lemonade yellow linen suit.

  Lisi had showed up, too, with Adam. They were a last-minute suggestion from Dakota. “Please invite her, Maddy? She really wants to become friendly with you,” Dakota had pleaded. “She feels bad about the whole Knave thing. She hadn’t realized that her cousin from Denmark was so dangerous—and flammable.”

  “No way! Lisi Elcris is a scab on top of a bruise.”

  “Please? I’ll let you use my didge.” So then Maddy didn’t really have a choice.

  When Lisi showed up on the Livingstone doorstep, she’d presented Maddy with an Elcris Shoe Emporium shoe box. “For you!”

  Maddy mistrusted the little smile on Lisi’s face. Could it possibly be a Box of Disgusting? Was Lisi on to Maddy’s best trick? But when Maddy opened the shoe box top at arm’s length, guarding herself from what might be inside, all she found were her dear old sneakers.