Not as complicated as the high council of the Waking Guard, granted. But still, complicated.
(Sorry, trying to avoid spoilers, but… just sayin’.)
Meanwhile, there was all this talk around town about rogue supers. Some vague reports talked about “bystanders witnessing suspicious behavior” around the building right before the lightning and all that, and C&I were sure that sooner or later someone would recognize us and we’d be put away for 20 years for unlicensed or malicious use of powers. Thank God nobody was killed.
C started paying more attention to her sister, to help us gather information. It didn’t do much good, because Brook was so stressed out about everything in her life, but we did learn that Darcy (Brook’s boss) was getting married soon, and in the society photos we could find, he looked like an Ancient too (except with a tan, which we agreed made him look a lot less alien than Darcy).
A little less than a week after the lightning incident, Chelsea heard from Brook that Darcy’s wedding was moving up to just a few weeks away. We were already so worried that we decided that this was probably bad news. C&I were starting to feel better, so we had gone close (but not too close) to Darcy’s building, and we could tell that there was something scary powerful going on around there—and neither of us thought it was going to be anything good.
Then—I remember that it was another Thursday, early in October—C&I were doing some practice routines after school, when our glowstone bracelets started to warm up. Mrs. P was there and we told her right away. She looked confused and a little worried, and said she had an idea of what it might be, but that we should go into the darkroom to be sure. So, the 3 of us went down to the art dept (luckily, nobody was staying late that day, so we didn’t have to come up with some stupid excuse to clear out the room) and Mrs. P told us to hold up one of the glowstones and trickle just a little power thru it.
We had practiced that kind of thing before, so it wasn’t too hard. Chelsea did it, and the glowstone started to, um, glow. The light came out in one direction away from us and toward the wall. And in the shining, dark words began to form.
It wasn’t any language we knew, but somehow we could read it just the same. The words felt ancient but beautiful, kind of like that time when we went to see Macbeth at the Guthrie and the acting was so good that after a while you could just forget how old the language was and let the words take you somewhere else.
The message was from this guy with a long name that you can’t really pronounce in English. He said that he was Darcy’s finance (so, the tan guy from the announcement we had found), and he explained a little bit about what she was planning to do. I won’t go into too many details because it didn’t matter much in the end, but let’s just say it involved a lot of death and destruction and the end of Minneapolis as we know it. Fun stuff like that. He didn’t really have a say in the matter, except that he didn’t want to destroy the city, so he was asking us to meet with him and try to come up with a way to stop her.
I know what you’re probably thinking. Trap trap trap. Yeah, but—it’s hard to explain. The language made it impossible for him to be lying. Like, we read the words and we could feel how the guy who wrote them felt about what he was saying. Mrs. P said that that was how she had heard that the Ancient’s most powerful words worked, and it was exactly like the old stories. He couldn’t be faking something like that. It was just too real. So, we talked for a while and decided to meet where the guy wanted to—about 2 blocks from Darcy’s building, on Friday around midnight.
Chelsea told her sister that she was spending the night at my place. I knew that after we were done we might need to actually crash somewhere, so I asked you and Mom if C&I could go down to the cabin (it was the week before we planned on going out and closing it down for the winter) – that way, we could always say that it had been too cold and that we had driven back to spend the night with some good old fashioned central heating. The Petrovskis wanted to help, but now that we were the official Waking Guardians there was nothing they could do except give us advice and tell us old stories, so they stayed behind. C&I drove out, parked a little ways away and went to the rendezvous site. (We wore all black, because we are just that cool.)
We were supposed to meet this guy in a stone piazza not far from the river. It was a really posh space, nice sparkly stones and a Chinese-style rock garden going on, which it turns out is really pretty in daytime but makes all kinds of creepy shadows at night. We got there and didn’t see anyone, so C&I walked into the middle of the piazza. Dumb move, it turned out. We figured that out fast, because as soon as we were both there we started to feel really scared and then completely frozen, like we had turned into stone ourselves.
Then out came this woman—Darcy Ages, the Ancient who was Brook’s boss. Totally channeling every evil Disney queen. She was all like, “Well well, what have we here?” and, “He was right; there are Waking Guardians about—but such little, stupid ones!” We couldn’t move, and also as soon as we got stuck we felt incredibly empty. No wind, no rain.
Then she started talking about what a perfect coincidence it was that we had just shown up. I can’t even describe how freaked out I was, and she just went on like we were a couple of Thanksgiving turkeys or something. I wasn’t clear on what she was planning, but it was obviously not good, and then she twitched her fingers and I fell asleep.
(Continue to Deena and Chelsea's big coming out.)
