House of Secrets

Chapter 21

Soon afterward they took Will to the kitchen. The sun was lower now; the light coming through the windows was amber instead of yellow. Nellie found her barbecue fork in the dumbwaiter and declared she was going to search the house to make sure they were safe. Alyssa said that was fine as long as she screamed if she saw anything strange. Nellie left as Alyssa and Jonathan  helped Will onto the kitchen table.

“I’ll get you some ice to numb the pain,” Alyssa told Will. Jonathan followed her to the fridge, whispering, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“What?”

“Taking in strangers? We’re about to spend a night here without electricity. We have limited food. We don’t know who this guy is or—”

“Jon,” Alyssa said with a smile, “you don’t have to be jealous just because he’s better-looking than you.”

“That’s not true! He’s not—”

Alyssa raised her eyebrows like, Really? Behind her, Will took off his shirt—very delicately so as not to disturb the arrow.

“So?” Jonathan whispered. “I’ll have a six-pack when I’m old.”

“You wish.” Alyssa opened the freezer and pulled out an ice tray, but it was only filled with water. The shelves inside dripped with melted H?agen-Dazs. “I’m sorry, Will,” she said. “No ice.”

“Not a problem,” shirtless Will said. “Can you please come help me fetch something?”

Jonathan rolled his eyes. Alyssa walked to Will.

“It’s for my shoulder, in my right hip pocket. Can you—”

“Sure.” Alyssa tried to project an air of confidence, like she was an old pro at dealing with handsome young British soldiers. She edged her fingers into Will’s pocket, blushing as she looked away from him, and felt something metal warmed by the heat of his body.

“Your gun?” she asked anxiously.

“No, no, gun’s on the other side. Go on, you’ve almost got it.”

Alyssa pulled out a sterling silver hip flask.

“There she is!”

It was slim and curved, with a Latin phrase etched on the front. Cordelia squinted at it. Even though she’d only known Will for about thirty minutes, she liked to think of him piloting fighter planes, not drinking. She handed the flask over disapprovingly.

Will took a long pull. As he drank, Nellie came back to the kitchen from her mission securing the house. Her eyes went wide. When Will rested the flask in his lap, she ran up and grabbed it.

“Hey!” Will said.

Nellie turned the flask upside down and let all the alcohol drain onto the floor.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Will yelled. He lunged at her but sat right back down—his shoulder hurt too much.

Nellie handed the now-empty flask back to him. “We used to have this uncle Pete,” she explained. “I mean, we still have him, but he’s not the same. He started drinking way too much. One time he got crazy and threw a raw steak at our aunt. So I don’t approve of drinking, and you’re not allowed to drink if you’re in here.”

“But it’s my drink!” Will protested.

“But it’s our house,” said Nellie firmly.

Will sighed and looked at his shoulder. “Then how exactly do you expect me to manage my pain? If you haven’t noticed, I’ve got an arrow sticking out of me!”

“Right,” said Alyssa. “We have to take that out. Any idea how?”

“No! I was trained for war with Huns, not barbarians.”

As Will got worked up, his face got pale. Beads of sweat lined his brow. Alyssa felt his forehead with the back of her hand. It was burning up. She became deadly serious.

“Your wound is getting infected. Nell, come with me. Jonathan, stay with Will.”

“What? What do you want me to—”

“Keep him calm, relaxed. We’re going to find out how to treat him properly.”

She grabbed Nellie and left the kitchen.

“You really do like him, don’t you?” Nellie asked in the hall.

“No.”

“Yes. You’re doing that thing where you look away when you answer my questions. That’s how I know you’re not telling the truth.”

“I just want to keep him alive. He’s good with a gun and he—”

“Looked away again.” Nellie smirked.

They went to the living room and picked up all the books that had been blown in during the Wind Witch’s attack. They brought them to the library (it took a few trips) and tossed them on the floor so all the books in the house were in a central location. It was a mess. Books lay on the floor in literary dunes. Some were open; some had had their covers ripped off. Mixed in with them were the splintered ladders and broken table of the library.

“Now we have to separate the books,” Alyssa said. “Put the ones like this book by the door; give the others to me.”

“Why are we doing this exactly, Al?”

“Because maybe one of those books is a medical manual! Can you help? Just look for a M—”

“I can read ‘medical manual’!”

“Don’t get mad, Nell—”

“I just searched this whole house by myself to make sure it was safe, and you’re treating me like a little kid!”

Alyssa smiled to herself. She and Jonathan had known the house was okay when they’d let Nellie go off exploring; they had each checked a floor when they’d gone to the bathroom upon arrival. (Unfortunately, after testing the sinks and determining that the plumbing was as busted as the electricity, they had been forced to go outside.) “I’m sorry, Nell,” she said. “Tell me if you find anything interesting, and I’ll tell you if I need help.”

The sisters went to different corners of the library. Every time Nellie came across a non-Kristoff book, she handed it to Cordelia. Cordelia was looking for something like Gray’s Anatomy, but she wasn’t having any luck. She wondered how she could open up Will’s shoulder, pull out the arrowhead, and sew it back up without a book to guide her. At least she had her memories of her father. She remembered how he used to sit her down at the kitchen table and show her how he performed surgeries, with a pan of lasagna for a patient and a butter knife for a scalpel. “The most important thing,” he told her, “is to think of your hands as tools. They’re the greatest and most precise tools in the world, but they’re just as dumb as a hammer. They’ll perform as well as you command them to.”

They searched for twenty minutes. Alyssa found books about Scottish armor, Polynesian occult practices, and mushroom cultivation, but she didn’t find anything that would help Will. Nellie, meanwhile, pretended that 'Medical Manual' was a neighborhood in Denver, Colorado, and so she was looking for books about Manual restaurants and shops; that helped her read the covers fine. For fun she tried to read all of them, and soon she came across something that jogged her memory.

“Hey Al! Wasn’t this the book you stole from the library?”

Alyssa immediately recognized the first-edition copy of Savage Warriors . . . and then something clicked in her head. The memory that had eluded her when she was captured by Slayne.

Alyssa took Savage Warriors and began flipping pages.

“What? What are you doing?”

When she hit page 17, she screamed.