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  The door groaned. Metal ground against metal.

  It split in two with a deafening screech. Fire exploded out, and I ducked as half the door shot over my head and crashed into the cell bars behind me, shattering them like chalk.

  “Gruffy,” I shouted, squinting into the billowing smoke and heat that came out.

  “I am here, Doolivanti,” Gruffy said, except not in front of me. His voice was behind me. And the voice was nasty, dripping with sarcasm.

  I spun around.

  Jimmy came into the room from the hallway. Connie walked over to stand next to him. Behind them were Lashtail, Licorice Man, and Blue Blobby Bobby. No Jayla.

  “Thank you, Doolivanti,” Licorice Man said, and he sounded just like Gruffy. “You saved me.” Gruffy’s voice now came from my right. I spun, but there was nothing except glowing red smoke.

  “Thanks, sis.” Theron’s voice came from behind me.

  I spun again, but Theron wasn’t there.

  Because I’d been duped. This was a Wishing World power. Luke’s mimicking thing had transformed into magic here. He could throw his voice and make it sound exactly like anyone.

  Jimmy’s laughter brought me full circle, and I stared at the group of them.

  “Brilliant Lorelei. Teacher’s pet. Bet you’re feeling pretty dumb now.” Connie picked up the spinner. She handed it meekly over to Jimmy. It crawled up onto his shoulder.

  “Connie . . .” I said, and there was a queasy feeling in my stomach. Vella had told me to beware.

  Jimmy watched her, then me, smiling. “Oh, yeah. Meet my friend, Connie Cobblestone. She told me where to get the hourglass of the Wishing World.” He pointed. “Behind that door.”

  I looked at the door, then back at Jimmy.

  “That’s right,” he said smugly, “And the only thing I needed to get to it was you. And now, well, I’ve got all the friends, and now I’ll have the hourglass, too. And you’ll have . . .” He leaned forward, cupping his hand behind his ear. “That’s right. You’ll have nothing. How does that feel?”

  His words hit me like little pebbles to the head, one after the other, and I put it all together. This was why he needed me. The spinner couldn’t open the door. He needed me to rip it open because he couldn’t.

  But something didn’t add up. Vella said André had the hourglass. She said that Jimmy had André imprisoned. If Jimmy couldn’t open the door, he couldn’t put André in there.

  “You couldn’t get in there?” I asked.

  “I can now.” He smiled.

  Then that’s not where André is. And that means that’s not where the hourglass is. So why would Jimmy think it was?

  I flicked a glance at the smoky door with its malevolent red light, then looked back at Jimmy. Someone was lying. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t Jimmy.

  My gaze snapped to Connie. She was staring at the ground like she’d stolen all the cookies from the cookie jar.

  “There’s no hourglass in there,” I whispered. Which begged the question: What was in there?

  “Agatha won’t allow us to do the things we do anymore,” Connie said.

  Oh, crap.

  Jimmy had played me, but Connie had played him. The hourglass wasn’t in there. Agatha was. When Flicker said Agatha was in prison, I thought she meant that her personality was buried deep inside Connie and locked away, but Connie’s split personality had actually split and took on a separate body. Agatha was in a prison. An actual one. With a big ugly iron door. When Flicker said “prison” before she passed out, she hadn’t meant the prison containing my friends. She meant the prison containing Agatha. She’d been trying to warn me! And then Connie had sent Flicker away.

  “Connie, listen to me,” I said. “You have to lock that door up again. Agatha can’t get out.”

  Connie looked at her shoes. “I didn’t let her out. I would never let her out. Agatha is so . . . angry.” She looked up, and I saw the crazy glisten in her overlarge eyes. “You let her out.” She cocked her head like this was all my idea.

  “What are you two yammering about?” Jimmy interjected angrily. “Where is the hourglass?” He looked at Connie, and I think he was starting to catch up that his master plan wasn’t so masterful. “You told me it was in there. That’s where Vella locked it away.”

  Connie studied her shoes.

  He snarled and pointed at me. “Get her out of the way!”

  Lashtail jumped toward me, and Licorice Man was right behind him. Blue Blobby Bobby became goo and sank into the floor.

  I scribbled on the air like a Ferbletick with its tail on fire.

  Jim slam. My new favorite. Jimmy flew off the ground and slammed into the wall.

  Tail face. Lashtail began hitting himself in the face again with his tail.

  Licorice pretzel. Licorice Man began tying himself into knots.

  Blobby bouncy. Blue Blobby Bobby squinched together into a big ball and began bouncing between the floor and the low ceiling.

  My chest felt like it had been ripped open with flaming hooks. Cracks sliced through the floor just like at Ripple’s palace. The mountain shook.

  Jimmy popped up and shot a fire blast at me.

  I scrambled out of the way, stumbled, skinning my elbows and knees on the broken floor. I wasn’t fast enough. The fire caught my back. My shirt burst into flame. I rolled to put it out.

  Footsteps thoomed from the giant doorway, as if they were huge and far away.

  My back burned, but my chest hurt so bad I could barely raise my pen. I was messing up all over the place. I was breaking things apart again, and I wasn’t sure I was going to be around to help put them back together this time.

  “Connie,” I yelled, “Bring Flicker back!” But the girl stared at the big doorway now. She wanted this to happen. She’d made this happen.

  I was alone. Alone alone alone. And I was going to die die die—

  Okay, stop. Be Loremaster. Win or lose, be the Doolivanti I’m supposed to be.

  I took a shuddering breath and stood up.

  Flicker was the one I needed. She was the one the whole Wishing World needed. I reached out, looking for Flicker’s bright story, her genuine desire to protect others from fire. I felt what she needed, what she wanted above all.

  She wanted…

  I turned my gaze to the Skitterspark on Jimmy’s shoulder. Flicker wanted that.

  I raised my quill, even as he pointed at me again, and wrote: The Skitterspark returned to Flicker.

  Fire roared toward me.

  Nineteen

  Always Be Yourself. Unless You Can Be Batman. Then Always Be Batman

  They’d thrown him into a prison cell with Gruffy. Theron stared out between the bars. When the fire-bearded thugs had moved him to this new cell, he overheard them talking and discovered that he was inside a mountain. If that was true, this room must have been on the other side from where Jimmy broke Theron’s comet stone. The rock walls were blue granite, not red volcano rock. The air was cool. There was moss everywhere, and streaks of water trickled in several places. And the door was totally weird. It was made of overlapping blue steel leaves, and they parted to let you in or out if you had a little silver leaf key.

  Theron and Gruffy were in a prison cell with bars made of smooth, white marble, while Pip was in a smaller cage hanging just outside the cell. There was a third cage, almost as small as Pip’s, in the center of the room and right under a trickle of water that dripped down from the ceiling. The three Flickapaws were stuffed inside, wet and miserable, and as tiny as actual kittens now. The flaming beard guys had brought the kitten cage in, muttering about the Flickapaws trying to carry Jayla out of the mountain. The escape would have worked, except Jimmy dumped water on them. Apparently, Flickapaws shrank when watered.

  Gruffy and Pip both tried to talk to Theron, but he just kept staring out the bars. He wanted to help Pip and Gruffy. He wanted to help the cats, but Jimmy had taken away his power. He couldn’t help anyone.

  Theron looked down at his
fist and opened it. He imagined the little silver figure, imagined it flattening and then unfolding over and over again. Nothing happened.

  He glanced up at the bars. Gruffy had bitten and pulled at them until he chipped his beak. He had yanked at them until his talons bled. He had rammed them until he knocked himself out.

  When he came to, he had said that Lorelei had used her feather, had called to him, but the bars were griffon-proof. They had been strengthened by Jimmy’s silver spider thingie. Regular marble would have shattered under Gruffy’s attack.

  The whole mountain shook, and a crack sliced across the ceiling overhead. Dust and small chunks of rock fell as granite ground together. Theron ducked, waiting for the ceiling to fall in, but it didn’t.

  Gruffy looked around. The Flickapaws raised their sodden little heads.

  “Lorelei has come for the Ink King at last,” Gruffy said, nodding sagely. “Veloran trembles at her approach.” He turned toward Theron. “We will soon be free.”

  Theron hated himself for just sitting here, waiting for his sister to rescue him, but what could he do as his ten-year-old self? There were magic cats and griffons in this prison, and they couldn’t get out. He couldn’t open those bars if Gruffy couldn’t.

  He thought about Lorelei. She had been alone for a whole year, with no powers and no idea where their parents were. She was so determined that she had pushed her way into the Wishing World. Lore never gave up. She made the impossible happen.

  Theron got to his feet and walked to the bars. There was a way out of here. There had to be. He started tapping a beat on his legs as he stared at the bars, at the room, at the sodden little fire kitties. Seven Nation Army was the first song he’d ever learned on the drums where he finally got the beat, and it always helped him think.

  “Ho, mighty Mirror Man,” Gruffy said, standing up in response to Theron’s movement. “You have an idea?” Gruffy moved up next to him and towered over him.

  “No,” Theron said, and as soon as he said it, the idea came. He smiled. “Actually, yes.” He pulled his shirt off and put his teeth to the collar, making a small tear. He pinched it between his two hands and ripped the shirt in half. “Yes, this.” His gaze fell on Gruffy. “And a feather. Or two.”

  Gruffy leaned his head back. “My feathers?”

  “Are you sure this will work?” Gruffy asked.

  “Sure, I’m sure,” Theron said. “Me and Kaeden played Batman in the backyard this one time. We had a piece of rope, and we made a grappling claw out of it by tying a rock to the end of it, then threw it up into the tree.” He didn’t mention that Kaeden got brained by the rock when it came back down and then wasn’t allowed to play with Theron anymore. Up to that point, the Batman plan had been working just fine.

  Theron’s big idea was “potential energy,” which he learned at this spring’s school science fair. Potential energy meant that wood was just wood. It just sat there and did nothing. Until you gave it a spark, then it was fire, and it could do a lot of stuff, like cook your food. Or light the darkness. Or burn down a forest. That was potential energy. It was like Lore. She’d had her Wishing World power locked inside her. It took a year of missing Mom and Dad to make it burst out. Potential energy.

  And right now, Theron and Gruffy and Pip were all locked up. Just sitting here, like wood.

  What they needed was a spark.

  So they were making ropes out of Theron’s shirt. Gruffy had sliced them into neat, even strips with his razor-sharp beak. Before, just a shirt. Now they were rope parts. Potential energy. They had a neat little pile, and that’s when the next part of the rope plan began.

  “I have never shed so many feathers.” Gruffy said, picking the last feather from his wing. He had given up twelve feathers to the project. Theron’s shirt didn’t have enough strips to make a rope long enough, but attaching them end-to-end with feathers gave them plenty of length. They made a slit in the shaft of the feather on each end, then threaded the strip of shirt through the slit and tied it off. Shirt—feather—shirt—feather. At first, Theron was worried the feathers would split when they pulled on the rope, but they were unbelievably strong.

  “We’ll stick them back in after,” Theron said.

  “They do not go back in,” Gruffy said.

  “Joking,” Theron said.

  “What would your mother say? Your mother say?” Pip asked, hiding a smile. “My son the plucked chicken. The plucked chicken.”

  Gruffy glared at him.

  Finally, they finished the rope. Theron lashed a chunk of granite that had fallen from the ceiling to the end of the rope.

  He let out a breath. Now the hard part. He held his arm outside the bars and began swinging the stone like a sling. He’d gotten pretty good at the Batman grapple claw after days of practice, but that was with a real rope. He winced, waiting for the feather-shirt-string to break, but it held together.

  To their right was a torch, stuck in a metal bracket on the wall. It must have been magical, because it didn’t seem affected by the wet room at all. He swung the rope fast and let it fly.

  It missed, clacking against the wall.

  “No problem,” he said. “Just need to warm up.” He reeled the stone back in.

  On the second throw, the rope wrapped around the torch shaft.

  “Nice throw! Nice throw!”

  “Well done,” Gruffy said.

  “Justice League, here I come,” Theron said. Now the tricky part.

  He yanked, and the torch jostled, but didn’t come out. Okay. Good. A strong yank should do it. He played out some of the rope, shaking it a little to get the angle right.

  Please hold together. Please hold together. Please hold together.

  He had to get this right on the first try. If the rope broke, or the torch fell to the floor short of the Flickapaws cage, there was no way he’d be able to wrap the rope around it again.

  Theron breathed in and held it.

  “You can do it, Mirror Man,” Gruffy said.

  Not the Mirror Man, Theron thought. Today I’m just Theron, but I’m going to have to be enough.

  He flexed his shoulder in a circle, let out the breath, and took hold of the rope. Then he yanked with all his might.

  The torch sprang from the bracket and spun across the room. It slid to a stop under the Flickapaws tiny cage, right under their drooping tails.

  “Yeah,” Theron whooped, then grinned at Gruffy. “Instant giant kitties. Just add flame.”

  Theron stared at the torch, hoping it would do its magic on the Flickapaws before the dripping cats put it out.

  The mountain shook, then quieted, then shook again. Rock dust sifted down from the ceiling. More water trickled into the room through the extra cracks, but the trickle over the Flickapaws had shifted and dripped just to the left of the cage now.

  “She is creating,” Gruffy said.

  “And giving us a little luck. A little luck,” Pip said, watching the flame, growing now, underneath the Flickapaws.

  Good job, Lore. Create away. Just don’t create a pile of rubble out of this mountain.

  The kitties began to liven up, their tails swishing over the flame quicker and quicker. Sparks began to fly.

  The Flickapaws grew. Their heads flicked back and forth, looking at the cage as though they didn’t even see it. They mewled low in their throats. The torch flared to twice its size. Flames licked up the sides. Water droplets hissed.

  “You may wish to stand back,” Gruffy said.

  Theron backed up.

  “Rrrowrl!” the Flickapaws said, and all the fire kitties became the size of rhinos. The tiny cage split like an aluminum banana.

  “Ha ha,” Theron shouted, jumping up and fist pumping the air. “All right, kitties. We let you out, now you let us out.”

  All three of the Flickapaws’ heads turned toward the blue leaf door. They sprang, and the leader swatted at it with his huge paw. The door shattered. Blue metallic leaves shot everywhere like someone had thrown a bag of q
uarters at the wall. The Flickapaws charged out the ragged doorway and disappeared.

  Theron ran to the bars. “Hey!” he yelled at them, but their mewls faded away down the hallway. “No!” He gripped the bars with his hands until his knuckles were white. “Hey!”

  “Faithless creatures,” Gruffy said.

  “What a rip. What a rip,” Pip said. “We free them and they run. Free them and they run.”

  Theron shook the bars with all his strength, but only ended up shaking himself. “Rrrrrrrrrrggh!” he shouted, then fell to his knees. He pounded on the floor until he skinned his knuckles, then started to cry.

  After a moment, Gruffy descended until he was laying on his belly next to Theron. He cocked his enormous eagle head downward.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Theron said.

  “No,” Gruffy said.

  “You don’t even know what ‘this’ I’m talking about.”

  “No?”

  Theron glanced at him, wiped at a tear. “I thought that coming back to the Wishing World would be a grand adventure. That I’d get to see HuggyBug and stop some bad guys and help Lore do the smart thing, whatever that is.”

  “But why hurt yourself?”

  “Because the clock is ticking, Lore is out there fighting, maybe getting hurt, and Jimmy has all of his bullies to beat her up and I’m . . . I’m useless!”

  “What is a clock?” Gruffy asked.

  Theron laughed, then snuffled as he wiped his nose. “You don’t know what a clock is,” he murmured to himself. “I want to laugh and yell at you at the same time.”

  A little curve appeared at the edge of Gruffy’s beak. “My mother says that.”

  Theron wiped his nose again. “You have a mother?”

  “Of course.”

  “I thought you were, you know, made up,” Theron said.

  Gruffy cocked his head. “I do not know what you—”

  “Never mind.” He shook his head. “It just seems weird. You’re huge, and you have parents.”

  “I am twelve. Griffons do not fly free until they are thirteen.”

  “You’re the same age as Lorelei.”