The Dark Portal (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 3) (37 page)

“Hmm,” she said, narrowing her eyes.

“So what do you think, ma’am? Are you willing to help us?”

“I’ll have to check my schedule. When did you want to do it?”

“Er, now?” Jake answered, startled.

“The sooner the better,
I’m afraid,” Derek said.

“Like
before we lose our nerve,” Archie mumbled.

Jake cast the bo
y genius a rueful half-smile.

Archie
already had the Phantom Fetcher slung across his back like a hunting rifle, and a Spirit Box to go with it, though Jake doubted the container was strong enough to hold the likes of Garnock the Sorcerer.

Dere
k was armed as usual—not that his Bowie knives and pistols were going to be much use against a wraith. No doubt, carrying them at least made him feel better about the battle ahead.

The girls had stayed back at Plas-y-Fforest to
keep watch over the unicorns with Miss Helena, but Jake did not intend to let Garnock get that far in the Spell of a Hundred Souls.

Much better to stop him well before he got to number n
inety-eight or ninety-nine; for once he had fed on the life-force of a unicorn, there was no telling what sort of effect that might have upon his abilities.

Unicorns had many potent and mysterious magical properties. Garnock was evil, but if he could somehow ass
imilate some of their spirit into his being, it might make him all the stronger.

But a
s for Jake, privately, even more than he wanted to keep Garnock away from the unicorns, he wanted him nowhere near the girls.

“Humph.” Madam Sylvia
let out a snort, still regarding him with a cynical stare. “Very well. Let me get my things. I have a few items here that should prove useful.”

Jake and Archie exchanged a discreet l
ook of relief while the plump little psychic bustled off and started sorting through the shelves of her shop. She tossed crystals and herb-laced candles of various sorts into a parti-colored cloth bag. “Out of sage,” she mumbled to herself, then glanced at them. “I have more in the back. Wait here. Sage is highly effective in helping to clear any building of evil spirits—”

Her words broke off abruptly as a spectral scream echoed from
somewhere outside.

“
HELLLLP!
Help, please!”

Jake looked out the window
and glimpsed an orb speeding over the roofs of the shops across the streets, leaving a faint trail of ectoplasm streaming out behind it.

Madam Sylvia
rushed back and glanced around, able to hear the voice, but unable to see the screamer. “What—who—was that?”

“I don’t know, an orb—”

Suddenly—
whoosh!
—down it came through the ceiling.

“Madam Sylvia! Oh, Lord Griffon! Thank goodness you are both here!”

Jake’s eyes widened as the orb turned itself into Professor Sackville. The headmaster ghost materialized suddenly, right there in the shop’s middle aisle.

“Please, you must come quickly!”

“What’s the matter?” Jake asked in alarm.

“Who’s there?” the medium called.

“It’s Dr. Sackville,” Jake told her. “The old headmaster from the Harris Mine School.”

“He’s here?” Archie asked in wonder. “Why?”

“I think he needs help. Sir, what’s wrong?”

“It’s not me, it’s the children!
Hurry, please!” the old ghost said frantically. “You must come! It’s Garnock. He’s attacking all the children! It’s like a feeding frenzy!” Old Sack cried. “He’s draining the students to within inches of their lives! Please, you must hurry!”

“We’ll be right there,” Jake assured him.

“What’s happening?” Derek asked quickly, since neither he nor Archie had the psychic gift.

“We need to go,” Jake answered.

“Let me get my sage.” Madam Sylvia ran into the back, while Derek turned to him for an explanation.

“Garnock must have heard about our foray into th
e mine. I think he figured out we killed his gargoyles. He must know we’re coming for him next. Sounds like he’s scrambling to reach his full strength before he has to face us.”

“So h
e knows we’re coming,” Archie said with a grim, meaningful glance from Jake to Derek.

The Guardian nodded. “
Jake was right. We’d better strike fast before he’s back to his old self. We stopped the gargoyles, but lost the element of surprise.”

Old Sack stood by fretting as Madam
Sylvia returned with the sage.

With her colorful cloth
bag full of magical equipment over her shoulder, she shooed them out, then flipped the sign in her shop window to
Closed
.

As soon as she locked the front door, they hurried to the carriage.

But when Derek opened the door for the lady and started to hand her up, Madam Sylvia suddenly screamed and recoiled in shock. “What is
that?”

Jake rushed over to her side. “Oh, sorry! I forgot to tell you about my Gryphon. It’s all right, he’s friendly.”

“A-a gryphon?” she cried.

“His name’s Red. Really, he won’t bite you.”

“B-b-but…”

The Gryphon blinked
innocently, as if to say,
What’s wrong with her?

Unfortunately,
Jake had forgotten that he had left the beast hiding in the carriage while they had gone into the shop. “Trust me, he’s a really good ally to have when you’re going into battle.”

Which it
seemed they suddenly were.

The old woman
looked at Jake in astonishment, but gave no further protest. When they had all climbed into the carriage, however, Madam Sylvia stared at Red in trepidation the whole way out to the school.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Harsh Lessons

Under dismal gray skies, the Harris Mine School loomed ahead as they turned in at the drive, passing through the tall wrought-iron gates. The spiky trees were bare and the whole place seemed bleaker than ever as a biting wind rasped across the bald face of the hill.

When they pulled
up in front of the school’s entrance, Derek slowed the carriage to a halt. Everyone warily got out, except for Red; Jake ordered him to stay in the coach for now. The Gryphon growled unhappily at this command, but Jake would only call him in as a last resort.

Having the creature
seen by countless schoolchildren and their teachers would only complicate
all
their lives.

Ar
chie shrugged the Phantom Fetcher over his shoulder. Derek touched the scabbards of his knives on each hip in a habitual gesture, armed and ready. Madam Sylvia pulled her colorful cloth bag full of charms and crystals higher up onto her shoulder.

Jake tucked another yew wood wand from the Archive into his back pocket, along with a folded-up copy of the Lightriders’ previous spell for vanquishing Garnock. Then he turned to his companions. “Everyone ready?”

They nodded, then they all walked up bravely onto the school’s shadowy stone porch.

Derek banged on the door with his fist.

No one answered.

His chest tight,
pulse pounding, Jake glanced nervously over his shoulder and saw Red peeking out the carriage window, watching the proceedings.

That was when he noticed an orb streaking toward them over the hill. In the next moment, Old Sack
reappeared on the porch beside them.

“Hurry,” he said anxiously, “you might as well go in. Nobody’s going to answer the door. They can’t. That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

“The headmaster’s here. He says we should just go in.” Jake brushed Derek aside and seized hold of the doorknob himself, then frowned. “Locked.”

The warrior
shrugged, stepped back, then lunged forward, kicking it open.

When it had blasted back with a bang, they walked into th
e gloomy foyer, everyone on guard, looking around in all directions. The four classroom doors that led off the foyer were closed. Since there were four rooms and four of them, they separated to look in through the classroom windows.

Before Jake had
even reached his door, Derek let out a curse and rushed into the room he was checking. The others followed—and gasped. The children were littered around the classroom, some half-conscious at their desks. Others had collapsed on the floor.

“What’s he done to them?” Archie cried.

“Blimey,” Jake breathed.

“It’s as I told
you,” Old Sack replied, nervously following. “Garnock’s been draining the life out of them!”

“Dr. Sackville was right. It
was
a feeding frenzy,” Madam Sylvia murmured. “This is almost as bad as the séance. Are they dead?”

At once, Derek and Archie hurried down the aisles between the desks
, checking all the kids.

“Alive,” Derek reported.

“This one, too,” Archie said.

As warriors, all Guardians were trained in battlefield medicine to help the wounded, while Archie had sat in on some medical courses at Oxford
. Madam Sylvia also knew about healing, though her specialty was in apothecary herbs.

With their various training, all three got to work helping the victims. While they
raced from one listless, inert kid to the next, checking their pulses and trying to revive them, Jake restrained his rage over Garnock doing this to them and carefully scanned the classroom.

As the only one who could actually see spirits, he alone was able to confirm that Garnock
wasn’t still in the room.

He wasn’t. O
bviously, the warlock’s work here was already done. Jake strode out to check the other classrooms and found the students in the same condition, but there was still no sign of Garnock.

As he hurried back to tell the others that the kids in the other rooms needed attention, too, another, even more ominous question
suddenly occurred to him.

Where are all
the teachers?

They would have tried to help their students, surely, and Garnock wouldn’t have liked that.

Jake rushed over to one of the older boys—he looked familiar. Yes, one of the stronger lads who had been assigned to help them carry in the presents.

Jak
e figured that the older, larger boy would have weathered Garnock’s attack better than the littler ones. He pulled the woozy kid upright at his desk, then started slapping him lightly on the cheek. “Hey, wake up. What happened here?”

“Huh? Please l
et me sleep. So tired…”

He shook him. “Where’s your teacher
?”

But he had no sooner spoken the question than a muffled
“Help!”
came from somewhere nearby.

Jake gl
anced around. His eyes widened.

He had been so appal
led by the condition of the students that he only just now noticed signs of a struggle up at the front of the classroom.

All the bookcases
had been knocked down.

A mountain of books had fallen off the shelves, and Jake had a feeling the teacher was buried under them.
He released the groggy boy. His head thunked back down onto his desk as Jake ran to help.

Another low, muffled call came from underneath the pile of books and toppled bookcases.

“I’m coming! Hold on!”

Blimey, the poor scholar was buried under an entire encyclopedia.

Unfortunately, the bookcases were too long and awkward for him to manage alone. When he lifted one end, trying to pull it up, the other end sagged all the more heavily.

He was afraid of hurting the teacher underneath. He almost yelled for Derek to come and get
the other end, but Derek was attending to the kids in the classroom across the hall.

Scowling at the risk of any of these ha
lf-conscious students seeing him use his freakish powers, Jake had no choice but to summon up his telekinesis. He had to free the teacher before he or she was well and truly crushed under all that weight.

Once Jake had discreetly floated the bookcases back to where they belonged, it only took a moment to dig the teacher out from under t
he avalanche of books. Unfortunately, the little man was so hysterical over the supernatural events he had already witnessed that all he did was babble incoherently.

“Hey!” Jake snapped his fingers
in his face. “It’s all right, you’re safe now, calm down.”

But as soon as the teacher did so, he leaped to his feet, ran out of the room, and fled the building
, his black robes flapping out behind him. Jake saw him out the window, tearing off down the drive, and shrieking at the Gryphon in the carriage as he passed.

“
You’re welcome,” Jake muttered with a scowl.

Then the other three came in.

“They seem to be all right,” Jake told them, but Derek and Archie gave the students a cursory check anyway. “It’s the teachers I’m worried about.”

While he explained how he had found the teacher in this room buried under books,
Madam Sylvia took some white candles out of her bag and hurried to set them in the four corners of the room, lighting them.

She then lit a little bouquet of dried sage tied with a string and began waving it slowly in the air, walking around the perimeter of the room and speak
ing some sort of chant, a white-magic incantation.

She continued this in the other classrooms, “clearing” the first floor of evil energy, so she claimed, while Archie and Derek made sure none of the kids were in too bad of shape, especially the little ones.

But in all the classrooms, they found the kids in a similar state: draped over their chairs, snoring on their desks, or sleeping on the floor in exhaustion, as if they had been subjected to the most boring lesson of their lives.

By feeding on their life-
force, according to the Spell of a Hundred Souls, Garnock had clearly stolen all their energy.

Hopefully, a good nap, a meal, and some time would restore them to their normal selves.

For the teachers, it was a different story.

Some had been dealt with more severely than others, probably depending on how hard they had fought back, trying to defend their students.
Prim little Miss Tutbury was locked in her classroom closet, which had been sealed up by some devilish spell.

“Try to be calm in there,”
Madam Sylvia told her through the door. “It may take some doing, but we will get you out!”

Miss Tutbury had fared better than
the art teacher, who had been stuck to the ceiling by her own classroom glue.

Dr. Winston, the current headmaster, must have abandoned his flask of liquor long enough to try to find out what was going on. He had made it as far as the second classroom on the left, where he
had been confined in a magic circle that Garnock had drawn on the classroom floor with the chalk from the blackboard.

Whenever Dr. Winston
tried to reach his hand or step with one foot or move in any way over the chalk line, a burning sensation engulfed that part of his body, forcing him to pull back again in pain.

The bewildered man was stuck inside the circle. “That piece of chalk is possessed
, I say! It just floated up from the blackboard and started writing b-by itself!” he whispered, wide-eyed. “Perhaps this is a dream? Am I actually passed out somewhere? At my desk?”

“That’s it,” Jake assured him. “Just a dream. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. Just stay in that circle for now, eh?”

They promised to free him at the first opportunity. But for the time being, at least he was relatively safe there and would not get in the way. For now, their number one task was finding Garnock and dealing with him before the wizard could do something worse to anyone else.

Indeed, his
various punishments on the teachers served as a warning to them all that the sorcerer’s strength had indeed grown after his feeding frenzy. Even if the black fog did not yet have a body, it was plain that Garnock had now grown strong enough to manipulate solid objects—from something as small as a piece of chalk or a bottle of glue, all the way up to sealing a door shut and knocking over those big, heavy bookcases.

They’d have to be on their toes.

“Where is he?” Jake muttered nervously under his breath as they pressed on in their sweep of the school.

“Hiding?”
Madam Sylvia suggested, still waving her smoking sage bouquet in all directions.

“By n
ow he knows we’re here,” Derek said in a low tone.

Meanwhile, Archie’s
head swiveled constantly back and forth, practically like an owl’s, as the boy genius kept watching for him.

“
I think Madam Sylvia is right. He’s hiding from us,” Jake said when they had swept the second floor and still saw no sign of the evil wizard.

“That means he’s scar
ed. Right?” Archie asked hopefully.

Derek shrugged. “Or he’s setting up an ambush.”

“I found him, here!” Old Sack suddenly yelled out, appearing in the open doorway of a room behind them.