Emerald Green (Ruby Red Trilogy, 3) - Hardcover

ONE


THE END OF THE SWORD was pointing straight at my heart, and my murderer’s eyes were like black holes threatening to swallow up everything that came too close to them. I knew I couldn’t get away. With difficulty, I stumbled a few steps back.
The man followed me. “I will wipe that which is displeasing to God off the face of the earth!” he boomed. “The ground will soak up your blood!”
I had at least two smart retorts to these sinister words on the tip of my tongue. (Soak up my blood? Oh, come off it, this is a tiled floor.) But I was in such a panic that I couldn’t get a word out. The man didn’t look as if he’d appreciate my little joke at this moment anyway. In fact, he didn’t look as if he had a sense of humor at all.
I took another step back and came up against a wall. The killer laughed out loud. Okay, so maybe he did have a sense of humor, but it wasn’t much like mine.
“Die, demon!” he cried, plunging his sword into my breast without any more ado.
I woke up, screaming. I was wet with sweat, and my heart hurt as if a blade really had pierced it. What a horrible dream! But was that really surprising?
My experiences of yesterday (and the day before) weren’t exactly likely to make me nestle down comfortably in bed and sleep the sleep of the just. Unwanted thoughts were writhing around in my mind like flesh-eating plants gone crazy.Gideon was only pretending, I thought. He doesn’t really love me.
“He hardly has to do anything to attract girls,” I heard Count Saint-Germain saying in his soft, deep voice, again and again. And “Nothing is easier to calculate than the reactions of a woman in love.”
Oh, yes? So how does a woman in love react when she finds out that someone’s been lying to her and manipulating her? She spends hours on the phone to her best friend, that’s how, then she sits about in the dark, unable to get to sleep, asking herself why the hell she ever fell for the guy in the first place, crying her eyes out at the same time because she wants him so much … Right, so it doesn’t take a genius to calculate that.
The lighted numbers on the alarm clock beside my bed said 3:10, so I must have nodded off after all. I’d even slept for more than two hours. And someone—my mum?—must have come in to cover me up, because all I could remember was huddling on the bed with my arms around my knees, listening to my heart beating much too fast.
Odd that a broken heart can beat at all, come to think of it.
“It feels like it’s made of red splinters with sharp edges, and they’re slicing me up from inside so that I’ll bleed to death,” I’d said, trying to describe the state of my heart to Lesley (okay, so it sounds at least as corny as the stuff the character in my dream was saying, but sometimes the truth is corny). And Lesley had said sympathetically, “I know just how you feel. When Max dumped me, I thought at first I’d die of grief. Grief and multiple organ failure. Because there’s a grain of truth in all those things they say about love: it goes to your kidneys, it punches you in the stomach, it breaks your heart and … er … it scurries over your liver like a louse. But first, that will all pass off; second, it’s not as hopeless as it looks to you; and third, your heart isn’t made of glass.”
“Stone, not glass,” I corrected her, sobbing. “My heart is a gemstone, and Gideon’s broken it into thousands of pieces, just like in Aunt Maddy’s vision.”
“Sounds kind of cool—but no! Hearts are really made of very different stuff, you take my word for it.” Lesley cleared her throat, and her tone of voice got positively solemn, as if she were revealing the greatest secret in the history of the world. “Hearts are made of something much tougher. It’s unbreakable, and you can reshape it anytime you like. Hearts are made to a secret formula.”
More throat-clearing to heighten the suspense. I instinctively held my breath.
“They’re made of stuff like marzipan!” Lesley announced.
“Marzipan?” For a moment I stopped sobbing and grinned instead.
“That’s right, marzipan,” Lesley repeated in deadly earnest. “The best sort, with lots of real ground almonds in it.”
I almost giggled. But then I remembered that I was the unhappiest girl in the world. I sniffed, and said, “If that’s so, then Gideon hasbitten off a piece of my heart! And he’s nibbled away the chocolate coating around it too! You ought to have seen the way he looked when—”
But before I could start crying all over again, Lesley sighed audibly.
“Gwenny, I hate to say so, but all this miserable weeping and wailing does no one any good. You have to stop it!”
“I’m not doing it on purpose,” I told her. “It just keeps on breaking out of me. One moment I’m still the happiest girl in the world, and then he tells me he—”
“Okay, so Gideon behaved like a bastard,” Lesley interrupted me, “although it’s hard to understand why. I mean,hello? Why on earth would girls in love be easier to manipulate? I’d have thought it was just the opposite. Girls in love are like ticking time bombs. You never know what they’ll do next. Gideon and his male chauvinist friend the count have made a big mistake.”
“I really thought Gideon was in love with me. The idea that he was only pretending is so…” Mean? Cruel? No word seemed enough to describe my feelings properly.
“Oh, sweetie—look, in other circumstances, you could wallow in grief for weeks on end, but you can’t afford to do that right now. You need your energy for other things. Like surviving, for instance.” Lesley sounded unusually stern. “So kindly pull yourself together.”
“That’s what Xemerius said, too. Before he went off and left me all alone.”
“Your little invisible monster is right! You have to keep a cool head now and put all the facts together. Ugh, what was that? Hang on, I have to open a window. Bertie just did a disgusting fart. Bad dog! Now, where was I? Yes, that’s it, we have to find out what your grandfather hid in your house.” Lesley’s voice rose slightly. “I must admit Raphael has turned out pretty useful. He’s not as stupid as you might think.”
“As you might think, you mean.” Raphael was Gideon’s little brother, who had just started going to our school. He’d discovered that the riddle my grandfather had left behind was all about geographical coordinates. And they had led straight to our house. “I’d love to know how much Raphael has found out about the secrets of the Guardians and Gideon’s time traveling.”
“Could be more than we might assume,” said Lesley. “Anyway, he wasn’t swallowing my story when I told him the coordinates were only because puzzle games like this were the latest fad in London. But he was clever enough not to ask any more questions.” She paused for a moment. “He has rather attractive eyes.”
“Yup.” They really were attractive, which reminded me that Gideon’s eyes were exactly the same. Green and surrounded by thick, dark lashes.
“Not that that impresses me. Only making an observation.”
I’ve fallen in love with you. Gideon had sounded deadly serious when he said that, looking straight at me. And I’d stared back and believed every word of it! My tears...