Twelve-year-old Carmen has a secret: she can talk to her cat Grim. But the powerful Brotherhood has banned pets, and the penalty is death.
Ward is the most wanted boy in the world. The only thing standing between him and the hangman's noose is maste...
These treasures of Ward's were curious things. Cuious, dangerous things.
The storeroom stood a short distance from the shack, on a rocky outcrop that overlooked the cove. It was built of stone. According to Jaggles it was the oldest building on Devil's Island – older than even the lighthouse. The cellar door in the floor of the storeroom was hidden beneath a mouldy rug that Jaggles had, many years ago, bought from a coffee-skinned sailor from a land far away. The cellar was spacious but cluttered, and lit by a single oil lamp. Ward had built a kind of nest in there out of old sails, broken nets, and some ancient vulpin furs.
Ward's jaunts in the cellar were some of his earliest memories, as were his attempts to escape it. He had never managed to do so. The door was solid mahogany, the latch cast iron. The padlock looked like something from a castle dungeon. The walls and floor were comprised of enormous bluestones laid snugly together; Ward had tried and failed to prise them up in order to dig his way out.
He might never have found the loose stone, except he had been in the midst of the type of game one plays during extended vacations in cellars – this one involved pitching long-dead mice into a bucket on the other side of the room (ten points if the mouse landed in the bucket without touching the rim) – when a wayward throw had sent his mouse skidding under the wardrobe that hulked in the corner. As Ward fished for the dead mouse under the wardrobe he heard a gentle chunk, and one of the stones had moved under his hand.
Once he had emptied the wardrobe he was able to drag it away from the corner. The stone, which was flat, was light enough to be levered up out of the floor. Ward dangled the lamp down inside the hole, but the aperture was so narrow that he could see nothing but his own arm. So he withdrew the lamp and reached down inside. His hand found a rocky floor. Then something soft and lumpy. He drew his hand back quickly. Had the thing moved? He thought he heard a stealthy movement in the darkness, and a sound like breathing. He waited for an interminable time, his heart pounding.
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