Something powerful is drawing Ward back to Devil's Island. Something he thought he had forgotten. He must evade vicious lighthouse keeper George Jaggles in order to rescue it, but Jaggles will soon be the least of his worries. Because an assassin is...
Nick had packed his few belongings into a rucksack and was about to leave when there was a knock on the bedroom door. He opened it to find Joe standing there. They looked at each other in silence.
"Did you do it?" Joe said finally.
Nick hesitated, thrown off guard by the blatant question. "No," he said.
" You did it. I know you did."
"Then we're even."
"What?"
"You know what I'm talking about."
Joe pretended not to. So Nick spelled it out for him. How Joe had set Kefira to spy on his parents. How it had led to their arrest and execution.
Joe's face drained of colour.
"Where were you the day they were hung?" Nick's own voice sounded distant, like it was coming from another room, like it wasn't his. He could barely hear it over the sound of the blood pulsing through his body. His heartbeats throbbed in his ears.
Joe's face had gone from white to purple. He made an animal sound, a kind of cry. Then he had thrown himself at Nick.
The two boys rolled across the room, crashing into Nick's desk. Nick was stronger: he got quickly on top of Joe and punched him in the face. Joe groaned. Another punch and Joe's lip split over his teeth. Nick was screaming at him, nonsensical strings of accusatory words that he couldn't remember. Tears streamed down his face. All the hurt and fear and grief of the past year had been compressed into a tight red ball of anger that throbbed behind his eyes, that travelled down his arms to his pumping fists.
Joe screamed, and blood spattered Nick's face, warm and metallic-smelling. My friend's blood, he thought. He got up on his feet and launched a kick into Joe's exposed stomach. Joe grunted and curled up. Blood squirted from his nose and pooled on the floorboards, and he began making a high keening sound, like a hurt nine. If I have to listen to that much longer I'll go insane, Nick thought.
Joe looked up at Nick through a gruesome mask. "Igth the digth!They dig thigth to you!"
"TAKE THEM THEN!" Nick screamed, pulling the pouch from his pocket and throwing it at Joe. Then he grabbed his rucksack off the bed and whirled out of the room.
It would have been a simple thing for him to steal the dice back from Joe, but he never did. Whatever spell the dice had cast over him, it seemed that the act of discarding them had broken it. Nick didn't remember how hard it had been to throw them away. How it had been like tearing out a piece of his own soul. Instead, he had rationalised the episode, putting it down to fear and grief. It would have been too easy for him to blame the dice. The coward's way out. No, he would take responsibility for his actions. The dice were just dice after all.
Magic didn't exist.
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That's it for chapter seventeen. On to the eighteenth and final chapter of this book, in which we discover that you can no more blame it on moonlight than you can on the boogie.
