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Finding out that Harriet's missing from her room at Lakehouse Clinic is the worst possible setback we could've encountered. The only thing that could've topped it is if, like, Imposter Denby kidnapped her and buried her in a shallow grave—no, Ashley, don't think like that, don't do that, you're an idiot, everything's okay—but she is missing. And that's just not good at all.
Oh, God, we are so, so screwed, aren't we?
"I found something," Eddie says, rising from underneath the bed, holding papers. I look over his shoulder to read whatever was on it as Fabian asks what it is. "Well, for her lunch order, she ordered fish sticks."
That's... a bit anti-climactic.
"Is that it?" Fabian asks.
"It could be some kind of code, right?" Eddie comments.
Fabian feigns recognition. "Oh, the fish stick code."
I snatch the papers out of Eddie's hands. "Eddie, I swear—it says discharged," I tell them, finding the word on the sheet and pointing it out to them. "She was discharged."
"But without Harriet," KT says, "how are we going to save my great-grandpa? How are we going to stop him from waking up evil?"
The door opens and I set the papers onto the bed. It's the same orderly from before. "Oh, you're back," he says plainly, condescension dripping into his words.
Eddie gestures to the bed. "Where is she? Who took her?"
"Left with a family member," he informs. "Didn't you know? You are her nephew, aren't you?"
It's then Eddie (and the rest of us) remembers his initial lie. "Well, yeah," he acts along with it. "You know, good old Aunt Harriet."
"Well, you're never far from her thoughts." The orderly pulls a yellow envelope out of his pocket. "She kept reminding me to give you this."
"Thanks," Eddie says, and then the orderly's gone. He makes quick work of opening it as Fabian closes the door back. Inside's a card, but the words on the inside of it worry us. "What?"
—
We sneak back into Anubis House through the kitchen, and we sneak past Joy and Sweet in the living room talking about something to do with entertainment—or something, I don't know. Patricia and Alfie are with us now, having helped us get back in through the laundry room, and once we're safely in Eddie and Fabian's room, he begins.
"All right, so," Eddie tells everybody, "Harriet left us this card. Okay, it tells us what to do if anything happened to her."
"It says we have to perform the ceremony ourselves," KT states.
"Ourselves?" Alfie repeats incredulously.
Yeah, that's about the reactions we had talking about it on the way back from the clinic. I read off the card with a heavy sigh, "'You have all you need to wake Robert. You're good people, pure of heart. He will again be the great man he once was.' Never mind the fact that no one on this planet actually wants him brought back to life. But... I guess it'd be better if we were the ones to do it and not the super villains."
"We have no idea what we're doing, Ashley," KT reminds me. I concede that fact with a sigh. "What if we do something wrong? It could finish him."
"I don't know about anyone else here," I say, "but I'm not too keen on raising him from the dead. Besides, Harriet said pure of heart and, uh, considering the whole Bringer of Death thing, not exactly sure I'd technically qualify, so."
"What, so we risk him being woken up by Denby?" Eddie counters. "Is that what the two of you want?"
"No!" KT exclaims.
I hadn't realized until now that KT and I were on the same side of this, albeit for two completely different reasons. She doesn't want something to go wrong and harm Frobisher-Smythe; I don't want Frobisher-Smythe living in the 21st century at all. To each their own reason against bringing someone back to life, I guess. At least she and I, who easily have the most solid connections to the Frobisher-Smythe family, agree on this.
"They're right to be worried," Fabian speaks up. "These ceremonies have to be correct down to the last detail. And if they're not—"
"Everything goes kablooey," Alfie interrupts. "Including us."
"Okay, well, this is our only chance now, okay?" Eddie says. "If Harriet wanted us to do it, we have to believe in her."
"Harriet didn't know what planet she was on," KT argues.
"What's the alternative? We wait for Victor to realize he's got a fake bracelet?"
I guess that might settle it.
—
The next day, Joy stands at the front of the classroom, going on about some entertainment, secret-talent-y thing for the school's open day, wanting volunteers. My secret talent? Somehow getting myself involved with Egyptian mysteries without looking for it. Though, I guess that's not exactly what she's looking for.
"So, I'm looking for a party piece," she states, "something that you're good at that nobody knows about, like Silent Jenny." She gestures to a girl in our class, who already volunteered her mimic retelling of an opera; at least, I'm assuming that's it. I mean, we call her Silent Jenny for a reason. "Brilliant. Oh, Ashley." My head snaps up from my notebook. "Can you do caricatures? Those go on great!"
"Over my dead body," I retort immediately. No way I'm gonna be a part of this entertainment thing—unless Sibuna ropes us all into it, like we've done in the past. And caricatures? No way. Do I look like a political cartoonist?
"Oh. Okay," Joy mutters, laying her sights on another student in the room. "Um, Willow? You're creative, aren't you?"
"Well..." Willow says. "I am secretly good at poetry."
"I was hoping for something a little more energetic."
"I can recite it with passion, from the heart."
"Can you do it on a unicycle?"
I grip my pencil harder to resist laughing at the very image of Willow riding on a unicycle reciting super-dramatic, probably Amber-inspired poetry. "Yes," Willow answers. "Well, I can do it next to a unicycle."
"I'll do the caricatures if you get her on a unicycle," I remark, raising my hand.
Joy looks at me, inquiring in a sickly-sweet tone, "Will it be your dead body doing caricatures? Since you said—"
"I know what I said."
"I can sing," Mara speaks up from beside me. I glance at her with raised eyebrows. Haven't heard that one before.
"Really?" Joy asks.
"You did say hidden talent," Mara says with a shy grin. "I wrote a very special song for a very special someone."
Joy nods and writes her name down. I lean towards Mara to ask her quietly, "I thought you and Atticus broke up?"
"We're back together," she informs me. "He apologized and he was so sweet. We're making another go at it."
Honestly, I wish their break up had been permanent. Mara's way too good for him. He deserves, like, a jail cell probably. And to step on Lego bricks every minute for the rest of his life. But, hey, maybe I'm biased.
"Alfie?" Joy says. "You could do some magic?"
"Yeah," Alfie answers, "but it's supposed to be hidden talent. Everyone already knows I can do magic," he adds, taking a coin out of Jerome's hair. I smile at the annoyed look on my boyfriend's face, already planning to pull him aside after class.
"Yeah, but we can just pretend, can't we?" she questions. "Come on, guys. This is a really big deal for the school."
Eddie speaks up from behind Mara and me, "Well, how big a deal? Like, no lessons? All staff on duty, even Victor?" Sounds like he's got an idea. Oh, this could go either way.
"I guess they're all expected to attend, yeah," Joy confirms.
Before anyone could say anything more, including Joy wrangling more students into this entertainment thing, the devil herself walks in, and by that, I mean Denby. "Sorry I'm late, class. I had a family matter to attend to." I glance at Patricia, who's at the table beside mine. Family matter. Anyone wanna take any guesses as to what that means? "Right, I think that's enough. And from you," she adds to Silent Jenny, who immediately stops.
—
Keeping true to my ever-distracting thoughts during class, when the bell rings and we can finally get out of that room and away from that teacher, I lean against the wall until Jerome comes out with Alfie, and while Alfie keeps going without realizing that his friend disappeared, I grab hold of Jerome's tie, let him see it was me, and pull him down to me to kiss him hard.
"What was that for?" he asks when we pull apart a few seconds later, breathless.
"I told you maybe later, didn't I?"
"Hm, this is why I love you."
"Oh, you loved me before I ever kissed you."
As he leans down to kiss me again, Alfie's voice sounds. "Oh, this is where you went." I glance at him to see how awkward he looks. Poor third-wheel Alfie. Although it has been a while since he interrupted us like this, so I guess an interruption was on the schedule. "I'll just... go. Leave you two to your kissing stuff."
—
Honestly, I was content with the idea of spending the rest of the night (until dinner, at least) with Jerome in his room, and hopefully Alfie would've given us some space, but as we all know, Anubis House and its many, many mysteries is, like, never on our side. My plans for the night were thrown out the window when Eddie pulled me away from Jerome and claimed that I'm not available for a date because it's family game night. Yeah, like Jerome was gonna believe that, but while it looked like he saw past the excuse, he decided not to argue and said he'd text me later.
And, as it turns out, Eddie's idea was something that needed to be heard. He wants to perform the ceremony while all of the adults were at the open day thing. God, I don't even know how we're supposed to pull this off. The Cup of Ankh was one thing, the Mask of Anubis another, but... bringing Robert Frobisher-Smythe out of his comatose, zombie state? And doing it tomorrow? He's insane.
"It's the perfect opportunity. When all the staff are at the open day—"
"Then we'll have enough time in the gatehouse," KT finishes. Eddie snaps his fingers to agree. "It could work."
Fabian looks up from the Book of the Dead and stops pacing. "Tomorrow?"
"Yeah."
"No, it's too soon," he argues. "I need more time to look over the instructions."
Eddie grabs Fabian's shoulders. "Fabian, buddy, you've looked at that, like, a kajillion times."
"No, look, something—something's bothering me," Fabian informs. "I've overlooked something."
Alfie suggests, "Maybe it's the prospect of terrible and certain doom that's waiting for us out there. Just a guess."
"No, we're good," Eddie denies. He turns to Fabian. "We're good, all right?"
"I'm with Fabian," I agree. "He says there's something he hasn't found yet, there is. We need to find it. It's like putting together a chair and you're missing that one screw, and the whole thing falls. We need to find that screw."
"There's not a screw to find," Eddie counters. "We're good. We just have to hold onto the bracelet until tomorrow, and then we go over and use it for—"
Patricia was our only missing Sibuna, but no more as she runs into the room. "Uh, guys? Come and look at this." We follow her into the hallway to see that someone's in our room, throwing stuff out. Something nearly hits me in the face and I just barely manage to catch it, a hairbrush, before I realize it's Victor doing it. Whoa, what?
Victor turns when he hears us. "I shall search every nook, every cranny, every loose board. I will stop at nothing until my bracelet is found. My real bracelet!"
"What are we going to do?" KT whispers to us.
From the doors of the hallway, Mara exclaims, "Those are my school books! Ashley, what's going on?"
"More chores for us tonight," I respond, glaring at Victor's back as a pillow comes flying toward us. KT catches it. "I hope Victor knows that getting all of this stuff back into our room is going to go well past ten o'clock."
Mara groans. "Oh, I was going to rehearse in our room. Alfie, can I borrow yours for maybe an hour?"
"Whatever," Alfie says, ducking out of the way of a textbook. "Be warned, Jerome's down there and he's gonna make fun of you."
"I can handle Jerome. Besides, something tells me he might like the song! Or it'll remind him of someone, wink-wink," she says, with two horrible failed actual winks at me. "It's a bit universal, I suppose. In terms of love."
Mara turns around and leaves, but Victor's still destroying my room. "He's not going to stop until he finds that bracelet," KT tells us again.
"I'll just hide it," Eddie says.
"There's nowhere in the building he won't look," Patricia reminds him as another book, this time a hardcover Harry Potter novel, comes flying out. "And we're all on lockdown. There's nowhere else we can go."
"True," Eddie concedes, a mischievous tone in his voice, "unless you have special permission from the headmaster to go to the school because," he discreetly takes the real bracelet out of his jacket pocket, "because it's take-out night."
—
Eddie leaves to go to the school, have take-out with his father, and hide the bracelet. Until he comes back, we hang out down the hall in Patricia, KT, and Joy's room, listening to Victor destroy mine and Mara's. He's literally not going to find anything useful to him in there. Not even Lily's diary, which I keep on my person at all times now. Anything Sibuna related, I don't keep in there now that Mara's my roommate.
Sometimes I wish she knew, so at least we could clue her into why her stuff's being thrown out into the hallway. Other times, most of the time, I'm glad she doesn't, because she's managed to keep herself out of literally everything that's happened without even trying. It's a gift, really.
Eddie texts us that he's outside and to meet him down there, and he's coming in when we run down the stairs. "Victor?" Fabian says. "He's still in crazyland up there."
"Great," Eddie mumbles. "Okay, well, the bad news is I couldn't hide it." I groan. He had one job! What are we supposed to do, bury in the bushes outside? "The good news. I did have some really good Chinese food, though."
I reach forward and smack the back of his head. Patricia and Fabian have similar reactions to me, but they don't smack him. KT and Alfie are interested in the food. From the top of the stairs, Victor's voice booms, "All of you, empty your pockets this second."
"Come on," KT complains as Fabian and Eddie share a crisis look, "didn't we already do this?"
"No more defiance," Victor demands. "Do as I say. You, sweet Junior," Eddie stops trying to sneak into the living room, "you can be first. Empty your pockets."
Eddie looks at us for help. "I can't."
"I shall tell you one more time. Empty them."
Thank God for Trudy's gotta be embroidered on a pillow. We gotta get on that. "Victor," she speaks from behind us, a face mask on and her hair in curlers.
"What?!"
"Do you know what time it is?"
"No! I am conducting a search!" Victor starts to look through Eddie's jacket pockets.
"How is that more important than the well-being of the children?"
Patricia immediately takes advantage of her statement. "Oh, we're just so exhausted, Trudy," she groans.
"All we wanna do is sleep," KT adds as the rest of us make similar complaints, "but we're not allowed."
"How very amusing," says Victor plainly.
"Don't you have a duty to perform, Victor?" Trudy continues. "It's ten o'clock."
That stops Victor right before he's about to search the pocket that the bracelet is in as the grandfather clock chimes. "You have five minutes precisely. Then I want to hear a pin drop!"
"Go on everyone," Trudy tells us as soon as he's in his office. "You all need your beauty sleep, unlike me."
I smile at that, and she goes back to her own room. I look at the others, shaking my head. "That was close."
"And we got lucky," Eddie adds. "All right, the sooner we get the ceremony done, the better. Agreed?"
"Definitely," I say. After that, I'm in. "We can't have that close a call again. Fabian?"
Fabian nods. "Yeah. I'll see what I can find before tomorrow. Good night, guys."