The Secret of Spellshadow Manor 5 by Bella Forrest (book series for 10 year olds .TXT) 📕

enjoying the good food while they could; it was a welcome change from the gray gruel at Kingstone. Alex was exhausted, having gotten little sleep, but the other two looked more refreshed than he had expected, given the events of the day before.

“How was your bedtime reading?” Aamir asked as he bit into a juicy plum.

Alex looked up at his friend. “It’s lengthy,” he admitted.

“Doable?” Ellabell chimed in.

He nodded. “I think so—definitely, with time to practice.”

“What else did it say?” Aamir pressed, brushing a trickle of scarlet juice from his chin.

He gave them the lowdown on the content of the spell, pausing to gauge their expressions as he touched upon the need for royal blood. They carried the same sense of trepidation that his own expression had.

“We could do the same thing we did in the labyrinth,” Ellabell suggested.

“Which thing?” said Alex.

She turned to Aamir. “You know, the glass orb with the letter inside? We could do the same thing we did with that, and vibrate it, if we could just get her to hold a glass,” she explained. As Alex had suspected, it seemed they’d had to undertake fairly similar tasks to the ones he and Lintz had faced.

Aamir nodded in agreement. “If we pre-fed our magic into the glass, and got her to pick it up, we could distract her and make it shatter in her hand. If we only use thin strands of magic, she hopefully won’t notice the glitter of it.”

“Then we’ve got the attack on Spellshadow to consider, once we have the blood,” Alex said, not wanting to pile doom on gloom, but knowing it had to be brought up. “I’d like to travel back to Kingstone as soon as possible, to get word through the still-open portal there to the others at Stillwater, and let them know we have the book. If we can get them prepared, we can launch an attack sooner rather than later. I don’t want them going through to Spellshadow before we have everything in place to perform the counter-spell. I’d rather we were all there before the fight began, you know?”

Ellabell nodded. “Absolutely—we don’t want them arriving before we have a chance to join the party!”

“We’ll need essence, too,” Aamir added. “We used up most of the Stillwater stash to make the portal here. If the others are going to build a portal back to Spellshadow from Stillwater, and we’re going to build one to Spellshadow from Falleaf, we’re going to need a lot more.”

“Hadrian might be willing to give up some of his store,” Alex said. “The Stillwater squad could use some too, and we need it not only for the portal, but for when we come up against the Head. When the time comes, it might be the only thing that can swing the odds in our favor in the fight.”

“Hang on a minute—we could use the essence to kidnap Venus,” Ellabell said, her eyes bright with the lightbulb-flash of an idea. “The last thing we want is for her to suspect something and tell her husband. If we have some essence to fight with, we can keep her trapped somewhere.”

Alex had been worrying about that aspect of the plan. If anything went wrong with the blood extraction, then Venus would go running to Julius, and that would signal annihilation for them. However, if they could knock her out using a golden monster or two, the way he had done with Alypia, then they might stand a chance. If Venus were coming down to Falleaf for a legitimate purpose, there would be no reason for her husband to suspect anything was wrong when she didn’t immediately return. Alex hoped he could get Hadrian to ask that she visit him for several days, which would give them a clean window of opportunity.

“It’s a near perfect solution,” Alex said enthusiastically.

“So, things to do,” Aamir said. “Number one, ask Hadrian if we might borrow some of the essence here.”

“Number two, get Hadrian to send word to Venus about a visit,” Ellabell added.

“Number three, head back to Kingstone to inform the others of what’s going on, through the portal to Stillwater, and pass on some essence to them,” Alex continued. “We won’t need to worry about building a portal from here to Kingstone, because my Thunderbird will take us.”

Aamir and Ellabell flashed each other an excited look.

“Then, we come back here and wait for Venus to arrive, at the specified time,” Aamir said. “Once she is here, we take her out.”

“After that, we steal some blood from her. Then we head through to Spellshadow with essence in tow, and we capture the Head, using whatever means necessary. It’ll then be up to me to begin the counter-spell, and hopefully end all this madness for good.” Alex grinned. It was nice to have a plan, and feel organized for once.

Ellabell smiled back. “There, how much simpler could it be?”

The trio laughed, though there was an undercurrent of nervous anticipation. Below that, a tremor of genuine terror. It didn’t sound like a lot, but the struggles that lay ahead were vast. It would take everything they had in order to succeed, but they had come this far. Nobody seemed willing to back down, which added fuel to the fire that burned in the pit of Alex’s stomach.

Not for the first time, he found himself wondering what his life would be like if Natalie had never arrived from France. If his mother hadn’t offered to take the exchange student, after her first option fell through, where might he be? Would he be up at all hours, trying to balance school and work? Would he be shyly approaching girls at parties, if he had never met Ellabell? It seemed like that life belonged to a different boy. The young man in those memories bore no resemblance to the Alex he had become, and it was a bittersweet realization. He longed for the carefree life he’d had, and knew, with complete certainty, that even if they