The Curse of the Lion's Heart Read online

  “Well at least he’s good for something,” she said a little rudely.

  I sighed. “Mom, please. Do you have to?”

  “You’re right, I’m sorry. I’m glad he can be of help.” Her voice sounded more sincere and she let the subject drop. When we got home, Jeff was there and had brought home take-out burgers. It was my least favorite meal, so I picked at it enough to make them happy before they let me excuse myself to my room. My homework was mostly done, so I decided to call Penelope and see if she was around.

  “Hey, so how was the museum?” she asked when she picked up. I could hear loud, sort of twanging music in the background which faded after a few seconds.

  “Oh it was fine. Usual dusty old books and my dad who was too busy to do anything helpful,” I complained. “Guess who I ran into, though?”

  “Who?” she asked, her voice getting lighter with the prospect of gossip.

  “Uh that English kid. You know, Jack Whatever.”

  “Collins,” she corrected.

  “Yeah. He was skateboarding in front of the museum and he stopped to talk to me.”

  “He talked?” she asked, her voice going really high. “Like with real words and everything?”

  I laughed a little and shook my head with wonder. “Yeah with words.”

  “Dude, Lex, he never talks to anyone. I mean that literally. I think the year he went to my school he said like a total of twenty words the entire time he was in class. What did he say to you?”

  “Nothing special,” I said and flopped down onto my bed. “He just talked about his uncle a little, and told me his parents died.”

  “Wow,” she breathed. “I thought that was just a rumor. I heard he actually punched a kid in the face last year for asking about his mom and dad.”

  My eyebrows rose. “Really? He seemed really nice to me.”

  “Maybe he likes you,” and I wondered if she was teasing, but her voice sounded sincere. I blushed anyway.

  “Uh, it wasn’t like that. He was just being friendly. Anyway, right before I left,” I said, suddenly remembering, “he gave me this piece of paper. Said that I’d dropped it, but it wasn’t mine.”

  “What was on it?” she asked excitedly.

  “Hold on, let me get it,” I replied and put the phone down to dig through my bag for it. I found it, a little crumpled from my books, but I started to unfold it as I picked the phone back up. I didn’t say anything as I stared at the drawing on the page. It was… well I wasn’t sure what it was. It looked like a shield or something, in bright red, with three axes directly on the front. On the top was a sort of old knight’s helmet and below it written across something that looked like a ribbon was written Spero Meliora. It didn’t make any sense to me, but I described it to Penelope anyway.

  “No idea, dude,” she said. “Is it from the uh… you know…”

  “It might be, but I don’t know what it means,” I said with a shrug.

  “You could show it to my mother tomorrow,” she said. “She knows about all kinds of useless history stuff.”

  “Yeah, yeah I might do that since my dad had no idea,” I said. Looking at the clock, I realized it was almost time for me to get ready for bed. “Anyway, I gotta go, but I’ll meet you out front tomorrow and maybe we can catch your mom before the bell.”

  “Yeah… yeah I guess,” she said and then groaned. “I can’t stand her.”

  I laughed. “I know, but hey, it’ll help us with the ghost problem. I’ll fill you in on the rest tomorrow.”

  After my shower, I came back into my room and nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw Elizabeth standing near my bed. She looked different, which surprised me because none of the ghosts had ever changed clothes before. She was wearing something slimmer now, a long, pale dress and her hair was let down. She smiled at me a little as I clutched my towel tighter around me.

  “What the heck are you doing here?” I hissed, shutting my door so my mom and Jeff wouldn’t hear me.

  “I came to see your progress,” she said with a slight frown. “Are you always so disrespectful?”

  “Well, when a ghost is standing in my bedroom while I’m standing here in just a towel, I sometimes forget to be polite,” I snapped. I fumbled in my dresser for my pajamas and then crammed myself into my closet to get dressed in the impossibly tight space. It was difficult, but I managed it and came out with my pajama top only slightly crooked.

  “Progress,” she said again as I grabbed my brush from my dresser.

  “Did you give me that thing?” I asked, and I nodded to the drawing that was laying unfolded on top of my bed.

  She walked over at it and frowned. “No. But it does look familiar.”

  That was not the answer I was expecting, and Jack’s face popped into my head. Could he have been lying? Did he give it to me? And if he did, why? I turned back to Elizabeth as I raked the brush through my tangled, wet hair. “Familiar like you’ve seen it before and know it, or familiar like you’ve seen a hundred things like it and have no idea what it is.”

  “The latter, I’m afraid,” she said with a small shrug. “Most of the families in my time had similar Coat of Arms, so I can’t say for certain. Sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry at all, but that didn’t really matter to me. Now that I knew she didn’t give it to me, it was another mystery added onto my ever-growing list of stuff I needed to figure out.

  “I’m going to talk to a few people, and I already have my dad on the case at the museum. He said the locket was taken out for a cleaning. So you know, if that’s the issue, it wasn’t stolen.”

  Elizabeth shook her head so hard her hair fell into her face. “No! The locket was stolen, believe me! That locket is tied to me. I know it’s not where it should be. The fact that I can’t find it is why I’m here. You have to find it before the curse sets in. It’s possible it already has.”

  “Fine, okay, I’ll look harder. Tomorrow,” I added when she looked at me expectantly. “Unlike you dead people, I actually have to sleep in order to function. So if you don’t mind…”

  But then I was talking to thin air. Elizabeth had disappeared and I was alone in my room. With a groan, I tossed my brush on my desk and crawled into my bed. I hated this gift, I really did. It made me feel like a crazy person, even when others weren’t watching. I was tired of talking to myself, tired of being hounded by the otherworld at all hours of the day, and tired of feeling like I had no privacy.

  Chapter Seven

  An Ally

  Penelope wasn’t waiting out front for me the next morning. I was a little concerned and I sent her a text as I went up the steps and into the common room. I was ten minutes earlier than usual, to give myself time to talk to Kate, so I thought maybe Penelope and her mom hadn’t gotten there yet. However, when I reached Kate’s room, I saw her sitting behind the desk with a stack of papers in front of her.

  I knocked lightly on the open door and walked in when Kate smiled at me. “Hi,” I said, feeling weird. I didn’t usually talk to teachers outside of classrooms, and it was weirder since I now knew she was my friend’s mom.

  “Alexandra,” she said with a nod. “How are you today?”

  “Uh I’m good. Is um… is Penelope around?”

  Her face fell a little. “I’m afraid not. She’s come down with something and is home sick. I was afraid maybe you’d caught it too, since you girls have been spending a lot of time together, but you look okay.”

  “Yeah, I feel fine,” I said with a frown. It was odd. Penelope had sounded just fine over the phone last night, so whatever she had must have come on quick. I felt a little bit of fear flare up in the pit of my stomach when I heard Elizabeth’s voice echo ‘the curse’ in the back of my mind, but I forced myself to ignore it. Curses were not real. Digging into my bag, I pulled out the drawing I’d planned to show her, and stepped further into the classroom. “I had a question for you, actually.”

  “Sure,” she said, putting down her grading pen, “how can I help?”

 
I approached her desk slowly, looking at all her little trinkets. Most of what covered her desk were action figures of historical figures, like Ben Franklin with his kite, and Abraham Lincoln with his tall hat. I thought they were actually kind of cool, and wondered, for just a second, what it was like to grow up with a mom like this.

  “So, I was wondering if you knew anything about this,” I said finally, and passed the drawing over to her.

  She took it and stared at it for a long moment with a deep frown. “Where did you get this? Did you draw it?”

  I shook my head firmly. “Oh no, I can’t draw,” I said with a small, embarrassed laugh. “It um… a friend from my other school gave it to me and wanted to know what it was. I’m not sure where she got it from,” I added in a hurry. “I asked my dad, but he didn’t know.”

  “Well it looks like a family crest,” she said with a deep frown. “Looks familiar, in fact.” She stood up and walked to the bookshelf which was crammed from top to bottom and side to side with giant texts. She scanned the shelf for a full minute before pulling out what looked like an ancient, leather bound book and slammed it on her desk.

  I peered over her shoulder as she began flipping through the pages, and I realized after a minute, the illustrations were hand drawn, not printed. The book had to be super old, and I stepped back, afraid that I would accidentally ruin it by breathing wrong on the pages or something.

  After several minutes, Kate’s hand stopped on a page and she tapped the picture there. It was really similar, a red shield with three axes on the front. She smiled up at me and said, “It’s a variation on the Ainsworth family Coat of Arms. They were a fairly prominent family from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. A lot of scandal and trouble, typical for any high-reaching family entity in that era.”

  “Was there anything special about them?” I asked, my stomach doing flip-flops. If Elizabeth hadn’t given this to me, who could have? I couldn’t imagine Jack doing it, but at the moment, he was the only suspect on my list.

  “Not really special, but they were a fairly interesting family line. There’s a legend about the family that the eldest born son was trained to become a thief. But there’s no actual evidence suggesting any of that ever happened.”

  “So no one in the family was ever executed for stealing anything?” I asked, thinking about Elizabeth’s story.

  “I’m sure plenty of them were tried for some crime or another. You won’t find a family in all of history that isn’t riddled with some scandal at one point or another. Even the Tudor family line was chock full of scandal and hypocrisy. But as far as I know, there isn’t any real evidence backing up the elder sons being trained in the art of burglary.”

  “Hmm okay,” I said, letting that all sink in. Just because the records didn’t exist didn’t mean it wasn’t true. My dad had spent enough time drilling that into my head over the years. “Are there any Ainsworth family members living today?” I tried to keep my voice simple, curious but not as desperate as I felt for answers. My head was whirling with questions but I couldn’t get ahead of myself just yet.

  “Oh, I’m sure there are,” Kate said with a smile, and she shut the book. “They were no small family, you know. The name is still fairly popular in Britain.”

  I sighed and took the picture back, folding it into my pocket. “Okay well… thanks.” She had a curious look on her face, but I hurried out of the class, not wanting her to ask me any questions I couldn’t answer. I had the information I needed for the moment. The drawing was related to the possible thieves, and now I just needed to know who had given it to me, and why.

  Dashing down the hall, I hurried into the common area, my head still racing with thoughts. Ainsworth. The family Coat of Arms. Family of thieves. It was connected, somehow, to the missing locket. But how? If there wasn’t a way to trace the Ainsworth thieves to an existing member today, I wouldn’t have any leads. I knew I could get help from my dad on the missing locket front, but there wasn’t any way to prove it had been stolen until he realized that the locket wasn’t coming back from the people who were supposed to be restoring it. And that in itself didn’t make a lot of sense. Why send it out after this long? Why order it out onto the floor if there wasn’t a specific showcase for that era going on? There were so many questions, and without access to my dad’s records, I had no way of answering them.

  By English class, I was completely consumed with this ghostly case. I didn’t even notice the teacher was asking me a question until her hand smacked down on my desk, making me jump. Blushing furiously, I looked up and gave her my best, most innocent smile I could.

  “Now that Miss Fry has decided to join our class,” she said, and Misty giggled way louder than necessary, “perhaps she would like to share with us her short story I assigned?”

  I blushed even harder. I was not good at public speaking, and with Elizabeth breathing down my neck about her stupid locket, I had only barely scraped together the story before bed. I did my best not to hyperventilate as I dug into my folder for the work. I was not great at public speaking, and with Misty sitting there staring at me, I stuttered through the whole thing and quickly sat down, hanging my head.

  The teacher had no remark for me, thank god, and she moved on to torture another student while I tried to get myself under control.

  “You are such a freak,” Misty hissed over at me.

  My gaze snapped over to her and I glared. “Whatever, Misty.”

  “Oooh good comeback,” she sneered, and her friend laughed. “Got any more?”

  I was never great at confrontation, and usually when it came time for me to speak my mind, I just stumbled over the words, looking like an idiot. Even now I could feel my brain getting all twisted around the things I wanted to say to Misty’s stupid face.

  Too much time passed and she smirked. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Freak.”

  My face went red again, this time from anger, but I turned away from her and pretended like I couldn’t hear her. There was no point, anyway. I had too much on my plate, and without Penelope here, I was just going to make a fool of myself if I tried to take her on. My head went back to the case and the Ainsworth family. Without any real leads, I had three options. The internet, the library, and the museum. Now the internet was an easy one, and there were plenty of websites I could still check out. The library was usually a last ditch effort, since most of the stuff in there was hard to find, and without any idea where to start, it would end up taking too much time. But the museum was a good possibility. If the Ainsworth family had any sort of connection to anything on display, I might be able to dig something up. After all, the museum did have the locket, so they had some ties to the locket’s era and to Elizabeth.

  The bell rang and I took my time getting my things so Misty and her little gang would leave before me. I just didn’t have time to deal with her in the hall, and I didn’t care if I was late to lunch. As I turned the corner from the classroom, I was so lost in my thoughts I almost didn’t see Jack, who had come to a stop in front of me. Gasping, I had to side-step to avoid smacking right into him, and I brushed my hair out of my face. “Sorry,” I breathed.

  “Contemplating the universe?” he asked with a small grin.

  I rolled my eyes and shoved my backpack higher up on my shoulder. “No,” I said. “Just thinking about a project I have to do.”

  “Ah, so much work already. Be glad you’re not going to school back in England. Work’s much harder there,” he said.

  He started to walk and I automatically followed him, growing more curious about him the more I thought about it. Elizabeth was English, the Ainsworth Coat of Arms on the piece of paper that mysteriously showed up was, too. There were way too many similarities to be a coincidence.

  “So what’s it like over there?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Lot like here, really, just busier. We lived in London. My uncle had this really tiny flat there, dingy and gross, but my sister and I were out all hours of the night and he never
noticed we’d gone missing. There’s always people there, too, on holiday, just sort of wandering round without a clue.”

  I thought about the busy streets downtown and I smiled. “Yeah well, that’s kind of everywhere, isn’t it?”

  He smiled and opened his mouth to say something when a familiar but unwanted pile of blonde hair and pink shirt came to a stop in front of us. “Jack,” Misty said. She had two of her friends with her, but I didn’t remember their names off the top of my head. “How’s it going?”

  Jack raised an eyebrow and looked over at me before looking back at Misty. “Er, fine, thanks. Can I help you?”

  “Oh I just noticed how charitable you were being to the… new girl,” she said, sneering at me. “What with her being crazy and all.”

  “Crazy?” he asked, and he looked at me.

  My face flared bright red and my hands curled into fists at my sides. “Shut up, Misty. I am not crazy.”

  “Oh she’s just embarrassed because she was talking to herself in class the other day,” Misty said with a wicked grin. “Didn’t you hear about it?”

  Jack gave a small laugh and looked at me, his eyebrows high into his hairline. “Uh no, she never mentioned.”

  “Oh yeah,” Misty said with a long drawl to her words. “Yeah, she’s totally off her rocker. She started yelling at no one right in the middle of class.”

  Just when I thought I might burst into flames with embarrassment, Jack whispered, “Brilliant.”

  I had been tempted to run, but my feet froze and I looked up at Jack, and then Misty who was frowning. “What?” she asked.

  “I said brilliant,” Jack clarified with a nod. “I mean, honestly, who wants to be a plastic Barbie doll? Right? Some of the greatest minds in all of history have been a little mad. I wouldn’t be caught dead with someone who gets their fashion tips from…” he paused and waved a hand in her direction, “well wherever you lot get them. I mean really, how generic.” He winked at her and then reached over and tugged on my back pack. “Have a great morning, whatever your name is.”