Blood Moon (Book Three - The Ravenscliff Series) by Geoffrey Huntington Page A

been to have a Guardian who’d really known his stuff, who could have taught him all the finer points of sorcery. Wiglaf would have known what to do, how to nab Crazy Lady …
    And maybe I do, too, Devon thought, an idea suddenly coming to him.
    Once, in a test with none other than Sargon the Great, the founder of the Order of the Nightwing, Devon had failed miserably because he had failed to see the obvious, because he had let fear and doubt get in the way.
    I am a Sorcerer of the Nightwing , Devon told himself. Not only that, I am the one-hundredth generation from Sargon, destined for greatness.
    If I can’t find Crazy Lady , Devon reasoned, I’ll find everything else.
    He emerged from the secret panel into what had been Emily Muir’s upstairs sitting room. A dust-covered chandelier hung forlornly from the ceiling. Shutters kept out most of the light, with only slivers of the sun’s morning rays slipping through. Devon stood in the middle of the room, trying to empty his mind of all other thoughts than the task at hand.
    “Everything in this house,” he said, “wood, glass, marble, furniture, electrical wires, carpet, plumbing, books, appliances, food, portraits, clothing, people—everything other than Crazy Lady—fade from my consciousness!”
    At first nothing happened. Then, bit by bit, the room around him began to shiver. First a corner off to his right, then a section of the floor beneath him. Then the chandelier trembled and disappeared, and then the ceiling was gone, replaced only by a stark white nothingness. Devon looked down at his feet. The floor was gone. He stood on white air. The rest of the room gave one last shudder, then was gone, too.
    The whole house had vanished. Devon was enveloped in a stark white void. No sound, no smell, nothing to see.
    “Now,” Devon said, “what can I discern?”
    With the distraction of everything else gone, he could concentrate on locating Crazy Lady. She might have been invisible, she might have wrapped herself in a cloak of mystical privacy, but now she did so in a chasm of nothingness.
    And Devon immediately detected a clue. A scent, recognizable only to his Nightwing nose.
    Hot fudge.
    Bjorn had said he’d given her a hot fudge sundae last night. There must have been a slight remnant on her lips or fingers.
    Devon honed in on the smell. He couldn’t tell exactly where he was going, as he had no relation to the house around him—which way was the floor and which way was the ceiling. Still, he moved through the whiteness with ease. At first he had the sense that he was descending, but then it changed to a sensation of rising. Up, up, up. The tower? It would make sense. It had been home to Crazy Lady for a long time …
    He stopped. The smell was strong here. He reached out his hands and touched flesh. A face. He heard Crazy Lady’s startled shout.
    “How did you find me?” she shrieked, and the whiteness suddenly disappeared. They stood facing each other in the tower room. Crazy Lady cradled a headless plastic doll in her arms.
    “I’m a sorcerer,” Devon told her. “It was easy.”
    She backed away from him, clutching the doll to her breast.
    “I’m not going to hurt you,” Devon said. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
    “You’re here to make me a prisoner again, aren’t you?”
    She didn’t seem insane now. She seemed merely frightened, and so much younger than ever before, as if she might not be all that much older than Devon. Her gray hair was pulled back into a ponytail; her eyes were cast down at that deformed little doll. Devon’s heart ached for her.
    “You tried to burn down the house,” he said. “Why did you do that?”
    “I don’t want to be kept prisoner any more,” Crazy Lady told him, still gazing down lovingly at the doll, rocking it back and forth in her arms. “My baby and I want to be free. We want to go back out into the world.”
    “I don’t think you’re quite ready to do that yet. But maybe we can get you