Silver - By Kailin Gow Page 0,27

insight, though, it didn’t.

“Do you think there’s any chance Aunt Sophie wil come back on her own?” Jake asked. He sounded very young right then. Very frightened. But then, he had just lost yet another family member, the same way Briony had.

Briony reached out to take her little brother’s hand. “I don’t know, Jake. I hope so, but we have to assume for now that things are going to be more difficult than that.”

“Things are always more difficult than that,” Fal on said, with a bitter note in his voice as he looked at Briony.

He obviously wasn’t just talking about gates to other worlds.

“Someone has to know how to get through,” Kevin said, and his brother rounded on him with an ugly look.

“Like who? That dragon shifter? Maybe you think that if we ask real y nicely, he’l tel us how to do the thing he’s just knocked us over half this clearing stopping us from doing?”

“Stop it, both of you.” Briony wasn’t in any mood for their bickering. Particularly not when she needed to think.

“There has to be someone who knows. Aunt Sophie can’t be the only one.”

The others looked doubtful. “I’m not sure that it works like that, Briony,” Kevin said. “Your great aunt kept a lot of secrets, and I doubt that she told anyone everything. You would need someone who was very close to her for a long time just to have a chance of finding something out, and even then, it would need to be someone who she trusted enough to tel her secrets.”

Explained like that, the list didn’t seem like a long one. Even George, who had known Aunt Sophie for years, obviously didn’t know everything about her. Nor did the other members of the Wicked Preservation Society. She had only told Briony a few fragments of things, deliberately keeping others from her for reasons of her own. Briony doubted that anyone would know al that Aunt Sophie had to tel .

Except that she could think of one person. One person who had known her great aunt longer than anyone.

One person who had once been closer to her than anyone else, if what the werewolves had said was to be believed.

“I think…” Briony could hardly bring herself to say it.

“I think that we need to find Pietre.”

“What?” Fal on and Kevin said it at almost the same moment, then glared at one another for doing so.

“If Pietre and Aunt Sophie were married, the way everyone says, then he might know. He’s certainly obsessed enough with her, and he spent more than enough time around her to learn a few of her secrets.”

Kevin looked at her like she’d gone mad. “Yes, but Pietre? He’s not exactly likely to help us.”

“He’l kil us as soon as we get close,” Fal on added.

Only Jake seemed thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he said.

“If it means getting Aunt Sophie back, he might help.”

“There isn’t time for a debate,” Briony said. “We need to get back to the vampires’ home and try to find him, before one of the werewolves finishes him off. We can’t afford to lose him. I know it sounds crazy, but Pietre is the only chance we have that doesn’t involve trying to get answers out of that dragon.”

That seemed to settle it. Even if the brothers didn’t appear completely convinced, they were stil wil ing to do what she said. Kevin transformed into a wolf once more, and Briony rode on his back as the four of them thundered through the forest, retracing their steps to the master vampire’s lair. Despite the urgency of their need though, the trip seemed to take forever. Even compared with reaching the clearing the first time, returning from it was slow.

With every minute that passed, Briony found herself fighting against the frustration of it. Darkness was starting to fal , and they stil hadn’t reached their destination. Briony tried not to think of al the things that might have happened to the master vampire in the time they had been gone from his lair. Who would have thought that she would ever care about what happened to him?

They got closer to the site of the old house, and Kevin slowed. Briony slid down from his back as the others paused in the trees. It was so dark now that Briony could only just make out Jake and Fal on. Yet further on it seemed lighter, the trees ahead pierced by an orange glow.

“What is it?” Briony asked. She didn’t raise