Thud! The door hinges began to work. A nail popped out and flew across the kitchen.

“Isaac,” Kat said. “Look at the map. I think there’s a staircase behind the hutch.”

Isaac and Amelie bent over the map. “Yes! It’s there,” Ame cried.

Bang! One of the hinges popped off the wall.

Isaac ran for the hutch and began to shove. “Leo, Amelie, give me a hand.”

They pushed as Kat and Lark braced for whatever was trying to come through the door. The hutch budged an inch, when . . .

Bang!

Both hinges popped, and Kat and Lark leapt aside right before the door crashed to the floor of the kitchen.

“Oh,” cried Lark.

“Oh, by all the saints,” whispered Amelie. “How horrible.”

“Miss Gumble?” Kat asked. “Oh, Miss Gumble.”

The monster version of Miss Gumble, with blank eyes and pincer hands, stood in the doorway. Clutched tight in one of those pincers, dragging behind her like a sack, was the limp body of a still-unconscious Colin.

CHAPTER 51

Isaac

1942

“Push,” Isaac said as he shoved at the hutch. “Now.”

Lark stood her ground, armed with her kitchen knives. “Ha! Can’t come over the threshold. Salt.”

“Oh, Miss Gumble,” Kat said again, her voice full of sorrow, and she lowered the frying pan.

“We’ve got to get Colin,” Amelie said. She moved away from the hutch and toward the prone boy.

At that, Gumble took a heavy step right over the trail of salt.

Lark tripped backward. “No.”

Kat bent and tapped her finger from the salt to her mouth. “Sugar, not salt!”

“Oh,” Lark wailed. “I’m hopeless!”

“Push,” Isaac cried, as the monstrous Gumble dragged Colin across the threshold. Isaac and Leo shoved as one, and the hutch opened to reveal a doorway. Isaac grabbed Amelie’s arm, and then . . .

. . . everyone froze in horror.

Slithering behind the unconscious Colin was an even more hideous being than Gumble. Not human (at least, not any longer), not animal (except for horrible sharp teeth and long fingernails), the creature looked straight at Kat, raised one bony arm, and pointed. And gurgled.

Kat took a step away, dropping the frying pan with a clang.

Lark cried out and fled to the far side of the room.

Willow gave a shriek and retreated to the ceiling. “Wraith! It’s the wraith.”

The hum rose in Isaac, the hum of an ancient dark magic, and he wrestled with it, tried to contain it. He could read this wraith’s tortured mind.

There was so much confusion, such hatred, in that miserable wraith, and it harnessed a magic different from Moloch’s—older, deeper, more primitive. Isaac’s mind filled with images of bones and sinew, pits of slithering vipers, giant spiders, and tortured creatures fused with wheels, pins, cogs—mechanical nightmares like the poor little mouse and Miss Gumble. The horror of those images chilled Isaac, froze him, made his knees weak.