Emily Windsnap and the Land of the Midnight Sun Read Online Free PDF

stage in a theater — and about as dramatic. The room was full of weird and wonderful furniture: a chaise longue in the shape of a giant lobster, an enormous cushion that looked like purple silk but could just as easily have been a giant eel wrapped around and around itself, coral-covered rocks lighting up the floor below our tails, a curtain of falling water across the center of the chamber.
    We swam across the room looking for Neptune. We could hear him; the snores sent vibrations through the whole place so hard that it made my teeth rattle. They were coming from the other side of the waterfall curtain. We swam toward it, pushed through it — and stopped.
    On the other side, we saw Neptune. At least, we saw bits of him. He was lying inside something that
could
have been a piece of furniture — the grandest, largest piece of them all, an amber bed, with Neptune on the inside, and eight pillars around him, twirling upward and tailing into a spiral above him. The pillars began to move and twitch as we approached — which was when we realized that they weren’t pillars. They were —
    “An octopus!” Aaron blurted out. “Neptune sleeps on an
octopus
?”
    I looked again, and just about managed to stop myself from turning and swimming straight out of there and never coming back. It looked so similar to something I’d seen before, and
never
wanted to see again. The kraken. Neptune’s special pet. The one I’d woken early from its hundred-year sleep. The one that nearly destroyed a whole island, not to mention a cruise ship full of people — including my mom.
    But Aaron was right. This wasn’t the kraken. Its tentacles weren’t filled with slime and goo and disgusting purple suckers. They looked, like everything else around here, as though they were filled with jewels. Triangles of light bounced off the suckers as they wafted with the movement of the water. No, this was just a harmless, innocent —
enormous
— octopus, which happened to serve the role of being Neptune’s bed.
    I had begun to think about the possibility of relaxing a little when Neptune suddenly let out a roar.
    “NOOOOOO! You will not!” he shouted. “The water! Fetch the water! I’m cold. So cold. Quick, catch the water. Catch it! Before it’s too late! Before it . . .”
    What was he talking about?
    A wave suddenly grabbed me, rolled me around like a snowball, and hurled me across the room. The room was shaking. The walls vibrating. The chandeliers jangling.
What was happening?
    Another, more violent, wave picked me up and threw me again. This time I landed next to Aaron. He was holding on to a dagger-shaped stalactite on the ceiling. He held out his other hand to me. I scrabbled through the current and reached out. Missed. Tried again, but got caught in a whirling current that spun me around as if I were an old pair of jeans on a spin cycle.
    Finally, I lunged against the tide and grabbed Aaron’s hand. Instantly, the water calmed. The spin cycle stopped. The room quieted and stilled. A minute later, it was as if it had never happened. Was Neptune right about us still having his power? Had we stopped his storm with our hands? Or had the storm merely worked its way out and finished of its own accord? I didn’t have long to think about it, as Neptune had woken up.
    We swam across the room to see the giant octopus slowly unfurl itself as Neptune sat up inside it, his tail draped lazily in between two of the octopus’s tentacles.
    “You came,” he said simply.
    “You ordered us to,” I pointed out.
    Neptune half smiled. “Quite. Well, then. On to business. Let me tell you about my dream.”

    “Business” was basically listening to Neptune talk for an hour, and trying to pick out the parts that . . .
    a) made any sense;
    b) might help us figure out how to prepare for our mission;
    c) gave us some indication about the minor details, like, oh, you know, where we actually needed to go.
    Unfortunately, there wasn’t much of
any
of these.