The Blood Binding Read Online Free PDF

another
way.”
    “No, wait,” said Belladonna.
“It’s extinct.”
    “Not getting your point, old
thing,” said Elsie.
    “Extinct,” repeated
Belladonna. “Like dinosaurs and mammoths…and you.”
    “Wait…you think it might be
growing in the Land of the Dead?”
    “Why not? The Queen of the
Abyss, Miss Parker, that is, said that everything that has ever lived and died
was somewhere on the Other Side.”
    “You’re joking, right?” said
Steve. “You want us to go to the Other Side to find a plant we’ve never seen?”
    “We don’t even know what it
looks like,” said Elsie.
    “We’ll ask,” said Belladonna.
“Who wrote your book, Steve?”
    “Ummm…Gertrude Jekyll.”
    “Is she dead?”
    Steve flipped to the front of
the book and scanned the biography.
    “Yes. 1932. She was born in
1843. It says she was a really famous garden designer.”
    “Garden designer?” said
Elsie. “Can I see?”
    Steve stepped aside and
turned the pages for her, as a smile spread slowly across her face.
    “I know exactly where she’ll
be! See you there!”
    “Wait,” yelled Belladonna,
stopping Elsie mid-dematerialization. “Why do we have to come? Can’t you just
bring it? We’ve got all these other things to find.”
    “If I bring it, it’ll just
vanish when I hand it to you. If it’s going to exist in the Land of the Living,
a living person has to fetch it.”
    Steve marched over to the
Classics shelves, rearranged the books in alphabetical order and stood back as
the door to the Sibyl’s temple slid open.
    “Come on,” he said. “Let’s
get this done.”
    “But lunch is nearly over,”
complained Belladonna. “We’ll miss all our afternoon classes!”
    “Sometimes sacrifices have to
be made.”

 
     
    “We’re going to get in so
much trouble,” muttered Belladonna, as she joined the grinning Steve by the
door. “See you in a few minutes, Elsie.”
    “Righty-ho!”
    “Um…could you go first?”
asked Steve.
    Belladonna rolled her eyes
and took his key-ring flashlight.
    “Honestly,” she said. “I
don’t see how you can be so scared of leggy insects when you keep dropping
spiders onto the chess club’s boards.”
    “That’s different. It isn’t
dark.”
    “That makes no sense,”
muttered Belladonna as they stepped through the door and started the descent.
    Journeys usually feel shorter
once you’ve done them a few times, but the aged winding staircase beneath the
school library always felt never ending. Eventually, however, they arrived in
the Cumaean Sibyl’s temple. The torches on either side of the great stone chair
sprang to life and the Sibyl’s disembodied voice echoed around the chamber.
    “WHO DARES TO…oh, it’s you
again.”
    “Yes, sorry,” said
Belladonna. “But we just need to use the lift.”
    “You don’t need to know the
future?”
    “Not this time. Thanks,
though,” said Steve.
    “Not even a little?” asked
the Sibyl, rather plaintively. “I could tell you if it’s going to rain
tomorrow.”
    “We don’t really need an
oracle for that,” said Steve, smiling. “Maybe next time.”
    “’Bye,” said Belladonna.
“Sorry.”
    “Typical,” muttered the
Sibyl.
    “ Arate Thyras!” commanded Belladonna.
    “Oh, I see,” complained the
voice of the Sibyl, which had moved from the vicinity of the great stone chair
to somewhere up in the ceiling near the stairs. “Now you know ancient Greek.
Very clever.”
    The doors of the elevator
slid open and Belladonna and Steve stepped inside. Steve pressed the
now-familiar button for the Land of the Dead, and the lift shot off sideways,
before descending rapidly at a slight angle and landing with a bump.
    Belladonna said the ancient
Greek for “open the doors” again and they found themselves back in the huge
rotunda of the House of Mists, the home of the ghosts’ seat of government, the
Conclave of Shadow.
    Elsie was waiting, but other
than that, the building was strangely silent.
    “Where is