There was a bench at the edge of the formal gardens. Hale scraped off the snow and ice, and Gabrielle laid out a blanket, and that is where they sat, Hale’s arm around her shoulders. It was late, and Kat was tired, so she leaned against him.
When Angus sat down beside her, no one said a word. Not even when Hamish and Gabrielle sat on the other side.
They were all as still as statues as a light flickered inside the dark castle, floating down the stairs like a fairy or a ghost.
When the door opened, Kat sat up. And waited.
“Now?” a voice asked from the shadows behind them.
Hale waited a beat. “Now.”
It only takes a second for the world to change sometimes. For up to become down, right to become left.
Dark to become light.
First, there was a click and then a light so bright it felt like instant day filled the darkness. The spotlight’s glare shone upon the mansion and the grounds, leaving dark shadows and a lone figure, almost glowing in the light, one hand held up to block the glare.
“Hello, Lady Georgette,” Hale said. “Leaving without me?”
“Scooter?” she said, but her voice had lost that dreamy, little girl quality. “What are you…”
Kat could tell the moment when Lady Georgette’s eyes began to adjust against the glare of the spotlight, when she was able to see the people who sat between the house and the garage, waiting.
“Scooter, oh, I was just going to—” The dreamy quality was back again.
“You weren’t going to leave without saying goodbye, were you?” Hale asked.
Lady Georgette shook her head. “No. I just couldn’t stay in that house with my father’s…body.”
Her voice broke. Her hands trembled. She made quite the pretty picture, but Kat couldn’t help but ask, “That father?”
The side door was opening, and Irina was there, the earl leaning on her arm, moving slowly but moving just the same.
“Georgie girl…” The earl started, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing—as if he’d rather be dead in truth than witness this.
Georgette gasped and brought her hands to her mouth, and the bag she was carrying landed in the snow.
“If my egg is in there—” Hale started toward her.
But Lady Georgette spun in his direction. “Your egg!” she snapped and the sweet little girl act was abandoned forever. “Your egg was stolen in London and the whole world knows it!”
She expected outrage, Kat could see. Georgette was looking for a scene. Nothing could have surprised her more than when Hale pulled a newspaper from his coat pocket and held it out toward her.
“Do they?” Hale asked. “Because this is a copy of yester-day’s London Herald.”
She looked at the headline, but Kat knew it wouldn’t make any sense.
“Yesterday’s real London Herald, that is. The secret’s still safe, Lady Georgette. Whatever buyers you found on the black market for that egg are never going to believe that it’s authentic. Not with another one being photographed and paraded over London like the queen.”
She looked at the headline: LONDON CHARITY GETS MAGI MIRACLE.
“I don’t… How?”
The snow was falling softly, shining in the too-bright light, so Kat yelled, “Simon?”
“Yeah?” The voice came from the shadows again as the garage doors opened.
Only then did Lady Georgette seem to realize that there was a boy in the garage, sitting behind a bank of laptops and very complicated equipment.
“I think we can turn the electricity back on,” Hale said, and in the next moment the mansion sprung to life like a Christmas tree, lights shining through every window.
Systematically, the lights that covered the grounds came on one by one, shining on the scene that, until then, had been invisible from the house.
There were huge banks of scaffolding covered with hoses and fans, a very complicated pulley system and something that Simon had patented when he was seven and was now used in nine out of ten big budget Hollywood movies.
“You can kill the snow too,” Kat said, and instantly, the fans stopped blowing and the hoses stopped running and just like that the storm was over.
“But…”
Too late, recognition dawned in Lady Georgette’s eyes. She grabbed her bag from the cold ground and bolted.
“Get out of my way,” she shouted, but Hale was bigger, stronger, angrier.
“Give me my egg.”
“It was never going to be your egg. It was mine. It should have always been mine. I’m his daughter. He bought it for my mother. But…no. I wasn’t even good enough for that, especially once she came along.” She glared at Irina who didn’t as much as blink. She’d heard worse in her life. And often. But Lady Georgette had been sitting on these words for most of her life, if Kat had to guess.
Nothing was going to stop them now.
“If I’d been a boy, then I would have been his real heir, then I would have been good enough, but I wasn’t. I was never…”
The earl eased closer, leaving Irina behind and drawing on some deep reservoir of strength. “Georgie…”
“My name is Georgette!” his daughter yelled. Tears streaked her cheeks and Kat wondered if her heart was so cold it might freeze. “It’s a girl’s name, Father. For a girl. For your daughter. And you would have left me penniless if you’d had your way.”