On a scale of one to ten, the evening fell somewhere between picking his teeth and babysitting bricks.

College students arrived in their fancy cars kicking up clouds of dust and pumping bad music.

The few students from Charlie’s class spent the evening laughing a little too loud and drinking ginger beer in beer bottles and pairing off and trying a little too hard to be cool.

Charlie and Allie were so bored they sat on a wooden railing, jabbing each other in the ribs for half an hour. It got so bad they tried stalking the lantern, which was a first, and when they reached the other side, the people who were supposed to be guarding it had disappeared leaving Joanne Hanke to cover a mile radius with her little flashlight.

She scrambled around on the brink of a nervous breakdown trying to keep it all together.

Allie seemed quieter than normal for most of the night. Mark hadn’t spared her a glance and she eventually went home early complaining about a headache.

Charlie knew there was more to it than that, but he was also more than ready to leave. He couldn’t stop thinking about the girl in the greenhouse. Secretly he’d hoped that he would meet her here.

Instead, the only other guy to make it to the lamp latched onto them like a lost puppy and kept turning the conversation to torch technology: “You need a good penlight with a long narrow tube for looking into people’s ears,” he explained importantly. “And nothing beats a silver top flashlight with black trim to go with a nice sports jacket. Make sure you get one with a pocket clip; it makes you look sophisticated and it drives the ladies wild.” He nudged Charlie, giggling profusely.

“I prefer a good belt,” Charlie said. “If you forget it behind, your pants will trip you up on the way to the door. Now that’s a clever design.”

The boy went on to explain what torches would last the longest, which were waterproof—though Charlie doubted he would ever lose his way in the shower enough to ever need one—and the guy told them what were the best torches to find your way to the toilet at night. He said the rule of thumb was you don’t want something so bright it blinds you and you end up spraying the seat, or too dark that you sit in the laundry basket.

Back home Charlie kicked off his shoes and lay on his bed staring at the letter again.

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He held it up to the light to see if he could discover anything, but the paper was too thick. He tried dropping the letter to break the seal ‘accidentally,’ but the floor was carpeted so that didn’t work either. He must have put it back in his bag and pulled it out half a dozen times before he finally talked himself into taking a look inside.

What if it contained something awful? Like that—like that white powder stuff the terrorists put in letters to melt your face, and he was sure she liked her face. He should spare the poor girl the horror. Yes, he was doing her a favour.

He grabbed a sandwich for extra energy, pocketed his mum’s lighter and a kitchen knife to heat over it, and felt the same nervous excitement he had sneaking through the manor.

He burned his fingers and got a bit of peanut butter on the letter, but he finally got the blade under the wax seal and popped it open in one piece. He just needed a blob of chewing gum and he could reseal it without anyone suspecting anything.

As the paper fell open, there came that whispering again like a group of people standing around him talking all at once. He almost shoved it back in his bag for real then but the thought of spending the next school event with Joanne Hanke and the flashlight kid convinced him to keep going.

His hands rattled as he opened it all the way.

The letter was simple: there was a drawing of a ring with a few lines of hand-written text beneath it. He read the words aloud, slowly and deliberately.

“To come this far takes courage. To go beyond takes something far greater.”

It was signed ‘The Council of Nine.’

“Is that it?” He turned it over, feeling a little cheated after all he had gone through to open it, and a ring fell out into his lap—a ring like the one in the letter.

He lifted it, wondering why he hadn’t felt anything through the paper, and when he turned the page over again to compare it to the drawing, the drawing was no longer there.

The ring didn’t look like any ring he had ever seen. It consisted of a plain silver band with scales rippling beneath it like the skin of a snake. He couldn’t imagine a girl would be into that, and no, he certainly wasn’t jealous that someone else had given her a ring; he hardly knew her, so that would be weird.

Besides, everyone knew you gave a girl flowers so if she hit you over the head with them, it wouldn’t hurt as much, and you’d smell good afterwards.

The ring seemed far too small, but when he pressed it to his fingertip it slid on without a problem. In fact, it was a perfect fit. As it settled into place the lights flickered and the whispering started up again. The words came clearer this time and they all seemed to be saying the same thing: “It has begun.”

A sudden gust of wind blew in the curtains, and Charlie scrambled off his bed with the same uneasy feeling he got sometimes when he walked home at night through some of the lonelier parts of town.

He hurried to close the window and tested the latch two or three times to make sure it was firmly in place.