Free The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens

he sat back, smiling his grand-fatherly smile. “Excellent. By the way, I asked Miss Sallow to do something special for dinner tomorrow. Goose, perhaps. It is Christmas Eve, after all.”
    “What?!” chorused Kate and Emma.
    “Why, yes. Hadn’t you realized?” Then, as if a thought had occurred to him, he murmured, “Oh, of course. It was Christmas Eve you were left at your first orphanage, wasn’t it? So tomorrow will be”—he appeared to be doing the math in his head—“the ten-year anniversary of your parents’ disappearance.”
    Kate was dumbstruck. Was tomorrow really Christmas Eve? How had she not known that? It was almost as if while they were talking to the Doctor, it wasn’t just hours that had passed, but days.
    Dr. Pym stood up. “Perhaps by tomorrow, your brother will be fully recovered and I’ll have the pleasure of meeting him.” He guided the girls, both of whom still felt fuzzy-headed, to the door. “Tell me, are you possibly on your way to see Abraham?”
    Kate didn’t question how he might know this. She just nodded thickly.
    “Ask him to show you the last picture he ever took. I think you might find it interesting.”
    And with that, he ushered them out and closed the door.

    As soon as Kate and Emma were out of the library, their heads cleared.
    “What happened?” Emma said. “It was like my brain got all mooshy.”
    “Me too.”
    “You figure he did some magic on us? I said stuff I never told anyone. You think it’s all right?”
    Kate could hear the worry in Emma’s voice. She probed her own feelings. She knew the normal reaction to having shared too much of one’s heart. You felt shame and regret and wished you could take it back. But the truth was, she felt as if she had been allowed to put down something she’d been carrying for so long that its weight had become part of her. And climbing up the spiral stairway to Abraham’s tower, she felt oddly light. She was aware of the coldness of the air drafting through the walls. The song of a distant bird. The creak of the stairs beneath her and Emma’s feet. And though the task in front of them was daunting—for she had no real idea how she and her eleven-year-old sister were going to rescue Michael from the witch and her demon soldiers—she felt a hundred times better than she had that morning.
    “Yes,” she said. “I think it’s okay.”
    “Me too,” Emma said. And Kate saw she was smiling.
    They pounded on Abraham’s door for a full two minutes, but again, no one answered.
    “He’s really starting to make me angry,” Emma said.
    Downstairs, they found Miss Sallow scrubbing the floor of the main hall.
    “I’ve sent the old coot to get the Doctor’s Christmas goose. He’ll probably have to go back down to Westport. He’ll be here by nightfall.”
    “But we need to talk to him now,” Emma said.
    “Oh, do you, Your Highness? Well, perhaps in the future we should arrange our schedules with your personal secretary. But until that blessed day”—she stuck a mop in Emma’s hands and pushed a bucket and brush into Kate’s—“you two can make yourselves useful.”
    She hustled them to the large formal dining room, where, she said, Dr. Pym wanted to have Christmas Eve dinner. It was an enormous, wood-paneled room with a long oak table in the center. Above the table hung two wrought-iron candelabras between which spiderwebs were strung like tinsel. There was a stone fireplace so huge Kate and Emma could’ve fit their entire bed inside it. At present, a family of foxes lived there. Two stone dragons held up the mantel, and they, like everything else, were covered with a thick coating of dust and grime.
    “Dr. Pym says not to disturb the foxes, but the rest I want clean as Sunday morning at your Paris Louvre.”
    “This is stupid,” Emma said when Miss Sallow had left. “We have to help Michael.”
    “I know,” Kate said. “But we can’t do anything till we get a picture from Abraham.”
    Emma grumbled