Free The Dark Giants by Cerberus Jones

Amelia. ‘We’ve got Grawk back. He saved us again.’
    ‘Where is he?’ James asked.
    ‘Grawk?’ Amelia called.
    Foxy came in first, cowering a bit.
    ‘You!’ said Mum, slamming down the phone.
    Grawk padded in after him, and everyone sucked in a breath, shocked.
    ‘Did you do this to him?’ Mum asked Foxy.
    ‘No!’
    ‘It’s true,’ said Amelia. ‘Grawk was like this when we first saw him. It’s because
he’s growing up on Earth, or something.’
    Mum and Tom swapped anxious looks.
    ‘Amelia …’
    ‘It’s not his fault,’ she said, and without thinking she stepped close to him and
laid a protective hand on his neck. As her fingers sank into his velvety fur, she
realised this was the first time she’d touched him since before he’d disappeared.
And from the looks on everyone’s faces, they were just as uncertain of Grawk as she
was. True, he’d defended them from harm, and she was sure he was still basically
good, but did that mean he was safe ? Maybe not.
    She felt him vibrating under her hand, and when she heard the deep grinding noise,
she nearly snatched it away. Then she recognised that this was his purr, not his
growl, and she dared to scratch him behind the jaw.
    ‘See?’ she said, trying to sound more positive than she felt. ‘It’s still Grawk.
He’s just bigger.’
    ‘We’re going to have to tell Ms Rosby,’ said Mum.
    ‘Oh, but –’
    ‘She’s already on her way,’ Mum spoke over her. ‘As soon as we saw your beds were
empty, Dad called Tom. And then, with his line being cut, we knew there was trouble.
Lady Naomi had heard a scream, and she and Dad went out to see if they could find
where you’d gone. That just left me and Mary in the hotel, so of course we called
Control. At the very least,’ she smiled sadly at Sophie T, ‘we have to own up to
letting one more person into the gateway club.’
    Sophie T looked warily at all the faces suddenly turned to her. Amelia felt thoroughly
bad for her. Sophie T had been so worried about being laughed at, but they’d done
worse than that – they’d lied to her. And for all her fears of being left out, now
she was stuck on the inside of a secret she’d never wanted to know.
    James seemed to recognise what Sophie T was going through. ‘Come on,’ he said, getting
up from the charts and coming over to put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ll make you
some really sweet tea and you can ask me anything you like until this starts to make
sense to you.’
    Sophie T nodded forlornly and followed him to Tom’s kitchen. ‘I don’t think this
will ever make sense.’
    ‘Maybe not,’ James admitted. ‘But after a while, your brain will sort of stretch
enough to fit it in. You’ll see.’
    ‘I doubt it,’ said Sophie T, tiptoeing past Grawk with a little shudder. But when
she got to the kitchen, Mary wrapped her up in a huge motherly hug, and fussed over
her.
    ‘Oh, you poor child, oh, manari mou , come and tell me all about it.’
    Charlie rolled his eyes in sympathy, but Amelia saw Sophie T snuggle deeper into
Mary’s arms, and thought Sophie T was in just the right place.
    ‘As for you,’ Mum said to Foxy, ‘you’re under house arrest until Ms Rosby gets here.’
    Foxy huffed at the news, but didn’t look too sorry to be taken out of Grawk’s custody.
    She handcuffed Foxy’s wrist to the leg of Tom’s desk, and then turned to Amelia.
‘We really are going to have to do something about Grawk, cookie.’
    Amelia stood closer still to the warm black body, amazed at both his familiarity
(his smell, the softness of his fur) and his newness (he sat down, and his head was
now level with Amelia’s), but determined not to let her doubts show.
    ‘Mum, without Grawk we all would have been killed, captured or lost in a repeating
time bubble about six times already. We don’t need to do anything about him. We should
just be glad we’ve got him.’
    ‘I am,’ said Mum. ‘I’m grateful to him every day, and I know he’s kept