1
“There it is!” Joel Demetrius leaned across his sister to point through the car window. “Look, Cass, that’s the house.”
At this distance, through the trees, you could see the size of the place but not the state of it. The peeling paint was invisible in the shadowed glimpses between tree trunks—the gaps in the slate roof were camouflaged by the mottling of age and moss. To Joel it looked huge and fascinating, a marked departure from the near-identical yellow-brick houses they’d been passing for most of the journey.
Cassie shrugged sullenly, and sank deeper into the car seat. “So?”
“So . . . there it is.” Joel had decided he wasn’t going to let his sister bring him down, but it wasn’t proving an easy vow to keep. She’d been determinedly hating every moment of the trip so far, and they hadn’t even got to the part she was unhappy about yet.
“I can’t believe we have to share a house with them,” Cassie grumbled, low but just loud enough to be sure that Mum heard from the driver’s seat. His older sister had never been shy about making her opinions known, and when it was snarled in that tone of voice, “them” could mean only one thing: Gerald Wilder and his two sons. Or, as Cassie preferred to think of them, the intruders.
It had been just the two of them and Mum for as far back as Joel’s memory would stretch. Cassie claimed to remember their father, but she was only a year older so that couldn’t mean much: he’d walked out on them so early that Joel wouldn’t have known the man’s face if it hadn’t been for photographs. If his sister missed their father more than he did, she was certainly in no hurry to replace him. So far as she was concerned, the three of them were just fine together, and the rest of the world could take a hike. Especially those parts of the world containing Gerald Wilder.
Joel didn’t really mind Gerald. It was weird to have him around, weirder still for Mum to be engaged to him, but he seemed to be an all right sort of guy. Joel had gradually got used to him. Cassie hadn’t, and she didn’t want to try. She hated Gerald, she hated his kids even more, and she hadn’t stopped screaming about it since she’d found they were all moving in together. Unfortunately for her, it was from Mum that she’d inherited that stubborn streak, and she was definitely fighting a losing battle. Joel just wished she’d give it up and surrender gracefully.
He was actually quite looking forward to it all. Their old flat had been tiny, too cramped even when they were kids, never mind now they were both in their teens. Gerald had found this battered old place through his work in the building trade, and even though it would be like living on a construction site for the first few months, it would be worth it just to have so much space.
“Come on, Cassie!” Joel urged. “The place is massive! We could probably live there for, like, a year, and never even have to see them.”
He was exaggerating, and only trying to stir Cassie out of her gloom, but their mother shot him a stern glance in the rear-view mirror. “Joel, don’t you start as well,” she warned. “One attitude problem in this car is already one too many. The Wilders are a part of this family now whether you like it or not, and you are going to be nice to them.”
“You can’t make me,” Cassie muttered, slumping down in her seat. “I didn’t ask to come. You can’t make it sound like I owe them something when I didn’t even want to come.”
“Cassandra Demetrius, that will do! It’s about time you got over yourself, young lady. Gerald is a perfectly nice man, and he has two lovely children, and if I say you’re getting along with them—you’re getting along with them.” Their mother had been uncharacteristically anxious about the pair of them taking to Gerald and his family, but her patience only stretched so far.
“Lovely? Them?” Cassie scoffed in disbelief. “Have you met them?”
“Cassie. Stop it!” Their mother’s voice had reached the warning level. For a moment Joel was afraid his sister would push it anyway, but she eased off and went back to staring moodily out of the window.
They pulled up in the big driveway, and piled out of the car. Joel roamed the front garden, glad of the chance to stretch his legs, but Cassie only had disapproving eyes for the shabby white van that was already parked there. “They’re here,” she said in a gloomy voice.
Their mother chose to ignore the tone. “Yes, they are,” she said brightly. “Gerald’s been working really hard to get this place in a fit state to live in, so maybe you should be a little nicer to him. Now, if one of you two would like to run round the back and tell them we’ve arrived—”
“I’ll do it,” Joel volunteered quickly. It wouldn’t go well if Cassie was ordered to do it.
They’d been told to use the back door, because the imposing front entrance had seized up and was going to need some oiling. For all that it was stuck shut, it didn’t make much of a barrier—the wooden porch was so warped and rotten it wouldn’t have taken much effort to tear a hole in it.
No would-be thief had bothered to make that effort—it was obvious from the most cursory glance that the house had been long abandoned. The paint was peeling, the wood was rotting, and almost everything that could crack, sag or fall off had already done so. All the same, the house retained a certain grandeur that the effects of age hadn’t erased. Joel thought it was a sad sight, like seeing someone who’d become a shadow of their former self after years of hardship.
Cassie was not nearly so inclined to be charitable. “Jeez, what a dump,” she said, shaking her head in disgust.
“It just needs a little work,” their mother said, with perhaps a tad too much optimism.
