The Key by Michael Grant Read Free Book Online

worked, but only a little. About a quarter of the skeletons stopped dead. Well, stopped, anyway. The rest kept right on coming.
    â€œThay aren’t a’ monsters, ye wee twit,” MacGuffin chortled.
    Jarrah had leaped to Stefan’s defense and was hauling back on skulls, and Xiao had raced to grab a torch from its sconce and was now swinging it around her so fast it was like a circle of fire.
    Dietmar grabbed Mack’s arm. “We need more Vargran!”
    â€œ Ret-ma … um … What’s the word for man ?”
    â€œ Dood! ” Dietmar supplied.
    â€œ Ret-ma dood! ” Mack cried, and at that instant a skeletal fist that had closed around his neck froze. Unfortunately, it froze in place. It froze choking Mack’s throat.
    Mack’s eyes began to bulge. He grabbed the skeletal human arm and yanked it wildly back and forth. The elbow snapped and the arm came loose. The grip stayed tight, so Mack twirled and gagged with a bony hand around his neck and a bony arm sticking out, and it’s amazing how quickly choking will drop you to your knees.
    The world was swimming around Mack and he knew his time was measured in seconds.
    Suddenly, there was Dietmar getting his fingers around the skeletal thumb and pulling just hard enough to let a few pumps of blood reach Mack’s buzzy brain.
    But then whatever skeletons weren’t either monster or human knocked Dietmar to the ground.
    Jarrah now had a torch of her own and was stabbing it into weird rib cages and up under bony jaws, and Xiao copied that action, and it seemed that, dead though they might be, the bony creatures didn’t like that much.
    The Magnifica had used Vargran to stop about half the skeletons, and with their fists and torches they were holding their own … until.
    Until MacGuffin seized a massive cudgel—a stick with a gnarled knob of polished wood on one end—and came wading into the fight.
    He jabbed the stick with amazing force into Stefan’s chest. Stefan staggered back, clutched at his chest, sucked air, and landed on his back.
    Seeing him down, the remaining skeletons regrouped. They pulled back, bunched together, and came on in a rush.
    Mack was still struggling with the bony hand around his throat, still gasping for air.
    Xiao, Dietmar, and Jarrah took the worst of it and all three were down in seconds, buried by a tangle of clacking bones.
    MacGuffin strode over to Mack, who was still very much in danger of passing out.
    â€œGimme up tae th’ All-Mother, wull ye?” He grabbed a handful of Mack’s curls and looked hard into Mack’s bulging, tear-streaming eyes. “Na, ah think ah will murdurr ye ’n’ then see howfur this rabble o’ yers likes it.”
    Connie zipped over, fast as a hummingbird but twice as mean. She had a coil of rope, and a weakened, gagging Mack could do nothing to stop being hogtied.
    MacGuffin pried the skeletal hand from Mack’s throat. A heap of bones assembled itself back into a proper skeleton and came over to retrieve the missing limb.
    Oxygen flooded Mack’s lungs, and his delirious brain refocused in time to see the skeleton army marching the Magnifica and Stefan to the gate of the castle, beaten, humiliated, and helpless.
    Mack himself was taken to the dungeon.

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Seven
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    H ave you ever seen a dungeon? They aren’t happy places. Down toward the foundation, the castle was built of massive blocks of granite, each of them about six feet by four feet.
    Those stones weren’t going anywhere.
    The dungeons were cells, with damp stone walls covered in lichen and mold and mildew and moss. But the lichen, etc.—that’s not what bothered Mack. He had no great fear of primitive plant phyla.
    In the corner of the cell was a cracked pottery jar that was supposed to be the toilet. At some later point, one of MacGuffin’s skeletal helpers would be coming by to collect whatever was in the chamber pot—and