Troubletwisters by Garth Nix, Sean Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

snack?’
    ‘She’s fed well enough already where she lives.’
    ‘I thought she was your cat,’ said Jaide.
    ‘If Kleopatra here belongs to anyone, it’s to David Smeaton, who runs the second-hand bookshop around the corner. She just likes to visit, when it suits her.’
    Kleo meowed again, defensively.
    ‘Rubbish!’ said Grandma X. ‘Ari is always happy to see you, whatever his other . . . ah . . . engagements. Wait here and I’ll get the cards.’
    Kleo inclined her head in regal agreement and turned her attention to the twins. She watched them and the children watched the cat until, one after the other, they found Kleo’s cool blue gaze too unnerving. Surely cats weren’t supposed to look people in the eye, Jack wondered, or engage them in staring contests?
    ‘Uh, can I pat you?’ asked Jaide.
    ‘Rowr,’ Kleo acquiesced. She lay down and allowed herself to be stroked.
    Grandma X bustled back into the room, holding a rather large pack of cards.
    ‘Who wants to deal?’ she said. Instead of waiting for an answer, she continued, ‘You try it, Jack. Five cards each, facedown, just like poker.’
    Jack took the deck from her and almost dropped it, surprised by its weight. The cards were more square than rectangular, and though at first he had thought they were gilt-edged, by the weight alone he realised they were actually thin plates of gold that had been enamelled with colourful designs, the diamond pattern on the backs a rich green and red, reminiscent of a tartan.
    ‘Deal Kleo in, too,’ Grandma X added as Jack tentatively shuffled the metal cards. ‘She can sit in this round.’
    Mad as a meat axe , Jack thought, using a phrase his father sometimes employed to describe very rich people who paid millions for paintings they didn’t like by artists who were famous. It was bad enough that Grandma X talked to cats as though they could understand her. Now she expected them to play cards as well!
    Odder still was what he saw on the cards when he picked up his hand. Instead of the usual suits and numbers, there were illustrations in red and green lines of enamel on the first three cards: a cave mouth in a mountain; a crescent moon; and a wave that reminded him of a famous Japanese woodcut of a tsunami. Even stranger, the last two cards were blank, just burnished gold, without enamelled illustrations.
    Jaide was puzzling over her cards, too. She had been dealt an old-fashioned sun with long, wavy streaks of fire around a disc; a bird in flight, its wings outstretched, with more wavy lines that she supposed represented the wind underneath; a half-shut human eye with very long lashes; and she also had two cards of plain burnished gold.
    ‘Let’s see what I’ve got,’ said Grandma X. She laid her cards on the table, but stacked so only the topmost card was visible. It was a crescent moon.
    ‘As one might expect,’ she commented. Quickly she flicked over her other cards. The next three were all also crescent moons. The fifth card was the same eye Jaide had, only instead of being half-shut, it was open and staring.
    Jaide and Jack looked at each other and knew they were thinking the same thing: What kind of game was this, when Grandma X showed her hand at the start?
    Instead of explaining, Grandma X pointed at the five cards sitting in a stack in front of Kleo, who was sitting up again and had one paw sitting on them as if she actually did know how to play. ‘Do either of you know what cards Kleo has?’
    ‘How could we?’ Jaide asked. ‘We can’t see them.’
    ‘Well, if you don’t know, perhaps you can guess. Let’s see if, between the three of us, we can get all five by guessing two each. That gives us one spare guess. I’ll go first: a tree and the hanged mouse. Now you guess, Jaidith.’
    ‘But the only cards I know in this weird deck are yours and the ones I have!’ Jaide protested.
    ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Grandma X with a wink. ‘Perhaps this deck contains anything you can think