Twist of the Blade by Edward Willett Read Free Book Online Page A

line, rolled onto his side, and finally fumbled the ancient pink handset out of its cradle with his left. “Hello?” he rasped.
    He expected to hear Ariane on the other end, or one of his parents. Instead he heard a voice he’d last heard two weeks ago, in an open-pit diamond mine in the Northwest Territories, from a man holding a gun to his head.
    “Hello, Wally,” said Rex Major. “How are you feeling?”
    Wally’s first inclination was to slam the phone back down into its cradle, but something stopped him. Partly, it was simple curiosity. But partly...maybe mostly...it was the little worm of doubt curling in his heart – doubt, now that he had seen how the Lady’s power could affect Ariane, about how much of what the Lady of the Lake had told them about Rex Major had been the truth.
    “I’m...fine,” he said cautiously. “A slight concussion, a few stitches. Why do you care?”
    “Wally,” said Major, in a tone the boy had not heard him use before, the very opposite of the Voice of Command, “I apologize for what happened in Yellowknife. But you must understand how desperate I was...how desperate I am ...to retrieve the shards of Excalibur. For more than a thousand years I have dreamed of a world united under one strong, benevolent ruler, someone who can keep order, ensure justice for all, punish wrongdoers. Excalibur has the power to make that happen, in the right hands.”
    “You mean your hands,” said Wally.
    “Yes,” Major said. “I don’t deny it. I tried once before to rule through a surrogate. But Arthur, though a great man, had his weaknesses, and let his kingdom fall when he could have saved it. Or perhaps I could have saved it, had my sister not already conspired with Viviane to have me imprisoned.”
    “I never heard of Merlin having a sister,” Wally said. “But hey, if she tried to stop you , she must have been all right.”
    Major laughed. “Wally, you’re smarter than that. She’s still trying to stop me. But she always did like to use others to do her dirty work. Then, it was Viviane. Now...it’s you.”
    It took a second for what Major was saying to sink in. “The Lady of the Lake is your sister?”
    “Yes. We’re not close,” he added. “Obviously. But we were once.”
    “I know how that goes,” Wally said, wondering, even as he replied, what the heck he was doing chit-chatting with Rex Major (aka Merlin aka the ancient sorcerer trying to take over the world ) as though they were classmates.
    But he wasn’t about to hang up after that bombshell about the Lady being Merlin’s sister. The Lady had never mentioned that little fact.
    “We were allies,” Major continued. “She believed then, as I still do now, that we must overthrow the tyrants who rule Faerie. But...” he sighed. “She succumbed to the temptations of wealth and power. Rather than fight tyrants, she decided to become one, seizing control of Clade Avalon.”
    “Avalon? Isn’t that an island?”
    “A legendary island,” Major said. “No one knows where it was, because it was never really here. It could appear in any lake, or at sea. In reality it was a doorway to the real Avalon, my realm...until my sister betrayed me.”
    “And I thought I had problems with my sister,” Wally muttered.
    “How is your sister?” Major said. “I know she was seriously injured by your girlfriend this evening
    “Ariane is not my girlfriend,” Wally answered automatically. He was used to the words by now – he had repeated them a lot over the last two weeks, after his classmates noticed how much time he and Ariane spent together.
    “Perhaps that’s a good thing,” Major said softly. “She seems...dangerous.”
    Wally said nothing.
    “But you still haven’t told me,” said Major again after a moment. “How is your sister?”
    “Broken bones. Cuts and bruises. She’ll be in the hospital longer than I will.”
    “And your parents? Your father was home just a short while ago, was he not? Has he or your