Read The Diamond of Darkhold - 4 for Free Online Page A

he took a piece of paper from his pocket. “I’ve made a list of things we need to take with us,” he said. He handed the paper to Lina. She read through it. The list was long: warm clothes, a blanket, candles, matches, dried food, bottles for water. . . . Lina read on.
    “You’ll need a pack you can carry on your back,” Doon said. “Can you make one?”
    “I guess so,” Lina said.
    “We’ll meet in three days,” Doon said. “Where the river road goes out into the fields, at the north end of town.”
    “All right,” Lina said. She saw in Doon the determination he’d had on that last day of school in Ember, when everything began, when he’d thrown down his job assignment and outraged the mayor, when he’d shouted out that the city was headed for disaster unless something was done. He wasn’t shouting now. But he had that same fierce look in his eyes.
    At that moment, the door opened, and Edward Pocket came in. “Aha,” he said. “Do I have two helpers this morning instead of only one?”
    Doon said, “No, I just had to talk to Lina for a minute; she’s going.”
    “Don’t you want to see my latest find first?” Edward said. He rummaged through a heap of books near the door and brought out one with a bent purple cover. “I read this yesterday,” he said. “It’s one of the strangest yet.” He showed them the title: Famous Fairy Tales. “I read the whole thing,” Edward said, “but I’m still not sure what a fairy is. Some sort of combination of a person and an insect, I think. The strangest things happen in these stories.”
    “Like what?” Lina asked, peering at the pages of the book as Edward flipped through it. There were pictures, and if she hadn’t been in the middle of such an important conversation with Doon, she would have liked to look at them.
    “Oh,” said Edward, “mostly terrible things. People turn into frogs, or go to sleep for a thousand years, or fight with huge lizards. I doubt that these things are true. But even if they are, everything almost always turns out quite well. Nearly all the stories have the same last sentence: ‘They lived happily ever after.’ Of course, that can’t be true, either.”
    “It can’t?” Lina said. It sounded lovely to her: happily ever after.
    Doon was jiggling a foot impatiently.
    “Of course not,” said Edward, “unless this world we’re in now works in a whole different way from the one where we used to live.”
    “Lina,” said Doon. “I’ll walk out with you.”
    “May I borrow that book sometime?” Lina asked Edward. He said of course she could, and she thanked him and went outside with Doon.
    “So we’ll meet in three days,” Doon said once they were several steps away from the door. “We’ll go early, really early, before anyone is up. Can you be there just before sunrise?”
    “I’ll be there,” Lina said. It will be all right, she told herself. We’ll be gone only a few days. It will be fine.

    It was easy to get Maddy to come help Mrs. Murdo. When Lina found her, she was by the riverbank, making her way slowly along, head down. Maddy was the kind of person who seems scary at first. She was big, and she didn’t smile much, and she wasn’t in the least chatty. But Lina had learned that there was kindness behind Maddy’s stern appearance, so she approached her now without hesitation.
    Maddy was wearing a green cape that made her look even larger than she was. Her wild swirl of red-brown hair fell in tangles on either side of her face. She glanced up when she heard Lina coming, nodded, and went back to her task.
    “I’m gathering round lettuce,” she said when Lina asked what she was doing. She showed Lina a basket full of small round leaves. “It’s good for you, and it doesn’t taste too bad.”
    When Lina explained about needing a change and asked Maddy if she’d trade places with her for a few days, Maddy said right away that she would. “There isn’t much going on here except building right