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

now,” she said. “And building is not my specialty.” So they arranged it: in three days, Maddy and Lina would change places.
    Persuading Mrs. Murdo was a little harder. She didn’t understand why Lina would choose this difficult time to go away.
    “But it’s because it’s a difficult time,” Lina said, following after Mrs. Murdo as she went from one task to another—poking the fire, sweeping dirt out the door, wringing out clothes that had been soaking in a bucket. “I need a break from it. And Maddy needs a change, too. She’ll be just as much of a help as me. More, even.”
    “Maddy is a capable person, it’s true,” Mrs. Murdo conceded, scraping candle drippings from the table.
    “It’s only for a few days,” said Lina. She gave Mrs. Murdo her best pleading look, although there was still a little bit of her that wished to be forbidden, so she wouldn’t have to go.
    But Mrs. Murdo gave in. So there would be no backing out, and Lina began to get ready. For the next three days, she spent a lot of time trying to do things without being noticed. She said she was tired and went to her room to work on sewing sacks together to make a backpack. She kept a sharp eye out for everyone’s comings and goings, and when no one was around, she took candles and matches from the cupboard. She took ten matches, hoping that Mrs. Murdo, who was very good at keeping the fire going, wouldn’t notice.
    Two nights before they were to leave, she wrote the note for Mrs. Murdo:

Doon and I have gone back to Ember to find
something important. We have a good plan,
don’t worry. We’ll be back in just a few days.
    Love, Lina

    She folded the note up small and buried it in the middle of a tub of dried beans in the kitchen. Mrs. Murdo used these beans for soup, but she wasn’t likely to use half the tub before Lina and Doon got back.
    After that, she had one more night of restless, wakeful sleep, and in the morning, loaded with a heavy backpack full of all the things on Doon’s list, she crept out of the house in the early darkness, long before anyone else was stirring. She paid a brief visit to the stinky, spidery outhouse in the backyard (in Ember, toilets were inside the house, right down the hall from the bedroom), and then she headed up the road. Stars shone in the black sky, and the ground, stiff with frost, crunched under her feet. When she got to the far end of the river road, she saw a shadowy figure. It was Doon, waiting for her. She hurried up to him. He had a pack on his back, and he was wearing his frayed green jacket and dark pants, but there was a dash of brightness about him, too—an orange scarf wrapped around his neck. Somehow it made him look ready for adventure.
    “There you are,” Doon whispered, even though there was no one anywhere around.
    Lina whispered, too. “I’m here. I’m ready, I think.”
    “All right,” said Doon. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER 5
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    Across the Hills
    They set out, walking side by side. The starlight was enough to see by, at least while they were still on the road. No moon shone. The moon had disappeared in the way it did every now and then; Lina wasn’t sure why. It grew from a silver sliver to a silver circle and shrank back into a sliver and disappeared, and it did this over and over. When she asked Doctor Hester why, she said, “It’s because of the earth’s shadow,” but the doctor was in a tearing hurry that day, rushing off to help someone who’d cut himself with his axe, and that was all she said before dashing out the door.
    The night was utterly still except for their footsteps on the road. No birds sang at this hour. On the left, the black bare branches of the trees stood against the slightly lighter black of the sky. On the right, the fields stretched away, scattered with the dead tomato vines that had been left to lie where they fell after the harvest.
    For a while, Lina and Doon didn’t speak. They walked quickly and steadily until they were