The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)

“But didn’t you say he was your brother?” Mack said, and then, without waiting for Sylvie’s response, added, “And doesn’t he work for Paddy ‘Nine Iron’ Trout?”

Sylvie shrugged expressively. “He learns from the man in green, but does he serve him? Valin serves himself alone, I think.”

“As long as he is working against us, he’s working for the Pale Queen,” Mack said sharply.

“You see the world in simple black and white? It must be us and them? Good and evil?”

“In this case, yeah,” Mack said. “The Pale Queen is

evil.”

“How do you know this? Because the ancient Grimluk has told you?”

Mack moved back a few inches. “Okay, yes. But I’ve also met Risky. That girl is evil.”

“You feel it here?” Sylvie lay her hand over his heart.

He nodded because he couldn’t speak.

Sylvie returned that wordless gesture. “Yes. And so I felt when Valin introduced me to l’homme en vert, the man in green. Paddy ‘Nine Iron’ Trout.”

“Yeah, he gives off a kind of evil vibe.”

“A vibe. Yes,” Sylvie said, not quite agreeing. “It was Valin who told me that I was one of the Magnificent Twelve. He told me that the strangeness of my life was because of this curse.”

“Curse?” The word surprised Mack.

“Of course it is a curse. How could it be a blessing, Mack? To have power is to have responsibility. I would have to devote my life to maintaining the empty shell of existence.”

“Um … well, I kind of guess I don’t think existence is meaningless,” Mack said.

That caused one of Sylvie’s eyebrows to rise in amused skepticism, but she didn’t respond directly. “Valin told me all. He revealed what I had never known: that we shared a father. But Valin was obsessed with his mother’s side of his family, indifferent to the father we shared. He told me that a terrible wrong had been done to his family by your people.”

“Did he tell you what his beef was? Because as far as I know, my family is pretty boring.”

“It was a long time ago,” Sylvie said.

“Even a long time ago my family was boring.”

“He did not explain this … as you said, beef. Instead he told me of himself and of the man in green. He told me too much, perhaps. Because as he explained, it seemed to me that I must not join him. But rather that I should fight against him.”

“Wouldn’t that be meaningless, too?”

“I must defend la liberté, liberty, no? I am French, after all.”

That seemed obvious to her, and Mack was frankly so confused by Sylvie he felt it best just to keep quiet.

“Valin, he foolishly trusted me with the names of two others who he would attempt to recruit to his side.”

“You beat him to those two?”

For the first time, Sylvie smiled. “Valin is very old-fashioned. He does not know email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. Before he could even begin to reach the two, I had found them online. They figured out ways to come to Paris. And I went in search of you, to unite us all together.”

“How did you find me?”

“You leave a trail of YouTubes behind you, Mack.”

Mack thought back on the first shaky YouTube video that showed him and Stefan running from Skirrit at Richard Gere Middle School;25 the YouTube video of him being dragged out the door of a jet by a monstrous version of Risky; the one about the swollen, bloated blue-cheese-filled Lepercons; the one some shaky tourist had filmed of the Great Wall of China.... Yes, he hadn’t exactly concealed his tracks. It didn’t seem as if the authorities had caught on yet. There were millions of hits on Mack’s various inadvertent (and terrifying) videos, but the consensus of opinion was that it was all a massive game being perpetrated as part of an advertising campaign for a movie.