Inkheart Read Free

bag of walnuts. Sometimes he chased her around the house after supper until she escaped into her room, breathless with 7

    laughter. And sometimes he was so tired he lay down on the sofa and she made him a cup of coffee before she went to bed. But he had never ever sent her off to her room so brusquely.
    A foreboding, clammy and fearful, came into her heart as if, along with the visitor whose name was so strange yet somehow familiar, some menace had slipped into her life. And she wished —
    so hard it frightened her — that she had never gone to get Mo and Dustfinger had stayed outside until the rain washed him away.
    When the door of the workshop opened again she jumped.
    "Still there, I see," said Mo. "Go to bed, Meggie. Please." He had that little frown over his nose that appeared only when something was really worrying him, and he seemed to look straight through her as if his thoughts were somewhere else entirely. The foreboding in Meggie's heart grew, spreading black wings.
    "Send him away, Mo!" she said as he gently propelled her toward her room. "Please! Send him away. I don't like him."
    Mo leaned in her open doorway. "He'll be gone when you get up in the morning. Word of honor."
    "Word of honor — no crossed fingers?" Meggie looked him straight in the eye. She could always tell when Mo was lying, however hard he tried to hide it from her.
    "No crossed fingers," he said, holding both hands out to show her.
    Then he closed her door, even though he knew she didn't like that. Meggie put her ear to it, listening. She could hear the clink of china. So the man with the sandy beard was getting a nice cup of tea to warm him up. I hope he catches pneumonia, thought Meggie . . . though he needn't necessarily die of it. Meggie heard the kettle whistling in the kitchen and Mo carrying a tray of clattering crockery back to the workshop. When that door closed she forced herself to wait a few more seconds, just to be on the safe side. Then she crept back out into the hallway.
    There was a sign hanging on the door of Mo's workshop, a small metal plaque. Meggie knew the words on it by heart. When she was five she had often practiced reading the old-fashioned, spindly lettering:
    Some books should be tasted
    some devoured,
    but only a few
    should be chewed and digested thoroughly.
    Back then, when she still had to climb on a box to read the plaque, she had thought the chewing and digesting were meant literally and wondered, horrified, why Mo had hung on his workshop door the words of someone who vandalized books. Now she knew what the plaque really meant, but tonight, she wasn't interested in written words. Spoken words were what she wanted to hear, the words being exchanged in soft, almost inaudible whispers by the two men on the other side of the door.
    8

    "Don't underestimate him!" she heard Dustfinger say. His voice was so different from Mo's. No one else in the world had a voice like her father's. Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone.
    "He'd do anything to get hold of it." That was Dustfinger again. "And when I say 'anything,' I can assure you I mean anything."
    "I'll never let him have it." That was Mo.
    "He'll still get his hands on it, one way or another! I tell you, they're on your trail."
    "It wouldn't be the first time. I've always managed to shake them off before."
    "Oh yes? And for how much longer, do you think? What about your daughter? Are you telling me she actually likes moving around the whole time? Believe me, I know what I'm talking about."
    It was so quiet behind the door that Meggie scarcely dared breathe in case the two men heard her.
    Finally, her father spoke again, hesitantly, as if his tongue found it difficult to form the words.
    "Then what do you think I ought to do?"
    "Come with me. I'll take you to them." A cup clinked. The sound of a spoon against china. How loud small noises sound in a silence. "You know how much Capricorn thinks of your talents. He'd be glad if you took it