The Dark Portal (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 3) Read Free Page B

still clogged.
    H e gave her a light, fond kick from across the carriage to distract her. “Hey! Come back to us, Izzy. They’re them, you’re you. Now block out their emotions like Aunt Ramona taught you.”
    “Easy for you to say,” she mumbled.
    Dani put her arm around the older girl’s shoulders and Archie, sitting beside Jake, pulled faces at his sister until she finally smiled.
    When the whole funeral procession had finally crowded into the cemetery for the burial and the road was clear once more, Derek swung back up onto his horse and trotted over, coming alongside the carriage.
    “Everyone ready to move on?” he rumbled, skimming the four of them with his usual protective glance.
    “More than ready. What happened?” Jake asked, while Archie helpfully pulled the coat off the Gryphon’s head. Red snuffled and shook himself, happy to be rid of it.
    “Some sort of accident at the Harris Coalmine,” the fierce-eyed warrior said.
    Isabelle fl inched at this news and turned her morose stare out the window.
    Archie shook his head sagely. “Dangerous business, mining. Explosive gases, cave-ins, collapses. Long hours, fires, floods in the tunnels. Dangerous machines. Fantastic machines, of course,” he added with a grin, “but dangerous.”
    “Did y ou say Harris?” Jake asked, trying not to ponder the list of underground dangers Archie had just rattled off, for they only intensified the, er, slight phobia he already had about descending into the mine. “That’s the same name as that school over there. Which is haunted, by the way.”
    Derek glanc ed in the direction Jake had nodded and saw the sign by the wrought-iron fence. “Must be a Company school, for the miners’ children.”
    “How much farther, Derek?” Dani asked wistfully, petting Teddy on her lap. The little brown terrier wagged his tail as if he, too, couldn’t wait to get out of the coach.
    Derek squinted toward the road. He alone of their party had been to Plas-y-Fforest before, the Everton family’s Welsh cottage, having come here on holiday long ago with Jake’s father when the two were only boys themselves.
    “ No more than twenty minutes, I should think. Good thing, too.” He glanced at the sun to judge the hour. “We don’t want to be late for our tour. The dwarves are a prompt people. They’ll be offended if we’re late. Best get moving.”
    So, they did, a nd as usual, Derek was right.
    Only a nother two more miles up and down the winding country road, the coachman turned in at a narrow dirt driveway that disappeared up into the woods. Beside the drive entrance sat a quaint, old, mossy sign that read: Plas-y-Fforest .
    Which , in Welsh, meant Mansion in the Forest —so Jake had been told.
    Up the long, bumpy drive the horses climbed, passing through a deep, mysterious pine wood that Jake was sure was full of magic. He could feel it in the air and could almost swear he saw some tiny people in the trees. Not fairies—about that size, but no wings or sparkly trails, and clad in bits of leather and colorful autumn leaves.
    He poi nted them out, but the others didn’t look fast enough to see.
    The tiny people followed, spying on them and running atop the branches to keep up with the carriage.
    Hmm! I wonder what they are, Jake thought, but they couldn’t be anything dangerous. His ancestors had protected all three thousand acres of their land here centuries ago with countless magical spells.
    Plas-y-Fforest was a very special place in Everton family history, which was why they had come. As the long-lost heir of the Griffon earldom and the family fortune, Jake still had much to learn about his heritage.
    At last, near the top of the mountain, they reached a clearing where his ancestors’ ramblin g old holiday cottage came into sight.
    As the carriage rolled to a halt in front of it, the children stared in delight. The sun had come back out; the sky was blue again; the earlier gloom and the sinister feeling up by the cemetery