The Wicked Passage (A Blake Wyatt Adventure) Read Free Page B

enter into a very special fellowship.” He eyed Blake as though entrance into this weird, secret club required a confidential and wordless agreement. “Do we understand each other?”
    Blake frowned. “Sure,” he said uncertainly.
    “Good. Your journey will begin when--”
    “What journey? I have football practice after school, and like I said before, I’m not going anywhere with you.”
    The man laughed. “Football practice? You’re not going to football practice. Besides, you said you were abandoning your team.”
    Blake’s eyes widened. Who besides Trevor knew he was quitting the team? “Look, dude, not sure where you got your information, but that’s just wack. The coach’ll make me sit out the game on Friday if I miss practice.”
    “You apparently didn’t understand anything I just said. This is a great gift, Blakemore Wyatt, and besides, you don’t have a choice.”
    “What?”
    “Your legacy was written before you were born.”
    Blake folded his arms and again stared at the rising steam from the cafeteria. This was totally nuts. No way could any of this be true, but the book was real, and it was totally cool. He admired the chronicle again. Maybe the book did belong to this Uncle Leopold guy. But if he could sell it on the Internet, maybe he could get enough money to buy that new video game Razeraction before Trevor got it first. “All right, first of all, how do you know my real name? No one knows it.”
    “And why is that?”
    “’Cuz it’s stupid.”
    “Stupid? Hmm.” Price flipped open his pocket watch again. “Curious that you’d be embarrassed by such a courageous and selfless title. Your father gave you that name, you know. It means ‘out of the darkness comes the light.’”
    He gasped. He had never known anything about his name or that his father had-
    “Anyway,” he said weakly, “I like Blake better.”
    “Does ‘Wyatt’ meet your approval?” the old man asked, viewing him over the top of his little glasses.
    “Yeah, Wyatt’s okay, I guess.”
    The old man sighed. “Blakemore, you are a Wyatt. Do you have any idea what that means?”
    “Yeah, it means my mom’s poor, and I have to work my butt off to have any money to get what I want.”
    The old man took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with his dirty handkerchief. “So is this how you judge people’s character? By how much money they have?”
    “Well, no, not really, it’s just that you need money to buy stuff.”
    “Of course you do,” the old man said, and returned the glasses to his face. “Do you want to know what Wyatt really means?”
    “I guess.”
    “Almost two thousand years have passed since the first Wyatt took her place in the Rellium,” the old man said. “She was Celtic nobility and very beautiful. Many princes wanted her hand in marriage, wooing her with expensive gifts and hosting public matches of swordsmanship to impress her. She rejected all their overtures except for one--Prince Donovan Wyatt. He ruled a small, peaceful commonwealth in what came under England’s rule but is now Pérouges, France. The wedding was lavish, and many people from all over his Alpine kingdom brought gifts for the couple. One gift, however, was unlike any other.”
    “Let me guess,” Blake said sarcastically. “This book.”
    The old man shook his head and glanced out the window. “No. It was a gold ring, Blakemore, engraved ‘past, present, future.’ No one knew who had sent the gift. When the new bride slid it on her finger, she knew exactly who had sent the gift and where to find them. The electromagnetic alloys in the ring guided her directly to Saphir Pré.”
    “Where?”
    “Saphir Pré, Sapphire Meadow, where all the grass is sapphire blue. But it wasn’t the color of the grass that pulled her into the lush field. It was this book, the Chronicle of the Rellium, shining as brightly as it is now, perched on a boulder in the middle of the meadow. She picked up the chronicle and took her place