Page 91 of Breaking the Dark

She tuts. “You have an IQ higher than ninety-nine point five percent of the population. If you can’t do this, then literally nobody can.”

“And that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s possible that no one can.”

She grips his knee under the table with her hand and looks up at him through her eyelashes. “Arthur. Please. There must be a way. There must be something. We’ve come so far….”

He drops his gaze down to the table and then lifts it back to her. “There might be something,” he says. “Something my dad once told me about. A kind of light.”

“What kind of light?”

“I don’t know. Someone showed it to him once, when he was traveling in Latveria.”

“Whereabouts in Latveria?”

“I really don’t know. He just said that it had something to do with blood and that it was meant to give people extra powers.”

“What sort of powers?”

“He didn’t say. But he spent years out there trying to find it and never could. They called it the blood light.”

Polly gasps. “The blood light,” she repeats in an awed whisper. She picks up her phone and immediately googles it. All she finds are links to a type of special effects makeup. She adds Latveria to her search. This brings up only one search result, a painting hanging in a gallery in Doomstadt.

“I can’t find it,” she says.

“Well, yes, that’s because it probably doesn’t exist. If my father couldn’t find it, then it’s safe to say it’s just a fairy tale, a myth.”

But Polly needs to know what this “blood light” does.

And Polly is going to find some, if it’s the last thing she does.

THIRTY-FIVE

JESSICA CALLS MALCOLM again on the street outside the school. His phone rings seven times before, finally, the call is answered.

“Malcolm!” she begins, feeling a huge pulse of relief. “Thank—”

“Oh, Jessica! I’m afraid Malcolm isn’t here right now. This is Brenda, his mother.”

Jessica closes her eyes. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Powder. Brenda. Do you happen to know where Malcolm is?”

“Malcolm is at school, Jessica.”

“But you have his phone?”

“Yes,” Brenda replies, slightly uncertainly. “It’s strange. He left it here this morning. Didn’t take it to school. I didn’t realize until just now. I just got back from work and when I walked past his room, I saw it flashing with your call.”

“He left his phone at home?”

She laughs. “Yes. I think maybe for the first time ever. Teenagers. He always has his phone with him. You know what they’re like!”

Jessica concurs. She does know what teenagers are like. More particularly she knows what Malcolm is like.

“Do you have any idea why he might have left it?”

“No! I have no idea! Unless maybe he has another phone that I don’t know about.”

“Is that possible?”

“Well, yes. It’s possible. These children, the bad ones, they have multiple phones, yes? They have the, what do they call them…?”

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