My heart sank. “You want me to … to take my own life?”

“Exactly.” He lovingly caressed his pistol. “Because there is no other way to kill you. And in order to … let’s say, help your decision along a little, I am going to shoot your friend Gideon the moment he arrives back here.” He looked at the clock. “Which ought to be in about five minutes’ time. So if you want to save his life, you had better take that capsule at once. Or you can wait until he’s lying dead before your eyes. Experience suggests that such things provide extremely strong motivation. Think of Romeo and Juliet.”

“You’re so horrible!” said little Robert, and he began to cry. I tried to give him an encouraging smile and failed miserably. I felt like sitting down beside him and bursting into tears myself.

“Mr. Whitman—” I began.

“I do prefer the title of count, you know,” he said cheerfully.

“Please … you mustn’t—” My voice broke.

“But why can’t you see sense, you stupid child?” He sighed. “Believe me, I have longed for this day. I am about to return to my real life at last. A teacher at St. Lennox High School! Of all the activities I have pursued for the last two hundred and thirty years, that was really the most demeaning. I have lived close to the pulse of power for centuries. I could have dined with presidents—with oil barons, with kings. Not that kings are what they used to be these days. But no, instead I had to teach dimwitted brats and moreover work my way up from the rank of novice to the Inner Circle in my own Lodge. The years since your birth have been terrible for me. Not so much because my body began to age again and was beginning to show slight traces of deterioration”—at this point he indulged in a vain, self-satisfied smile—“as because I was so … so vulnerable. I lived for centuries without a fear in the world. I marched over battlefields amidst a hail of bullets, I exposed myself to any danger you care to mention, always in the knowledge that nothing could happen to me. But now? Any virus could have finished me off in the last few years, any damn bus could have run over me, any falling brick could have knocked me down and killed me!”

At this moment, I heard a clattering noise, and Xemerius came swooping through the wall at high speed. He landed right beside me on the desk.

“Where the hell are the Guardians?” I asked him, not stopping to bother that the count could hear me. But he seemed to think the question was meant for him.

“They can’t help you now,” he said.

“I’m afraid he’s right.” Xemerius was flapping his wings frantically. “When Gideon got back before, those idiots closed the Circle of Blood, and then Mr. Male Model here took that useless fool Marley hostage and forced the Guardians into the chronograph room at pistol point. They’re locked in there now, turning the air blue with their language.”

The count shook his head. “No, that was certainly no life for me! And it must come to an end. What can a little girl like you offer the world? I, on the other hand, still have many plans. Great plans—”

“Distract his attention!” cried Xemerius. “Just distract his attention, never mind how.”

“How … how did you manage about elapsing all that time?” I asked quickly. “Uncontrolled time travel—I mean, it must have been terribly uncomfortable.”

He laughed. “Elapsing? Huh! My natural life span had run out, and from the moment when I would have died, I no longer had to bother with the nuisance of traveling in time.”

“And what about my grandpa? Did you kill him, too, and steal his diaries?” At this point tears rose to my eyes. Poor Grandpa. He’d been so close to uncovering the whole plot.

The count nodded. “Our clever friend Lucas Montrose had to be silenced. Marley senior saw to that. The descendants of Baron Rakoczy have served me well over the centuries, although the last in the line is a disappointment. That pedantic, red-headed dreamer has inherited none of the Black Leopard’s quick wits.” He looked at his watch again and then glanced expectantly at the group of armchairs standing around the documents room. “Well, it ought to be any time now, Juliet. You obviously want to see your Romeo lying in his own blood!” He took the safety catch off his pistol. “It really is a pity. I liked the boy. He had great potential.”

“Please,” I whispered one last time, but at that moment, Gideon, bending his knees slightly to ensure a soft landing, came down beside the door. He didn’t even have time to straighten up before Mr. Whitman fired the first shot. And then another. And another, firing again and again until the entire magazine of his pistol was empty.

The gunshots echoed deafeningly through the room as the bullets hit Gideon in the chest and the stomach. His green eyes, wide open, wandered around the room until he caught sight of me.

I screamed his name.

As if in slow motion, he slid down the door, leaving a wide trail of blood behind. Finally he was lying on the floor, oddly distorted.

“Gideon! No!” With another scream, I rushed to his side and clasped his lifeless body in my arms.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God!” cried Xemerius, spitting out water. “Please say this is all part of your plan. He isn’t wearing a bulletproof vest, anyway. Oh God! So much blood!”

He was right. Gideon’s blood was all over the place. The hem of my dress was sucking it up like a sponge. Little Robert crouched in a corner, whimpering, with his hands over his face.

“What have you done?” I whispered.

“What I had to do! And what you obviously didn’t want to prevent.” Mr. Whitman had put the pistol down on the desk and was holding the little box of cyanide capsules out to me. His face was slightly flushed, and he was breathing faster than usual. “And now it’s time you stopped hesitating! Do you want to live with his death on your conscience? Do you want to go on living at all without him?”

“Don’t do it!” cried Xemerius, spewing out water all over Dr. White’s face.

Slowly, I shook my head.

“Then be good enough to stop trying my patience!” said Mr. Whitman, and for the first time, I heard him lose control over his voice. It no longer sounded either gentle or ironic, but almost hysterical. “Because if you keep me waiting any longer, I shall have to give you further incentives to end your own life! I’ll kill them all, one by one: your mother, your irritating friend Lesley, your brother, your cute little sister … believe me, I won’t spare a single one of them.”

With trembling hands, I took the little box. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Dr. White clutching the edge of the desk and hauling himself laboriously up. He was dripping wet.

Thank heavens, Mr. Whitman had eyes only for me. “That’s a good girl,” he said. “Maybe I’ll catch my flight yet. And once I am in Brazil I will—” But he never got around to saying what he would do in Brazil, because Dr. White brought the butt of the pistol down on the back of his head. It made an ugly, dull thud, and then Mr. Whitman fell to the floor like a felled oak tree.

“Yes!” crowed Xemerius. “Good work! Show the bastard there’s life in the old doctor yet.” But the effort had been too much for Dr. White. With a horrified look at all the blood, he collapsed again with a soft sigh, and lay on the floor beside Mr. Whitman.

So only Xemerius, little Robert, and I saw Gideon suddenly cough and sit up. His face was still as pale as death, but his eyes were bright and full of life. A smile slowly spread over his face. “Is that over?” he asked.

“The cunning so-and-so!” said Xemerius. In his astonishment, he’d suddenly lowered his voice. “How on earth did he do that?”

“Yes, it’s all over, Gideon!” I flung myself into his arms, taking no notice of his wounds. “It was Mr. Whitman, and I can’t think how we failed to recognize him!”

“Mr. Whitman?”

I nodded, and clung closer to him. “I was so afraid you might not have done it. Because Mr. Whitman was perfectly right about one thing. I don’t want to live without you, not for a single day!”

“I love you, Gwenny!” Gideon hugged me so hard that I was left breathless. “And of course I did it. Well, what option did I have with Paul and Lucy standing over me? They dissolved the stuff in a glass of water and made sure I drank it down to the very last drop.”

“Now I get it!” cried Xemerius. “So that was your brilliant plan! Gideon’s been feeding his face with the philosopher’s stone, and now he’s immortal as well! Not a bad idea, particularly when you think that otherwise Gwenny might get to feel rather lonely one of these days.”

Little Robert had lowered his hands from his face and was looking at us wide-eyed. “It’s going to be all right, Robert dear,” I told him. What a shame there weren’t any psychotherapists for traumatized ghosts yet. That was a real gap in the market, well worth investigating. “Your father will be better soon. And he’s a hero.”

“Who are you talking to?” asked Gideon.

“A brave little friend,” I said, smiling at Robert. He hesitantly smiled back.

“Uh-oh, I think he’s coming to his senses,” said Xemerius.

Gideon had spotted it, too. He let go of me, stood up, and looked down at Mr. Whitman. “I guess I’d better tie him up,” he said with a sigh. “And Dr. White needs a dressing on that injury.”

“Yes, and then we must let the others out of the chronograph room,” I said. “But first we’d better think what we’re going to tell them.”

“And before that, I absolutely have to kiss you,” said Gideon, taking me in his arms again.

Xemerius groaned. “Oh, really! As if you two didn’t have all eternity ahead for that kind of thing!”

* * *

AT SCHOOL ON MONDAY, everything was the same as usual. Well, almost everything.

In spite of the springlike temperature, Cynthia had a thick scarf around her neck, and she crossed the foyer inside the entrance to the building fast, without looking either to right or to left.

Gordon Gelderman was close on her heels. “Oh, come on, Cynthia!” he growled in a bass voice. “I’m sorry, but you can’t hold it against me forever. And I wasn’t the only one who thought your party could do with … well, something to liven it up. I distinctly saw Madison Gardener’s boyfriend pouring another bottle of vodka into the punch. And Sarah finally admitted that the green dessert was up to ninety percent her grandmother’s homemade gooseberry spirit.”

“Go away!” said Cynthia, trying hard to ignore a group of giggling Year Eight kids who were pointing at her and giggling. “You … you’ve made me a laughing-stock in front of the whole school! I’ll never forgive you!”

“And to think I missed that party!” said Xemerius. He was sitting on the bust of William Shakespeare. A piece of the poet’s nose had gone missing during “an unfortunate little accident,” as Mr. Gilles the principal had put it after Gordon’s father gave the school a generous donation to renovate the gym. Before that the principal had called the accident “willful destruction of a valuable part of our cultural heritage.”