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his mother’s voice when he told her.
    He leaped backward and vaulted over the altar’s railing, landing hard on the marble floor and crashing through the velvet ropes around it. Then he was running down the aisle, dodging the guards who tried to grab him and slamming through the doors into the night. His feet pounded against the pavement, legs burning, lungs gasping for air, until he reached a motorcycle parked just down the street, waiting for him. He jumped on, turned the key, and roared off into the night, the shouts of the Pantheon guards fading into the distance.
    Even when he was undercover on a Cahill mission, Jonah Wizard traveled with style.

     
    Jonah Wizard’s escape from the National Pantheon was most impressive. The watcher had to admit that her expectations had been far exceeded. Especially since she was the one who’d alerted the guards that an intruder was attempting to break into the Pantheon.
    The young Wizard had surprised her by passing the test. This Janus had far more than money and an appreciation for the arts to offer the Vespers. He had outsmarted armed guards and officers of the Venezuelan police force, performing well under intense pressure.
    Perhaps he would make an excellent Vesper after all.

     
    Everywhere Hamilton Holt looked, there was nothing but white. The snow stretched across King William’s Island in every direction, endless. And he’d thought Beechey Island looked barren. That place was a paradise compared to where they were now — the middle of nowhere.
    Ahead of him, his mother and father were making their way through the deep snow, their snowshoes scraping across the icy surface with every step. Ham’s own snowshoes were old, with several broken strings. Even though he was fifteen, several years older than his sisters, he was having a hard time keeping up with them. Every so often, one of them, he wasn’t sure if it was Madison or Reagan, yelled back that he was a slug, but their teasing had slowed as the day went on. Even suited up in their thick purple parkas, all of the Holts were freezing.
    The cold didn’t bother Hamilton. What made the Arctic difficult to bear was how there was nothing to distract him from his thoughts. He kept seeing things flash across his mind — kids tied up in the back of a van, the blackened husk of a burned building, the murderous looks on the faces of fellow Cahills as they tried to steal Clues from one another.
    The Clue hunt had changed everything. At least it had for Ham. His sisters still seemed content to follow their father, Eisenhower, around the globe, sabotaging the other Cahill teams and doing whatever was necessary to get the Clues. But Ham wasn’t so sure anymore.
    “Team! Halt!” The command from his father took Hamilton by surprise. The Holts weren’t big on rest stops.
    “What is it, sugar muffin?” Ham’s mother, Mary-Todd Holt, asked.
    “Binoculars!” Eisenhower barked, extending his thick, gloved hand. His wife dutifully reached into her pack and produced a pair, which Eisenhower rammed against his eyes. But he’d forgotten to remove his ski glasses first, and there was a yelp of pain and a muffled curse from beneath his balaclava.
    The family waited in silence as Eisenhower adjusted the binoculars and peered into the distance.
    “There!” he yelled suddenly. “We’re not alone out here.”
    “Who is it?” Madison demanded.
    “They’ve got a tent,” said Eisenhower, “and a fire. We’ve been followed!”
    Hamilton stomped forward on his snowshoes and took the binoculars from his father. Through them, he had a good view of three people, all sitting on tiny camp chairs around some sort of glowing orange device.
    “It’s a heater,” he said, “not a fire.”
    “They’re obviously after the Tomas clue!” Eisenhower yelled. “They followed us here so they could steal it from us.” He took the binoculars back from Ham, stared through them one more time, and then passed them back to Mary-Todd. “All