Secret Breakers: The Power of Three Read Online Free Page A

sickness, the fact she’d eaten half a bag of toffees or because she missed her granddad.
    ‘So, what d’you reckon?’ the driver asked as the car climbed up a hill towards a large gateway. Brodie was too busy trying to take everything in to answer.
    At the end of the drive was a sprawling, red-brick mansion. There was a mixture of designs; some window frames painted white, others black and edged with stone. There were sections of pitched roofs, some turrets and green-topped domes. In places there were thick black beams criss-crossed along the plaster, but some walls were covered in a creamy pebbledash. There were high chimneys and jagged archways, wooden doors and glazed ones, and in front of the main entrance a gravelled forecourt with a circular lawn. It looked to Brodie as if no one builder had ever quite taken control. It looked unfinished, as if things here still needed completing.
    The car slowed to a halt.
    Brodie stared at the front door of the mansion. In the story she told herself in her head, it looked like an opening to a new world. She was scared. Unsure again, if she wanted to go inside. Two stone statues stood like guards either side of the door and above their heads hung a single lantern. A candle burned inside, the light of the flame bouncing against something small and shiny.
    Brodie bit her lip as the driver of the car unloaded her cases from the boot. She thanked him, checked the time on both her watches and the car pulled slowly back down the drive.
    Then she turned and ploughed straight into the path of a boy riding a unicycle.
    The crash wasn’t pretty. Her case burst open, spilling an embarrassing load of clothing and books on to the ground. Brodie landed in a heap next to the boy, who’d fallen with an ominous crunch on top of the unicycle. As Brodie fought to catch her breath, chocolate toffees rained down on the pair of them.
    ‘Where the deep-fried Mars bar did you come from?’ His voice tailed away as he rose from the ground and rested the unicycle in his place. The wheel looked more than a little bent.
    ‘I don’t believe it,’ Brodie groaned through teeth clamped tight together.
    ‘Well, you better toasted sandwich believe it. Unless it’s raining sweets and knickers and you’ve decided to take a quick kip on the pavement, then we’ve really just crashed. It’s my nineteenth circuit and the path’s been totally clear every time.’
    Brodie flicked a toffee from her shoulder and pulled herself up to sitting. ‘Well, it wasn’t clear this time!’
    ‘No. I see that now . Sorry! Really sorry.’ The boy towered over her, his face ringed by the sun as it broke through a cloud. He looked tall, although it was hard to tell from so far below him. He was perhaps her age, probably a year or two older, and his hair was fairly
long, a fringe flopping in front of his eyes and a freckled nose blushed red with embarrassment. He swept his hair back from his face then offered his hand out towards her.
    She wanted to yell at him for not looking where he was going; scream at him for making all her books burst out of the case. But he looked so incredibly awkward and his hand shook so much as he offered it, all she could bring herself to mutter was, ‘Thanks.’
    The boy knelt down and scrambled to repack her case. His hands hesitated over a nightdress with a rather large rabbit printed on the front, and she thought for a moment he was going to comment, but then as if thinking better of it, he scooped up the books and pressed the case lid shut. ‘There,’ he said purposefully. ‘Like I said. Very sorry.’
    Looking down at where he knelt beside her case, Brodie could see a toffee was still wedged in the collar of his jacket. She bent down to remove it then looked across at the unicycle. It was clear now the wheel was completely buckled. ‘Oh, your bike,’ she said, ‘unicycle, thing. It’s all wonky.’
    He lifted the unicycle from the ground. The wheel squeaked as it spun. ‘Doesn’t