Clash of the Worlds
The third and final book in the epic HOUSE OF SECRETS series. Get ready for another roller coaster ride of an adventure!The Walker kids – Cordelia, Brendan and Nell – may have saved the world, but they can’t save their home and must leave Kristoff House. Things can’t get any worse, but then…Turns out the Wind Witch is still alive and planning an invasion. To defeat her the Walkers must return to the book world, split up and embark on a dangerous quest – facing aliens, dinosaurs and monstrous creatures from the deep.The Walkers always have each other’s backs, but must go it alone in their most important mission yet. And this time, if they fail, there’s no coming back…
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First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
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The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk
Text copyright © Novel Approach LLC 2016
Illustrations copyright © Tom Percival 2013
Jacket Illustration © Cliff Nielsen, 2016
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780007465859
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007465880
Version: 2016-04-05
For Ned
Contents
Brendan Walker knew this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending.
He stood on the beach near his home on Sea Cliff Avenue with his sisters, Cordelia and Eleanor, and stared out at the San Francisco Bay. Not at the whole bay, but rather at the exact spot in the water where they had just seen their friend, a colossus named Fat Jagger, standing a few moments ago.
Cars were stopped on the Golden Gate Bridge. Several people peered over the edge, likely wondering if they had really just seen a massive, fifty-storey tall, overweight version of Mick Jagger in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, howling at the moon.
But it simply couldn’t have been possible. Fat Jagger wasn’t real, at least not in the same way that he and his sisters were. He was just a character in an old novel by Denver Kristoff. Or so Brendan had thought. Then again, the Walker children had witnessed enough “impossible” things in the past few months to convince them that literally anything was possible.
Most kids would probably run away screaming if they saw a huge colossus wearing a loincloth rise up out of the ocean. Or at the very least, call 911. They certainly wouldn’t try to lure the massive giant even closer. But the three Walker children were definitely not like most kids. At least, not any more. Not since they had moved into Kristoff House and found themselves thrown into the magical world of his books – engaged in a seemingly endless battle with the evil Wind Witch, frost beasts, Nazi cyborgs, bloodthirsty pirates, and a variety of other horrors from the depths of the author’s imagination.
“Well, now what?” Brendan asked. “We could call my English teacher, Ms Krumbsly, to lure him out. She’s still single and almost as big as Fat Jagger. They might make a cute couple?”
His younger sister, Eleanor, slapped his arm. “Bren!” she scolded. “Fat Jagger’s our friend! You should be nicer to him; he did save our lives a couple of times. Ms Krumbsly is way too mean – I wouldn’t even wish her on my worst enemies.”
“Yeah, I know, Nell,” Brendan said. “I guess what I’m saying is that we don’t exactly have a good plan.”
“Since when have you ever worried about having a well-structured plan in place before acting?” Cordelia asked.
She was the oldest of the three Walker kids at nearly sixteen, although she tended to sometimes talk and act like she was at least twice her age.
“Hey, I can make plans and be the leader sometimes too,” Brendan protested. His sisters just looked at him. They knew, as well as he did, that he was much better at making jokes.
The three Walker children were standing on the beach directly below the cliff upon which the Victorian, three-storey Kristoff House was precariously perched – the same house that they would only be able to call home for one more night. Because after once again barely escaping from the fantastical book world with their lives, they had returned to a reality in which their father had managed to gamble away a ten-million-dollar fortune. And so the next morning they’d be moving back into a cramped apartment near Fisherman’s Wharf.
