“Extra! Extra! Town Cryer’s latest! Read all about it! Rare Crystal Emerges from the Henessen Family!”

Emily stopped dead in her tracks as she heard the raspy man’s voice call out the latest headlines from his newspaper stand. How did it get out? Who would have shared the secret? How could they?

She backtracked, grabbed a paper, and placed a few coins into the man’s hand. “Keep the change.” she murmured as she turned away and looked down at the paper she’d just bought.

She heard the man thank her somewhere in the distance as the words on the page drowned out the bustling world around her.

Someone had talked. They knew about the Crystal. And that meant danger. *For everyone involved.*

She quickened her step, her heels clacking on the paved slabs as she made her way to the family home, a large institutional looking building at the end of the busy road. People had already begun to congregate around their grand, old, entryway; reporters waving their notebooks, and curious onlookers stopping for a possible peek at the headline sensation.

—-

Emily strode into the dining room and slapped the newspaper down on the table in front of Humphrey, who had been scrawling mathematical equations in his notebook. “Do you mind?” he said with a drawl, “I’m working here. You can’t…”

Humphrey’s voice trailed off as he finally saw the huge bold letters that headlined the Town Cryer. “Oh…”

“Yes! *Oh!*” Emily snapped, pacing up and down beside the vast mahogany dining room table that eclipsed the room in all its grandeur. “What do we do now? How do we enforce safety procedures when the entire realm now knows there’s a Crystal in their midst?”

Humphrey put his pen down and sat back, both hands splayed on the table on either side of the newspaper. “I don’t understand. Who would have broken the bond? It makes no sense for anyone to do that...”

“Well, they did.” Emily said, folding her arms, her eyes smarting from the tears that had begun to water her eyes.

Humphrey pulled the newspaper towards him and began to scan the article. “Sources… they say sources. More than one?”

“Maybe. Possibly to cover their tracks. Who knows?” she said, walking over and peering at the newspaper from over his shoulder.

“Maybe we can track the reporter down. Get them to reveal who they were.”

“Nevermind that! What about the fact that the whole world knows that there’s another Crystal?” Emily said, exasperation in her voice as she sat down on the nearby chair with a thud. “How do we protect…”

“Is anything the matter?”

Both Emily and Humphrey stopped short as they heard the little, soft voice of the child behind him. Humphrey carefully moved his notebook over the newspaper to cover the headline. “Oh nothing, sweetheart, just me and Aunty Emily quarrelling as usual. You know how it is.” he said with a gentle smile, as he held out his hand towards the blonde child with pigtails that stood in the doorway. “We never see eye to eye, do we? Come, sit.”

And as the little girl trundled in, holding her cuddly rabbit by a single floppy ear as its body dragged on the floor, the two of them looked on in wonder, their hearts swelling as this jewel of a child graced them with her beautiful presence. *The Crystal*. The one they held dear, and for whom they would fight the entire world if need be, to keep her safe.