In only moments, she would become an owl. Petra was already digging through Viggo’s backpack for the vials of blood and other supplies that she needed to perform the contra-beastie spell. Anouk looked at her hand clasped in Beau’s. Soon his hand would be a shaggy golden paw; hers a talon. It would have made her feel sick to think about it, if she could have brought herself to think about it.
She let out a cry. Beau swept her into his arms and held her tightly. “Don’t be afraid, Anouk. We’ll be together.”
“We won’t know each other! You know what it’s like. So dark, so cold, and everything shrouded in fog. What if we don’t make it to London? Or what if Sinjin can’t turn us back? We could be trapped like that forever, Beau.”
“I don’t care what the spell says,” he said, smoothing her hair. “I’d know you anywhere, Anouk. If I lived forever as a dog and you as an owl, I’d spend the rest of my life with head upturned, searching the night sky for your silhouette.”
She buried her head in his chest. She wanted to believe him. Wanted to feel that, regardless of what happened, they’d recognize each other’s souls. She knew it was foolish . . . but maybe she hadn’t given up on fairy tales just yet. She clutched the bell again. Maybe she wouldn’t give up on magic either.
He brushed some dust off her temple and pressed a kiss on the center of her forehead.
She closed her eyes.
Something hard snapped around her ankle.
Her eyes shot open and she kicked involuntarily at a rope Viggo was tying to a plastic ring around her foot. Her toes connected with his nose.
“Hey!” he complained. He rubbed his nose as he unrolled the rope connected to the ring around her ankle. “I can’t have you flying away. You’d perch up somewhere in those pipes and I’d never get you down. I’d have to use Luc as bait.”
She felt sick. “That isn’t funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
None of the others looked amused either. Viggo had already tied a rope around Luc’s wrist. He had a third fastened to a collar around Cricket’s neck, and a fourth attached to a chain around Hunter Black’s. They all stood with their hands on their hips, shooting daggers at Viggo with their eyes.
Anouk moved to stand next to Petra and said quietly, “If you’re ever going to tell me your moniker, it might as well be now. I might be an animal forever. If it’s a secret, it’ll be safe with me.”
Petra smiled mysteriously. “When—not if—you’re human again, I’ll tell you.”
Viggo held up another collar. “Your turn, Beau.”
Anouk couldn’t watch, even though she knew Viggo was only doing what they had all agreed to. She wondered if he had any idea what it felt like to be anything other than rich and beautiful, if he knew how often she had craved even a day of his lavish life.
Hunter Black, attached to the chain, also eyed Viggo closely, but with a different look of longing.
“Does he know how you feel?” Anouk asked quietly.
Hunter Black’s dark eyes flashed to hers, and for a second she was afraid he might growl at her, but then his eyelids lowered. “He knows.”
Anouk felt her heart sink. They all knew that Viggo was attracted to girls only, but she still wished the best for Hunter Black’s doomed love life.
He continued, “All that matters is that he knows I’d kill for him. I’d steal for him. I’d die for him.” Hunter Black paused before adding, “As I would for any of you.”
This surprised her so much that she nearly stumbled. “Hunter Black, do you mean that?”
He slowly nodded.
Before she knew what she was doing, she wrapped her arms around him and squeezed him hard. If she could, she’d spare him all the pain they were about to endure. If she could, she’d spare them all.
“There.” Viggo interrupted them by clicking a chain to the collar around Hunter Black’s neck. “Now, try not to kill each other, everyone. And remember, I’m your friend. You don’t need to bite me or scratch me or piss on me.”
“No promises,” Cricket said.
Luc touched Cricket’s shoulder reassuringly, then went around to all the beasties, pressing his forehead to each of theirs, giving each of their shoulders a good squeeze.
“Okay.” Luc turned to Petra. “Do it.”
The five of them joined hands, their five ropes connecting them all to Viggo. He pulled on the backpack and took out an umbrella with a sharp point. Clearly, it wasn’t meant for rain.
“This is going to work,” Petra said, sounding like she was trying to reassure herself as much as anyone else. “I can do this, and Viggo has that amethyst chess piece that Rennar imbued with the beastie spell. As soon as you can, send word through Saint that you’re human again.”
A train rumbled by in the next tunnel over. The utility lights flickered. Dust rained down again. The train’s roar was so deafening that Anouk couldn’t hear the words Petra began to whisper. Suddenly it all seemed to be happening too fast. What if Petra got a word wrong? What if they’d botched the elixir? The train began to squeal. The lights flickered faster. Beau was squeezing her left hand tightly, and Cricket her right. Her vision began to swirl as she twisted to look down the far end of the tunnel. So black. Nothing was that pure black. Except the Noirceur.
She was about to scream for Petra to stop, but suddenly the squealing and rumble of the train disappeared, and the flickering lights vanished, and the pressure from Beau’s and Cricket’s hands was gone, and the blackness had swallowed her whole.
Part III
Chapter 29
Anouk woke with the sound of wings beating in her ears. She blinked groggily. Overhead, orbs of light swayed from side to side like a sky hung with pendulum moons. Walls pressed in on every side, giving her the unnerving sense that she was waking up in a coffin. She sat up with a gasp for air.
At first everything was blurry and she took in only strange, whimsical shapes—figures with no arms or heads, lumpy bones twice her size, vibrant sprays of oranges and blues. When her vision cleared, the shapes still didn’t make sense. Marble statues that were missing heads and limbs. Fossils of femurs that must have belonged to prehistoric creatures.
With a yelp, she realized she was lying in a coffin.
It wasn’t like the tombs in Paris’s catacombs that the Goblins had used for makeshift dining tables. This one was curved in the approximate shape of a person and was covered in flaking red and gold paint. A sarcophagus.
A chill ran through her. She tipped forward, trying to climb out, but she wasn’t prepared for how weak her limbs were. She collapsed back.
“Hey, watch out, you’ll hurt yourself!”
Viggo appeared by her side with a damp cloth. He dabbed at her forehead with a tonic that smelled of rosemary and sweet orange, then thrust a steaming cup of tea in her hands. “Here. The tea will help ease the lightheadedness. You’re the first one awake.”
She stared dimly into the cup. Tiny leaves floated in dark brown liquid. She blinked and looked around the room. It was filled with bizarre antiquities. A suit of Japanese armor made of chain mail and lacquered iron. Masks with beaded headpieces. One whole side of the room was taken up by a stage set: a frozen lake made of glass, a painted backdrop of a forest that was only half finished, ballet costumes, buckets of artificial snow.
There were three more sarcophagi. Like hers, the heavy stone lids had been pushed back. In them were Cricket, Luc, and Hunter Black, one in each, their hands folded over their chests, which rose and fell with their breathing. Next to the last sarcophagus was a cardboard box filled with crumpled newspapers. Beau slumbered in that, one arm thrown clumsily over his eyes.
Viggo gestured to the box sheepishly. “We ran out of sarcophagi. Found that carton in the back.”
“Viggo, stop talking, please. This is all too much.” Anouk set down the tea with a shaking hand. A thousand questions appeared in her head but she chose just one. “We? Who is we?”
“Sinjin and I. He popped up
stairs for a moment. There’s a café. It’s closed now, but they keep microwave pizzas in the freezer. The egg-salad sandwiches aren’t bad either. If you want pastries, though, you’re out of luck. We ate all of those yesterday.”
Her head ached so badly that everything Viggo said felt like it had happened to her in a dream. Sinjin—that was the hacker who supposedly knew what to do with the amethyst chess piece to turn them human. She looked down at her feet and saw a fine powder of purple-tinted crystal. Was that what was left of the amethyst? Then her gaze fell on a taxidermied lion with worn fur in need of repair.
“What is this place?”
“The British Museum.” Viggo perched on the edge of her sarcophagus and sipped his own cup of tea. “Part of its basement. It makes for a brilliant base of operations. The Pretties closed it when the plagues began, so we have it to ourselves. Lots of ancient magic here. Old herbs and charms. Plus the café—well, I already told you about the café.” He motioned to a stack of greasy paper plates that bore the British Museum’s logo. She noticed that over his usual black shirt, he was wearing a fleece jacket from the museum gift shop.
She sat up straight and gripped the edges of the sarcophagus. “So it worked? We’re human again?” She pressed a hand to her face, feeling for a beak, for feathers, almost crying in relief to find her own nose.
“Yes—didn’t you hear what I told you?”
“Tell me everything.” Her voice was breathy and quick, but as soon as she said it, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“You were the least of my worries.” Viggo leaned back, swirling his tea. “As soon as Petra’s spell took effect, you perched on my shoulder for most of the walk through the Chunnel, except once, when the mouse slipped out of my pocket and you dived for it. You nearly ate Luc.”
Queasy, she pressed a hand to her stomach.
“Beau was Beau—even as a dog, he’s deliriously happy. But Cricket! And Hunter Black! Naturally, they were awful. She got loose and hid in a drainpipe and Beau had to sniff her out. The wolf was insufferable, even though I eventually got the muzzle on him.” As evidence, he held up his arms, which were covered with bite marks.
“But I got all five of you through,” he continued proudly. “Took all night to walk the tunnel. Sinjin was waiting on the other side with a taxi. He’d gotten our message.” He gestured to a spot behind her, and she turned to find an entire wall of taxidermied animals, a lion and a badger and a falcon. The falcon’s head suddenly turned in her direction. Not taxidermied after all.
“Saint!”
Viggo nodded. “Saint got through first and delivered Rennar’s message to Sinjin, so everything was set up.”
Her headache worsened at the thought of Rennar. She collapsed back in the sarcophagus with a sigh. The lights overhead made her wedding ring gleam. She worked it anxiously between her fingers. Did Rennar toy with his ring too? Did he think of that last kiss before she left? She shook her head to banish such thoughts and then sat back up. Her gaze again fell to the glittering purple powder on the floor. “Is that the amethyst chess piece?”
“You should have seen it,” Viggo said, guessing her thoughts. “Sinjin had tools to extract the spell. It took a special kind of hammer, nothing magical, but a technical one that could shatter the amethyst in just the right way so as not to damage the spell inside.”
“And it worked?”
He reached out and pulled on her ear and she winced. “What do you think? As soon as the amethyst powder landed on the five of you, you turned human. I dressed you all. Didn’t think you’d mind. Look, I even remembered that jacket you like.”
She was relieved to see she was wearing her Faustine jacket. She rubbed her sore ear. “And the others?”
“Should be waking up soon. Sinjin warned it would take a while for all of you to recover. You’ve been out for two days.” He opened a greasy pizza box, but it was empty, and he frowned. “I’ll go upstairs and get you something to eat. You’ll feel better.”
Before she could stop him, Viggo grabbed a flashlight branded with the British Museum security logo and disappeared into the cavernous basement. His footsteps echoed. Anouk hugged her jacket around her. It was eerie down here. What she’d mistaken for swinging moons were, of course, overhead lights. The whoosh of wings was the air-conditioning unit. They must have been in the portion of the basement used for constructing exhibits. Cautiously, she climbed out of the sarcophagus. She checked on the others, but they were deeply asleep, their pulses slow and steady. All around her were tables full of cataloged bits of broken ceramic, hunting spears, bronze vases. An assortment of long white feathers that, judging by the size, had belonged to an owl; they made her shudder and she quickly stepped away. She moved to a table that held a collection of Victorian clocks in various states of repair. The smell of polish and oil laced the air. She picked up a massive pocket watch that was bigger than her palm. It ticked softly.
A dream pulsed at the edge of her memory. Only it hadn’t been a dream, had it? When she’d entered the Coal Baths, reality and the dream world had merged—instead of a bed of coals in the Cottage courtyard, she’d been thrust into a den of witches with an eyeless owl overhead.
She found herself absent-mindedly tracing the shape of Jak’s symbol in the dust on the clock-repair table. A circle. The two lines. It looked like the owl from her vision, a face with a mouth and nose but no eyes. An idea rustled at the back of her mind.
A face with no eyes . . .
“Well, well. The sleeping beauty awakens.”
She spun around so fast that the pocket watch slipped from her hands and fell to the ground. Viggo was back with the Pretty broker she remembered from the engagement party. He held his golden hare in the crook of one gloved arm.
“Sinjin,” she said. “It’s nice to see you again.”
He was holding two paper plates of pizza. He thrust one at her, and she found that she was ravenous. She perched on the edge of her sarcophagus, stuffed pizza in her mouth, and groaned contentedly. Greasy perfection.
Sinjin leaned over Cricket’s sarcophagus and lifted one of her eyelids. “This one’s waking too.”
Viggo leaped up to pour another cup of tea. Cricket sat up with a jolt, reaching instinctively for the knives she kept tucked in the folds of her clothes. But her hands came up empty. Viggo must have taken the blades. She gave a growl.
Viggo held up the tea.
“Hi, Cricket. Welcome back. You’ll find your knives on that table over there. Forgive me for taking them from you, but you did enough damage to my skin as a cat.”
She looked disoriented until her eyes settled on Anouk and a little of her panic faded. Anouk swallowed a mouthful of pizza, tossed aside the plate, and threw her arms around Cricket.
“It’s okay. We made it.”
“Is this hell?” Cricket was staring at the threadbare taxidermied lion. “We died, didn’t we? This has to be hell.”
“Not quite, but it is a basement.”
Cricket’s gaze caught on a collection of pearl-handled boxes that looked valuable and immensely stealable, and the worry lines around her mouth disappeared. She straightened, her fingers already stretching toward the treasures.
Sinjin went to check on the status of things outside while Anouk explained to Cricket what Viggo had told her. Cricket scarfed down some pizza and then went snooping through the museum’s collection of shiny treasures with a glint in her eye, and then Luc jolted awake, and Hunter Black a few minutes after him; an hour later, Beau started snoring loudly. Anouk couldn’t wait any longer. She poked him in the side until he sputtered awake.
Once they had all eaten and cleared their heads, Sinjin returned. His face was grave.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Luc said.
“Close enough.” Sinjin jerked his chin toward the ceiling. “It’s gotten worse out there.”
“How could it possibly get worse?”
“You know about the plagues? The black rainbows?
Double moons?”
“We’ve heard the rumors,” Luc said.
Anouk got a sudden shiver. Here in the basement, amid all the artwork and artifacts, at least they were protected. Bolted doors, security systems, locks. She scanned the ceiling, wondering what was happening outside.
“It’s a nightmare out there. Pretties coughing up blood and black smoke and dying in the streets. Car accidents everywhere. Madmen on lawless sprees, driven wild by the double moons. Time slips so big that entire buildings have disappeared into the past.”
“Why would the witches do that?” Luc asked.
“They wouldn’t,” Sinjin said, stroking his hare. “The plagues are as much a problem for the witches as they are for us. They’re an unintended consequence of dabbling in magic they shouldn’t.”
Anouk asked, “Why didn’t anyone try to stop the witches when they first took over?”
His hand went absently to the ruby stud in his left ear. “They did. Prince Maxim fought them, but it was a battle he could never win; the witches were only projections. Kill one, it didn’t matter—it was only smoke and magic. Lady Imogen knew better. She sent a fleet of lesser Royals to search for their den, the source of their magic. But those Royals disappeared. If they found the den, that knowledge died with them.”
The air conditioning turned on overhead with that whoosh like flapping wings. Prince Maxim and Lady Imogen had been looking for the same thing she was—the answer to Jak’s riddle. The object that bound the Noirceur.
Her eyes fell to the clock-repair table where she’d drawn Jak’s riddle in the dust, the circle with what might be a nose and mouth but no eyes.
A face with no eyes.
Hesitantly, she stretched her hands out over the drawing. A small thrill ran up her limbs as she realized the shapes on either side of the circle weren’t meant to be sunrays—they were more like fingers. Ten in all, though the hands lacked arms.
Hands with no arms.
She pressed a palm to her mouth.
Midnight Beauties Page 21
