Midnight Beauties

by Megan Shepherd

  “Hmm.”

  She smiled wider at his obvious discomfort. “And you care if I live or die?”

  He scowled again. “Don’t mock me.” But then he tipped up his chin. “All things considered, your survival would be . . . preferable to your death.”

  “Hunter Black! How sweet.”

  He turned and went down the stairs so quickly that for a moment she thought she’d imagined their conversation. Hunter Black, caring about whether they all lived or died? She’d never have believed it. He was right, though—​the beasties were family. The thought made her feel both tender toward and fiercely protective of the others.

  She climbed the rest of the stairs to the museum. She ducked and dashed her way up four floors, dodging undead hands, running from hollow undead eyes, and finally reached the roof. She went through the doors and thrust a flashlight through the door handles behind her, barring it against the mummies trying to get through. Moans came from the other side. She was breathing heavily. She dusted bits of desiccated fabric and skin and an errant tooth off her clothes with a shudder.

  “Damn it, Sinjin,” she muttered, even though it was bad luck to curse the dead.

  The roof of the British Museum was largely taken up by a glass dome. She extended her arms for balance and carefully stepped across the glass tiles toward the cupola. Clouds had moved in, darkening the skies, and the double moons threw strange light over the city. Anouk’s heart drummed wildly. From this high, she could see all of London. The churning waves of the river Thames. Entire buildings flickering in and out of time. A Ferris wheel that rose like the blackened bones of the city. To the right of the Ferris wheel rose a tower with a glowing clock face.

  Big Ben.

  The clouds hung low around it. Black fog swirled at its base. It was roped off for construction, but in the chaos of the plagues, Pretties staggered straight past the barricades and disappeared into time loops.

  She shivered. The wind was savage this high.

  A snowflake bit at her face, and she looked up at heavy clouds. Alone on the rooftop, Anouk felt topsy-turvy, as though she were standing on a frozen lake high over the city, and she thought of the Schwarzwald and the Cottage. The snow began to fall more heavily. The wind blew in an odd circle with a whistling sound and then, just as she knew he would, Jak materialized.

  He crouched like a gargoyle, perched effortlessly on the glass tiles.

  “Jak.” It was darker now, the city skyline lit only by headlights and streetlights. “Take me to Stonehenge.”

  The smile he gave her was sweet, not like his usual sharp-toothed grin, and it made him look suddenly like an impish boy who’d only ever wanted someone to play with.

  “You figured out my other riddle.” His voice brimmed with cheerfulness, but then he seemed to think of something grave, and he said more seriously, “Do you know what waits for you there?”

  She nodded. “I do.”

  “You failed once. What makes you think it will be different this time?”

  She paused. Heart-pounding feelings of failure flared up again. But courage, she’d decided, was forging ahead when things went wrong, not when they went right. “I’ve been thinking about what Petra said after the trials,” she said carefully. “She said she felt like she never belonged anywhere—​at the Cottage or anywhere else—​but that she’d accepted it. The rest of us were searching for our connection to magic as if we were looking for the place we belonged. But I think that’s why Petra succeeded when we all failed. Because you never find the place where you belong. Duke Karolinge said it himself—​the cruxes are only symbols. There’s nothing inherently magical about, say, leaves or moths. The trick is to accept the hole in yourself. Accept that it will never be filled, not with flowers or herbs or anything. Like Petra accepted herself.”

  Jak cocked his head. “So you think you’ve learned the morality of magic? That the Coals will honor you now when they didn’t before? If cruxes don’t matter, will you walk in empty-handed?”

  “I didn’t say that cruxes don’t matter. Even symbols have power. I won’t be empty-handed.”

  She felt certain this time, but she’d felt certain before. She could fail again, and this time Rennar wouldn’t be there to save her. “I think that sometimes it takes a spectacular failure before you can rise to incredible heights. I think that I’ve never accepted the fact that I’m not like the Pretties out there. That I have a hole in my heart shaped like an owl. That no matter what I do, that hole will never be filled. I’ll never be a Pretty. I’ll never be normal. And that’s okay.”

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out one of the long white feathers she’d taken from the museum basement. “This is my crux. I should have known from the start. I was blind to my own soul.”

  The glint of mischief returned to his eyes. “Take my hand.”

  The wind swirled around her, pushing her toward Jak. This time, there was no magic mirror in her pocket, no Rennar to save her, no Petra and Luc to catch her if she fell.

  She stepped onto one of the dome’s glass panels.

  And she was falling. Falling. Falling.

  But Jak caught her hand, and they were falling together.

  * * *

  For a few moments, Anouk felt trapped in time. The snow swirled so thick around them that the city was gone, the lights and the traffic and the smell of burning chestnuts on the air. Her feet no longer rested on the museum roof. If the dead still pressed at the door, their groans were very far away now. She felt burning cold as Jak clutched her hand, but he was gone—​at least his boyish form was. He was simply snow again. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be a bird. To ride the wind. To soar with the snow. She had the sense that the world was passing far below, that they were skipping over towns and valleys and roads as easily as Beau would trace his finger over one of his road maps. Up high, they didn’t need to bother with traffic circles and detours. They could fly as straight as a bird, and almost as though no time had passed at all, Anouk felt solid ground once more beneath her feet.

  She crouched, breathing heavily. The snow and wind swirled around her. Her fingers dug into the earth. The grass was stiff with frost. She stood, squinting into the snow and fog. There were no sounds of the city. No sounds at all except the wind. The fog continued to lift until she could make out colossal stone slabs rising around her. There was a hum that was almost deafening and yet somehow didn’t make a sound. It was like the hum she’d felt from some of the enchanted ancient objects in the British Museum, but it came from every direction. An ancient song of the stones.

  Jak materialized on the other side of the circle, sitting on one of the stones. She tilted her head up.

  “I thought there’d be tourists,” she called.

  “Not at night, lovely.” He pointed far off, where she could see a faint light on the horizon. Dawn was coming, but for now, she had Stonehenge to herself.

  “What do I do?”

  “Wait,” he said cryptically, “and watch.”

  As the sun rose, its rays caught the frost on the grass like light concentrated through a magnifying glass, and mystical blue sparks began to appear. Anouk stepped back as if she’d stumbled onto a beehive. The song of the stones grew.

  “It won’t last long,” Jak warned. “Once the frost melts, it’ll be over until the next midwinter dawn. It was Pretty women who first discovered this, one thousand five hundred years and a day ago. They saw and understood the power of the stones. And so the Coals rewarded them for their insight. It gave them the chance for greatness. It still does today. But do not mistake a chance for a promise. There is just as great a chance that the Coals will burn you alive, as it has so many women.”

  The sparks began to catch and spread. This was no ordinary flame. It took on the blue tinge of the frost. Flames rose, licking at the falling snow. Anouk got the sense she was watching something rare and special. The stones, the frost, the winter dawn—​it had all come together in just the right conditions to create
a naturally occurring Coal Bath.

  The flames formed a circle bound by the stones. She was starting to feel cold coming from them, a cold so intense that it was burning. She glanced in the distance. The fog was rising, and she could make out a wire fence and vast fields stretching toward the horizon. There was still time. She could run. Break out of the circle.

  But then it was too late, even if she’d wanted to. The flames were too high. Her chance to give up was gone—​but she didn’t want it anyway. The blue flames rose three feet, then six, then nine, almost as high as the tops of the stones. On his perch above, Jak crouched, his icicle hair hanging in his face and hiding his expression. Another ray of sun burst from the horizon, and he called through the snow: “Now, lovely. It must be now.”

  The frost was already melting. Her shoes and socks were soaked with dew. The flames burned brightly. No Royals watching now. No Duke Karolinge and his rituals. No acolytes. No robes.

  She kicked off her shoes, clasped the owl feather in both hands, and stepped barefoot into the flames.

  Immediately, she was burning. Her throat closed up as she remembered the pain from before, the courtyard and all those watching eyes as she screamed, as the flames licked at her skin with their barbed tongues. Burning into her flesh. Scalding her blood. Hot and cold became one: pain. She felt her body being torn apart again. Dimly, she blinked down at her bare toes. The flames had eaten off her trousers. Her underclothes were in tatters, rapidly burning off of her skin. Oh, the jacket! Her beautiful Faustine jacket was falling apart and turning into ashes. She cursed herself for not taking it off. But then the flames rose and she didn’t care about the jacket. She could barely remember what the jacket looked like. The flames were turning her to ash now. Skin and bone and blood and eyes and hair and throat and toes; she was ash, all of her. She waited for the blackness to come. That awful, encompassing, yawning blackness. It licked at the edges of her vision. She felt nothing—​she had no more fingers or toes with which to feel. She heard nothing—​her ears were no longer ears. The blackness overtook every one of her senses and she knew the end was coming.

  But then, with a brilliant burst, the blackness shattered. Lights crackled and then the darkness was replaced by the full spectrum of light. Reds and blues and greens and oranges. All the colors of her jacket, all the colors of the world, the colors of frost and grass and dawn and sky, all at once in a single beautiful burst.

  So beautiful it ached.

  So beautiful it healed.

  Part IV

  Chapter 35

  When Anouk opened her eyes, she was staring into the frowning face of an old man dressed in a navy-blue coat, Wellington boots, and a tweed cap. He prodded her gently with his cane.

  “Oy there, girlie. No sleeping in the stones. I don’t have to tell you crazy pagan types that. Now, scamper off and there’s no harm done, eh? Don’t want to have to call the police.”

  She stared blankly at the old man. A patch on his jacket declared him an employee of the Stonehenge Visitors’ Center. She must have looked more than a little bedraggled because he cocked his head and said, “Girlie? You okay? Didn’t eat any special mushrooms, did you? I was young once. I remember the thrill of sneaking into a forbidden place after lights-out. Lucky you didn’t freeze to death out here.”

  Dazed, she sat up and looked around her, but Jak had vanished from the top of the stones. It wasn’t snowing anymore. Dawn had come and gone, and the sun had burned the frost from the fields. She pressed a hand to her head. Last she remembered, she was being roasted alive. Her skin had sizzled like butter in a pan. Her blood had bubbled like broth brought to a rolling boil.

  “Missy?” The elderly man was holding out a hand to help her stand. Instinctively, she took it. He pulled her to her feet and then brushed lightly at her shoulder. “Oops, you have a bit of grass on you. Don’t want to stain such a pretty jacket.”

  She jerked her head at the word. Jacket?

  To her supreme shock, she was fully dressed. She was wearing the black dress she’d gotten from Galeries Lafayette—​never mind that she’d left it in Mada Vittora’s townhouse—​and her oxford shoes, and her hair was pulled back in a black ribbon. Nothing was burned or singed or even wrinkled; it was as though every piece had come straight off the hanger. And the Faustine jacket! She’d watched it burn! Now it was draped over her shoulders like a cape. She shrugged it off and ran her fingers over every inch, checking the stitching, the red satin fabric, the cuffs and collar. Everything was perfect—​almost. It wouldn’t be her jacket if it didn’t have a few errant streaks of dust.

  She hugged the jacket to her chest and then ran her hands up her arms, marveling at how the bruises she’d collected when she’d hit the floor after sliding down the museum banister had vanished from her skin. Even her knuckles, which had been perpetually chapped since the Black Forest, were now buttery smooth.

  She laughed aloud. “It worked!” She threw her arms around the first thing she saw, which happened to be the visitors’-center employee.

  Puzzled, he laughed off her embrace and readjusted his cap. “Hop off now, girlie. Howl at the moon somewhere else tonight, eh?”

  She spun in a circle in the center of the stones. They weren’t humming like they’d been the night before, but she still sensed magic in them. She felt connected to the stones and the grass and the visitors’-center employee in a way she never had before, as though the world were now an extension of her own body and she might make the grass ripple as effortlessly as she tossed her own hair. Was this what it felt like to be a witch? Not just small sparks of magic at her fingers, but as though the whole world were a warm glittering dream that until this point she’d been merely sleeping through?

  The smile left her face as she remembered London. “I have to save Luc!”

  The bewildered old man called after her as she leaped over the guard railing and sprinted down the path to the visitors’ center. An awful idea hit her and she stopped abruptly. Without Jak, how was she supposed to get back to London? She needed a bus schedule . . . a ticket . . .

  “Idiote!”

  She groaned. She was a witch! She thrust a hand into her pocket and found the bag of Cricket’s eucalyptus. At the Cottage, Esme had told her that, with the right combination of life-essences, doorways could be altered to lead to different destinations. It was tricky magic. Flowers alone wouldn’t suffice. She swallowed three dried eucalyptus leaves along with a handful of fresh dewy grass from within the circle. A glittering, warm fizz spread through her body. Why hadn’t Mada Vittora told her that magic could feel like this, like the tickle of a feather on the back of her neck, both delicious and bothersome at the same time? Raising her hands toward the nearest bathroom door, she whispered the words that were bumping around in her mouth. “Abri nox.”

  Creating doorways was far more advanced magic than sewing on buttons. She’d expected the magic to explode from her like water from one of Luc’s garden hoses set on high, but instead it simply was there when she needed it and wasn’t when she didn’t. It reminded her of “The Goat Lottery,” one of Luc’s fairy tales, about a poor goatherd girl who’d bet her family’s flock in the village’s annual lottery and won a magical coat from the meadow sprite who ran it. Every time the girl needed money, she reached in her pocket and there it was. Exactly as much as she needed, no more, no less.

  She held her breath as she twisted the bathroom doorknob. The last thing she wanted to see on the other side was a commode—​and to her delight, the bathroom beyond had indeed disappeared. The door now led into the grand entryway of the British Museum, with a banner over the ticket booth advertising the upcoming Nutcracker Ballet special exhibit.

  She paused to smile over her shoulder at the old man.

  “Thanks for not calling the police, monsieur.”

  The door now led into the grand entryway of the British Museum, with a banner over the ticket booth advertising the upcoming Nutcracker Ballet special exhibit. The ancient stones had wo
rked their magic again—the border spell was no match for their mysterious energy. The elderly visitors’-center employee would doubtlessly run after her though the door, but he’d find only the usual row of urinals. A shiver of magic ran through her as she crossed the enchanted threshold. No trains, no buses, not even any help from Snow Children. That warm tickle ran through her whole body, but there was a scalding-hot edge to it too, and she pressed a hand to her stomach as if she’d gotten a sudden cramp. Magic wasn’t limitless. She could open a doorway across half of England, but she couldn’t travel that far that fast without a hefty bout of motion sickness.

  Her shoes echoed on the museum foyer floor as the door shut behind her.

  “Anouk!”

  Cricket was on the stairs, skipping down the steps two at a time to join her. “We’ve been looking for you all night! Beau’s tearing up exhibits to find you. Luc is barely hanging on. The dead have completely taken over the upper floors—​we had to barricade the basement to keep them out. You . . . whoa. Arrête un moment.” Cricket stopped on the last step. Her features twisted as she looked Anouk over. “You don’t look like you.”

  Anouk knew what Cricket meant, even though on the outside she looked like she always did, dressed in the Faustine jacket, tawny hair pulled back in a messy ponytail.

  “I did it,” she breathed. “Cricket, I’m a witch.”

  The caution in Cricket’s face intensified. She was a thief, after all, and thieves had a sharp eye for traps. But then Cricket’s gaze settled on the grass stains on Anouk’s shoes. Her frown vanished.

  “Like, seriously? Anouk, that’s incredible!”

  She ran over, touched a lock of Anouk’s hair, rubbed the silky strands between her fingers, and laughed. Anouk beamed until a rasping groan came from the top of the stairs.

  Both girls tensed.

  “The dead,” Cricket warned. “We’d better get out of here. Luc’s still downstairs. Hurry.”