by Kat Shepherd
Maggie shrunk against the wall. “What’s happening to her?!”
Tanya didn’t answer. She was frantically turning Mary Rose’s words over in her mind. Final vessel. Final vessel. If it wasn’t Mary Rose, then what was it? When she realized what it must be, her heart stopped.
Kira.
“It’s Kira!” Tanya shouted. “Kira is the final vessel!” Tanya glanced over to the fireplace, where the little girl still sat limply in the chair, her face and limbs as slack and unresponsive as a doll’s. For weeks the doll must have been draining her like a battery, preparing for the Night Queen’s return. “We can’t let Mary Rose take her!”
Mary Rose floated at the bottom of the stairs, her glowing eyes staring hatefully at Tanya. “What do we do?!” Maggie cried.
“There’s four of us and one of her. We have to take her down!” Tanya lunged at Mary Rose, who floated away effortlessly with a tinkling laugh.
Clio was taller and managed to grab the doll’s leg. Mary Rose struck like a viper. Her razor-sharp teeth slashed, and Clio fell back and clutched at her wounded arm. The girls were wary now and huddled together. Mary Rose’s eyes gleamed with malignant glee. She licked her lips.
Rebecca grabbed a sofa cushion and swatted at the doll. One of her blows made contact, and Mary Rose tumbled against the wall. A china pinkie snapped off and fell to the floor. Another spider leg sprouted from her head, and Mary Rose drew closer to Kira. The other three girls tore the other pillows from the sofa and joined in, doing all they could to drive back the demonic doll. But Tanya knew it wasn’t enough. They didn’t just need to slow Mary Rose down. They had to capture her and stop her for good.
Tanya found herself remembering a skittish runaway dog she had once found in the park. Nobody could coax it back to safety, until finally a neighbor had tossed a towel over the dog. Would the same thing work with Mary Rose? Tanya dropped her pillow and grabbed a thick, fleece blanket from a basket in the corner. “Try to knock her out of the air,” she whispered in Clio’s ear.
Clio leaped up and slammed the pillow into Mary Rose like she was acing a serve. The doll dropped like a stone, and Tanya threw the blanket on top, wrapping up Mary Rose as quickly as possible. The doll fought with surprising strength; its limbs felt like steel cables beneath the layers of wrapping. Tanya’s arms, already weary from fighting it off, felt weak and trembly against the violent struggling of the blanket bundle. “I don’t know if I can hold her.”
“I got this,” Maggie said. “She can’t still bite, right?”
“There’s, like, six layers of blankets between her mouth and anything else, so we should be pretty safe,” Tanya answered.
“Good,” Maggie said. She sat down on the bundle, and a muffled shriek of anger came from the folds. Tanya laughed in spite of herself. Everyone took a breath.
“So, what the heck just happened?” Rebecca asked.
“The paper that Ethan found. We thought it was an exorcism, but it wasn’t. Instead, it was the next step to bringing the Night Queen back.” Tanya shook her head. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she somehow planted it there herself. None of us had ever seen it before, and it magically appeared at just the right moment for us to play into her hands.”
“So, is Mary Rose the vessel, or is Kira?” Clio asked.
“I think Mary Rose was designed to be a temporary vessel for the Night Queen, but the doll is too small to contain her essence for long. She needs a living vessel in order to return to earth with her full power.”
“Why Kira, though? Why not Mrs. Fogelman?” Maggie asked. “I mean, she had the doll for years. She said Mary Rose was like a daughter to her.”
“I think Mrs. Fogelman’s too old now,” Tanya said thoughtfully. “The Night Queen needs children to feed her powers.”
“But she can’t do any of this without a beacon,” Rebecca said. “And I thought we destroyed those.”
“That’s the part I don’t understand,” Tanya said. “Without the beacon, she can’t fully return to our world. She can’t make the change into Kira’s body.”
“Then why is she still trying?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t know,” Tanya answered. “Maybe she doesn’t realize that there aren’t any left. Or maybe she knows something we don’t.”
“So, what are we supposed to do now?” Maggie asked.
“I say we wait it out,” Clio answered. “Whatever she thinks she’s trying to do, she needed the full moon to act. If we can hold out until the sun rises, then her window of opportunity will close. All we have to do is make it through the night, and then we can destroy Mary Rose for good.”
“Should we try to wake Mrs. Fogelman again? Maybe she can help us,” Rebecca said.
Tanya shook her head. “I don’t think we can. The Night Queen must have her under some kind of spell, like she does with Kira.”
Maggie stole a glance at the chair by the fireplace. “What if destroying Mary Rose doesn’t break the spell?” she asked in a whisper. “What if Kira and Mrs. Fogelman stay like this forever?”
“I didn’t think of that,” Clio said softly. “Maybe Ethan or Kawanna can find something that will bring her back.”
“And this time I’ll be more of a help,” Tanya said. “If I had worked alongside Ethan, kept better notes, and vetted those sources, then maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.” She picked at the dirt under her fingernails. “But I let my fear get in the way, and it made me sloppy.” She shook her head. “Scientific procedures exist for a reason.”
Rebecca grinned. “‘Scientific procedures.’ That’s the Tanya I remember.”
Clio’s eyebrows arched. “Nobody’s blaming Ethan because we got played by the Night Queen, are they? After all, it’s not like any of us figured it out, either.”
“Just friends, huh?” Maggie asked teasingly.
Clio frowned. She was just about to make a sharp retort when the lights went dark. The fire died in the hearth, and an ominous silence fell over the house. Even Mary Rose went still.
“I don’t like this,” Tanya whispered. The drapes at the window twitched, and there was a clatter from somewhere in the kitchen.
Something under the sofa cushions squirmed. A shadow darted out from beneath a chair, and Maggie let out a cry.
“What is it?” Rebecca cried. Tanya could see the wide whites of her friends’ eyes in the faint light from the streetlamp outside.
There was another dark scuttle of movement from under the sofa, and Tanya felt a searing pain on her palm. She screamed and snatched her hand away from the floor. Similar yelps came from Clio and Rebecca, and the girls pulled tighter together, searching for the unseen assailants.
There was a sound from upstairs. At first it was a kind of pattering. “Is that rain?” Clio asked softly.
“I don’t think so,” Rebecca whispered. The patter was joined by slithering scraping and then the pounding of something bumping down the stairs.
Not something. Lots of somethings. And they were headed to the living room.
From the hallway, a horde of dolls swarmed into the room like rats. The ones with firm-jointed bodies careened stiff-legged across the floor, and the soft-bodied rag dolls crawled, dragging their limp legs behind them. Their eyes were burning black suns, and jagged teeth crowded their mouths.
The girls jumped to their feet, their screams slicing the air. Tanya grabbed the struggling blanket bundle and held it over her head. “They’re here to free Mary Rose! I’ll keep them busy while you three protect Kira and try to find a way out!” Maggie and Tanya locked eyes, and Maggie nodded.
Maggie and Clio rushed to Kira and scooped her up between them while Rebecca worked to clear a path to the hall. Tanya heard Rebecca scream as a doll clamped its jaws around her ankle. She shook her leg free, and the doll hit the wall with a crack before tumbling to the floor, only to stand up and advance again. Tanya paused in the kitchen doorway, torn. “Don’t worry about us!” Rebecca shouted. “Just keep Mary Rose away from Kira!”
Mary Rose’s wriggling grew more aggressive, and Tanya’s arms began to fail. The doll seemed to grow heavier by the second, and Tanya’s fingers were numb from holding her arms up for so long. Down below, the dolls were beginning to pile up on one another, creating mounds the others could climb. They had almost reached the edge of the counter. Tanya kicked at them, but there were just too many. They streamed across the counter top, jagged teeth bared for battle.
When they started crawling up her legs, Tanya tried to shake them off, but they clamped down with their sharp little jaws and held on. She could feel their cold limbs through the thin fabric of her pajama pants. Soon they had reached her waist, and one began to claw its way up her back like a crab. Her arms were trembling violently now, and she gritted her teeth to keep from screaming.
Tanya was still wearing her winter coat, and when one doll began working its way up her sleeve, Tanya knew she was lost. Moments later, she was covered completely, and she fell to her knees. She felt razor-sharp teeth at her throat, and Mary Rose was pulled from her arms. Tanya watched in horror as the dolls reverently unrolled the blanket bundle and the demonic doll arose again.
Something had happened to Mary Rose while she had been cocooned in the blanket. Her face had begun to pit and crack, and a kind of sickly, gray light was radiating from the tiny openings. From outside the kitchen window, Tanya could see the same gray light streaming out from something in the yard. What could it be?
Tanya felt her arms pulled sharply behind her and tied behind her back. Mary Rose floated into the air, the cold gray light beaming from her cracked features. “Prepare the vessel now, my children. The beacon awaits us,” she said in her high, breathless voice. “Bind the other mortals tightly. I have been waiting a long time for my revenge, and once I have returned to my true form, I shall enjoy seeing their bones ground to dust.”
A river of dolls streamed into the living room, and Tanya could hear the screams of her friends as they tried to fight them off. She felt crawling dolls swarm over her, and for a moment she found herself staring into a golden pair of falcon eyes before everything went black.
CHAPTER
19
TANYA AWOKE TO find herself tied to a tree in the backyard, her shivering friends beside her. Each girl had cuts and scratch marks from trying to fight off the dolls, and all three were hunched over in defeat. Rebecca’s teeth were chattering from the cold. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We tried.”
“I know,” Tanya answered. “Me too. There were just too many of them.”
“I still don’t understand how this can be happening,” Rebecca said. “I thought there weren’t any more beacons left.”
“There must have been another one we didn’t know about.” Tanya angled her head over to the line of dolls that marched toward the gray glow in the yard. “Look.” The glow was coming from Mrs. Fogelman’s sculpture, Unburied Past.
“Mrs. Fogelman made the beacon?” Clio asked. “But how? Why?”
Tanya thought back to the feverish intensity of the artist’s creative energy, the way she seemed to ignore everything else. The way her drive to complete the work seemed to come from somewhere outside of her. “I don’t think she meant to do it,” Tanya said slowly. “I think the Night Queen found some way to control or possess her, too. Just like she did with the people who made the other beacons we destroyed.”
Maggie tugged against her bonds. “The Night Queen has Kira and the beacon. Once she fully enters our world, she’ll destroy everything and turn the earth into another Nightmare Realm. There’s nothing to stop her now, is there?”
“Nothing but us,” Rebecca said. “Maybe we can find a way to free each other.” She strained against the ropes around her wrists, trying to reach Clio’s hands next to her. She twisted and squirmed, but she couldn’t quite reach. “It’s no use,” she said.
Across the yard, a sea of dolls surrounded Unburied Past, and Mary Rose hovered above it, her crown gleaming in the unearthly light. A chunk of her china scalp fell to the ground as two more spider legs punched through. Kira was slowly being led across the yard. She wore a long, ivory dress and a necklace of jet-black beads. Her eyes glowed with a dull gray light, and her lank hair had begun to rise up and stand on end.
“Look at her hair,” Tanya said. “There’s some kind of electrical charge between Kira and the beacon.” Her hands itched to write down everything she was seeing, and she longed for her notebook, forgotten upstairs next to her pillow. If only she had it now, she might be able to make sense of it all, find some way to stop this from happening.
Kira shuffled closer to the beacon, her bare feet dragging across the frozen ground like a sleepwalker’s. A sense of despair filled Tanya so deeply that it felt as if all her muscles had turned to lead. Suddenly, she jumped as something cold and slimy slithered between her arm and Rebecca’s. Tanya let out a scream, and a cold, spongy hand clapped over her mouth. The pungent smell of decay filled her nostrils, and her eyes widened when a familiar face filled her vision.
It was the changeling, Horrible. The Night Queen’s former servant was still an unreliable ally, but he did have a habit of showing up whenever they needed him most.
Tanya looked into his sunken-apple face and nodded her understanding. Nimble fingers brushed against her wrists, and a few moments later, she and Rebecca were rubbing their cold hands together and waiting for Horrible to untie the other two girls.
“Horrible, where did you come from?” Rebecca whispered. “I thought you had left Piper weeks ago.” The changeling finished untying the last of Maggie’s bonds and waddled over to Rebecca on his bowlegs, the talons on his feet leaving divots in the frosty ground. He climbed into her lap and ran his mushroom-tipped fingers over her hair, grooming her. He picked out a stray piece of rotten leaf, and it disappeared into his mouth.
“Horrible, I’m glad to see you, too, but could you take this whole disgusto thing down a notch?” Maggie quipped with a grimace. “Or at least change your clothes every once in a while?” She pointed at the torn blue onesie that was streaked with filth, the same one he had been wearing when they first discovered him months earlier.
The glow from the beacon grew stronger, and Mary Rose’s whole body was buzzing with energy. Another chunk of cheek broke off and fell onto frozen mud below. “I think we’re running out of time,” Clio whispered. “We have to find a way to stop her.”
Tanya closed her eyes for a moment, picturing her notebook. She mentally turned the pages, scanning through the notes in her memory. Even the supernatural world had rules. Rules that were governed by science, just like everything else. She thought back through what she had learned about elements. Gold. Iron. Mercury. She blinked and squinted, searching the scene before her. If the sculpture was a beacon, it had to follow the same rules as the other beacons. Something in it must have mercury, and if she could find it, she could destroy it.
Kira had almost reached the sculpture now, and Tanya could see the eagerness in Mary Rose’s golden eyes. The Night Queen’s triumphant return was close enough to taste. The gazing globe in Unburied Past roiled, and Tanya recognized the familiar oily sheen of the glass. Mercury glass.
Tanya knew she had only seconds to act. Without thinking, she grabbed the snow shovel by the back door. “What are you doing?!” Rebecca asked.
“Destroying the beacon,” Tanya answered. She held the shovel in both hands, ready to swing.
“But that thing is cement,” Maggie cried. “A shovel isn’t going to be strong enough!”
“The beacon isn’t the sculpture,” Tanya sa
id. “It’s in the sculpture! It’s the gazing globe!”
“What are you talking about?” Clio asked.
“It’s mercury glass!” Without stopping to explain, Tanya ran straight for the sculpture. Just beside it, Mary Rose was bent over Kira, and a beam of bilious gray light was just beginning to come out of her mouth.
Tanya used the shovel to scoop the dolls in her path and fling them to the side. Several of the porcelain ones hit the wall of the studio and shattered, but the cloth dolls kept coming. Tanya knocked them away. With the flat end of the shovel, she swatted Mary Rose out of the air. The doll flew across the yard and slammed against a tree. Behind her, Tanya’s friends picked up brooms, pots, and anything they could find to fight off the other dolls. “We’ve got to get to Kira!” Rebecca cried to the others.
There was a scream near the tree as a doll latched onto Maggie’s arm. She desperately tried to shake it off. Clio knocked it away with a broom and stomped on its china head, crushing it. Dolls tore at Horrible, who seemed impervious to their bites. He plucked a rag doll from his leg and tore it in two. It fell limp to the ground at his feet.
Horrible mowed a path through the horde of snapping jaws, but the remaining ones closed ranks around Kira, some almost as tall as Tanya’s waist.
Tanya turned back to the beacon. There, in the center of the basin, the gazing globe glowed the putrid color of filthy snow, its milky surface roiling with power. She stepped forward and raised the shovel over her head.
Just then, the clown doll appeared, blocking her path. Its jagged, yellow teeth dripped with a venomous liquid. Mary Rose loomed up behind it, her cracked and pitted face unrecognizable. Spider legs burst from every part of her like tentacles, and her black teeth jutted like knives beneath her golden falcon eyes. She vibrated with a white-hot energy. Tanya’s heart froze in her chest like a mouse that has seen the shadow of the hawk above it.
