by Karen Foxlee
Annabel looked at Hafwen. She looked at Hafwen’s stout legs and Hafwen’s round belly. She looked at the small hole. Hafwen looked at Annabel and raised one hairy troll brow.
Hafwen stood on Annabel’s bent knee, and once the troll had her head and shoulders through, Annabel began to push. She pushed and prodded and shoved. She smoothed down rolls of troll belly so that they would pass through the opening, and she leaned with all her might against Hafwen’s bottom until, with a sudden plop, the troll was through. Annabel quickly passed her the torch.
The lair of the West-Born Wyrm was filling with sound.
A violent hissing and a wild churning. The walls rattled, the shields and swords fell over, the armor clattered to the ground. The dragon was returning.
The shadowlings flew. They screeched and skittered. They moved in a seething, shadowy cloud against the rising moon. Londoners already afraid of the black night shuddered at the sound. Mothers checked on their babies once, then again. Slumbering old men in nightcaps opened their eyes at the sound.
They breathed, those shadowlings. They breathed the breath of dark stairwells and damp cellars and old chests long forgotten. They breathed the breath of empty, closed spaces where they had slept for centuries. And they searched.
They searched for Annabel.
They opened their blank mouths above the sewer grates. They threaded their long shadowy arms down drainpipes. They whispered her name up and down streets and lanes. They rushed across railway yards. In one church door and out another. They looked for cracks, for fissures, for holes. They looked for where she might come up. Until, finally, they tasted her.
In his dark mansion Mr. Angel pressed his monocle to his eye and saw that the dark-magic gauge was almost full. A matter of hours and the Grey girl would remedy that. When the shadowlings brought her to him, he would tell her the story of her mother and then feed her to the machine.
He climbed the staircase, up past the moon funnel that chanted a sad, lonely song, out onto the platform that looked over London. He breathed in the dark miasma, wept at the great wretched fog. He looked over all that would be his.
“No matter the heat, a young lady shall not remove her gloves in the ballroom.”
—Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)
Annabel clambered through the hole. First one leg, then the other. It was most unladylike. She twisted onto her belly and slid herself through, and as she did, she saw the dragon coming. She saw its black snout and its black eyes. She saw its huge enraged shape sliding into its lair, filling the space. She ducked down and crouched with the others, low to the ground.
A blast of hot wind shot through the hole, followed by a huge flame. It was a golden dragon flame, and it licked up the wall above them as they huddled on the ground. By the light of the flame, Annabel saw that the circular wall of the chamber rose as far as the eye could see. They were at the bottom of a very deep well.
And there, in the center of the chamber, on a small raised dais, was the wand.
The Morever Wand.
“The White Wand,” said Annabel and Kitty in unison.
They were quiet for several seconds, and in the quiet they could hear the dragon breathing. It nudged its snout against the hole, sniffing them out. There was nothing for it. Annabel was up. She ran as quickly as she could to the middle of the chamber and clutched the thing in her hand.
It was a stick with a jagged bend at one end and thousands of tiny words and symbols written all over it. It was light. So light that it felt like air. She scuttled back and threw herself flat as another blast of heat came through the hole, followed by a golden flame. She smelled singed hair.
“Now for the way home,” she said.
The dragon was angry. Very angry. It threw itself at the wall at the sound of their voices; it slammed its nose against the hole. Hafwen grabbed Annabel’s hand and uttered several troll prayers.
“But how?” asked Kitty.
Another flame burned through the hole, this time aimed low, and they rolled to one side, farther from the opening. They looked up again and, by the flame’s light, saw the brickwork stretched above them until it disappeared into the darkness above.
Annabel touched the map on her forehead with her hand, but she knew that even as she did, it was vanishing beneath her fingertips.
Another blast of golden flame erupted through the hole. It was hot, so hot in that place. The dragon thrashed and thumped against the wall, and bricks rained down. A fireball shot up into the darkness. How would they get out? There must be something that Annabel was meant to do. She was the most magical girl.
She was the Valiant Defender of Good Magic.
Miss Estella had touched her head and her heart.
All Annabel’s answers were there.
She was not alone. She knew it then. She was most definitely not alone.
“We must go up,” Annabel said purposefully, her shoulders back, her chin held high, exactly the way she had been taught at Miss Finch’s Academy for Young Ladies.
Up.
More bricks fell beside them, and the dragon’s snout appeared. They screamed.
“But how?” said Hafwen and Kitty together, looking upward at the seemingly endless tunnel.
“I know exactly how,” said Annabel.
The broomstick thrummed in Annabel’s hands. Her broomstick! The broomstick she’d chosen herself from the pile in the magical storeroom. The broomstick that had saved them over the streets of London Above. The broomstick that had saved Kitty from Aunty.
It bucked in Annabel’s hands. It wanted up the moment she thought it, and she had to keep it from flying off without her.
“Everyone climb on!” shouted Annabel as another great dragon fireball exploded into the chamber and burned a trail upward. The dragon’s snout was in the room now, its hot breath upon them.
“All of us?” shouted Kitty.
More bricks rained from the opening, which was growing bigger by the minute.
“We have to try,” said Annabel. Another flare erupted and licked across the floor and up the wall beside them. They skittered quickly to one side. By the light of a new flame that rushed just above their heads, Annabel saw Hafwen’s wide eyes and knew what she was thinking.
“Never,” said Annabel. “You know I wouldn’t, Hafwen. You know it.”
She held out her hand to the troll, who jumped on the broomstick behind Annabel.
Kitty scrambled on at the rear. “You’ll kill us all!” she shouted.
Annabel ignored her. She waited for the dragon’s fire. It burst through the hole and the huge flame ball rose up the chamber.
Up, commanded Annabel, and the broomstick flew up.
It leapt high and fast into the air.
It stopped and hovered. It strained under the weight of the three girls and began to fall.
Up! cried Annabel again.
But the thing began to plummet backward.
There was no time to think. No time to yell. She thought of the Miss Vines, of the Finsbury Wizards, of her mother. A new fireball exploded from the hole in the wall. The dragon’s head was through.
Up, she commanded her broomstick. She meant it with every cell in her body. She meant it with her heart. She had never sounded surer. A great jolt of power coursed through her hands and into the broomstick. It stopped sliding backward. It bucked and surged forward, and with flames licking their toes, they shot upward toward the world.
“Upon arrival at her destination, a young lady says farewell to any acquaintances she has made. She does so warmly but without undue extravagance or familiarity. Addresses should not be exchanged unless mutually agreeable.”
—Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)
They lay where they had landed, breathing hard. It was very dark—not the darkness of Under London’s caverns and troll holes but an airier, more open blackness. Annabel took a deep breath of London Above and smiled. As her eyes adjusted, she saw there was an expanse of marble floor and great stone steps and, above th
em, a magnificent ceiling. She thought it was perhaps a castle, but then, after she had stared a while longer, she realized it was really only the great hall at Euston Station. She’d been there once before with her mother to catch a train to Birmingham. There was a glimmer of light from a high window, and when she looked, she saw the brownish blurred face of the moon appearing.
“Look—the moon is quite high,” she said, and sat up quickly.
She looked down at her torn cloak and mud-coated dress. Her hair was filled with straw and dragon scales. In one hand was her broomstick; in the other, the Morever Wand. The map was gone from her arm and her face, but she still felt the weight of it inside her. Its fullness. All of Under London was inside her, and she would never get it out again.
“Now, my star,” said Hafwen, sitting up just as quickly, for she had remembered.
“Yes, dear Hafwen,” said Annabel. “Your star. But first we must take the wand to the Miss Vines.”
First they must stop Mr. Angel. First they must save all of London. Somehow.
Annabel wondered at the Morever Wand’s magic. She looked at the strange words written all over it. How did it work?
They sat at the edge of the hole they had flown from, which was already disappearing. The marble floor was growing over it, shimmering in the muddy moonlight.
“We could have come straight here and flown down and got the stupid thing without all the trouble,” Kitty said.
“I don’t think magic works like that,” said Annabel.
Kitty smiled, but it was a weak smile, and she coughed again as she sat. Her cheeks were very red. She closed her eyes, and half her dirty little face shone in the moonlight.
Hafwen smiled her large gray-toothed smile.
“Did you enjoy that adventure, Haffie?” asked Annabel. She had decided that was what she would call her troll friend.
“No,” replied Hafwen, putting away the smile, although little bits of it still twitched at the edges of her mouth.
Soon there was nothing to show for the hole to Under London, just a patch of marble floor a little glossier with rusty moonlight than the rest. Annabel tested it with her toe. Yes, solid marble.
“We must take the wand to the Miss Vines. They will know what to do,” said Annabel. She didn’t want to think of her vision on the Lake of Tears. It wasn’t good to think of that at all.
She stood and swayed with hunger and tiredness. She had the Morever Wand in her hand, and she had returned to London Above. It should feel like an ending, yet, standing there in the great hall of Euston Station, she felt tired and very brave but as though her journey had not finished. It was an unsettling feeling, like being asked by Mr. Ladgrove to recite a Latin passage and not having a clue what it meant.
Kitty coughed and nodded as though she understood. She refused the hand that Annabel offered her, scowled, and stood.
Hafwen held out her hand to be assisted, and Annabel, laughing, helped her up.
Yes, they were the best friends she had ever had. Isabelle Rutherford seemed like a paper doll in comparison. Here were her true friends. Her heart soared in such a way that she had to put her hand over her chest to hold it in.
“To the magic shop,” said Annabel.
“To the magic shop,” repeated Hafwen. “To find my star.”
They went out into London Above. Out past the darkened ticket windows and the refreshment rooms. Out past the ladies’ cloak rooms and gentlemen’s cloak rooms, out through the great arch into the night. Annabel never knew it could feel so good to take deep breaths of foggy London night air. But she also felt frightened. The fog was thick and the gaslights shone weakly, with pale halos. There were strange sounds: the slow heartbeat of faraway horses’ hooves, a lone bell, muffled, as though it were deep underwater.
How much time until the moon reached its full height? It was already high in the sky, a pale smudge behind the fog.
Annabel held Hafwen’s hand. London was full of many unusual things, but stout, hairy Hafwen would probably still stand out. She took her little troll friend and hid her behind her skirts. There was another sound, a whispery sound, and a faint breeze made the fog swirl around them.
“It is Euston Station,” said Annabel nervously. “But I’m quite sure I don’t know the way from here.”
She imagined the magic shop and the Miss Vines waiting for her. She longed to see Miss Henrietta’s face when she showed her the wand.
“It’s that way,” said Kitty, leading them out to the road. “You and Hafwen will fly.”
The breeze grew stronger, a sudden wind now, blowing against their skirts and lifting the red cloak.
Hafwen didn’t like it. “What is that talking air?” she asked.
Annabel tried to smile at the little troll’s expression. “But why do you say only Hafwen and I?” she asked Kitty.
“Because I have done what I told the Miss Vines I would do, and more.”
“But, Kitty…,” whispered Annabel.
Kitty wanted sky. She wanted to walk all the way to Highgate and curl herself beneath a tree and wake with sunlight on her face. She wanted no more journey. No more trolls. No more wands. She didn’t want to look at the disappointed face of the Grey girl, who all her life had gotten exactly what she wanted.
“But, Kitty, you can’t mean that,” said Annabel. “After everything we’ve done.”
“Traitor,” said Hafwen.
“Shut your gob,” said Kitty.
“The Miss Vines would have you. They would—I know they would,” said Annabel. “Please say you will.”
Kitty was her friend. She’d never had a friend like Kitty. It seemed all wrong. How could she be the Valiant Defender of Good Magic without Kitty?
Kitty shook her head. In all her life she had never met a girl like Annabel Grey. She was bright as a star and good and brave.
“It is not my place,” Kitty said, but the wind grew louder still, and it whipped up her words and blew them away.
It came in a sudden rushing gust, blew up from the pavement, and sent rubbish flying. It worried their skirts and grabbed the wand from Annabel’s hand, and the broomstick too, and threw them out onto the road.
“Whatever is…,” Annabel began but did not finish.
The fog was quite blown apart before them, and out of it flew a terrible shape.
A monstrous shape.
Out of the fog a huge dark carriage drawn by six shadowy horses came. It made a sound like a thousand angry hornets. It flew straight toward them, so that there was not a moment to think. It rushed toward them, so that Annabel knew it would crush them, smash them, end them.
But it passed through her. The horses passed right through her, and as they did, she felt a great tugging sensation and she was lifted clean off her feet. She felt Hafwen’s hand slip from her own. She was yanked violently upward and into the thing and onto a hard seat, and then the carriage was lifting, soaring away from the ground.
“Kitty!” Annabel screamed as she went up. “Hafwen!”
“Annabel!” she heard Kitty shout before the most magical girl was taken by the shadowlings and carried away into the sky.
Mr. Angel stood on his rooftop platform and raised his Black Wand. He lifted the fog. He lifted it from tenements and tiny lanes. He lifted it from the grand mansion streets. He lifted it from the closes and circuses and cathedrals. He lifted it from churches and charnel houses and factories. Like a blanket he lifted it up from the marshes, from the shining still river, from the great parks. He tossed it up into the sky like a blanket, and it drifted away.
The full moon gazed down, new and clean. It shone into the moon funnel, and the machine below fed. It was full of dark magic and ready for him. The house bulged with shadowlings. They swarmed in rooms and on the staircases. They filled the ballroom. They tapped their claws at the windows. They mimicked the sound of the machine, its great whirring and sighing and whining, as it waited for its last meal.
“When out walking, a young lady does not stop or
turn to stare at those she passes. She keeps her gaze steady and pays little attention to that which does not concern her.”
—Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)
Annabel flew through the air in the claw chair, the shadow carriage around her, rustling and hushing and saying her name. Up and down the thing went, riding the wind, until she felt dizzy and sick. She gripped the seat, and just touching it terrified her, but there was nothing else she could do. Her bottom lifted off the seat with each undulation, only to slam down hard again.
“Oh,” she cried. “Please stop.”
But it wouldn’t. They wouldn’t. She could see their open empty mouths, and all about her they breathed. Through the little spaces between them she caught glimpses of moon-washed parks and churches and road after endless road. The shadowling carriage flew her over London. It swept her over rooftops; it rushed her through the night air.
When it did come down, finally, it was into a street of well-to-do houses with well-to-do gardens. Without warning the shadowlings unlaced their claws and dropped her onto the grass before one such house.
“Ouch,” she said, and stared at the tall, dark building.
She shivered, for she knew it at once.
The curtains were drawn, and the black windows stared back at her. It was the house from her visions. The shadowling carriage dissolved and vanished in a plume. The shadowlings twisted and turned like a murmuration of starlings, up to the rooftop and inside.
Annabel stood.
She felt instinctively for her broomstick and the Morever Wand.
She was empty-handed.
The front door opened slowly, and Mr. Angel appeared. He bowed deeply.
“Annabel Grey,” he said. “At last. We have been waiting for you.”
His black hair fell over his shoulders, and his cheeks were filled with darkness. He was horribly crooked and more wickedly gleeful than ever. Behind him in the house she heard a noise now. It was a droning and thrumming. She realized that the pavement shook beneath her and the roof groaned and the walls creaked as though they might explode.
