All the guests agreed that the Sunset Gala was a sensory triumph and the hottest ticket in town that night. Hundreds of hopeful gate-crashers were turned away at the door… but the later it got, the bigger the party seemed to grow.
Morrigan had invited Hawthorne and Cadence, and also managed to lure Jack from his room, where he’d spent most of the past week sulking. He even obligingly pulled his eye patch aside to play Morrigan’s favorite party game. The four of them were stationed behind the concierge desk for maximum visibility of the guests (and proximity to the door from which the party food was emerging—Hawthorne’s stipulation).
“He’s having a fight with his mum,” said Jack, pointing to a young man scoffing canapés with abandon. “She thinks he’s not applying himself to his studies and he thinks she’s overbearing. The woman at the top of the staircase is cheating on her wife. Those two sitting by the fire are secretly in love, but each one believes it’s unrequited because they both think the other is too good for them.”
“Ooh!” said Hawthorne, clasping his hands delightedly. “Should we go and say something?”
“Definitely not.” Jack swiped a canapé from a passing waiter (Hawthorne took three). “They’ll either figure it out or they won’t, but Uncle Jove says nosing into people’s love lives is never helpful. He must have learned from experience, because we all know how much he loves nosing into things.”
A rather noisy group of guests arrived just then, and among them was a giraffewun, a Wunimal Minor. She was long of neck with a spotted pattern covering her skin, languid brown eyes, and large ears a bit like a deer, but otherwise quite humanoid.
Morrigan glanced at Jack, who was watching the giraffewun carefully, but after a moment he shook his head. He’d been examining every Wunimal that came through the doors and monitoring them throughout the party, but so far none posed a threat. Frank had had the decency to look sheepish when the first Wunimals arrived (unexpectedly), but the rest of the staff agreed they couldn’t ask anyone to leave. It wouldn’t feel fair and would risk the Deucalion’s reputation being tarnished, even if it was for safety’s sake… but it had certainly put the staff on edge.
She knew Jack was trying to keep track of every Wunimal guest, because she was doing the same thing. The owlwun Major perched on the railing of the staircase. The wolfwun Minor howling with laughter at his own joke. The iguanawun Major playing on the bandstand. The fact that some of the human guests were giving the Wunimals a wide berth certainly made them easier to spot in a crowd.
“She must be a celebrity among Wunimals,” Jack whispered to Morrigan and the others. He gave a subtle nod toward an elegant dogwun with flowing silvery-white fur, wearing a black velvet bow above each ear and a string of black pearls around her neck.
“How do you know?” asked Morrigan.
“Little synchronized flashes of light,” Jack explained. “Like lightbulbs switching on above every other Wunimal’s head as they saw her come through the door.”
Morrigan was thrilled by the drama of this and was just wondering how she could get close enough to find out who the dogwun was, when another little flash of light went off nearby and they all flinched at the sudden brightness. Hawthorne gasped.
“I just—I saw the light!” he cried. “Jack, does that mean I’m a Witness now, or—?”
“That was a camera flash, genius,” said Jack.
He was glaring at its source: a man carrying an enormous camera and following close behind the dogwun. He had a bag full of photography equipment slung over his shoulder, and Morrigan saw with alarm that the logo embroidered on it said THE LOOKING GLASS.
Jack had spotted it too.
“We should tell Kedgeree,” he murmured, with a meaningful look at Morrigan. “If Dame Chanda finds out a photographer from the Looking Glass was allowed in here after that ‘opera horse’ article, she’ll never forgive Frank.”
A woman standing near the concierge desk made a noise of disgust. She carried a sunset-colored cocktail in one hand and a beaded clutch in the other.
“Utterly disgraceful.” The woman wrinkled her nose as she watched the elegant dogwun and her pursuing photographer disappear into the crowd. Leaning in toward the man who was with her, she said in a loud whisper, “The Deucalion really is going to the dogs, if that’s the sort of riffraff they’re letting in.”
The man nodded in agreement. “Hmm. Someone should call the pound and have that pooch taken away.” The pair of them shared a smug little giggle.
“She’s not a dog,” Hawthorne said loudly. “She’s a dogwun.”
They turned as one to look down their noses at him. The man scoffed. “Dogwun. Rubbish. If it’s got four legs, a wet nose, and a tail—it’s a dog. In my day, we called things by their real names and none of this horsewun, rabbitwun, lizardwun nonsense. I’m sick of having to be so respectful all the time. Dogwun,” he finished, shaking his head and downing his cocktail in one. “Someone fetch me another drink,” he added, snapping his fingers in the air.
Morrigan turned to her friends, nonplussed. “What’s wrong with being respectful?”
“Obviously takes more than two brain cells,” Jack muttered.
“Yeah, and they’ve only got one between them,” added Cadence with a snort of laughter.
“What did you just say?” said the woman. She swayed over to the desk, leaned in uncomfortably close to Cadence, and repeated her question in a waspish voice. “What did you just say?”
Unfortunately for her, it was hard to intimidate Cadence, who squared up to the woman without hesitating. “I said, you’ve only got one brain cell between you. Would you like me to sing it?”
“Why, you beastly little—”
“Is there a problem here?” Fenestra had arrived just in time. She planted herself at the end of the desk, stationed between each side like a referee at a tennis match.
The woman twitched with revulsion. “Another talking unnimal! Who in the Seven Pockets wrote this guest list? They ought to be arrested for crimes against decency.”
Morrigan, Jack, Hawthorne, and Cadence all looked up at Fenestra, holding their collective breath and waiting for an explosion.
But Fen surprised them by responding in what was, for her, a reasonably polite tone. “Not an unnimal. Not a guest. I work here. How can I help?”
“A cat, working at a five-star hotel?” said the man with a disbelieving little giggle. “Glad we’re not staying the night, darling, we might get fleas.”
Once again, Morrigan and the others hunched their shoulders and braced for impact. But again, Fenestra managed to restrain herself.
“It’s a nine-star hotel,” she told him calmly. “I don’t have fleas. And I’m not a cat.”
The man rolled his eyes. “Sorry. Catwun.”
“Not a catwun either.” Fen’s lip curled to reveal the tip of one gleaming yellowish fang. “I’m a Magnificat, it’s a whole other thing. Read a book, for goodness’ sake.”
The woman flinched. “You’re very rude.”
Fenestra stood up to her full height. “YOU’RE very rude. And your dress is ugly.”
There she is, thought Morrigan, torn between nervousness and glee.
The woman gasped. “EXCUSE me—”
“No, I won’t excuse you, or your behavior,” Fen interrupted in a bored, impatient voice. “You’re a bully and a bigot and frankly I’ve no idea how either of you made it onto the guest list. I can only assume you’re gate-crashing.”
“Fen,” said Jack, gently tugging at the Magnificat’s fur. An audience had begun to gather around the concierge desk, and they too looked nervous. “Maybe we should just ignore—”
“We don’t ignore bigotry, Jack,” said Fenestra. “That’s how cowardly bigots turn into brave bigots.”
“How dare you!” spluttered the man, clutching indignantly at his lapels. “We shan’t return to the Hotel Deucalion if this is the sort of treatment—”
“You shan’t return to the Hotel Deucalion because f
rom now on there’ll be a great big sign behind the check-in desk with your faces on it, saying NO ADMISSION.”
The man was struck momentarily speechless but swiftly recovered his bluster. “I demand to speak with management. WHO is in charge here?”
Fen took two slow, deliberate steps toward him and pushed her face close to his, her enormous amber eyes dangerously narrowed. Her wet pink nose was almost the size of his head, and when she spoke, her voice rumbled like an idling engine. Morrigan could feel it reverberating through the floor.
“I’m in charge here.” Fen leapt up on to the desk, bared her teeth at the couple, and hissed.
“She’s infected!” the woman shrieked. “The cat has the Hollowpox!”
“She’s not infected!” Morrigan shouted, running around the desk to stand between them, arms thrown wide. “She can’t be infected, she’s not even a Wunimal, she just told you that!”
“CALL THE STINK!” the man shouted.
“IT HAS THE HOLLOWPOX!” cried another guest, picking up a chair and shoving it violently in their direction. “Get back, beast!”
Everywhere Morrigan looked, people were picking up items to use as makeshift weapons against Fen, who was—naturally—firing up in response, hissing and yowling, batting away any weapon that came too close.
Jack climbed up onto the concierge desk beside her, shouting to be heard. “Please, everyone, calm down. This is just a misunderstanding.”
Morrigan frantically scanned the lobby and saw Charlie and Martha trying to push through the party toward them, shouting Fen’s name, and Kedgeree coming from the opposite direction, and Dame Chanda from the main doors and Frank from the spiral staircase, but they were all struggling to make a path through the swollen crowd.
It was remarkable, Morrigan thought, how quickly the situation had deteriorated. She felt as if every pair of eyes in the lobby—hundreds of them—were suddenly fixed on Fenestra, either in terror or hatred. Fen wasn’t helping matters either, with her fangs and claws bared and her back arched defensively.
Even worse, the photographer from the Looking Glass was hastily changing the roll of film in his camera, eager to get a shot that would no doubt be used to make people even more frightened of Wunimals.
Morrigan felt sick. She just wanted them all to stop looking at the Magnificat, to turn away and leave before something terrible happened, either to Fen or somebody else.
She began to sing softly under her breath. It had become a kind of nervous habit, something she’d taken to doing in moments of tension. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had begun, but she supposed that somewhere between being chased and mauled by a bearwun, watching a horsewun rampage through the opera house, and being swarmed by giant bugs in a public library, she’d unconsciously decided it was best to be prepared for anything.
“Morningtide’s child is merry and mild.” She felt her fingertips tingle and warm as Wunder instantly gathered. “Eventide’s child is wicked and wild.”
In an instant, she decided to try something she never had before, something she’d watched over and over in the ghostly hours but Rook said she wasn’t ready to try yet: shadowmaking—a skill that required both the Wundrous Art of Weaving and the Wundrous Art of Veil.
Morrigan took a deep breath to clear her head.
She observed the room as if she were observing a painting: examining the shapes and colors of things, places the light touched, and the recesses where shadows formed—the very materials she needed.
All the while, she felt Wunder sensing her intentions and taking them as commands. And she felt herself—her self, that amorphous inner thing that was her—ballooning, growing bigger than her body, reaching out into the room with its monstrous, Wundrous arms and gathering what she needed, plucking bits of shadow here and there—tiny bits, not enough to be missed but enough to build a new shadow of her own making.
She and Wunder were perfectly, exhilaratingly in sync.
Soon the lobby was swarmed by starry darkness, a shadow that kept growing until everything was black.
Morrigan hadn’t meant to make her shadow quite so all-consuming—she’d only wanted to obscure Fenestra from view—but nonetheless, the effect was the same. They couldn’t see her anymore, and so they couldn’t attack her, and the photographer couldn’t get a shot of her looking threatening. Morrigan felt a rush of relief.
The room was noisy with confusion and shouted demands for the lights to be turned back on, and later she would remember a moment in all of this when a question formed in her mind, clear as a bell: What now?
She’d made a whole room full of shadow.
Could she sustain it long enough for Fen to calm down? Could she hold her concentration and somehow communicate to Jack and Hawthorne and Cadence that they needed to spirit Fenestra away in the darkness, to hide her until everyone had gone? Could they resolve this safely and happily and let the party end as it always should have: with a mess in the lobby and a rave review in the society pages?
What now?
But Morrigan didn’t have to answer that question, because it was answered for her.
Out of the darkness came a single source of light. Somewhere way across the room, a dim green glow. Morrigan felt her heart race. The hazy green light was growing closer. She saw that it wasn’t one light but two; two pinpricks of glowing green moving toward her in the darkness.
Eyes. Watching her.
Before she could think straight, another set of glowing green eyes appeared on her left, blinking on and off as if they were weaving in and out of shadow, low to the ground. And a third pair, gliding through the air above Morrigan’s head, moving fast, growing bigger and clearer… and then the piercing screech of a bird, squeals and shouts of surprise from the crowd, and a scream torn from Morrigan’s throat as she felt talons and beating wings upon her head and heard a snarling, snapping growl from somewhere to her left and felt a human hand grab at her face in the darkness—
And then they stopped, and Morrigan heard three distinct thumps. Whoever had attacked her had fallen to the ground. The panic in the room grew.
“What was that?” someone shouted.
“Darling, where are you—”
“I can’t see a thing!”
The glowing green lights left the three bodies behind and came together in one strange, nebulous shape in the darkness. It swarmed Morrigan, swimming across her skin, dancing around her as if trying to find a way in. Wherever the light touched her, she felt cold.
Finally, it seemed to give up and simply floated in midair.
“Jack,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Can you see it?”
“Yes,” he said, in a soft voice full of confusion and wonder.
It felt like the light was… watching her. Assessing her. Like maybe the strange green something was just as baffled by her as she was by it.
And it was, she knew now with one hundred percent certainty, something.
The Hollowpox was a living thing.
Morrigan felt her energy ebbing away; all the Wunder she’d gathered had been depleted. The shadows disappeared as suddenly as they’d arrived, like the flick of a switch, and the lobby was once again flooded with light.
In a flash, the Hollowpox was gone—split not into three, but dozens of tiny green specks of light that flew away in all directions. Some seemed to disperse among the crowded lobby, and some left the building entirely, but they all disappeared.
Morrigan felt her knees weaken. It was taking all her energy just to remain standing. She gazed down at the floor, where the three bodies lay still, their eyes wide open.
The owlwun. The giraffewun. And the dogwun.
“They’re dead!” someone screamed. “They’ve been murdered!”
“No, you fool,” shouted another, “it’s the pox—the Hollowpox has taken them.”
“It was the CAT!”
The lobby was once again a cacophony of noise and confusion as people tried to get away from the lifeless Wunimals, as if their
misfortune might be contagious. Morrigan, Jack, Hawthorne, Cadence, and Fen moved quickly to form a barrier around the three bodies, protecting them from being crushed by the hundreds of people now rushing for the doors in a great stampede.
The cool autumnal breeze turned to a gale, whistling through the crimson trees. As the last guests fled into the night, the leaves turned brown, fell from the branches, and chased them out the door in one big whoosh.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
RESCUE RINGS
Morrigan’s bedroom was a soothing summer oasis that night, yet she didn’t sleep a wink. Three hammocks strung between palm trees swayed in a light, balmy breeze. Gentle waves lapped at the sandy island floor beneath her, and above her the ceiling was a clear starry night.
Her brain and body were so exhausted from her first effort at shadowmaking she might have gone ten rounds in the Trollosseum with Grimsgorgenblarg the Mighty. But sleep wouldn’t come.
It might have been Hawthorne’s soft, persistent snoring on one side, or Cadence’s occasional sleep-muttering on the other. Or more likely, it was the fact that Morrigan had been counting down each tick of the clock until dawn, ever since Fenestra had insisted they all go to bed.
After the ambulance had come to take away the three stricken Wunimals, Morrigan had grabbed her brolly and tried to leave for the Nevermoor Bazaar right away, to find Jupiter and tell him what had happened. But Fen scuppered those plans in a heartbeat.
“That is exactly the kind of distraction Jove doesn’t need on the last night of the bazaar,” she’d said, marching Morrigan, Hawthorne, and Cadence upstairs to bed.
Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow Page 24