Morrigan copied her every move—not flawlessly, by any means, but with greater success than she’d ever had before. She even breathed her own firebird into life—a crow with long, trailing wings of fire—and let loose a shout of triumph as she sent it flying into the sky, imperfect but hers. The lesson became a meditation, and time flew. Her connection to Inferno felt smoother, somehow. Faster. Almost seamless.
She even had a go at circular breathing (Dame Chanda had obligingly explained the concept to her), though not very successfully. The problem with ghostly hours was that she couldn’t simply put up her hand and ask a question. She had to rely on whoever had been present in the original lesson to ask, so unless they were much younger or much less experienced than she was, most of her questions went unanswered. Even if she remembered to ask Sofia or Conall or Rook afterward, they could rarely help her with practical matters. They just weren’t Wundersmiths.
Goldberry spoke only once during the lesson. The older Wundersmith, Maurice Bledworth, had stopped to watch her, overawed and unable to keep up any longer.
“How do you do that?” he asked, gesturing to her hands. “I can’t seem to see where it’s coming from.”
“Where what is coming from?” asked Goldberry, looking annoyed at the interruption.
“The flame,” said Bledworth. “Even when it’s completely died, you seem to bring it back so quickly, so easily.”
The older Wundersmith—and Morrigan—watched closely as Goldberry made her entire forearm a torch, and then let it sizzle all the way down to the tips of her fingers until it was entirely extinguished.
Or… not entirely.
Goldberry held out one finger and, leaning in close, Morrigan could see the tiniest, most minute, almost invisible spark of fire, hovering at the very edge of her skin.
“Not dead. See?” said Goldberry.
She crouched low and ran the length of the rooftop, brushing her fingertips across the ground and then upward in a wide arc toward the sky, leaving a perfect trail of flames blazing in her wake.
“Only need a spark,” she said with a shrug. “Small sparks make big fires.”
Morrigan stared mutely as the fire, the Wundersmiths, and the whole ghostly hour faded before her eyes, leaving her alone on the rooftop again.
Small sparks make big fires.
The words bounced around her head as she watched the flames in her fingertips burn down to almost nothing. A tiny, minute, almost invisible spark.
Taking a long, deep breath, Morrigan grinned. She felt energized and buoyant and—for the first time in a long time—somehow certain that there was a way out of this mess Nevermoor was in.
She felt hopeful. And she couldn’t really say why, because nothing had changed.
Though that wasn’t altogether true. Something was changing. She was changing. She felt more like a real Wundersmith than ever before, and that knowledge made anything seem possible. It cleared her worried head just a little, and gently nudged her shoulders straight. For the first time in days, she felt… calm.
Then a sound from behind her brought on a rush of adrenaline.
Her heart drummed a warning before her brain even registered what it was.
Morrigan turned around slowly, while Ezra Squall hummed a song that felt like spiders crawling beneath her skin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SQUALL, THE MONSTER
The bright day darkened. A pungent smell of woodsmoke filled the air.
“Is this the best they can do for you?” A tiny smile curled one corner of Squall’s mouth. “Dead, irrelevant wisdom from dead, irrelevant Wundersmiths?”
Morrigan said nothing. She rubbed the tips of her fingers together and felt a tiny shock of heat. The spark was still there.
He looked just the same as ever, she noticed. Neat, contained, deliberate; like a portrait of a man frozen in time. The perfect parting of his feathery brown hair, with a hint of silver at the temples. The pallid, porcelain complexion like a death mask, marred only by the thin scar that split his left eyebrow. The eyes so dark they were nearly black.
Yet—if she narrowed her eyes until they were nearly closed—the faint, reassuring shimmer of the Gossamer surrounding him that told her it was his mind, not his body, that was in Nevermoor.
He shook his head. “Tell me, have you learned a single thing since last we met?”
Crouching low, Morrigan pressed her fingertips to the ground and ran the width of the rooftop, leaving a fiery trail behind her. With a triumphant shout, she swung her arm up into the air just as Goldberry had done, creating an arc of flames that burned out and left a lingering circle of smoke against the blue sky.
She turned back to Squall, lungs heaving and eyes blazing.
“I’ve learned plenty, thanks.”
There was a low, rumbling growl, and Morrigan felt her throat grow dry as a pack of hounds emerged from the shadows. Of course. Wherever Squall went, the Hunt of Smoke and Shadow was sure to follow. They began to circle, fur black as pitch and eyes like embers. The smell of woodsmoke filled Morrigan’s nostrils and made her eyes water.
He stared right back at her, unimpressed. “You are light-years away from where you ought to be. It might feel like the Wundrous Society is allowing you to fly, Miss Crow… but I’m afraid all I see is a sad little bird with clipped wings who cannot even comprehend the cage she’s in.”
“Interesting,” she replied. “All I see is a pathetic, lonely killer whose only friends are a bunch of smoky dogs. I’m not afraid of you, Squall.”
He smiled. “What a comforting affirmation that must be.”
The strangest thing was, Morrigan found it was true. Sort of. Mostly.
Squall’s presence on the rooftop had taken her by surprise, and she didn’t like surprises. But she wasn’t feeling the gut-deep terror she’d felt on the other occasions they’d met. Perhaps it was because she’d seen him as a child now, spent time with him in the ghostly hours.
Or perhaps she was simply getting used to him.
What a bizarre thought.
“I’ve told you before. There is nobody at the Wundrous Society who can teach you what you need to know. Not even the great Griselda Polaris. I am the best and only chance you have, Miss Crow.” He gently inclined his head. “Time to stop playing. I’ve come to formalize the arrangement.”
Morrigan narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Be my apprentice,” he continued. “Agree to learn from me everything that I am able to teach you. Work hard, pay attention, and finally become the Wundersmith you were meant to be.”
“Oh, I see,” she said, with a slightly bewildered laugh. “And—sorry—what exactly am I supposed to get out of this arrangement?”
Squall raised an eyebrow. “Aside from an incomparable depth of knowledge and the opportunity to become the most powerful person in the Free State? Aside from veering away from this path you’re on to become a second-rate version of a ghostly reenactment of a long-dead also-ran?”
“Right, aside from all that,” said Morrigan. “The truth is you can’t give me anything, because there’s nothing I want from you. I have everything I need right here at Wunsoc.”
“Except… a cure.”
The words hung in the air. Morrigan and Squall watched each other for several silent seconds.
“A cure for what?” she said finally, her pulse quickening.
He didn’t respond to that. He didn’t need to.
Morrigan shook her head in disbelief. “You’d just give me the cure?”
She saw a tiny flicker of amusement cross his face. “Certainly not. But become my apprentice, and I won’t just cure the so-called Hollowpox, I will destroy it. We will destroy it together. For good.”
“How do I know you’re not lying?” she demanded. “How do I know it can even be destroyed?”
“Do you think I would make something I couldn’t unmake?”
Morrigan felt her blood rise. She opened her mouth, then closed it. She felt vindi
cated and furious all at once.
“I knew it was you. I told them!” She began to pace back and forth, agitating the spark of fire between her fingertips. “It’s not a disease at all, is it? It’s one of your monsters! I’m right, aren’t I?”
But Squall said nothing, gave nothing away.
“Why? Just because you like killing things, because you like hurting people? Or is this another one of your sick tests, like the Ghastly Market? Did you cause all this havoc and pain just so that I would…” Morrigan trailed off. Her mind had been racing ahead, but it came to a crashing halt as she connected the final dot. Her mouth twisted into an expression of disgust. “So that I would agree to become your apprentice.”
Squall’s face was impassive.
“I’m right,” she said again, her voice low and angry, “aren’t I? You can only get what you want by blackmail—”
“You’re being dramatic.” It felt somehow like an insult—the contrast of his soft, disinterested voice against the anger she felt buzzing inside her like a beehive. She wanted to throw something at him. She wanted to shake him. “Not to mention terribly presumptuous—you know, the entire world does not revolve around you. And if my sole aim were to swindle you into an apprenticeship, I could think of far more efficient ways.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You rarely do.”
“Why, then?” she demanded again. “Why create the Hollowpox at all? Just your warped idea of fun?”
He gave a tiny, irritated sigh, little more than a puff of air. “I didn’t say I would give you an explanation, Miss Crow. I have never felt the need to explain myself to anyone and I don’t intend to begin now. I said I’d give you a cure. That is my offer.”
“Maybe we don’t need you.” She tilted her chin slightly upward, clenching her hands into fists. “Dr. Bramble thinks she’s close to finding a cure.”
His only response to that claim was a pitying smile that made the skin on the back of her neck grow cold.
“Come now. It’s not so difficult a choice, is it? Become my apprentice and save all of Wunimalkind! Be the hero of Nevermoor! Hip, hip, hooray! Who knows, they might even give you a medal.”
Squall gave a low whistle, and the shadow-hounds swarmed obediently to his side. “I’ll give you a few days to consider my offer, but don’t take too long. Things are ever so much worse than you know. You’ll find that out for yourself soon enough, and when you do, you will come looking for me.”
Morrigan’s lip curled. “I will not come looking—”
“You will,” he repeated in the same calm, conversational tone. “On the Gossamer Line.”
“The Gossamer Line station is closed,” she said belligerently.
Squall closed his eyes, a line creasing the space between them, and shook his head as if she had said something ridiculous. “One day, Miss Crow, you may begin to understand how much of Nevermoor lies dormant or dead, waiting patiently for you to nudge it back to life. One day, you may realize how formidably you could run this city, if only you’d put in a little effort.”
Squall and his hounds made to walk away, looking for all the world as if they might just saunter straight off the rooftop.
“Oh—one other thing.” He stopped abruptly, spinning back to face her. “I should warn you. They’re going to flip the script.”
Morrigan frowned. “What?”
“The Wundrous Society,” he clarified. “Any day now, they’re going to flip the script about Wundersmiths. About you. The official Wunsoc line has long been Wundersmiths are monsters. Wundersmiths are the cause of all our woes. But watch. Someday soon it will change to This Wundersmith will slay our monsters. This Wundersmith will solve all our problems.”
“Oh no.” Morrigan glared at him from beneath half-closed eyelids. “What an awful thought, that I might be asked to help people. How truly terrible.”
“You have no idea.”
He’d already turned once again to leave, cloaked in shadow, when Morrigan finally shouted at his back the thing she really wanted to say. The thing she’d been wondering for months.
“Why did you kill them?”
It had taken all of her courage to say it, and she could feel herself trembling, shocked by her own audacity. Squall halted, but he didn’t face her. The hounds growled a warning. “Why did you murder the other Wundersmiths? Your friends?”
Squall remained perfectly still.
“They trusted you.”
She didn’t even see him move, but in a fraction of a second he was right there, looming above her. The pale, expressionless mask had slipped to reveal the beast inside, black eyes and blackened mouth and sharp, bared teeth. The shadow-hounds whined. Even they were afraid of him.
Morrigan felt terror grip her throat. Her overwhelming instinct was to shrink away, to run, to close her eyes, but she wouldn’t let herself. She held her breath, staring at the monster Squall. Committing him to memory.
“Another thing you will one day understand,” he snarled, “is that Wundersmiths don’t have friends.”
Morrigan recoiled from his words as if they might burn her.
And then the mask was back. So still and pale and cold, it might have been carved from marble. So ordinary, she might almost have believed she’d imagined that other, hidden face. His true face.
And then he was gone, leaving only a curl of black smoke.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SPARK
Morrigan stayed on the rooftop for some time after Squall and his hounds disappeared into the Gossamer. She took deep, steadying breaths, and pressed her hands together to stop them shaking.
Eventually she wandered in a daze back to the stairwell, still replaying the conversation with Squall over and over in her mind while trying to shake out the image of his monstrous face.
Things are ever so much worse than you know.
What could be worse than a hospital overflowing with comatose Wunimals? Worse than people scared to leave their homes for fear of being attacked, and Wunimals unable to break curfew under threat of being arrested? Worse than the Deucalion being closed down indefinitely? Worse than people dying? Worse than a disease without a cure—or more accurately, a monster that couldn’t be destroyed?
As she descended the last steps into the buzzing Proudfoot House entrance hall, Morrigan felt a hand grab her elbow.
“Morrigan!”
“Ow! Cadence, what—”
“Where have you been?” Cadence began steering her through the throng of scholars and toward the front door. “You missed our organic witchery workshop.”
“I was on the rooftop. Wait, I have to—”
“Doesn’t matter now. Just come outside. You’ve got to see this.”
“Cadence, wait,” Morrigan said again, trying to yank her arm back, but her friend held on tight. “I have to tell you something.”
“Tell me later. This is important.” Cadence let go of her arm when they’d reached the top of the marble steps. A dozen or so scholars were standing there, looking nervous.
A huge, noisy crowd had gathered at the end of the long drive, outside Wunsoc’s tall iron gates. Hundreds of people carried placards and shouted at Elder Quinn, Elder Wong, and Elder Saga, who stood just inside the grounds. The placards were too far away for Morrigan to read, but judging from the angry yelling, she doubted they had anything friendly written on them.
Cadence and Morrigan joined Lam on the bottom step. She had a basket of funny-looking herbs and plants from their witchery workshop and was clutching it tight to her chest, looking uneasy.
“It’s them again,” she said, nodding down the drive.
A tinny, mechanical squeal made everyone wince and cover their ears, followed by a familiar strident voice ringing out across the campus.
“WE DEMAND ANSWERS,” boomed Laurent St. James, and the protestors roared their agreement. It seemed the Concerned Citizens of Nevermoor Party had gained a few more members since Morrigan last saw them. “WE DEMAND THE TRU
TH. WE DEMAND THAT THE WUNDROUS SOCIETY STOP PROTECTING MURDERERS AND VIOLENT ATTACKERS!”
The crowd cheered so loudly for this that the megaphone squealed again.
“What ‘murderers’ are we protecting?” huffed a senior scholar leaning against a pillar. “The baboonwun drowned in the Juro! What exactly are we protecting him from?”
“THESE PEOPLE, THE SOCIETY’S SO-CALLED HIGH COUNCIL OF ELDERS, REFUSE TO PROTECT NORMAL, HARDWORKING CITIZENS.”
Word had evidently spread through Proudfoot House; more scholars began to trickle out into the grounds. Thaddea and Anah had snaked through the gathering crowd to join them.
“Why isn’t anyone defending the High Council?” asked Thaddea. She rolled up her sleeves as if preparing for a fight. “We should all be down there.”
“Yeah, we should,” Morrigan agreed. She hated seeing the three Elders standing alone against an enormous, angry crowd, even if there was a locked gate between them. Ordinarily she’d be most worried for tiny, ancient Elder Quinn… but in this particular situation, she had her eye on Elder Saga. What would happen to him if the Concerned Citizens breached the gates? She remembered how quickly the guests at the Sunset Gala had turned on Fenestra.
“We were down there,” said Cadence. “A few of us. Lam and I were coming out of the Whingeing Woods when it all kicked off.”
“Couldn’t you have just… y’know. Mesmerized the lot of ’em?” asked Thaddea. “Done your funny voice thing, told everyone to pack it in and go home?”
Cadence rolled her eyes. “My ‘funny voice thing’ doesn’t really scale up, Thaddea. I can’t just tell a whole crowd of people what to do, it doesn’t work like that. Anyway, Elder Quinn ordered everyone back up here to Proudfoot House.”
“They don’t want it to turn into a standoff,” Lam explained in a slightly muffled voice, because she was chewing fretfully on her bottom lip. Her fingers had turned white where they were clutching the basket. “They’re trying to calm things down.”
Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow Page 27