“Prince Aleksi and I are gathering the senior Royals at midnight to begin drafting the protection spells.”
“Good luck. If we fail, your spell will be all that protects the near realms.” She finally managed to shed the dress and left it pooled in a puddle of feathers on the bedroom floor. She glanced in the mirror and cringed at the mess that was her hair.
Through the lattice screen, she saw him move to the window, pick up a seashell she’d left on the sill, and toy with it absently. “You don’t have to, you know.” His tone had changed.
“Don’t have to what?” She dragged a comb through her hair.
“Come back.”
She froze with the comb in her hand. She glanced toward the dressing screen. His back was turned to her so she couldn’t see his face.
“You and your friends are human now,” he continued. “You are bound to no master. You’ve gotten everything you’ve ever wanted. You could run away. Take off in the Roadster and never come back. Go to Prague. Go to Timbuktu, if you like. Leave us to our fates with the Coven. You owe me nothing. You made the terms of our marriage very clear.”
She frowned as she slid back into her old tuxedo pants and T-shirt. “I gave the Goblins my word that I’d help them retake London. They sacrificed everything to help us in Montélimar. I’m not going to walk away from my promise.” She tucked in her shirt and then pulled her hair into a ponytail. “Besides, beasties are the only things that can kill witches. You think the Coven would let us run off to Timbuktu? If we don’t stop them, they’ll come for us next. Even me. Even though I can’t cast a single whisper.”
She slid on the Faustine jacket and instantly felt better, like a lock had clicked into place. She sighed. She thrust her hands in the pockets and came around the dressing screen. Rennar’s gaze flickered over her. He didn’t seem to mind her like this, dressed in pants instead of a gown.
“Why are you saying all of this?” she asked softly.
“Because I need for it to be said. I have no hold over you anymore. None of your friends are caged or tied up with chains. We are married, but we’ve agreed that it doesn’t mean you must remain at my side.”
She leaned against the bedpost, arms folded. “I’m not going to betray you, Rennar.”
“You could. We aren’t friends.”
“Like you said, we aren’t enemies either.”
He walked toward her with a smoldering look. “What, exactly, are we?”
She was lacing her oxford shoes; she paused and looked up at him. She didn’t have any kind of answer for that question, and she told him as much.
“For the first time in my life,” he continued in a softer tone, “I have something I don’t want to lose. Someone I don’t want to lose. I’m worried for you, Anouk.”
“Rennar, it’s a sham marriage.”
“I don’t care about you because a piece of paper tells me I must.” He was close enough to her that she could smell his cologne. “Anouk, you’re . . .”
She made a show of rolling her eyes, but the truth was, his look was shaking her. “Beautiful? Charming?” she suggested.
“Unexpected.” He reached up to untangle a knot in her hair. He was close, and his head turned, and so did hers, and before she knew it, he was kissing her. How? She again got that sense this was happening to someone else. His hands gripped her waist. His fingers dug into her sides. His lips were urgent. Her pulse flared to life. This wasn’t like the kiss at the wedding. There was nothing chaste about the way his lips crushed hers now. He ran a hand up to the back of her neck, cupped her head to deepen the kiss. His other hand fumbled with her jacket for a moment and then found her hand and wove it into his own hair, as though he were silently begging her to touch him.
She pushed away, took a step back, and wiped her mouth with her hand. She was breathing hard. “Don’t do that again, Rennar.”
He stared at her. His hair was mussed from where he’d run her fingers through it. His lips were parted, and she thought he was going to do something stupid like try to kiss her again or even say that he loved her, but then his lips twisted into that arrogant smile.
“I won’t. Not until you come to me, admit that you regret the ridiculous terms you set for our marriage, and beg me to kiss you again.” For all the show of superiority, he seemed wounded by her rejection.
She gave a sharp laugh. “You’ll be waiting a long time.”
He shrugged carelessly. “I do have eternity.”
She gave him a long look and then left, closing the door firmly behind her, wishing she could lock it and barricade it and push a dresser in front of it, just to keep him from saying such things again. She paused in the elevator foyer, her legs wobbly, and sank onto a bench.
What a foolish thing it was for him to remind her of her freedom. What a foolish thing, too, for her not to take it.
Then she took a deep breath, slid on her sunglasses, and pushed the elevator button.
Chapter 28
The other beasties were waiting in the lobby, along with Viggo, whose pale face and bandaged arm said he’d given the blood they needed for the spell. His long dark hair was pulled into a ponytail. He shouldered a backpack that sagged heavily—Cricket must have packed it with more than ample weaponry.
The five Marble Ladies, stone guardians of Castle Ides, blocked the turnstile that allowed access to the building’s exit. Cricket paced in front of them, tapping them provokingly on the ears and noses, but of course, none of them would move an inch until compelled to.
“Good. You’re here.” Petra nodded approvingly at Anouk and then gestured to the Marble Ladies. “Shall I whisper them out of our way?”
“This is one thing I can do,” Anouk said. She made a gesture toward the Marble Ladies like she was shooing away a fly, and they roused themselves from their stone slumber and stepped away from the turnstile. “I’m the princess of Castle Ides now. They have to obey me whether I wield magic or not.”
“Have a nice journey, Princess,” the closest Marble Lady said with a carved smile.
Cricket snorted as she passed through the turnstile. “We could have used that the last time we tried breaking into this place, Princess.”
Anouk paused at the front door to adjust her jacket. The embroidery under her fingers was like a talisman, giving her strength. She shook away the thoughts crawling around in her head about Rennar’s kiss, Rennar’s confession.
Someone I don’t want to lose.
“Is the car ready?” She peered out the glass door at the snowy city streets.
“December’s pulling it around now,” Beau said.
In another moment an engine roared and headlights shone into the lobby. They pushed outside into the shelter of the porte-cochère, where a spotless Roadster purred with its windshield wipers going.
“Si belle.” Beau sighed contentedly. He tugged on his old leather driving gloves, flexing his fingers.
The car shook a little as though someone was bouncing around inside, and then the driver’s-side door opened and December tumbled out. Anouk wondered if she was drunk.
“December? Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Perfect!” With outstretched arms, December jerkily made her way around the car, and it became apparent that her strange movements were because she was wearing roller skates. They looked ancient, worn white leather and rainbow trim, grungy laces, and scuffed wheels. She grinned uneasily.
“What are those things?” Luc asked.
“Roller skates!”
Beau looked toward the car in alarm. “You drove the car wearing those?”
“Don’t you get it?” December struggled to push herself from the car to one of the porte-cochère columns. “I’m coming with you.” She tromped awkwardly on the skates. “I’m not setting foot in London. That’s the spell, isn’t it? That no living creature imbued with magic can set foot in England? It doesn’t say anything about not setting wheels in England.”
“That’s insane,” Cricket muttered.
“Technically,” Luc pointed out, “she’s not wrong.”
“So I can come?” December beamed.
The beasties all exchanged hesitant looks. December had saved Anouk’s life at the Château des Mille Fleurs with a handful of glitter, so maybe rainbow roller skates would rescue them this time. But December lost her balance and tumbled to her knees. She winced, rolling onto her bottom.
“Um,” Anouk said. “You’re . . . needed here is the thing. Someone has to look after the rest of the Goblins. We can’t have them burning down Castle Ides like they burned down the townhouse.”
December, still wincing, gave her an odd look. But the clock in the church steeple across the street chimed six, and Cricket smacked Anouk lightly.
“Time to go, beasties.”
Anouk knelt down and helped December to her feet. Then she gave her a push toward the doors, and December wheeled her arms forward and caught herself on the door handles.
The rest of them piled into the car, Beau in the driver’s seat, Anouk in the front passenger seat with Cricket in her lap, and Luc, Viggo, Hunter Black, and Petra in the back. “There’d be more room,” Viggo said, “if Cricket hadn’t brought so many knives.”
“I brought toasted-cheese croque-monsieurs too,” she said.
“You took the time to pack sandwiches?” Luc asked.
“Have you had British food?”
Beau threw the car in gear and stomped on the gas. He roared down the narrow streets, throwing up puddles of icy slush. The windshield wipers fought against the snow.
Anouk gazed at the city. Leaving France altogether, even leaving the continent! She’d never traveled through a tunnel before, especially one that ran thirty kilometers beneath the English Channel. What would London be like? In Germany she’d wandered into fairy-tale land: Black Forests, Snow Children, eternal winters. Would London be a fairy tale too? All Anouk knew of London was what she’d read in books and seen from the enchanted windows of the fourth floor of Castle Ides, which looked down on Piccadilly Circus. She wondered if the bakeries would rival Paris’s patisseries. If there were wishing fountains down secret alleyways. If there were Saturday bird markets and poets by the riverbanks.
“I don’t suppose we’ll have time for shopping?” Cricket said as though reading her mind. “There’s Debenhams. And Fenwick of Bond Street.”
“Harrods is better,” Hunter Black muttered.
Beau gave the assassin a questioning look in the rearview mirror.
Luc laughed. “Let’s focus on, first, getting into London. Second, hoping Sinjin can turn us human with that amethyst chess piece that Rennar enchanted. Do you have it, Viggo? Good. Third, recovering from the change. And fourth, stopping a coven of evil witches who can wield technology that we can’t.”
This plunged everyone into a thoughtful silence for the remainder of the drive. Night came early in winter, and the roads between the city and the coast were cast in murky darkness. Streetlights lit up orbs of falling snow, but beyond that, the world was black. After some time Beau pulled off the highway at a sign for the Coquelles train terminal and followed the arrows to a nearly empty parking lot. Snow was still coming down heavily. The train station itself had a small lobby, ticket booth, and coffee shop. The station was mostly quiet. According to Cricket’s timetable, they were in the lull between departures. Passengers for the next train to England wouldn’t start to arrive for at least a half an hour.
The seven of them stared through the windshield at the train yard behind the station.
“That’s it?” Beau asked.
Luc pulled out the guidebook he’d taken from Castle Ides. “ ‘The Chunnel is thirty kilometers long,’ ” he read. “It’ll take us most of the night to walk that far.”
“Longer,” Petra added, “if one of you decides to go chasing another one’s tail instead of following Viggo.”
Viggo dug around in his backpack and proudly held up a fistful of leashes. “Already thought of that.”
Luc eyed the leashes, then sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Just try to put one of those things on me,” Cricket said to Viggo.
“It’s that or stuffing you in one of the boxes in the trunk. I don’t have time to go chasing after a white cat.”
She sulked in the front seat. “Fine, but I can’t help it if I claw you to shreds while you’re trying to put it on.”
“Well, you’d do that as a human, too.”
She smirked. “Good point.”
“Okay, look.” Petra, who’d been watching out the side window, pointed to the guard station. “There. Only one guard on duty.” She swallowed a sip of her elixir and began to whisper. “Latinka, latinka . . .”
The guard put down the paperback he was reading, stood, hopped awkwardly from one foot to the other, then ran toward the terminal to what Anouk assumed was a badly needed bathroom. Petra whispered again and, one by one, the floodlights shining on the train yard turned off. With another whisper, all of the CCTV security cameras slowly panned upward, filming only the night sky.
Petra dusted off her hands. “I’m getting good at this witch thing.”
They climbed out of the car and crept from parked car to parked car to the chain-link fence surrounding the train yard. Petra whispered and the lock fell off the gate. She held the gate open and they dashed across the long expanse of rail and gravel until they reached the rear of the station. A single light shone down on an access door.
“Now watch,” Petra said. “I’ll put out that light.” She hunted through her black leather oubliette for whatever life-essence she intended to use. “Merde, where is—”
Her head jerked up at the sound of glass shattering. Hunter Black was no longer in their midst. In just a few seconds, the assassin had crept across the train tracks and thrown a perfectly aimed rock at the light bulb. He was now waiting for them in front of the door.
Petra muttered a curse.
They crossed the train tracks quickly and joined him.
“Okay,” Petra snarled, “but you can’t unlock that door with a rock, can you?” She went to the door and wiggled the deadbolt for proof. Then she made a big show of consuming some aspen leaves from her oubliette and enchanted the deadbolt. When she twisted the knob, the door swung open. She gave Hunter Black a toothy smile.
They passed through the doorway into a dimly lit cinder-block room with nothing but a staircase and a bulletin board filled with train timetables and a pinned note telling someone named Jacques to stop stealing lunches from the break room. Anouk hugged her arms across her jacket. The access rooms were dank, and she didn’t like the odd clicking sounds and smell of standing water. Not all of Paris was glittering lights.
“Down the stairs,” Luc said.
They followed him down three flights of service stairs and through a few more locked doors. It was loud down here. Machinery rumbled in unseen rooms. The trains overhead squealed. At last Luc opened a door marked No Access and they were out of the station. An enormous subterranean tunnel stretched as far as Anouk could see and then disappeared into darkness. Her footsteps echoed. The ground began to tremble. Dust rained down from the pipes overhead and she steadied herself.
“The trains,” Luc explained, motioning to either side. “This access tunnel runs between the two lanes, one from London to Paris, one from Paris to London.”
As soon as the train passed and the rumbling stopped, Anouk squinted down the tunnel. “So that’s England on the other side?” She took a curious step forward and smacked into something hard. “Ow!” She bounced back, rubbing her head.
She stared at the place she’d just hit. It was thin air, no different from the rest of the empty space around it. Luc approached, holding out his hand, and then he, too, stopped as if he’d encountered a glass wall.
“The border spell,” he said in a hushed voice. “That’s it.” He jerked his head toward Viggo. “Viggo, go over there.” He pointed beyond where he and Anouk stood.
Vi
ggo took a few cautious steps forward as if he were walking over a barely frozen lake, afraid to put his weight in the wrong spot, but he passed through without any obstruction.
“See?” Luc said. “He can cross. The spell stops us because we’re magical in our human forms. But it won’t stop us once . . .” He cleared his throat. “Once we turn.”
His words cast a dark shadow over the tunnel. Another train rumbled by, loud enough to drown out anything anyone would have said, and Anouk was glad for the pause. Panic was starting to crawl up her throat. Nothing about this dank, utilitarian tunnel felt heroic. This didn’t feel like the kind of place where magic happened. If she had to turn back into an owl, she would have preferred to do it amid the beautiful bones of the Goblins’ catacombs or in some charming glen in the Black Forest.
And that dark end of the tunnel . . . it felt impossible that England actually lay on the other side. A crazy fear came to her that there was nothing at the end. That the blackness was complete. She would willingly walk straight into the Noirceur, which waited for her, ready to swallow her whole.
“Are you ready?” Beau rested a gentle hand on her shoulder.
She jumped and spun toward him. She saw herself reflected in his eyes: frightened, bedraggled, nothing like a princess.
She clutched the melted bell around her neck, then grabbed his hand. “Beau, I’m afraid.”
One of the lights flickered behind him, throwing shadows over his face. In that moment, she would have given anything for them to be back at 18 Rue des Amants, cuddled up in Mada Vittora’s library with a bowl of popcorn. She hadn’t been free, but life had been simple.
Her stomach tightened.
The townhouse was gone. Mada Vittora was dead. There was no going back. There was only one way forward, and it was through this dark tunnel.
Midnight Beauties Page 20