The hare’s head shot up at the sound of the accident.
Anouk lunged. “Got you!”
Her hands closed over it and this time it didn’t slip away. She wrestled the hare to her chest, hugged it tight. She looked up triumphantly, but then her face fell.
Cricket was in the middle of the street, straightening up after throwing a knife. She looked untouched. Safe. Someone had darted across the street, and a black town car had driven up onto the sidewalk and hit him. Sinjin! He was moaning. Blood stained his white coat.
Anouk jogged over to Sinjin, clutching the hare. From the looks of it, Sinjin hadn’t been hit fatally. One of Cricket’s knives protruded from his shoulder. The car doors opened and people climbed out, and Anouk jumped in surprise to see familiar faces. “Beau! Hunter Black!”
Beau ran around the car and checked for Sinjin’s pulse—they needed him alive so they could question him—then grinned up at Hunter Black. “Just like in Lisbon.”
Anouk scoffed. “That’s what happened in Lisbon? You ran someone over?”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Hunter Black smoothed a hand over his black shirt with its gleaming glass buttons. There was a note of satisfaction in his voice.
Cricket came over and nudged Sinjin with her toe. “He wouldn’t have darted into the street if I hadn’t wounded him first with my knife. So it counts as my catch.”
“What? That’s not fair!” Beau protested.
Anouk crouched by Sinjin. His forehead was slick with a yellowish sheen. She glanced warily at the smoke drifting out of a nearby sewer grate. “We need to get him inside. Quickly. Beau, Hunter Black, carry him through the loading dock straight into the basement. It’ll be safe there. I bolted the door to the upper levels—let’s hope it holds.”
“What’s in the upper levels?” Beau asked.
Cricket snorted. “Trust us.”
They picked up Sinjin and carried him toward the museum, Cricket and Anouk right behind them. Anouk still clasped the hare firmly. She whispered reassurances in its ear—then made a face as she thought about what they were going to have to do to get that ruby back.
Chapter 33
The four of them brought Sinjin in through the exterior loading dock. Beau checked the rest of the basement doors to make certain they were locked against the dead upstairs, while Cricket searched for a place to put their prisoner. She settled on a wire storage locker currently filled with artwork from one of the museum’s rotating exhibits. She shoved aside some paintings, pausing to appraise the expensive gold frames, and then they dumped Sinjin into the makeshift cage.
“Careful.” Luc stood up from where he’d been tending to Viggo, who’d gained a few stitches in his arm. “Those are priceless paintings. Part of Monet’s Water Lilies series.”
“How priceless?” Cricket stroked her chin.
Her pockets, Anouk noticed, were no longer bulging with stolen goods. At some point in the past few minutes, Cricket must have hidden the Assyrian bowl somewhere.
Luc felt Sinjin’s forehead. He lifted both of Sinjin’s eyelids and checked the pallor of his lips with a frown. “Cricket, were your blades poisoned?”
“Of course. I’m not an idiot. I use every means I have.”
He carefully drew Cricket’s knife from Sinjin’s shoulder and sniffed the blade. He suddenly dropped the knife to the floor. His eyes went wide. “This is nightrose poison! Once it gets to the heart, nothing can stop it, not even magic.”
Cricket nodded. “That’s the point.”
“You stabbed Viggo too! When were you going to tell us so that we could cure him?”
She rolled her eyes. “That knife didn’t have poison on it. Unfortunately. Look—he’s fine.” Viggo had turned a shade paler, but it was true, he didn’t look poisoned.
Luc shook his head as he fetched his herbalist bag and started to make an antidote for Sinjin out of various elements preserved in dark bottles. He handled every flower with grace, every set of wings with care. In Mada Vittora’s service, he’d made love potions for Goblins, obedience potions that he soaked into clothing, tonics that sometimes smelled divine, sometimes reeked, sometimes were the electric color of heat lightning, sometimes were blacker than night. Anouk suspected that half of Mada Vittora’s power had come not from her magic but Luc’s skill.
Anouk sidled up to Cricket, the hare clutched in her arms. “What did you do with that carved bowl?”
Cricket gave a dismissive wave. “Don’t worry about it.”
“If you’re planning something against Rennar, I don’t blame you, but tell me.”
Cricket looked mildly annoyed. “I’m not completely obsessed with revenge, you know.” Then she sighed. “Look, it’s . . . it’s just a new spell I’ve been working on. A stealing spell. There are plenty of spells for masking intention or distracting security guards, but there are no spells for making an object disappear from one place and reappear elsewhere, regardless of walls or vaults or anything between it and a thief.”
“A transference spell? You’re writing it yourself?”
“Trying to.”
Anouk was about to prod her again—she was clearly not telling the whole truth—but Luc gave a satisfied grunt.
“There!” He swirled the antidote, then touched a few droplets to Sinjin’s lips, the edges of his nostrils, and the inside of his ears, using every last drop.
On the floor, Sinjin let out a groan. Luc gathered up his supplies, exited the locker, and slid the bolt closed behind him. Sinjin sat up and squinted at them through the wire mesh.
“Guess what?” Cricket said, sneering. “You’re going to live, but you and your bunny belong to us now.”
Hunter Black said bleakly, “I say we feed him to the dead upstairs.”
“Hunter Black gets cranky,” Cricket informed Sinjin, “when he goes more than three days without assassinating someone.”
Hunter Black spun on her. “I never said I enjoyed killing.”
“Ha! I’ve seen you kill. You look like you’re having really good sex or really bad indigestion.”
He growled, “Mada Vittora made me to kill and so I kill. Not because I enjoy it. Sometimes difficult things must be done, and I’m the only one who has both the stomach and the skill to do them.”
Cricket threw up her hands and exclaimed dryly, “Oh, noble you.”
Before Hunter Black could retort, Viggo pushed between them and gripped the bars of Sinjin’s cage. “Look, ignore these two,” he said to the broker. “One witch’s boy to another, tell us how we can defeat the witches. They must have weaknesses. All witches do. Certain organs that haven’t yet turned to wood and can still bleed.”
Sinjin scowled. “Organs? What are you talking about?”
Anouk joined Viggo at the cage. “Tell us how many witches there are. What their monikers are. What they use as oubliettes.”
Sinjin stared at them oddly.
Luc came over, dusting herbs off his hands. “Listen, you’d best tell us everything. I have it on good authority from a Crimson princess that one of the Royals is in league with your witches. That’s the only way the witches could have gotten into the Castle Ides ballroom. Tell us how. In exchange for the information, we’ll spare your life and even keep your secret. You can go back to Paris and hack whatever Pretty websites you want.”
Sinjin’s expression slowly cracked into a cruel smile. He started laughing.
Beau slammed his palm against the wire cage. “It’s no use. He won’t betray his witches.”
Sinjin’s laughing tapered off. “You don’t understand, any of you.There are no monikers or oubliettes. There are no organs. Not anymore,” he spat out sourly. “There’s nothing left to betray.”
Anouk considered him carefully. “What are you saying?”
“There are no more Oxford witches. The entire coven is dead.”
Viggo barked a laugh. “Yeah, right.”
Anouk added, “We saw them at the engagement party when they pos
sessed King Kaspar.”
“They possessed King Kaspar not to threaten you. They were warning you. Begging for help! When your Royals killed King Kaspar, they killed the final spirit of the witches too.”
Cricket shot up from a crate and waved her knife. “I’ve got a whole city plunged into chaos out there that would disagree with you. Chaos your witches awoke.”
Sinjin shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re up against.”
Anouk crouched next to the cage and said softly, “Then tell us.”
He looked up with cruel words poised on the tip of his tongue, but then he met her eyes and the fight seemed to go out of him. He sighed. Sank back heavily against the water-lily paintings.
Luc winced. “Ah, the paintings really are quite delicate—”
Beau elbowed him quiet.
Sinjin rubbed absently at the line of tattoos spanning the back of his neck. “They were witches, once. Women who, decades ago, were turned away from Oxford University, back when women weren’t allowed to be students. One of them found a reference to the Coal Baths in a book that a Royal had left behind in the university library. She saw it for what it was: a chance to learn more than they ever would at Oxford. She convinced the others to go to the Black Forest. Close to a hundred went; only five survived and came out witches. They named themselves the Coven of Oxford. One of them was Mada White, my mistress. She stole me as a baby and raised me as her own until I turned twenty-five. Then she found a younger boy and kept me on as a spy.”
“You hated her,” Anouk concluded.
His eyes flashed. “I loved her. If she were alive, I’d be at her side. But she’s gone. All of them are. It’s the Noirceur, don’t you get it? They woke up something they couldn’t control. It destroyed all five of them. Women who had shaped the world, gone like that.” His snap echoed. “The Noirceur destroyed the entire Court of Isles too, and King Kaspar.” He pointed in the direction of Big Ben. “Anyone who’s gone up against the Noirceur is now part of it. You aren’t fighting people, you’re fighting that smoke. It can’t be stabbed with knives. It can’t be poisoned. It can’t be bribed or reasoned with—it doesn’t want anything. It’s simply a force. A void. And it’ll destroy you too.”
Anouk’s heart thundered in her chest. She thought of the glimpses she’d gotten of London, the escalating chaos, the plagues that were getting worse. Most of all, the black smoke that had sunk into the streets, dirtying everything it touched with soot, swarming toward the vibrations of screams.
She stood and paced by the ballet set. “This changes everything. I thought we were up against witches. Women we could bargain with or, if it came down to it, kill. But how do we stop chaos?”
“We round it up,” Luc said. “Jak said the only way to stop it is to transfer it to a new vessel. The first step is to collect every clock in the city.”
“That’s impossible,” Beau argued.
“Not if we had reinforcements,” Luc said. “Not if we had teams in every borough of the city that could use tricks and whispers to gather every clock, street by street.”
“It would take hundreds of magic handlers,” Anouk said. “We would need every Royal in the near realms.”
Luc nodded. “And every Goblin and every witch too.”
“We’d have to break the border spell to get them into London.”
“Exactly, Dust Bunny.”
“I lost my magic—I can’t do it. And Cricket isn’t powerful enough.”
He sighed. “Well, I didn’t promise a perfect answer. And then there’s the question of what the new vessel would be.”
Anouk’s mind raced. She paced through the artificial snow on the Nutcracker set, thinking. Luc said the vessel needed to be something unique, something secure. The original Royals had placed it in an abstract concept—time—before they knew how ubiquitous clocks would become. She tapped her chin. If only she hadn’t failed in the Black Forest. If only she could get a second chance. She knew so many spells, but none of them could help her now.
She gasped softly. “I might know a good vessel—”
But as she turned, Luc cried out. He’d stepped too close to the art locker. Sinjin had reached between the wires and grabbed him, and he now held one of Cricket’s poisoned knives to his neck, the one Cricket had stabbed him with earlier, that Luc had thrown to the floor.
“Sinjin!” Anouk felt the blood drain from her face. “Let him go.”
“Let me go.”
“I’ve got your rabbit. I won’t hesitate to hurt it.”
He shook his head. “You might be partial to things that creep and crawl, but I am not. Go ahead. Kill it.” He pressed the blade to Luc’s neck. “I have to get out of London. That darkness is growing and it’s going to kill us all. Plagues, smoke—one way or another, anything breathing in this city will be gone soon. I have to get out.”
“Easy, Sinjin.” Anouk held out one hand. She could feel the desperation rolling off him like cold sweat. “Easy . . .”
“I have to get out!” A mad sort of fever overtook him. He jerked the knife. Luc dodged the full impact, but the blade scratched his neck.
“No!” Anouk cried.
Luc staggered away from Sinjin, one hand pressed to the scratch on his neck. A small scratch, barely bleeding. But . . .
“The nightrose poison!” Cricket breathed.
Anouk gave the hare to Viggo and knelt next to Luc. Her hands were shaking. Her lips felt so cold. She tapped her fingers against them, wishing for that fizzy warm spark of magic, but they didn’t warm. Hunter Black, brooding over by the dinosaur fossils, had been so silent that Anouk had almost forgotten he was there. But in a few steps, he threw open the bolt of the locker, grabbed Sinjin by the shoulder, twisted his head, and, with a sickening crack, broke his neck.
“Hunter Black!” she cried.
Sinjin’s body slumped to the ground. Anouk started to run over, but then stopped. There was no point in feeling for a pulse. His chin was practically touching his spine. She spun on Hunter Black with hot cheeks. “I thought you said you didn’t enjoy killing!”
“Luc is family,” he said grimly. “And I make an exception when someone hurts my family.”
Should she feel grateful or disturbed? “Luc.” She picked up a cloth and pressed it to his neck, but he waved it away—the bleeding had already stopped. “Cricket, get his herbalist kit.”
Luc shook his head. “Dust Bunny. No.” His face was slick with sweat. It smelled sharp and astringent. “I used the last of the antidote on Sinjin.”
“Then we’ll get more. It’s a big city. We’ll get flowers and . . .” She turned helplessly to Cricket.
Cricket looked like she’d seen a ghost. “The poison I used is from Mada Zola’s stash in Montélimar. It contains a cultivar of lavender found only on the estate. The antidote has to come from there too.”
Anouk staggered to the nearest seat, the throne from the Nutcracker set. She felt numb. Luc was poisoned. They had no antidote. She had no magic to save him. They had the golden hare, which meant they had the ruby stud. Theoretically, if they could get the ruby to Paris, Petra could pass into London—but she’d never arrive before the poison reached Luc’s heart.
At her feet lay the Nutcracker dolls that Jak had commanded like puppets. She kicked one, watched it roll across the stage and bump into the presents that had been set up to look like Stonehenge.
Her spine went rigid. An idea was forming in her head, a valiant one, and those were the most dangerous. She closed her hand instinctively around her Faustine jacket, still hanging on the back of the throne.
Cricket stopped pacing and gave Anouk a searching look. “What are you doing?”
“Leaving.”
“Leaving? Why? Where?”
Head spinning, Anouk pulled on the jacket, letting the silk slide over her like battle armor.
It’s snowing, Jak had said before disappearing, in Wiltshire.
Her eyes fell to one of the paintings in
the art locker, a landscape of a field of heather beneath a brilliant blue sky. For all she knew, it was a field in the Russian countryside, not in Great Britain, but regardless, something about the field reminded her of Jak’s words. “I’m going to Wiltshire.”
Cricket stared at her as though she’d gone mad. “What’s in Wiltshire?”
Anouk flipped up her jacket collar. She checked the security cameras trained on the exterior steps, noting with satisfaction that a light snow had started.
A place of immense power, Jak had said. A place of transformation and blue flame.
“Stonehenge,” she answered.
Chapter 34
“Anouk. Wait.”
She was halfway up the stairs. Hunter Black, his face cast in shadows, took a single, halting step toward her.
“You’re leaving,” he said. “You’re going to do something dangerous. At the least, you’re going to fight your way through the dead up there.”
“If you’re going to tell me not to go—”
“I’m not.” He took another step toward her, closing the distance. “You wouldn’t listen to me anyway. But I want to tell you . . .” He cleared his throat, and she found herself curious and a little worried. It was rare to see Hunter Black flummoxed. Rarer still that it didn’t have to do with some poor soul he’d just killed. “Be careful.”
She let out a laugh without meaning to. “Careful?” How many times had Hunter Black himself threatened her? He was Mada Vittora’s loyal wolf, there to do her dirty work. In the case of Anouk, that had meant making sure she was too scared to ever leave the townhouse.
He gave something like a growl, coming up the rest of the stairs until they were just a few steps apart. “I know I . . . I’ve been a monster. But it isn’t like it was before. I meant what I said about us being . . . being . . .”
That ugly feeling inside her softened, and she hesitantly took a step down. “Family?”
After a second, he muttered a word that resembled yes.
A smile flickered at her lips. “And you’re worried for my safety?”
Midnight Beauties Page 24