Oona let out her breath, uncertain of what to do next. She turned the questions over in her mind: Should she move forward, or turn back? Was she doing the right thing? After several seconds of deliberation, however, she reminded herself that she had not come all the way down here simply to turn back at the last moment. This was her chance to learn the truth. Now was the time to be brave like a true detective, not meek like a frightened child. This is what her father would have done, she was sure of it. He would have met the challenge head on. And with that final thought, turning back was suddenly not an option. It was all or nothing. She took in several deep breaths to calm herself, and then said: “Come along, Deacon. It’s time to confront Sanora.”
They found Sanora huddled on the floor of a candlelit room—though calling it simply a room would have been an understatement. Perhaps thirty feet across by fifty feet long, the room appeared to be an entire underground library. The stone walls had been carved into rising shelves, all of them stuffed with books, stacks of yellowing newspapers, and thousands of scrolls.
A long wood table occupied the center of the room, atop of which sat a pair of flaming candelabras. There were only two chairs that Oona could see, one at the end of the table and another sitting beside a bookshelf, as if someone had used it for a stepping stool. The floor was nothing more than hard-packed earth.
Sanora had curled herself into a ball on the floor in front of a shelf containing newspapers. She hugged her knees, rocking from side to side on the ground.
“Remarkable!” Oona said as she stepped from the opening of the tunnel into the light of the library. “Not only do you steal a gorgeous dress, but you choose to use it as a floor rag as well. Here. I believe this would be more suitable.” Oona tugged the black dress she had found in the showroom from her shoulder and tossed it to the floor.
Sanora looked up, her large eyes round and red from crying. She sprang to her feet. The dress looked positively radiant on her, its shimmery cloth causing Sanora’s normally pale complexion to look as if it glowed.
“Oh, Miss Crate,” said Sanora in a small, shaky voice. “I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have. But … But I can explain.”
Oona raised an eyebrow. “You mean explain why there is a tunnel leading from the dress shop to Witch Hill? I’ve already figured it out, Sanora. It was quite devious of you to tell me that you saw Hector Grimsbee on the steps of the museum, especially when you knew quite well that it was you, and not he, who stole the daggers.”
Sanora sank back to the floor, as if defeated, and she spoke in a trembling voice. “It’s true, I told you about seeing Mr. Grimsbee so you would think he stole the daggers. But I also thought that it must have been Grimsbee who was the one who threw the dagger at the Wizard.”
Oona shook her head, confused. “What are you talking about? If you stole the dagger, then why would Grimsbee or anyone else be the one who threw it?”
But before Sanora could answer, a voice interjected. “What is this?”
Oona whirled around, only to discover a girl, about fifteen or sixteen years old, standing at the mouth of the tunnel. Upon her head sat a tall, pointy hat. Her dress, a silky purple gown, was breathtaking in its finely detailed craftsmanship. The girl wore the dress well, and from the way she held herself, she knew it.
Oona braced herself. If these witches knew any sort of magic at all—or were in possession of the second dagger—then this was surely the moment she would find out. But nothing happened. On the contrary, it was Sanora who blurted out: “Katona, be careful! She’s a Natural Magician. I saw her yesterday. She conjured a powerful spell right in front of everyone, so she did.”
Oona glanced down at Sanora, feeling a shock of guilt shoot through her body like lightning, and for a moment the shame of doing the magic—letting it happen—came rushing back to her. It had been a dreadful betrayal of her promise to never do magic again. A betrayal to her mother and sister. It had been a mistake. A stupid mistake.
A trace of movement at the mouth of the tunnel pulled Oona’s attention back into the present moment. A second girl, roughly the same age as Katona, stepped out of the tunnel and into the library. She was followed by another girl, and then another, and another, each of them dressed in the finest of clothing—Madame Iree’s missing dresses, no doubt—and each was wearing a pointy black hat. They stopped a few paces into the room and stared at the intruder and her bird.
Oona swallowed a lump in her throat, and Deacon whispered, “Oh dear,” under his breath.
Again, Oona’s muscles tensed in anticipation of being struck with some secret spell, but just as before, there appeared to be no threat of this at all. Indeed, they all seemed quite a bit more afraid of her than Oona was of them.
“Who is that?” asked one of the girls.
“It’s that Crate girl,” said another. “The Wizard’s niece.”
Katona’s eyes widened beneath the brim of her pointy hat, like she’d suddenly remembered something. “You … You’re the one who … who killed your own mother.”
Oona took in a sharp breath, and it seemed as if the entire room gasped with her. No one had ever said it so directly to her before, so matter-of-factly. It sounded so brutal to her ears, so painfully cruel and true. It was like a blade slid right into her chest, sinking deep into her heart, and for a second she thought perhaps one of the witches had thrown the second dagger, piercing her straight through. But it was not steel that cut at her, nor any enchantment. This was cold, undeniable remorse. It was guilt and loss all tangled together in barbed wire. It was the drowned song of heartache. She wanted to shout out that it had been an accident, that she had not meant for it to happen. Part of her wanted to crumble to her knees and fall into a fit of tears, while another part wished to leap on Katona and pull at her hair, to tell her to take it back; to take back what she had said in order to make it untrue. But Oona did neither of these things. There was nothing she could do that would make it untrue, nothing at all … not even magic.
But she also knew that there was something that she must do, and that was save her uncle and Pendulum House. She might not be able to turn back the clock and save her mother and sister, but she could save the street from Red Martin’s greedy scheme, and bring all those responsible to justice. That was what her father would have done.
Looking at the astonished expressions on the girls’ faces, Oona realized for the first time that she just might be able to use their fear of her magic to her advantage. Even if she did not intend on using magic, that did not mean that she could not make the witches believe that she would. She only hoped that she could bluff them all.
And, she thought, let’s pray that none of them possesses Fay Mors Mortis.
“What is it you want,” Katona asked Oona wearily. “The dresses?”
Oona stepped forward, and the group of girls stepped back, all except for Katona, who seemed to be their leader. Oona could tell that the older girl was nervous, and yet there was an air of defiance about her as well.
Oona raised her chin. “The dagger that Sanora used to attack my uncle has turned him into a toad. What I want is for Sanora to tell me the magical phrase that will turn him back into his human form.”
Katona laughed. It was a high-pitched chortle, filled with nervousness. “Sanora is not the person who attacked your uncle, Miss Crate.”
Oona’s eyes slitted. “Explain yourself.”
Before Katona could answer, Oona noticed that several of the girls were attempting to edge their way back toward the tunnel. She arrowed a finger in their direction, like a Magician of Old preparing to cast some terrible enchantment. The girls stopped in their tracks.
“I want you all where I can see you,” Oona commanded. “All of you, get on the table!”
The next moment, Deacon was soaring into the air, batting his wings at the girls, and cawing his high raven cry. The girls darted for the table; all except for Sanora, who remained where she was on the floor. There were nine witches in all, including Sanora.
“Where are the rest of you?” Oona asked.
The girls looked at one another. They did not seem to know what she was talking about, and then Oona suddenly understood.
“You mean to say that this is all there is? Nine witches?” She furrowed her brow, trying to adjust to this strange bit of news. Oona had always imagined scores of witches living below the hill. She’d imagined them beating on drums and dancing wildly around boiling kettles. The fact that none of them appeared older than sixteen was quite a surprise … or, that is to say, it was a surprise until she remembered the turlock root.
The odor of the beauty cream was faint against the smell of books and earth, but it was there.
“You, Sanora,” Oona said. “Sit here. In this chair. Now explain to me how you did not attack my uncle, even though you were clearly involved in stealing the daggers.”
Sanora rose to her feet and took her seat, her dress shimmering in the candlelight, mesmerizing to behold. She glanced nervously from Katona to Oona. “It was Red Martin,” she said finally, her voice high and meek. “He forced us to do it … to steal the daggers. We did not know that one of them was to be used on the Wizard, I swear it. I was just as surprised to see it happen as you was. We was just told that if we didn’t get the daggers, and take them to the Nightshade Hotel, then we would no longer receive our supply of … of …”
“Of turlock root,” Deacon finished for her.
Sanora looked up in surprise.
Oona twirled the candle in her fingers like a baton. “Yes, we know that you have been using turlock root in your so-called Witchwhistle Beauty Cream to make yourself young. But we did not know where you were getting it from.”
Now the question is, where is Red Martin getting it from? Oona thought, but did not ask. She waited for Sanora to respond.
Finally, Sanora nodded, smoothing the shimmery skirt of her dress. “Red Martin’s the only one who knows how to get hold of the root. And I promise, Miss Crate, that he wouldn’t say what them daggers was for. Just that he had to have ’em, and that we was to do the getting … or else. He gave us a drawing of the museum layout, and the buildings around it. It was very detailed. So, anyway, we started digging. We tried to dig directly into the curator’s office, but the floor was solid stone. It would have taken too long to break through.”
Oona nodded, circling around the back of Sanora’s chair. “I’m guessing that’s when you decided to tunnel beneath the dress shop next door.”
Sanora nodded. “The showroom floor is made of wood. And that platform was hollow underneath.”
“Of course,” Oona said. “You could cut through the wood floor much easier than through solid stone. And from there you went into the museum through the common wall of the showroom.”
Sanora began to fidget with the folds of her gleaming dress, and the light played eerily upon her face. “Once we got inside, we had to work by night, when the dress shop and the museum was both closed. It took longer than we thought it might to cut through into the museum, right? A whole week goes by, and we still wasn’t in. And so, yesterday we get a message from Red Martin saying that we was taking too long, and that he needs the daggers that very day or we could kiss our beloved root good-bye. The message also says that he’s gonna make sure that the curator is out of his office by one o’clock, and that he’ll be gone for several hours. So, you see, we had no choice but to finish the job in the daytime. Thing is, Red Martin didn’t know that we was going in through the dress shop next door. We just never told him.”
“Lucky for you, Madame Iree was having a tea party at one o’clock, and the showroom was locked,” Oona said.
“It’s true,” said Sanora. “And we was already almost through. We punched through the last bit of wall right behind that tapestry in about twenty minutes. We broke the glass case with a pick, took the daggers, cleaned up, and then … then …”
“And then you took the dresses,” Oona finished for her.
Katona pointed her chin at Oona, her voice full of defiance. “We may spend most of our time down here in the hill, Miss Crate, but at least part of the reason for that is because people up there on the street treat us so rudely. They take one look at our pointy hats and scurry to the other side of the street. They point and whisper behind their hands. And that snobby dress shop owner was the worst of them. She never once let any of us witches so much as get three feet into her precious store before shouting at us to get out. Taking the dresses seemed only fair … and convenient.”
Oona remembered her own experience of walking into the store for the first time only the day before, and the treatment she had received. The looks of distain on the ladies’ faces had almost made Oona turn right around and head back out the door.
“Convenient, I will agree,” Oona said. “Fair? That will be a matter for the courts to decide.” She turned to Sanora. “Please, continue.”
Sanora swallowed uneasily. “I dropped the daggers off in an envelope at the front desk of the Nightshade Hotel, and that was that.”
“Surely you would have known that the daggers were highly dangerous,” Oona said. “Even their names speak of their treacherous possibilities. And yet you still stole them for a notorious criminal.”
Sanora bit at her lip. “I swear, Miss Crate, none of us knew one of ’em was meant for the Wizard. If we had, then we would never have taken it.”
“Really, Sanora?” Katona said, disbelieving. “You would have given up the beauty cream? I find that hard to believe. Look at you. Can’t even act like an adult when you need to, in spite of being five hundred and seventy years old.”
“Five hundred and seventy?” Oona said, hearing the astonishment in her own voice.
Katona shrugged. “Give or take a few years. When you’re that old, it does not matter. Sanora, though she may appear to be the youngest among us, is by far the oldest … and by all rights should be head of the coven. But over the years, as her body grew younger, so did her mind. Lately, she got it in her head that she wanted to become the Wizard’s apprentice. A ludicrous idea, really. The rest of us warned her against it, but she wouldn’t listen. She’s grown so insufferably obstinate, yet as timid as a … well, as a little girl.”
Oona squinted at Sanora, trying to comprehend somehow that this was no girl, but a five-hundred-and-seventy-year-old woman. And then suddenly Oona thought that she understood what was really happening here. It came to her in a flash: the witches’ real motivation. “If you are all truly so old, then that means that if you stop using the beauty cream … you will all die. Is that correct?”
Katona hesitated, her finger twisting nervously at a lock of hair. At last she said: “It is true. Without Red Martin’s supply of the root, we will be unable to make the cream, and we’ll return to our true age within a month’s time. No doubt, we would die of old age much sooner than that.”
Oona brushed a stray hair from her face, considering what Katona had just revealed. Stranger things had happened on Dark Street, and yet she couldn’t help but feel sorry for them all. These … girls … women … old crones? What precisely were they?
“But I do wonder,” said Deacon. “Where is Red Martin getting turlock root from?”
Sanora shared a look with the other girls. Katona began to shake her head, as if warning Sanora that this information was too precious to give away. After a long moment, however, Sanora said: “He gets it from Faerie.”
Katona sprang to her feet. “Sanora, hold your tongue!”
“Faerie?” Oona said. “How can Red Martin be getting turlock root from Faerie? The Glass Gates bar the way.”
“He smuggles it in, he does,” Sanora said. “Only he knows how.”
Katona moved forward as if to silence her, but Oona stepped between them. “Let her speak!”
Katona backed against the table, staring Oona down with eyes as cold as ice.
“Red Martin’s found a flaw in the Glass Gates,” Sanora continued. “He’s been smuggling turlock root—and all sorts
of other things, I’m sure—across the border for almost as long as the gates have been standing. The deal has always been that he provides us witches with the root, and we pay him with the various crystals and gold that we extract from deep within Witch Hill. We’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. Ever since Oswald closed the gates, and the magic began to fade. We used to be able to do magic, you know. All of us. But by the time we was a century old, the spells we once knew began to fade from our memories. Part of it was the closing of the gates, which softened all the magic. But mostly it was the turlock root. It somehow blocked our ability to remember the magic … and by that time we had no choice but to keep applying the cream.” She touched the brim of her pointy black hat with a sort of loving fondness. “That’s why we always wear our hats. To remind us of what we once were. Real witches who done real magic.” She paused a moment, sitting up straight. She squared her shoulders and looked at the girls on the table: “That’s why I wanted to become the Wizard’s apprentice. To feel what it was like to do magic again.”
For a moment, Oona could only stare at Sanora, blinking foolishly. It was all so extraordinary. Finally, she said: “But if you’ve been getting the root from Red Martin the whole time, then that means that Red Martin must use the beauty cream as well. He’s at least as old as you are, and all of those ridiculous rumors that he is hundreds of years old are actually true.”
“Just figuring that out, are you?” asked a new voice. “I thought for sure that little fact would have been in your father’s files on me. But then again, I suppose he was just as dim-witted as you.”
The voice emanated low and amused from the mouth of the tunnel, and Oona did not like the sound of it one bit.
She whirled around, only to discover a very plain-looking man dressed in an even plainer-looking tan suit and bowler hat. The man stepped casually into the room. His face was ordinary—the kind of face one might pass a hundred times on the street and never take notice of. Quite frankly, there seemed nothing extraordinary about the man at all. He smiled a perfectly uninteresting smile, and the only remarkable thing about his expression was that the smile did nothing for his eyes … eyes that, upon first and perhaps even second glance, seemed utterly unexceptional. And yet upon further examination, there was something altogether eerie about them. There was a kind of menacing glimmer in their gaze that caused a shiver to shoot up Oona’s spine, and she realized all too quickly that these were the same eyes she’d seen peering down at her from the high window at the Nightshade Hotel.
The Wizard of Dark Street Page 20