Hawthorne looked thoughtful. “Does that first rule mean if any door’s unlocked you’re allowed in?”
“S’pose so.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Cool.”
They spent the next hour running up and down hallways rattling door handles, trying six floors before it got boring. The only unlocked rooms in the Deucalion seemed to be rooms they’d already visited a million times, but finally, on the seventh floor of the west wing, just as a game of Happy Housewives was looking inevitable, inspiration struck.
“This looks familiar.” Morrigan rattled another locked door. It was different from the others on this floor. Instead of solid brass, the doorknob was made of twisted silver filigree and had a tiny opal bird on the top, its wings outstretched. “This looks like… Oh. Oh! Wait here.”
She ran all the way to the fourth floor and back, arriving out of breath but clutching her umbrella triumphantly.
Hawthorne tilted his head. “Expecting bad weather?”
The silver tip fit the lock. Morrigan twisted the oilskin umbrella and turned the handle. The door opened with a satisfying click, and she smiled. “I knew it.”
“How—”
“Jupiter gave me this for my birthday,” she explained, her excitement growing. “Do you think he knew this would happen? Maybe he meant for me to figure it out!”
“Yeah.” Hawthorne looked bewildered. “He’d do something nutty like that.”
The room was large, echoing, and entirely empty but for a glass lantern in the center of the floor. It held a single lit candle, bright enough to cast a warm golden glow around the darkened room.
“Weird,” muttered Hawthorne.
It was an understatement. Morrigan was pretty sure there wasn’t meant to be a lantern burning unattended in a locked empty room on the seventh floor. For one thing, it was probably a fire hazard. For another, it was spooky.
As they got closer to it, the light from the lantern made their shadows huge and monstrous. Hawthorne cracked himself up by hunching his back and doing a zombie walk, groaning loudly for effect. He shuffled toward the candle and his zombie shadow grew enormous on the wall behind him.
Then something strange happened. Hawthorne stopped moving. But his shadow did not. It continued its zombie walk without him, taking on a life of its own and lumbering across the far wall, until it melted into a dark corner and disappeared.
“Creepy,” breathed Morrigan.
“Very creepy,” Hawthorne agreed.
“Let me try.” She made a snake shadow puppet with her arm. It coiled away from her and slithered along the walls, striking angrily at the poor shadow-bunnies Hawthorne sent hopping toward it.
Morrigan’s slightly lame attempt at a cat became a roaring lion that stalked and ate every one of those bunnies. Hawthorne made a bird, which turned into a bat that swooped down on his own shadow as if trying to scratch his eyes out.
Their creations became more elaborate as they tried to out-spook each other. They didn’t even have to work very hard—it was as if the shadows were trying to be as scary as possible. A fish became a shark, became a circling school of sharks, became a swirling hurricane of giant sharks with Hawthorne’s and Morrigan’s shadows at the center. It was terrifying and thrilling and so, so cool.
“I’m… gonna make…” Hawthorne said, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth as he bent his fingers into a complicated, unrecognizable shape, “…a dragon.”
And suddenly, his blobby shadow became a great reptilian beast. It loomed large on the wall, its black wings beating monstrously as it took flight. It soared and swooped around their heads and shot shadowy black flames from between its terrifying jaws. Hawthorne made a shadow-horse, and the dragon burned it to a crisp and gobbled it down in three sickening bites.
Morrigan and Hawthorne screamed as they watched it dive down and pick up Hawthorne’s shadow in its talons, flying into the distance while Shadow-Hawthorne’s black limbs flailed. Their screams turned to laughter.
“I think I just won,” said Hawthorne with a smug grin.
“Firstly, it’s not a competition,” said Morrigan. “And secondly—I’m going to win.”
They sat on the floor with the lantern between them, and Morrigan flexed her fingers. If Hawthorne thought he could out-scare Jackalfax’s scariest citizen, he was kidding himself. “Let me tell you a story.”
She twisted her hands into something that looked roughly like a person. “Once upon a time, a little boy was walking alone in the woods.”
She made some tall, waving trees, and the shadow-boy walked obediently among them.
“His mother always told him not to walk in the woods alone. There was a witch who lived there, and her favorite thing to eat was chopped-up little boys on toast. But the boy didn’t listen, because he liked to pick the berries that grew in the forest.”
Morrigan hunched over into what she thought was a suitably witchlike shape, her fingers bent into claws. Her shadow did the rest, transforming into a spooky old woman complete with hooked, warty nose and pointed hat. The shadow-witch stalked the boy through the trees.
“He thought he knew the forest, but he got lost and couldn’t find his way out. He walked for hours and hours. Night fell, and the forest grew dark.”
Morrigan made an owl that suddenly took flight, shaking the branches of a tree. The shadow-boy looked over his shoulder and shivered, and so did Hawthorne.
“Suddenly, he heard a croaky old voice from behind him. ‘Who’s that walking in my woods?’ called the witch. ‘Who’s been picking my berries?’
“The boy tried to run, but the witch plucked him by the scruff of his neck and carried him home to her chopping board, cackling all the way.” (Morrigan was particularly proud of her witchy cackle.) “As she lifted her knife high in the air, a howl pierced the night.”
Morrigan made a dog shadow puppet, which turned into a wolf, then a pack of wolves. They circled the witch and the boy, growling viciously. She hadn’t meant to make so many of them, but the shadows had ideas of their own; they were too good at this. Morrigan needed to take control before the story got away from her.
“Finally,” she said, grasping for a hasty ending, “the boy, um… the boy heard his mother calling for him in the distance. She came riding to his rescue on their trusty old horse, Sergeant Clop, and… and the boy cheered as he saw them galloping over the hill!”
Morrigan’s shadow-puppet horse did indeed gallop toward the boy, the witch, and the wolves. But there was no heroic mother on its back, coming to save the day. There was no mother at all. Only a towering, skeletal man holding a long black rifle.
“I didn’t make that,” whispered Morrigan, cold fear rising up in her throat. The shadows had hijacked her story.
A brigade of horses swelled up behind the first, each bearing a ghostly hunter at the reins. The shadow-witch and the shadow-boy faded into darkness, and the wolves loomed larger and larger as they surrounded Morrigan and Hawthorne.
Morrigan screamed.
She ran for the door with Hawthorne close behind, and only when they emerged in the bright light of the hallway did Morrigan realize they weren’t being chased.
“What’s wrong?” said Hawthorne. “That was getting good.”
She shook her head, trembling. “That wasn’t meant to happen. The Hunt of Smoke and Shadow wasn’t meant to be in the story.”
“The Hunt of—what?”
Morrigan took a shaky breath and told Hawthorne the story of her eleventh birthday. Once she started, it all came tumbling out—about the Eventide curse and how she was meant to die but then Jupiter came and they were chased by the Hunt of Smoke and Shadow and went through the clock and that was how she ended up at the Hotel Deucalion, and how she really, really didn’t have a knack, or even a clue what she was doing there. She even told him the most painful, scary part—about Inspector Flintlock, and how if she didn’t get into the Society she’d be forced to leave Nevermoor and face the Hunt again.
&n
bsp; Hawthorne stayed quiet until she’d finished, and for a little while afterward. He looked dazed. Morrigan watched him, biting her lip, worried she’d said too much. Perhaps she should have left out the bit about coming from the Republic and being in Nevermoor illegally. And the bit about the curse. And all the other bits.
“No offense,” he said finally, “but that story’s way better than the one you made up.”
The air left Morrigan’s lungs in a low whoosh. It was typical of Hawthorne to take the strangeness of her life in stride, but she was deeply relieved nonetheless.
“Hawthorne, you have to keep it a secret,” Morrigan said. “I wasn’t supposed to tell. If anybody finds out—if Inspector Flintlock—”
Hawthorne held out his little finger. “Morrigan Crow,” he said solemnly. “I pinky-promise to keep your secret and not tell another soul.”
Morrigan raised an eyebrow. “You pinky what?”
“Pinky-promise.” He pushed his little finger closer to her face. “I’ve never broken a pinky promise in my life. Never.”
She hooked her pinky in his, and they nodded.
“Now,” he said, frowning, “please tell me that bit about getting chased through the clock by hunters with guns while driving a giant spider again.”
But she didn’t get a chance, because suddenly Morrigan noticed two things:
1. They’d left the door to the Creepy Room of Creepiness open.
2. One of her shadow-wolves had escaped and was stalking down the hallway.
“Maybe it faded away,” Hawthorne moaned as they searched the kitchens for the third time. They’d looked all over the hotel, but the shadow-wolf eluded them. “All the others did.”
“But what if it didn’t? What if it comes across a guest? They’ll be scared to death, their family will sue the Deucalion, and Jupiter will kill me. We have to find it before someone sees it.” Morrigan didn’t know how she was going to get rid of the wolf if she ever did catch it, but she couldn’t think about that now.
“Before someone sees what?”
It was the last voice she wanted to hear. Jack stood in a corner of the kitchen, pouring a glass of milk.
“Nothing,” she said quickly. “None of your business.”
He rolled his good eye. “If there’s something wandering around scaring people to death, it is my business. I don’t want to stumble over any dead bodies on my way to bed. What is it?”
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
They told him. Jack listened with increasing annoyance. “For goodness’ sake! If you’re going to leave a pack of killer wolves in the Hall of Shadows, at least shut the bloody door behind you. It’s locked for a reason. How did you even get in?”
“I… we… well, I realized that—”
“Forget it!” Jack held up a hand to stop her. “Don’t make me your accomplice. Jupiter’s going to be furious.”
As much as Morrigan didn’t want to admit it, it was a stroke of good luck that Jack was there, because he knew an awful lot more about the hotel than she did. He led them to a maintenance closet and pulled out three battery-powered flashlights.
“Right, we’re going to have to split up. I’ll take the east wing, you”—he pointed at Hawthorne—“take the west wing, and Morrigan, you take the north wing. If you find the wolf, shine your flashlight directly on it, at the highest setting. Don’t let it get away, keep shining the light on it until it fades.
“It won’t be in places like the hallways and kitchens, it’ll be someplace darker, with other shadows to hide in. If you corner it in a room and you can get to a light switch, flick it on and flood the room with light. If not, your flashlight should do the job. Now, this is important—do not stop searching until you find it. Even if it takes all night.”
Morrigan didn’t like the idea of splitting up. The last thing she felt like doing was wandering around in the dark, looking for a giant ravenous shadow-wolf on her own, but what could she do? It was her fault the thing was out there. She had to find it.
The north wing was surprisingly dark. She crept down black stairwells and through unlocked rooms, unsure whether a shadow could hear her coming but unwilling to take the risk. It was hard to know what to look for in the dark. How do you find a shadow in the shadows?
After what felt like hours of searching, Morrigan was ready to give up when she heard a sound from the moonlit balcony of a fifth-floor drawing room. Somebody was out there, looking up at the sky and singing quietly. The sound drifted inside, and though Morrigan couldn’t quite make out the words, she recognized the melody. And the man.
She held the gauzy white curtains aside and stepped onto the balcony, into the bluish light of a full moon. The beam of her flashlight fell across the man’s face. “Mr. Jones?”
He was jolted out of his reverie. “Miss Crow! Hello again.”
“Another visit,” Morrigan observed. “You must come to Nevermoor a lot.”
“Yes, I have business here on occasion. And I like to visit friends.” He smiled a little sheepishly, holding up a hand to shield his eyes. Morrigan lowered her flashlight. “I don’t believe the Wintersea Party would approve, but what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Our deal still stands, I hope? You won’t tell on me?”
“As long as you don’t tell on me.” Morrigan shivered. The evening breeze had a bite. “What are you doing out here?”
“Oh, just… looking for the Music Salon. I thought it was somewhere near my suite, but I suspect I’m a bit lost—the Deucalion still baffles me, after all these years. I passed this charming spot and couldn’t resist a moment of reflection under the stars.” His voice was wistful. “Such a beautiful evening.”
“Yes, it’s—” From the corner of her eye, Morrigan saw something move in the drawing room. She threw back the curtains and swung her flashlight around, but it was only the branch of a small potted tree, swaying in the breeze from the open door. “Where is it?” she whispered.
“Are you looking for something?”
“Um… yeah. But you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
He smiled gently. “I’m certain I would.”
She told him about the Hall of Shadows. He barely raised an eyebrow. “And then one of the shadows I made escaped and now it’s running around the hotel, and I have to find it before it scares somebody to death and Jupiter loses all his business and goes bankrupt. Jack says the only way to kill it is to shine a light on it until it fades away.”
Mr. Jones didn’t laugh at her, or call her a liar, or even express the smallest amount of surprise. “You created this shadow on your own?”
“Sort of. And it sort of… created itself.”
He looked oddly impressed by that. “Hmm. It’s a scary shadow, you said?”
“They’re all scary. Even if you make a nice one, like a kitten, it’ll turn into a man-eating tiger or something. It’s like they’re trying to be scary.”
“That makes sense.”
Morrigan was surprised. “Does it?”
“Shadows are shadows, Miss Crow.” His eyes reflected the moonlight. “They want to be dark.”
Morrigan swung her flashlight wildly about the room, hoping to catch the wolf by surprise if it was there. The beam began to stutter and fade. She whacked the side of the flashlight. “I think my batteries are dying.” With one last flicker the light went out. She groaned.
“I doubt it matters,” said Mr. Jones. “Miss Crow, I suspect your friend—the one who told you how to kill the shadow—”
“He’s not my friend—”
“—was merely having fun at your expense.” He smiled, not unkindly. “Your rogue shadow has almost certainly faded away on its own.”
Morrigan frowned. “How do you know?”
“I’ve been staying at the Deucalion for many years; I hope I’ve learned a few of her secrets in that time. As I understand it, anything made inside the Hall of Shadows is nothing but an illusion—just a bit of theater. It can�
�t harm anyone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
Morrigan felt relief wash over her, followed by cold fury. Had she really just wasted a bazillion hours chasing nothing? “Jack. I’m going to kill him.”
Mr. Jones chuckled. “Pity you can’t send a real wolf to teach him a lesson. Now I’m afraid I must get myself to bed. I’m checking out in the morning. Good night, Miss Crow. And remember—my employer’s offer is always open.”
He was well and truly gone by the time Morrigan realized she’d never told him the shadow was a wolf.
“What are you—you were supposed to be looking in the north wing!”
The cavernous foyer was dim and empty but for Jack, lounging on a love seat and reading a clothbound book. The chandelier—growing, slowly growing—twinkled feebly overhead, still in its infancy. Jack shined his flashlight in Morrigan’s face, nearly blinding her as she emerged from the hall.
“I was, you rat.” Morrigan glanced back the way she came. “That is the north wing.”
“No.” He looked slightly panicked. “That’s the south wing. It’s closed for renovations. It’s unsafe. You’re not supposed to enter under any circumstances. Can’t you read?”
He pointed at a sign that said CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS. UNSAFE. DO NOT ENTER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Morrigan had walked right past it. Whoops.
“Well, it’s your fault!” she sputtered. “You lied, Jack. We didn’t need to chase that stupid wolf around the hotel at all.”
“Did anybody see you in there? Fenestra would kill—”
“Who cares about the south wing? You knew the shadow would disappear on its own, didn’t you? You’re a liar.”
Jack didn’t look remotely guilty. “It’s not my fault you’re gullible. Try having a brain next time.” He scowled and shook his head, muttering, “I can’t believe my uncle thinks you belong in the Wundrous Society. Can’t even read a sign.”
The Trials of Morrigan Crow Page 15