“I look like an absolute urchin,” she said. “My mother will faint when she sees me.” But the idea seemed to cheer her enormously. Cordelia couldn’t help but wonder how Elizabeth’s mother would react when Elizabeth grew bony ridges on her spine and knuckles, if she could get worked up about a simple haircut.
She had to tell Elizabeth the truth.
By now, the sun was setting. Soon the pixies would wake, and the smell of strange intruders in the galley would draw them out to explore.
“Do me a favor, Gregory,” Cordelia said. “Go and tell Wincombe that it won’t be long before we’ve chased off all the angry spirits. Make sure the crew is ready to sail immediately.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” he said, touching his fingers to his hat in a salute.
His footsteps soon echoed into silence, and Elizabeth and Cordelia were left alone. At least, they were alone except for Icky, Cabal, and the dragon, of course. But they could hardly be counted on for conversation.
There was a long beat of awkward silence. Cordelia was still trying to work out the nicest way to tell a girl that she was, in fact, part-goblin, when Elizabeth spoke up.
“I have something to tell you,” she said.
Cordelia took a deep breath. “I have something to tell you too.”
“I’ll go first,” Elizabeth said. “Mine is important.”
“Let me go first,” Cordelia said. “Mine is important too.”
“It’s not a competition, Cordelia,” Elizabeth snapped.
“Why don’t we both go at the same time, then,” Cordelia said.
“Fine.” Elizabeth tried to toss her hair, only to remember that she didn’t have enough hair to toss anymore. “On the count of three. One . . . two . . . three.”
“I’m part-goblin.”
“You’re part-goblin.”
For a second, both girls stared at each other, stunned. Then both said, at the same time, “You knew?”
“Of course I knew.” Elizabeth was the first to recover and speak. “I found out years ago, after we stumbled in on my great-aunt Gertrude in her nest. I mean, I didn’t know she was my great-aunt Gertrude when we found her, obviously . . . although I did think it was weird that she was using all the nicest guest pillows for a bed. . . .”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Cordelia asked.
Elizabeth’s eyes nearly popped out altogether. “Why do you think? My family was already getting hounded. There were reporters at our door, and crazies threatening fire, and then the SNP came barreling in and tried to smoke her right onto their pitchforks. Thankfully, my dad had tunneled an escape route beneath the garden. . . . She’s fine now,” Elizabeth added. “Remarried, and living in a four-bedroom hole in Arlington, Virginia. Sends up hideous Christmas knits every year. The last one had beetles in it.” She shuddered. “We were terrified someone would find out we were . . . you know . . .”
Monsters. The word hung between them in the silence. But even unspoken, it carried power—echoes of violence, of hatred, of cages and isolation.
“My father would have lost his job. My family would have lost everything. No. We had to be sure no one would know. We had to be sure no one would poke around and begin asking questions. That’s why,” she finished, “my parents said I shouldn’t speak to you again.”
Cordelia felt the words like the punch of a fist. “They . . . ?”
“They were worried that you would ask too many questions, or get suspicious. You might wonder how she’d managed to survive under the garden for so long, or remember the guest pillows the next time you slept over. Or you would someday notice the green at my mother’s roots, or the length of her hands and feet. . . . She made it through her teenage years without ever showing, luckily. But a size-fourteen shoe might still raise eyebrows. I was too ashamed, anyway. . . .”
“There’s no reason to be ashamed,” Cordelia said. “Most people have a goblin or two somewhere in their family tree.”
“Yeah, but not beneath their actual trees,” Elizabeth snapped. “I thought for sure you wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore. Especially after I found out I was related to that . . .”
She trailed off with a helpless gesture.
“She is especially warty,” Cordelia said synpathetically. “Even for a goblin.”
Elizabeth nodded miserably. “You lied to me too, you know. You told me your father was a veterinarian.”
“Technically, that’s true,” Cordelia pointed out.
“Sure. But you left out some pretty important details.” Elizabeth’s eyes flashed yellow again, and this time stayed that way for several long seconds. “If I’d known you were knocking around with dragons and—and hufflepins—”
“Hufflebottoms,” Cordelia corrected her.
“—I would have told you the truth. And we could have stayed friends. Real friends.” Elizabeth looked down again, knotting her hands in her lap. “We moved houses. My mom insisted I grow my hair long and start wearing stupid frilly dresses everywhere, so I’d look like a walking wedding cake. I had to pretend to like St. George’s Academy—”
“Wait.” Of all the things Elizabeth had admitted, Cordelia thought this was the most surprising of all. “You don’t like St. George’s Academy?”
She might as well have asked if Elizabeth liked getting stuck with hot pokers.
“Like it?” Elizabeth repeated. “I hate it. I’ve always hated it. The teachers only teach us nonsense, like how to sew a hemline straight or make conversation at a party. The girls are a bunch of pack animals—if they catch even a whiff of weakness, or difference, or weirdness, it’s goodbye to your intestines.” She shook her head disgustedly. “I had to act like they did, and dress like they did, and speak like they did. I started to think like they did, sometimes. And then I would remember why all the pretending, and remember it was so that no one like the girls I called ‘friends’ would scream about the beastly terror in their watercolor class. So none of them would find out what I was, and hate me for it. So no one would.”
Cordelia felt a wrench of pity twist around her stomach. She couldn’t imagine how lonely Elizabeth’s life had been, for years now. She knew what it was like to carry a secret, of course—a big one. But although she’d learned to see the outside world as a threat to monsters—although she’d expected the monsters would be misunderstood and hated—she had never seen the outside world as a personal threat. She had never believed that she was the monster—and that everyone, everywhere, would surely hate her for it.
If she’d only been brave enough to tell Elizabeth the truth about her father, and the monsters, Elizabeth might never have believed it, either.
“But someone did find out. Actually—more like somemany. A whole organization, in fact.”
“The SNP,” Cordelia said, understanding.
Elizabeth nodded. “They’ve had their eye on my family ever since my great-aunt Gertrude had to flee in her underpants. They’ve had their eye on me.” She bit her lower lip with three rows of teeth. “My parents were hoping the goblin wouldn’t show. That I’d take after my mother—she hardly shows at all, really—and not my aunt and her side. My cousin Millicent,” she added, “was greening at just ten years old. By eleven she’d developed a taste for spiders. Can you imagine, Cord? She eats spiders. Sometimes she takes them with tea!”
It had been years since Elizabeth had called Cordelia by that nickname, Cord. Cordelia had almost forgotten the sound of it. It spread with all the warmth of hot chocolate.
It bobbed with all the floating joy of marshmallows.
“I’m not afraid of spiders,” Elizabeth finished. “I’m afraid to like them. I’m afraid one day I’ll look at a creepy-crawly and think, ‘Now that I think about it, it has been several hours since I ate lunch.’”
Although the idea of Elizabeth—with her flouncy dresses, and (formerly) flouncy curls—snacking mindlessly on daddy longlegs might have been comical, Elizabeth looked so miserable that Cordelia couldn’t find any humor in it. She th
ought about telling Elizabeth that spiders were actually full of protein and nutrients, but it didn’t seem, somehow, like the right thing to say.
“My father puts mustard on his toast like jam,” Cordelia said. “Sardines too. Spiders can’t be worse than that.”
Elizabeth attempted to smile, and failed. “The SNP is giving cash rewards for help purging Boston of evil. Signs of unnatural possession include discoloration of the skin, yellow eyes, and dental crowding.” She shook her head miserably. “I’d been hiding the signs for months, even from my parents. But the night before my birthday, I found . . .”
She tugged down the collar of her dress, and Cordelia swallowed a sharp inhale. The skin at her neck and shoulders had cracked already, revealing an underskin the color and texture of baked mud. That, too, would someday molt, into one of a hundred vibrant colors of the adult goblin’s skin.
“I had to run away,” Elizabeth said. “I couldn’t face my parents’ disappointment. I couldn’t stand to stay and ruin the life they’d worked so hard to protect. I set off for the train station, thinking old Gertrude might take me in. But when I saw you and Gregory . . .”
“You followed us,” Cordelia finished for her. Gregory had been right after all. There had been someone on their tail, all the way from Boston.
Elizabeth knitted her hands so tightly in her lap, another row of warts bloomed briefly on her knuckles. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have trusted you. I should have trusted you years ago.”
“And I should have told you the truth,” Cordelia said.
A lie, she thought, was a little like building a fence around somebody else’s house, as if it might protect anyone from breaking into yours.
“I thought you hated me,” she blurted out suddenly. “I thought I wasn’t good enough for you.”
“And I thought I wasn’t good enough for you,” Elizabeth said, so quietly Cordelia nearly missed it. When she looked up, her eyes were full of tears, and the vivid green of summer leaves. Her cheeks too. Several warts of strong feeling broke out suddenly on her nose.
She was a goblin. She was Lizzie.
She was the bravest, most beautiful girl Cordelia had ever seen.
“I missed you,” Elizabeth whispered.
“I missed you too,” Cordelia said, squeezing the words out through the enormity of all her feeling. “So much.”
Elizabeth smiled, even as huge tears, dark like moss, dampened her lap. “It isn’t a competition, Cord.”
Then Elizabeth fell onto Cordelia, or Cordelia leapt for her, and the girl who was part-goblin and the monster-keeper’s daughter laughed and cried and hugged and became best friends again. They stayed that way so long that Cabal grew jealous and squirmed into Elizabeth’s lap, and then Icky got agitated and began to tug at Cordelia’s hair, and then the dragon grew protective and began snapping at Icky.
They might have stayed that way forever—or at least, for hours—were it not for the sudden whirring of soft wings that announced the pixies’ arrival.
Chapter 27
There were six of them, dark-winged, easily mistaken for moths from a distance.
Until, that is, they started screaming outrage from inside the barrel Cordelia had used for a trap.
“What are they saying?” Elizabeth inched a little closer to the barrel, then jumped backward when it gave an angry wobble.
“You don’t want to know,” Cordelia said. A common joke among monsterologists was that pixies had 567 words, and only three were appropriate for the dinner table.
Gregory was heartbroken when he returned and found the pixies already captured, and all the action over. But he cheered up when Cordelia asked him to help her with the transfer of the pixies into a birdcage Elizabeth had found in the captain’s berth, a sensitive operation that required precision and a strong tolerance of nibbled fingers.
Cordelia showed Gregory how to distinguish between the males and females by the color of the fur that grew all over their bodies, fine as silk. The males were much more vividly colored—in this case, blue and green. The females had tawny fur and beige-and-black-striped wings.
Gregory, it turned out, was a quick study. With no prompting, he had picked out the matron of the clan, identifiable by a secondary set of wings—plucked, no doubt, off the body of her predecessor—secured to her back by a chemical secretion that Cordelia’s father had never been able to replicate.
“Didn’t see the wings,” he said, when Cordelia congratulated him. “I just saw her shrilling all the rest of ’em around.”
Captain Wincombe and her skeleton crew—grown miserable after months of stumping around with nothing but solid land around them—agreed to set sail immediately, even though it was only an hour until midnight, and the weather was unfavorable. After they’d let out the sails and turned south toward Massachusetts, the crew got to work scrubbing the deck and chasing cobwebs out of the corners, cleaning out the berths, and driving the shadows from belowdecks with dozens of lanterns, smoking off their whale fat. Wincombe lashed the birdcage to an iron hook in the mess, narrowly avoiding a nip on the nose when she leaned in for a better view.
“Blow me from the ballast. Pixies.” Wincombe shook her head. “I thought pixies was just make-believe. Garden twiddle, pastel colors, you know.”
“You’re thinking of fairies,” Cordelia said, as the enraged pixies lunged for Wincombe, shrieking, gnashing their teeth. “And they’re totally different species. Pixies are related much more closely to bats, actually.”
Wincombe sniffed as if it didn’t surprise her. “Don’t like them, either,” she said.
She told them that the journey would take almost three full days, assuming there were no squalls. Cordelia simply prayed that would be quick enough. After a dinner of hardtack and oyster stew, Cordelia, Gregory, and Elizabeth settled down in one of the cabins. Icky curled up at Elizabeth’s feet and belched a quiet bass rhythm that underscored the slushing of the waves and the creaking of the ship as it rose and fell inside of them. Cabal, who’d made due with just a few drops of blood from the nearly empty pipette, snored loudly on his back. And the dragon turned lopsided circles in the air, testing out his wing, which was almost fully healed. His shadow turned circles with him, tripled in size across the ceiling.
It was surprisingly peaceful there, in the narrow room, with the wind singing in the sails and the waves rocking them to sleep and the creaking of the ancient wood.
Cordelia slept for nearly sixteen hours and dreamed of absolutely nothing.
The weather had held. The wind had turned strong. They would soon close in on Boston—and Cordelia’s thoughts turned to revenge.
Chapter 28
Byron Newton-Plancke had inherited his father’s vast chain of pharmacies, and the wealth that went along with it. A portion of the family estate, sprawled across twenty lavish acres just a few miles outside of Boston, was a dedicated museum of natural history, and boasted the largest private collection of fossilized and biological relics in the world. On rare days, the museum was open to the general public. For the most part, however, Plancke kept the doors barred to everyone but special patrons and invited guests.
Cordelia learned all this from the No Trespassing sign hung neatly from the heavy iron padlock on the gates.
Thanks to Professor Natter, they had paid for a hansom cab to take them out to the estate, surprised to find that the driver knew the way without any address.
“You’ve got crowds going just to get a peek of him through a window four hundred yards away,” he said. “And bigwigs, too, kinda names you only see in the paper. Governors and deans and book writers and all kinds of swanks. Well. I guess they want to get in good now, just in case he does become president. . . .” The driver leaned over to spit from his perch. “I hope he doesn’t, though. Saw him once or twice. Somethin’ the matter with his eyes. Never seem to be lookin’ in the same direction.”
It was just after eight o’clock in the morning when they arrived, and brittle cold. Co
rdelia was sorry to see the old man and his carriage go, rattling and bumping back down the road. She couldn’t help but feel that they were being abandoned at the end of the world, although the idea was absurd. Several reporters had beaten them there and tried to argue, unsuccessfully, with the patrolling guards for admittance. Cordelia gestured the others into the dense trees just across the road, where they would have a clear view of the gates.
“No press on the premises today.” Only one of the guards spoke. The other three remained in the guardhouse, blank and indistinguishable as enormous knobs of clay. “No exceptions.”
Undeterred, the reporters began to fire off questions.
“Is it true that the governor has been invited to tour?”
“Is it true that he has the endorsement of the police commissioner?”
“Is it true he has another book in the works?”
“The book’s finished,” the guard corrected him. “Mr. Newton-Plancke is expecting his publisher today, in fact. Now clear off, or I’ll have you hauled in for harassment.”
The Newton-Plancke estate was patched with snow, and above the swell of the winter gardens, the mansion spread vastly across the hill. A scud of clouds bustled busily across the blue sky.
A beautiful day. A beautiful place.
But Cordelia couldn’t shake the impression of something dark and evil waiting for them just beyond the gates. She could feel it, like the squelch of sewage beneath a boot. The monsters seemed to feel it too. Icky kept squirming in Elizabeth’s arms, and Cabal’s fur stood up on his spine. The dragon, already too big now for Cordelia’s pocket, had settled on her shoulder, and every so often hissed an agitation of smoke.
Stay calm, Cordelia told herself. She had gone up against ghouls and flesh-eating chupacabras; she had once taken a piggyback ride on a werewolf, whose breath had still smelled of blood.
She could do this. They could do it.
The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street Page 20