Briar Queen_ A Night and Nothing Novel - Katherine Harbour Page 0,120
had been replaced with a reindeer skull. She had Sylvie’s face, but she wasn’t Sylvie. Her eyes glimmered Fata silver. “Do you know who I am, Finn Sullivan?”
“You’re Sylph Dragonfly. The witch.” Finn felt unbalanced.
“I do wish your kind would stop using that word. Come along. We’ll have to walk because you can’t fly. Your friends aren’t far.” The Dragonfly twirled her staff.
“Jack . . .”
“He’s with them. He was dragged away by a wolf. Jack’s in fine shape. The wolf is not.” Sylph Dragonfly began moving gracefully away. Finn followed, noticing that the witch’s heeled boots didn’t leave prints in the earth. “You are quite the firecracker, Finn Sullivan—or rather, an atomic bomb.” She grabbed Finn’s wrist and pulled her close. “Hush. Don’t move.”
Finn followed her gaze to an upright shadow loping through the trees to their left. She glimpsed a white, ghastly face above a mouthful of teeth.
As the wolf Fata loped away, Sylph Dragonfly jerked her head. She and Finn continued on. When Finn felt safe enough, she whispered, “Why weren’t Sylvie and Christie, as kids, taken by your people and replaced by you and Sionnach Ri?”
“Our originals were flawed and protected. My people don’t like flaws and they don’t like being exorcised. So.”
“Flawed and protected.” Finn wondered what that meant.
“Could you lose that backpack? You’re too encumbered.”
“There are things in it that I need.”
“Like what?”
“Stuff.” Finn hoped they were getting closer to Jack and Lily and the others. This replica of Sylvie was making her nervous.
“Stuff to slay a wolf? You dropped this.” Sylph Dragonfly tossed something to Finn, who caught it and stared down at the tiny sphinx bottle labeled Tamasgi’po. She’d forgotten about it. It must have fallen from her boot as she ran.
“Spirit in a kiss.” Finn quickly reached down to check that the elixir was still in her other boot.
“Tamasgi’po. Where”—Sylph gracefully turned—“did you get such a thing?”
“From the Blue Lady. What is it?”
“Hellaciously dangerous.” The Dragonfly began walking again. “What is memory, Finn Sullivan?”
“A storage of life events.”
“It is conscious spirit. It is being something over being nothing. Therefore, memory for us is a tricky thing. Here we are.”
“Finn!” Lily ran from the trees and embraced her. When she stepped back, she gripped Finn’s shoulders and shrewdly looked her over. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” She wasn’t.
Lily nodded once to the Dragonfly, who curtsied as if Lily was a queen. Behind Moth and Leander stood two girls dressed in fashionable black, Egyptian designs painted around their eyes. Each girl held a staff adorned with ribbons and topped with animal skulls.
“Finn.” Jack walked toward her. He had a bloody scratch on his face, but he smiled like his old, wild self, and his eyes were the beautiful gray and blue. He touched her face and said, “I knew I hadn’t lost you.”
Finn glimpsed a shadow in her sister’s gaze when Lily looked at Jack.
A howl broke the quiet. Sylph Dragonfly glanced at the other two girls. “We counted twenty wolves. Half went in another direction, as if led that way. The other ten—”
A huge, spiky shadow launched itself from the trees.
The humanity sloughed from Jack like a shed skin. He moved with feral grace, flinging Eve’s silver dagger into the shadow, which became a Fata man, who fell to the forest floor.
Lily looked impressed as Jack put one booted foot on the Fata’s shoulder and pulled out the dagger. The Fata blackened and bled until all that was left was a fur coat and some fossilized bones that didn’t seem human at all.
“He had teeth.” Lily gazed down at the monstrous skull that remained. Again, something dark passed behind her eyes. She raised one foot—she wore black Converses—and smashed it down, shattering part of the wolf’s skull. Everyone stared at her.
The howling came from all sides now, growing closer. More big shadows were moving through the trees. Finn said, “They’ve found us.”
Sylph strode to Moth. She grabbed him by his hoodie and kissed him as everyone stared. He flinched back from her but didn’t change. Then she and her witches walked to three points around Finn and her companions, facing outward. The air began to hum. Finn heard another sound in the distance, like roaring, and whispered, “What—”
Lights danced through the trees. The roaring grew louder.
The wolves howled, circling closer. Feral eyes glowed in the dark.
The bright lights and thunder of the motorcycles that sped from the night to surround them seemed like the descent of battle angels. As the lead rider glided up