Briar Queen_ A Night and Nothing Novel - Katherine Harbour Page 0,47
she realized she wasn’t holding hands with anyone. She whirled in a panic. “Jack!”
“Here. I’m here.” He stepped before her.
“Where’s Moth—”
He pointed to something that fluttered around them—a large, pale-winged insect, a luna moth. “There.”
“That can’t be . . . We need him.”
“He’ll change back. The Way through must have triggered the curse. Back in Shakespeare’s day, he pissed off Absalom.”
“Absalom did that to him?” She reached out a hand to the insect, which continued to frantically circle them. It was so fragile—and it contained all of that brooding young man, condensed. Did he understand what had happened? “What a nightmare, for him.”
“Absalom, being Absalom, has forgotten how he cursed Moth. I think we’ve found out how.”
“We can’t leave him like this.”
“We don’t have a choice. We must catch that train, Finn. We need to get the elixir from Cruithnear before we encounter the bad sort of Fatas.”
The moth was the size of her hand, and it was white with silver markings—she peered closer. “Do those look like death’s head markings on its wings?”
“Don’t think about it. You’ll make yourself sick.” As Jack turned away, his eyes seemed to silver. “Right now, we’ve other things to worry about: that is not the right station.”
“What do you mean, it’s not the right—” Her voice shook. The building before them had been created in the ’40s art deco style. On either side of its circular stair were two green marble statues of goddesses draped with crimson ivy that had run riot. Within the leaves, Finn saw angular faces of green stone with hollow eyes and open mouths, weatherworn green men wreathed in thorns. Like most Fata places, the railroad station exuded an ominous sentience.
“This isn’t the right station. I’ve never been to this one. I’ve no idea where we are.”
She breathed deep. “Let’s find out then.”
He looked at her as if not sure whether to be impressed or worried, then indicated her wrist. “Your sister’s bracelet—it’s not falling apart. Remember? Silver rots here.”
She glanced at the bracelet, and the silver charms winked in the starlight. “It must be magic.”
They walked to the station. Beyond the broken windows, a chandelier of orange crystals lighted a deserted lobby and a wall scrawled with sparkling graffiti, like runes. Phosphorescent toadstools scabbed another wall shattered by a cadaverous tree fruiting with apples. On the platform was a sign with names and times:
Blackwing . . . Midnight
Phantom Queen . . . Three o’clock
Chimera Blue . . . Anytime
“Do things here run on—dare I say it again—magic?”
“If you want to call it that.”
She sank down onto a bench, her backpack between her feet. She shivered. She couldn’t hear any insects, and the air carried the scents of alien flora. “What are we going to do?”
“Wait for the next train. We’ll just be taking the circular route to Cruithnear.”
That was somewhat reassuring, but she was still shaking a little. “Tell me more about him.” She didn’t say Seth Lot’s name out loud as the moth glided around them.
Jack settled beside her. “I was sixteen. I was starving, desperate, and phenomenally stupid. My dad—the exorcist—had warned me about them. Lured by a beautiful face, I walked right into their lair.”
“Reiko.” Finn imagined Seth Lot in his fur coat, all fin de siècle wolfishness, cupping the face of a young and pretty Jack and smiling at him like a king about to grant knighthood. She imagined that same king whispering into the ear of a Jack with scars and cold eyes and no hope of being anything other than a killer. Her voice broke a little as she said, “Reiko took you to him. Even though people disappeared in his house.”
Jack’s voice had a low intensity as he continued, “He mutilated some of his Jacks and Jills until they didn’t look human anymore. He smashed one boy’s skull into another shape. He broke one girl’s bones and reset them until she was a thing. And what else did they have after that? Serve him or die. I think many of them wanted to die.”
Finn watched a slight tremor begin in his hands as his eyelashes flickered. She hurt for him.
“Fatas don’t murder mortals, Finn. But Lot has learned how. As for killing Fatas—he’d do that without a thought, using his Jacks and Jills, the Grindylow. He’s a criminal of his kind, an outcast for that reason. The face he wears is a mask over the beast he has become after centuries of riding the shadow.”