Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,125
coal and it fell quiet. Morrigan listened for a moment to the steady crackling of flames, wondering if it was ignoring her question or gathering its thoughts. ‘What is your name, Wundersmith?’
‘Morrigan Crow.’
‘Tell me then, Morrigan Crow. Why have I been abandoned?’
She noticed then, for the first time, how miserable it looked. With a sudden pang of sorrow, she understood that hers must be the first face it had seen in over a hundred years. It was lonely.
‘Nobody comes to see me any more,’ it said with a sigh. ‘Where are Brilliance and Griselda? And Ezra and Odbuoy? They all just … went away. My brightest flames.’
Morrigan didn’t know what to say. How could she tell it what had happened? She barely understood it herself.
‘I don’t know,’ she lied. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Do they still … visit the others?’ There was a petulant note of jealousy in its voice.
She shook her head. ‘No. They don’t visit anyone at all. I promise.’
There was silence for a while as the Kindling processed this information.
‘But you … you will come back?’
Morrigan nodded. Of course she’d be back. She had to show the others.
‘Goodbye until then.’ The Kindling stretched out a twig-like finger, and Morrigan mirrored the gesture without thinking. When their fingertips touched, the fire began to die. The darkness receded, the stone walls withdrew, and the Liminal Hall brightened once again. Folding in on itself, the Kindling cast her one last blazing look.
‘Burn brightly, Morrigan Crow.’
Morrigan ran back through the Liminal Hall on muffled footsteps, all the way through the echoing chambers of Sub-Nine, and was shouting for the Scholar Mistress and the basement nerds even before she reached the firelit study chamber at the end of the marble hallway.
‘Rook! Sofia! Conall, where are you?’ The room was empty. She dashed back into the hall, calling even louder – perhaps they were in one of the other endless chamber branches and would hear her voice bouncing around the empty hallway. ‘SOFIA! CONALL! Come out here, I have something to tell you – Sofia! There you are.’ She came to a breathless halt, lungs heaving, and bent forward to rest her hands on her knees. There was a dim outline of the foxwun at the far end of the hallway, by the Sub-Nine entrance. ‘You’ll never guess what I just – Sofia, is that you?’
She breathed a tiny puff of a spark into her fingertips, and in that fraction of a second, two things happened. First, Sofia crouched low, lifted her head and sniffed the air. Second, Morrigan got a sick, swooping feeling in her stomach and the tiny hairs on her arms all stood up, alert to danger. Her body knew before she did. But too late.
Snap.
It was like flipping a switch. With one click, orange flames danced in the palm of Morrigan’s hand … and Sofia’s eyes lit up brilliant green, like a furnace had been turned on inside her. Teeth bared, ears and tail erect, the foxwun hurtled down the hall in a blur of red fur and emerald light. Morrigan held her hands out in a futile attempt to stop what she knew was coming, but suddenly Sofia was there, launching powerfully from the ground, straight for her throat. She shrieked, feeling the sting of sharp teeth grazing her skin. A burst of terror and adrenaline shot through her and she wrenched Sofia away, flinging her to the ground where she landed with a yelp and a sickening thud.
‘Sofia!’ Morrigan cried. She felt an urge to run to her side but knew that would be extraordinarily stupid. Ignoring the instinct, she instead snapped her fingers again, crouched down and drew a line of fire across the marble floor from one wall to the other, building a barrier between them. The foxwun ignored it, picking herself up and leaping for Morrigan once more … only to rear back at the last moment, yelping again in pain.
Morrigan took shallow, panicked breaths, feeling like her heart might explode. Sweat beaded on her face. The flames climbed almost to the ceiling, fencing her in with no escape. Brilliant, she thought. Well done, idiot.
‘Sofia? Sofia, I know you’re still in there. Wake UP.’
But if Sofia was in there somewhere, she wasn’t listening. She scurried frantically back and forth, snapping her jaws, trying to find a way through the flames then rearing back again, barking in fierce frustration.
The line of fire was already dying – in the cold, empty marble hallway, there was no fuel to burn.