Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,18
Morrigan ran from gas lamp to gas lamp, candelabra to candelabra, blowing out every light until the entire fourth floor of the east wing was bathed in darkness. Then she stood very still, eyes closed, as smoke from the extinguished wicks swirled around her. She breathed in the scent and pictured a tiny spark of fire.
A single flame, burning brightly inside her chest.
Inferno.
She focused for a moment on that fire, feeling it grow and warm her from the inside out. Then she opened her eyes and ran all the way back around again, gas lamp to gas lamp, candelabra to candelabra. At each one, she breathed a puff of perfect, precise flame, relighting them with ease, feeling utterly gleeful.
‘You are such a show-off,’ said Jack, coming out of his bedroom a few doors down from hers. He shook his head as Morrigan breathed life back into the last wick. The hallway glowed cheerfully once again. ‘Is that really necessary? Every night?’
She took one look at him and snorted, ignoring his comment. ‘Nice hat, broccoli head.’
‘Nice ribbon, capitalist scum.’ He tweaked the scarlet bow in her hair with one hand while adjusting his strange, utterly unstylish green hat with the other. It was the same hat he’d worn last Christmas Eve, and it still looked like he was sprouting a bizarre growth from his skull. Morrigan could not for the life of her understand why he’d ever be caught dead in it. But then, she supposed he couldn’t understand why she’d ever support Saint Nicholas over his beloved Yule Queen.
Truthfully, after last year’s Battle of Christmas Eve – the first she’d attended – Morrigan had been tempted to switch her allegiance. While she enjoyed the jolly, showy man in red Jack liked to call an ‘elf-enslaving home invader’, there was something deeply impressive – even moving – about the elegant, understated Yule Queen and her devoted Snowhound.
But it would give Jack too much satisfaction to know that she agreed with him, even a little bit.
He checked the angle of his hat one last time in the hall mirror, adjusted his eye patch slightly and then nodded at his reflection, apparently liking what he saw.
‘Come on,’ he said to Morrigan. ‘Let’s get downstairs before we end up sharing a carriage with Uncle Jove. I am not having another singalong today.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Six Swifts, Two Cats
The atmosphere in Courage Square was heavy with expectation, ready to tip over into unbridled delight at any moment. Thousands of Nevermoorians were gathered – a sea of crimson and emerald, breathless and silent – awaiting the final moments of the annual Christmas clash.
It had been an epic, exhilarating battle once again. Morrigan could still taste the warm, buttery, perfectly spiced mince pie that had shot from one of Saint Nick’s canons and floated down into her hand, wrapped in a tiny red silk parachute. That had been her second favourite moment so far, after the cloud of twinkling fireflies the Yule Queen had conducted to fly above Courage Square like a murmuration of starlings, a hypnotising dance of light. Morrigan had been certain nothing could beat last year’s show, and thrilled to find she was wrong.
‘Candles out,’ whispered Jupiter, and Jack and Morrigan – like everyone else in the square – retrieved from inside their coat pockets the candles they’d brought with them, lifting them high in the air.
In one last spectacular effort, Saint Nicholas rubbed his hands and started to spin in a circle, around and around and around, arms extended towards the audience. One by one, the candle wicks spontaneously ignited, a spiral of light moving outwards from the centre of the square to its very edges in a long whoosh of flame.
The square was aglow with candlelight. Still nobody made a sound.
The silence was broken by the Yule Queen’s gigantic white Snowhound who, on her command, lifted his head to bay at the moon. Answering howls rose from all corners of the city, and for one lingering moment, Nevermoor became a communion of dogs. The sound sent an agreeable chill down Morrigan’s back.
This was her favourite part. She closed her eyes and turned her face to the sky. The air was perfectly still. She could smell the promise of snow.
It came slowly at first, flake by flake.
Then faster. And faster.
The flurries and eddies of snowfall drew together, swirling and transforming into something with a life and a will of its own. Before Morrigan knew it, a wintry snowstorm had filled the air all around her.