Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,31
likely.’
Morrigan heard a series of tiny little pops, then a familiar crack-crack-CRUNCH that made her skin crawl.
‘You can’t just leave me here by myself!’ she insisted.
‘You won’t be by yourself.’ Crack-pop-pop-pop-CRRRRUNCH.
Morrigan cringed. ‘No – please, please don’t change into Ms Dearborn now!’ A wave of panic rose in her chest.
The change took mere moments, but Morrigan felt as if time had stopped. Murgatroyd’s cracked and purpling lips, sunken grey eyes and stooped posture warped and reformed until the person who stood before her was no longer Murgatroyd.
Nor was it Dearborn.
The changes wrought on their shared body to create this third person were subtle, yet utterly transformative. Murgatroyd’s murky, mudflat eyes had sharpened not to Dearborn’s cool blue but to a deep slate, framed by thick black lashes and heavy brows. Her spine had straightened, shoulders broadened, jaw squared. The stripped-white hair had not returned to silver, but had darkened instead to pewter, and smoothed into long, thick waves. She was younger than Murgatroyd, plainer than Dearborn, taller than both. And she peered down at Morrigan with a mingled expression of academic curiosity and wolfish delight.
‘Wundersmith,’ the woman greeted her. Her voice was not icy, like Dearborn’s, nor was it guttural and rasping like Murgatroyd’s. It wasn’t a voice that needed to be any of those things to be unnerving. It didn’t need to shout or snap or growl. It was low and calm. Weighted and sure of itself. The kind of perfectly pleasant voice Morrigan imagined a dragon might speak with, just before it ate you.
The dark eyes blinked placidly, surveying Morrigan from head to toe before landing at last on her pale, frightened face.
When Morrigan spoke again, it was in a voice as thin as paper.
‘Who are you?’
‘Rook.’ Her eyes gleamed almost black in the dark. ‘Rook Rosenfeld. Scholar Mistress for the School of Wundrous Arts.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Basement Nerds
‘Wundrous … Arts,’ Morrigan repeated.
The phrase was brand new and yet somehow entirely familiar. Like the bit in all of Dame Chanda’s arias when everything got louder and higher and more dramatic, and you knew it was coming but even so, it sort of took your breath away when it arrived.
She waited for Rook to elaborate, but Rook did not. Instead, she turned and began to descend the stairs into darkness. She didn’t ask Morrigan to follow and, for a moment, the sensible voice in Morrigan’s head told her to get back inside that railpod, go straight upstairs to the dining hall, sit herself down with a nice cup of hot chocolate and pretend this never happened.
But an odd thing about living in Nevermoor, and joining the Wundrous Society, and having Jupiter North as her patron, and being best friends with Hawthorne Swift, was that the sensible voice in Morrigan’s head seemed to be getting quieter by the day. Some days she could scarcely hear it at all.
Morrigan sighed, already annoyed at herself before she’d even taken a step. Of course she was going to follow the scary stranger down a dark stairwell into a secret basement. Of course.
The stairs curved around and around in a wide spiral, and Morrigan had to go slowly and trail one hand along the cold stone wall so that she didn’t trip and tumble all the way down. When they reached the bottom, she followed Rook along a chilly, narrow, pitch-black passage for what felt like an age, but was probably more like a minute.
Morrigan shivered and tried to convince herself it was because of the cold. ‘Where exactly are we going?’
Rook didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Morrigan flinched as somewhere up ahead of them, a letter T – tilted on its side – began to glow in bright, luminescent gold, piercing the near-perfect darkness. More letters followed, blinking into life one by one, until they formed an enormous sign carved into a stone arch above a wooden door.
The second-to-last word had gashes and scorch marks all over. It looked as if someone had tried to violently remove it, first with a blade or chisel of some sort, then with fire, and finally they had simply crossed it out and painted over the top.
Rook looked at the sign and gave a small, unimpressed grunt. ‘Ignore the vandalism.’ She lifted her hand as if to push open the door, then paused, glancing at Morrigan with a slight incline of her head. ‘Ready?’
Morrigan stared up at the golden words. A tempest had begun to gather in her stomach. Of nerves, and excitement, and more than anything, a