Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,93
in the lobby – hundreds of them – were suddenly fixed on Fenestra, either in terror or hatred. Fen wasn’t helping matters either, with her fangs and claws bared and her back arched defensively.
Even worse, the photographer from the Looking Glass was hastily changing the roll of film in his camera, eager to get a shot that would no doubt be used to make people even more frightened of Wunimals.
Morrigan felt sick. She just wanted them all to stop looking at the Magnificat, to turn away and leave before something terrible happened, either to Fen or somebody else.
She began to sing softly under her breath. It had become a kind of nervous habit, something she’d taken to doing in moments of tension. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had begun, but she supposed somewhere between being chased and mauled by a bearwun, watching a horsewun rampage through the opera house, and being swarmed by giant bugs in a public library, she’d unconsciously decided it was best to be prepared for anything.
‘Morningtide’s child is merry and mild.’ She felt her fingertips tingle and warm as Wunder instantly gathered. ‘Eventide’s child is wicked and wild.’
In an instant, she decided to try something she never had before, something she’d watched over and over in the ghostly hours, but Rook said she wasn’t ready to try yet: shadowmaking – a skill that required both the Wundrous Art of Weaving and the Wundrous Art of Veil.
Morrigan took a deep breath to clear her head.
She observed the room as if she were observing a painting: examining the shapes and colours of things, places the light touched, and the recesses where shadows formed – the very materials she needed.
All the while, she felt Wunder sensing her intentions and taking them as commands. And she felt herself – her self, that amorphous inner thing that was her – ballooning, growing bigger than her body, reaching out into the room with its monstrous, Wundrous arms and gathering what she needed, plucking bits of shadow here and there – tiny bits, not enough to be missed but enough to build a new shadow of her own making.
She and Wunder were perfectly, exhilaratingly in sync.
Soon the lobby was swarmed by starry darkness, a shadow that kept growing until everything was black.
Morrigan hadn’t meant to make her shadow quite so all-consuming – she’d only wanted to obscure Fenestra from view – but nonetheless, the effect was the same. They couldn’t see her any more, and so they couldn’t attack her, and the photographer couldn’t get a shot of her looking threatening. Morrigan felt a rush of relief.
The room was noisy with confusion and shouted demands for the lights to be turned back on, and later she would remember a moment in all of this when a question formed in her mind, clear as a bell: What now?
She’d made a whole room full of shadow.
Could she sustain it long enough for Fen to calm down? Could she hold her concentration and somehow communicate to Jack and Hawthorne and Cadence that they needed to spirit Fenestra away in the darkness, to hide her until everyone had gone? Could they resolve this safely and happily and let the party end as it always should have: with a mess in the lobby and a rave review in the society pages?
What now?
But Morrigan didn’t have to answer that question, because it was answered for her.
Out of the darkness came a single source of light. Somewhere way across the room, a dim green glow. Morrigan felt her heart race. The hazy green light was growing closer. She saw that it wasn’t one light but two; two pinpricks of glowing green moving towards her in the darkness.
Eyes. Watching her.
Before she could think straight another set of glowing green eyes appeared on her left, blinking on and off as if they were weaving in and out of shadow, low to the ground. And a third pair, gliding through the air above Morrigan’s head, moving fast, growing bigger and clearer … and then the piercing screech of a bird, squeals and shouts of surprise from the crowd, and a scream torn from Morrigan’s throat as she felt talons and beating wings upon her head and heard a snarling, snapping growl from somewhere to her left and felt a human hand grab at her face in the darkness—
And then they stopped, and Morrigan heard three distinct thumps. Whoever had attacked her had fallen to the ground. The panic in the room grew.