Briar Queen_ A Night and Nothing Novel - Katherine Harbour Page 0,3
anything.”
Aubrey looked at Finn and lowered his voice. “You wasted one of their queens, and a knight. That’s like . . . I mean, do you know what you’ve done?”
Two ancient beings had walked into a supernatural fire meant for her. Finn still had bad dreams about it.
“Reiko might have been an outlaw, but she had allies.” Aubrey frowned at Jack. “You really didn’t expect . . . I don’t know—retribution?”
“What I didn’t expect”—Jack’s smile was a razor glint—“was you and your friends to be attending the sacrifice of an innocent girl.”
Aubrey’s expression became desperate. “We didn’t know there was going to be an actual goddamn sacrifice. And we walked away.”
“Instead of helping.”
“Jack, what could we have done?”
Jack stepped close to the six-foot-tall football player and whispered with a terrible, leashed anger, “You left her to burn to death.”
Finn didn’t like the ugly turn this conversation had taken. “Jack.”
Jack’s eyes seemed to silver. He lowered his lashes and looked at Aubrey. “Good-bye, Aubrey.”
Aubrey turned and trudged away as Sophia Avaline walked past. Lovely as a fashion model in high heels and a sleek dress, the history professor glanced at them but didn’t say anything. Like Jane Emory, she was part of the cabal who knew about the Fatas. Unlike Jane Emory, Sophia Avaline had been there on Halloween night when Finn had nearly burned.
Finn frowned at Jack. “What is Aubrey talking about?”
He pushed his hands through his hair, and the bronze ring she’d once bound him with, two lions clasping a heart, glinted on one finger. “Someone—a Fata—will try for Reiko’s place. It has nothing to do with you. With us.”
“Jack, that has everything to do with us.”
He whispered, “Not here. We’ll talk later.”
The Wolf at the door, Finn thought, remembering Reiko’s words in her dream. “Okay. Later.”
“I’ll pick you and Anna up. She wants to see Swan Lake for her birthday.” He flashed a smile and she almost believed everything was going to be all right, that the world would remain normal.
“‘THE ERL KING’ BY Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.” Professor Fairchild, as rumpled and charming as ever, stood at his desk. His British accent tended to make his words seem more interesting than they sometimes actually were. Gothic Literature was the official name of the course, not—as Christie called it—Defense Against Dark Faeries 101, although three of the poems they’d read in the past few weeks had been about malign spirits: Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” It did seem as if Fairchild was trying to teach them something about defense against the Fatas.
Christie, who had recently taken up the course, was seated beside Finn, scrawling in the margins of his own copy of Romantic Poets of the Victorian Age. Finn looked down at the passage she’d read three times now, from “The Erl King.”
“Father, my father, are you listening
To what the Erl King is promising?”
“Child, calm yourself, be calm, please.
It’s just the wind rustling in the leaves.”
Surrounded by invisible threads of electricity, by sunlight and whispered conversations, Finn felt the hair rise on the nape of her neck. Why didn’t parents ever believe kids who claimed there was a monster under the bed or in the closet? Just because they couldn’t see the monsters? In her experience, the monsters never showed themselves to anyone who had outgrown adolescence and its aftermath.
She looked up at Professor Fairchild, who had attended the Halloween ceremony that had nearly resulted in her death.
“The Erl King,” Fairchild continued, “is an elemental, a thing of nature with unnatural intelligence. Why does he want the child?”
“Because,” Finn spoke quietly, “he’s a predator. And predators hunt the weak.”
Fairchild blinked as if she’d pulled him out of a dream. He said, carefully, “The Erl King is one of the characters in poems of that time who symbolized primordial destruction.”
“But that would mean mindless destruction.” Finn realized they were talking about something else, something dark and secret. “And predators aren’t mindless.”
“Good answer, Finn, good answer.” Christie applauded.
“Mr. Hart”—Professor Fairchild actually sounded stern—“this is not a game show.”
“You’re right, Professor. But I’d rather watch game shows than, say, human sacrifices.”
Fairchild said, “Mr. Hart, stop wandering off topic. Now, interestingly enough”—he began to saunter around his own desk—“Mr. Hart’s ancestor, Augusta Danegeld, was an accomplished poet whose works could be considered Gothic poetry.”
Christie muttered, “Leave my ancestors out of this.”
Finn gazed down at the poem again. “Lovely, lovely child, come with me, such wondrous things you