spilled from broken windows. There were cars—rusted and grime-smeared shells filled with shadows. The urban decay was made even more disturbing by wistful objects strung on the trees . . . small clocks, bird skulls, toys, an excess of broken jewelry. Shadowy figures moved like velvet and gossamer in the jellyfish light of the streetlamps. The motorcycles’ raucous engines seemed to disturb unseen things, and Finn tried not to look too closely at the phantom city’s inhabitants.
The breath left her as the motorcycles cruised down a street toward a tunnel of glowing-white birches, their woven-together branches forming a twisting roof. At the street’s end loomed a soot-smudged neoclassical building, its stairway guarded by two gargoyles with lanterns in their mouths. Prehistoric yews surrounded the building, moss-draped branches clawing at the roof, the lit windows. Beyond was the metal dome of a conservatory. Over the entrance, in bas-relief on the triangular pediment, were the words MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. Spray-painted across the doors in glimmering red were other words Finn couldn’t quite make out.
Sionnach and his fox knights halted their motorcycles before the tunnel of glowing birches.
“Goblin Market,” Sionnach told Finn as his motorcycle’s engine thrummed. “It has everything. True food—there’s a changeling who bakes the best cupcakes I’ve ever had. And we’ll be able to get the elixir if we’re clever. We just need to get past those trees.”
“Goblin Market?” Finn said, wary. “And what’s wrong with those tree—” Then she noticed tangles of ivory in the roots of the birches and whispered, “Please tell me those aren’t bones.”
“Hold on and don’t let anything touch you.”
He sped forward. The others followed. As they roared past the birches, Finn, her heart pounding, saw crimson veins glistening in the trees’ pale trunks and realized how sharp-edged the silvery leaves were. When something drifted across the back of her neck, she yelped and swatted at a red tendril snaking from one of the branches. She touched her skin, felt a sting, and warmth—blood. The silver leaves drifting around them crackled against her helmet.
Several more tendrils whipped down.
Sionnach’s motorcycle shot toward the stairs. Glancing over at Moth and his rider, Finn saw a red vine whip across Moth’s hand. Blood spattered—Moth had remembered he was human again, at the worst time. As Sylvie and her rider shot past, Finn ducked her head and held tight to Sionnach.
The motorcycles bumped up the stairs toward the doors spray-painted with the words Goblin Market. The doors, their bronze panels engraved with images of knights fighting monsters, opened before them, onto darkness.
The three motorcycles motored down a vast, gloomy corridor lined on either side by hollow-eyed Renaissance statues. Outside light glimmered through the windows. At the hall’s end was another set of doors, opened to reveal a cavernous, crumbling atrium with a pterodactyl skeleton hanging on wires from the vaulted ceiling. The first and second floors of the atrium had flickering, jewel-hued lamps above dark alcoves. Moss covered the concrete, as did fields of toadstools. Ivy rustled on the walls, on pillars, around the balustrades of a stairway. An eerie silence folded around them.
“This is Goblin Market?” Finn tried not to sound crushed. “It looks like an abandoned museum.”
“We’re early.” Sionnach seemed tense. He raised a hand. “It doesn’t wake up until thirteen o’clock.”
“Thirteen o’clock?”
It began as whispers, and giant shadows rippling over the walls. Finn’s skin iced and her eardrums vibrated with a buzzing sound that shook her brain. She tasted blood in her mouth.
Then the hissing shadows rushed down into the atrium, followed by hundreds of glowing orbs. Dark figures formed. Light slowly melted across the walls, the newly arrived inhabitants, and the fantastical merchandise of Goblin Market.
Sylvie breathed out, “Wow.”
Faces flickered. Silver eyes cast back the jeweled lights. The ruin remained, but, now, objects were on display in the alcoves: books and bottles, clocks and taxidermy animals, fanciful jewelry and weapons, bizarre fossils and plants. No one would have mistaken it for a human marketplace, with its denizens that resembled the members of several savage and elegant tribes dressed in clothing from different eras. Despite a lack of dramatic mutations—no pointy ears, hooves, bat wings, or butterfly wings—the Fatas here would never be mistaken for mortals.
Three young men in fedoras and suits strode past, tattoos on their hands. A young woman in gladiator sandals and a red tunic leaned in the inner doorway, smoking a cigarette.
Sionnach halted his motorcycle in the outer hallway. There were other motorcycles there, each forged from an organic metal into