A Most Magical Girl - Karen Foxlee Page 0,63

reshaped, and a shadow tree appeared, its shadow limbs stretched across the ceiling vault before dissolving.

“All of good magic depends upon you,” said shadow Miss Estella when she reappeared.

The taller shadow stepped forward. She moved closer and closer, the way a mother leans down over a child in bed to place a kiss upon its head. Annabel thought perhaps that was what the shadow Miss Henrietta was about to do, and if the real Miss Henrietta had done that in the magic shop, she would have been horrified, but here on the Lake of Tears she was quite looking forward to it.

The shadow giant Miss Henrietta came closer until Annabel’s face was covered in the velvety Miss Henrietta shadow, but she did not feel a kiss. She felt nothing, and then the shadows were gone. Annabel’s glass moved out of alignment with the tiny speck of light, and the ruby-red glow of the cavern vanished. There was only darkness and the three of them drifting across the lake.

She remembered what the wizards had told her about visions that spoke. If someone speaks to you directly from a vision, then that person is dead or very close to death, hovering between the two worlds. Annabel had not wanted to remember those words. She put her face in her hands and began to cry.

Mr. Angel carried the good wands to the machine room. He ran his hands over them, and the shadowlings leapt and danced upon the walls. There were five hundred now, more. He had raised them from the bottom of wells and behind paintings. From tea chests and unopened trunks. From unused ballrooms and forgotten stairwells. From quiet vestries.

Now they watched him.

When he leaned forward to examine the dark-magic gauge, they copied him. They grew themselves tall and thin and leaned forward with shadowy monocles pressed to their empty eyes. The needle had moved past two-thirds full. Mr. Angel snapped the wands, one by one, like twigs. He fed them to the machine, which groaned. The gauge needle trembled and climbed.

He destroyed the good wands that had raised fires in hearths and made dead trees blossom. That had coaxed babies from dying mothers and ignited love in unexpected places. The good wands that had helped ruined cakes rise and summoned good rains and bought sudden afternoons of much-needed sunshine. The wands that had given good dreams and seeded good friendships and soothed grieving mothers and healed injured limbs and fixed broken wings.

It was the end of good magic, the end of the Great & Benevolent Magical Society. And the machine, sensing this ending, sang up in ecstasy.

“A young lady always ascertains she has her hand luggage before disembarking. There is nothing more vexing than to find oneself in the rain without an umbrella.”

—Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)

Annabel stopped crying almost as soon as she’d started. Where would crying get her? She simply would not believe that her great-aunts were gone. She couldn’t be separated from her mother and find out her father was not a dead sea captain and then lose her brand-new great-aunts as well. It was impossible.

There was a job to be done, and she would do it. She was the most magical girl, and there were prophecies about her, and…She stopped because that seemed more impossible than anything. But she pulled her cloak close to herself and straightened her shoulders and took a very deep breath.

Emerald-green ice skates, she thought. The emerald-green ice skates she’d had her heart set upon before her whole world turned wrong. The green ice skates her mother had promised her for her birthday.

“Why, it must be my birthday,” she said to herself very quietly, and Hafwen snored beside her in a comforting, grumbly way. “Many happy returns, Annabel Grey.”

Just saying that made her smile because she was not at all who she thought she would be when she turned thirteen. She was someone completely new, and she liked the new her. She was brave and good, and she had magic inside her.

Her smile vanished when she saw a light in the distance and realized it must be the far shore of the Lake of Tears. The fires were pretty from a distance but horrible up close. The rocky shore was littered with centuries’ worth of funeral boats, pile upon pile of sticks and wood and spot fires smoldering. The place smelled terrible, acrid with smoke, pungent with death. She woke Kitty and Hafwen, speaking softly so they were not startled.

The hull