A Most Magical Girl - Karen Foxlee Page 0,66

was nearly upon her.

Faster! thought Annabel. She urged her broomstick on. Her broomstick. Faster. Faster. Faster. She flew so fast that she could barely open her eyes against the roar of the wind. Faster. Faster. She let out a scream. One long, high-pitched scream, and the broomstick jolted forward in a great surge of speed, and the dragon, thinking it would lose her, surged after her, toward the cavern wall.

Annabel Grey flew toward the cavern wall without slowing. Annabel Grey, who had never once done a dangerous thing, not once, until she met this broomstick. She flew without slowing.

She shrieked another wild, unladylike shriek that would have made Miss Finch turn gray in an instant.

She was oblivious to the rocky shore. She did not notice the wreckage of boats or the spot fires burning. She did not see Kitty and Hafwen standing to watch her, their mouths open. She hurtled toward the wall without slowing, until it grew so huge, so close, that there was nothing but the great rocky face and she would slam into it within seconds. And then she flipped the broomstick upside down and turned with such swiftness that she felt she had left her stomach behind. She turned out over the lake, which was so wide and open in comparison that she smiled and remembered to breathe.

She heard the dragon hit the wall. She flinched at the sound of it. It hit the wall with such a crash that the whole cavern shook. The jumble of funeral boats collapsed, clattering and banging, and the water rose up in a huge wave and thumped itself against the shore.

Annabel swept her broomstick around.

“You really are very good, dear thing,” she said, and it skittered and swerved so playfully that it almost threw her from its back.

The West-Born Wyrm lay upon the rock before the entrance to its lair. It huge black body was not completely still. It twitched and lifted its giant head, shaking it slowly, eyes closed. It groaned and slumped again.

“We must hurry,” said Annabel, landing before Kitty and Hafwen. “Perhaps it will not sleep for long.”

Hafwen still had her mouth open. Kitty shook her head, and a brief smile of admiration passed across her face before she hid it away just as quickly.

They had to climb over the dragon’s tail to enter the tunnel. It was scaly and slimy and covered in pointed barbs. Annabel held the torch, which they lit from a smoldering funeral boat. Her broomstick was tucked back inside her sash on her back. She held out her hand to Hafwen, and Hafwen held out her hand to Kitty, who refused, of course. Sometimes the dragon convulsed suddenly and they clung to the spikes on its tail. It was treacherous business. They scrambled over the side of the dragon into the dark entrance, where Annabel held her flame high. Hafwen smiled her huge gray-toothed smile.

“Dragon slayer,” she said.

“Oh, not really,” said Annabel, but her cheeks flushed.

“She wouldn’t have needed to if you hadn’t been so stinky,” said Kitty, but Hafwen smiled as though it were a compliment.

The tunnel was a black hole. The worst hole. It was sticky and slimy and coated with scales. It filled Annabel with dread, but she also knew it was the only way to find the wand. If they found the wand, she could go home, and home was what she wanted. Yet it wasn’t the house of her Mayfair mother she thought of, but the little magic shop in Spitalfields and her two great-aunts and everything they might teach her.

The full moon rose slowly through the fog. Its first beams hit the great brass moon funnel, and the Dark-Magic Extracting Machine sang up one gear. The shadowlings slid themselves across the ceiling backward, away from it.

Their number had grown. All through the house they clung to the ceilings and to the staircase balustrades. They swayed and shivered against the walls. They filled up the darkened sitting rooms, whispering black thoughts into each other’s ears. They touched their faces to the windows and looked out upon the city with their empty eyes.

The moonlight hit the moon funnel, and the machine fed.

Its cogs and wheels turned. The light filtered down through its brass tubules. The moonlight combined in glass reservoirs with the dissolved remnants of sorrowful things. The black hats and mourning rings, the unfinished letters and the dead baby’s booties. It mixed with the pieces of stopped clocks and the poor girl’s boots and the strap