A Most Magical Girl - Karen Foxlee Page 0,78

watched her every move.

She took the ruby-red seeing glass from her bodice and placed it on her palm. There was barely any light in the room, but she hoped there was enough. Please, she said to herself. Please. Please, someone tell me what to do. She looked into the glass and saw nothing but dimness.

Her mind raced. She needed the Miss Vines to appear, or the Finsbury Wizards. Oh, it would be good to hear kindly advice from them. She peered into the dark glass, but nothing came.

She remembered the cup of her mind. She examined her thoughts, and there were many. She was running out of time. Hafwen would be frightened. Kitty was unwell. Her father had died twice, and it just wasn’t fair. Her mother should have told her the truth. She should feel angry, but all she felt was longing. All of London was in danger. She was the Valiant Defender of Good Magic, even though she didn’t want to be. There, she’d said it. And now she’d let everyone down.

She peered into her ruby-red seeing glass and waited. The shadowlings crowded around her. She saw darkness, she saw dimness, she saw the sudden silvery moonlight on long grass.

Hafwen and Kitty trudged through a heathland. Kitty held the wand and the broomstick. Hafwen gazed in awe at the stars.

Annabel didn’t think she had ever been happier to see someone. “Hafwen!” she shouted. “Kitty!”

But they faded just as quickly as they’d appeared. Now there was nothing but the opaqueness of the glass, and when she looked up, Mr. Angel was waiting at the door to take her upstairs.

Kitty heard the shout. It wasn’t so much a word as a sudden change in the landscape. The wind blew out one hard breath, and the trees shook their leaves, and the grasses banged down their tips once to the earth. Hafwen stopped in her troll tracks.

“Did you hear it, too?” asked Kitty.

Hafwen nodded.

“We are close,” said Kitty.

She held her aching chest and coughed another violent cough. When she spat, there was more dark blood on the ground.

“We must not tarry, skinny,” said Hafwen. “You can keep going?”

“Yes, Hafwen,” replied Kitty. “But I must listen.”

She closed her eyes. Her ribs ached, and every breath caught and snagged inside her as though she contained a thorn. She listened. She listened to the night. Annabel’s shout was gone, but it had left behind a faint echo, the way a bell leaves a sound where it has broken the air on a clear, still day. She heard a new sound. A dark sound. A grinding, turning, rattling sound. A noise that did not belong there. It pulsated in the night air. She felt it in her body and knew it to be wrong.

“Yes,” she said, but that one word made her cough, and her knees crumpled beneath her, and she fell to the ground.

“Before climbing stairs, a young lady arranges her skirts in such a way as to make the task possible, but so gracefully that none would notice she had done so.”

—Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)

Mr. Angel led the way. The passageways creaked and groaned beneath their feet. Up above them the machine clanked and sighed. Mr. Angel climbed the stairs before her, and the shadowlings came after her. Hundreds of them, clouding the air, whispering in her ears. They said her name and her mother’s name, and they hissed the words the Great Geraldo and giggled. Every part of the story that Mr. Angel had told, they repeated.

Annabel felt the machine. It rattled the banister. It shuddered the floorboards. She wished for Kitty and Haffie. She did not want to be here alone.

Nothing could have prepared her for the sight of the Dark-Magic Extracting Machine. Even the darkness of Under London was nothing compared with the darkness of the machine. In the gloom it vibrated and twitched, and its giant bellows, as if sensing her, snapped open and then huffed shut. The room was cold, so cold.

“It knows you are here,” said Mr. Angel quietly. “See how it senses you. It is alive with terrible magic.”

Annabel stood in the doorway, and her skirts lifted toward it; she felt the pull of it on her skin. What was she meant to do against such a thing? As the most magical girl, she must be meant to do something. She looked at the huge funnel that stretched up toward the ceiling with its great and jagged hole. Pure bright moonlight hit the brass