A Most Magical Girl - Karen Foxlee Page 0,8

and full of speaking.

Kitty walked. She walked and rested and walked again. She knew all the cobbled streets and the grand thoroughfares. She knew all the worn Thames steps and all the jagged alleyways. She listened as she went. She could hear all of London on a night like this: the taverns and theaters, the organ-grinders and the balladeers, and, hidden in amongst these sounds, a wizard singing to the rain and the wild lamenting of faeries.

She wanted to listen to the trees again. The old willow in Regent’s Park, thrashing its head, and the grand old lady hornbeam in Knightsbridge, whispering and shivering in her leaves. As the moon came up and peeked its head through the rain clouds, the great yew in Totteridge called far across the streets to the yew in Bromley, its old voice full of dirt and rain and greenery. She knew they were worried. Something was afoot, and she thought of what it might be as she walked. A great fire or a flood or a dragon coming. It had happened before. She knew such things.

She crept into Highgate Cemetery. The place was full of thieves, but she was swift and quiet in her worn little boots. She took refuge in a mausoleum and waited. She could smell the faeries, even in the rain. They smelled of honey, but she knew they were not sweet. They were nothing like the way people drew them or carved them into pretty statues. They spat and wailed and sang, with their sticky dresses bulging over their swollen little bellies and their nails sharp as sewing needles. Everything about them was enough to vex you. She would wait for near dawn, when they were drowsy.

She thought of Miss Henrietta’s new girl, the pretty one who saw things in water. She didn’t look at all magical or smell it, that one. She had a strange smell, that Annabel, blank as a page without a story on it yet or like sunlight and clean sheets. And pretending she saw nothing when she saw something, all right—something that made her turn white and nearly wet her pants! Kitty smiled in the dark at the thought of it and then began to hum a little song that she had taught herself.

It started deep down in her toes, and she hummed it up and coughed a heart light from her mouth. Kitty was full of magic that she did not understand. The light was blue, daylight blue, and it pleased her, hovering there all shimmering and spittle-covered in the dark. It was the size of her fist, and she blew it up and down with her breath, just above her nose.

She called them heart lights because they came from inside her, and the place they came from seemed near her heart.

She knew they were part of her. Had always known it.

Part of what was inside her—not her shell, which she knew would one day break in the cold and rain. The outside of her would break like the beetle shells she found and kept or the dried body of a blackbird chick fallen from its nest but that she knew was somewhere else, still flying. Her heart light would not die.

She swallowed her heart light, and the mausoleum grew dark. She closed her eyes to listen to the rain.

By the time the wand was empty of its power, Mr. Angel had raised three shadowlings. They swept up the stairwell after him, softly rustling and whispering. In the machine room he commanded them to be still. They were just as his ancient books described: dreadful things, made of nothing yet brimming with wickedness, sleeping shadows brought to life with his dark magic.

They tittered and hissed when he came too close.

They changed their shapes—tall and thin one minute, stout the next. They joined together in the shape of a great tall man and towered over him so that he shivered.

“Down!” he yelled, and they were three again in an instant.

They were made of shadow, some parts ink black, others gray. In their darkness there were yawning mouths and empty eyes. On their fingers there were solid silvery claws. They showed them to Mr. Angel; they rattled and clacked them at him, rustled and hushed. When he reached out to touch one, his hand felt nothing, and they made an angry sound like the wind in long grass.

“Pass through the keyhole,” he commanded of one, which sped off and slipped itself small through the tiny space,