Briar Queen (20 page)

Finn glimpsed her reflection in a large mirror framed by pewter leaves—she'd become a shadowy-eyed girl with tangled hair and a feral face. When she tilted her head, her eyes glinted oddly. She looked around, realized she could see
in the dark
. “Moth, can you see?”

“Of course. It's the elixir.”

The elixir
. She walked toward a huge fireplace and tried not to think about exactly what that stuff was doing to her. On the fireplace's mantelpiece was a clock with thirteen numbers, its hands turning backward. Above it was a painting of a Victorian coach and horses plunging through a forest.

Moth began trudging up the rotting stairs—she reluctantly followed. They ascended to a black hallway with waxy vines tentacling over the walls. At the hall's end was a large room, its glass ceiling blossoming with dusky light. They entered the glass-ceilinged chamber. Moth opened a porcelain cabinet shaped like a girl to reveal a collection of gleaming knives. He whistled. Finn, moving past him, said, “Won't weapons invite danger?”

“Nevertheless . . .” He began selecting a few.

Finn walked toward a bed hung with sooty velvet and surrounded by furniture shaped like grotesque animals. Glimpsing a shadowy figure seated in a chair, she flinched before realizing the figure was made of wax, with silk hair and glass eyes. She remembered the wax doll in the Scarborough pavilion, the one that had belonged to Seth Lot's Jill, and whispered, “Moth.”

He sauntered to the doll, leaned toward it. “There's a tag.”

“What kind of tag?”

“A label tag.” He read it: “‘This is Adonyss, who used to lure youths to dark places and drink their blood.' Sounds like a pervy bastard.”

Finn skewed her gaze from the wax doll. “That used to be
alive
?”

“He was a Fata.”

She bumped into a chair, and flinched, because the chair was carved into the realistic image of a seated man, his eyes closed. There was a tag hanging from one arm. Nearby was a bronze lamp shaped like a girl. The lamp also had a label. Finn's skin crawled. “Were they all
alive
?”

“I'm thinking they were.”

She looked at the bed—the looming headboard consisted of several curled male and female figures. She swerved her gaze upward, to the portrait hung above it.

Her breath caught in her throat.

The painting was of a young man in Victorian clothes, one booted leg slung over an arm of the chair in which he was sprawled. He held a jackal-headed walking
stick in a jeweled hand and long, dark hair set off a princely profile, familiar, yet alien to her.

Lily had once told Finn that her favorite god in mythology was Dionysus—not the mad, dark wine-god Dionysus, the wildling who drove girls and boys crazy, but the gentle god who defended girls by revealing to them their strengths, the one who led people away from crazy. That was who Jack reminded her of, in his portrait above the grotesque bed.

She turned and found, on the opposite wall, a framed poster of a young woman with black bangs above electric-green eyes: Reiko Fata as a '60s Biba girl.

“This place”—her heart crashed—“belonged to Jack and Reiko.”

Moth glanced up from studying another chair. He frowned.

Jack,
she thought,
this is part of your past, this terrible place
. “Where's the attic? We need to find Ellen and Roland's maps and get out of here.”

THE ATTIC OF THE BLACK HOUSE
was a robbers' den. Moth flung open the lids of steamer trunks and crates and started raiding.

“How long has he been taking people?” Finn looked around at the opened trunks, the coats and boots and jewelry and weapons. She felt sick at the thought of Jack being here while the Wolf murdered.

“Judging by the age of some of these things, quite a long time.” Moth was crouched near a trunk, studying an antique pistol in his hands.

“You're really taking that?”

“No. No bullets or gunpowder.”

She glanced again at the sad, discarded clothes and objects: a leather book titled
Animals of the Western Hemisphere,
a tin of cigarettes, an artist's paintbrush, a . . . tooth nestled in a black velvet jewelry box.

“The cigar box!” She grabbed it from a shelf beneath a round window and found, inside of it, a book of red leather with a butterfly embossed in black on its cover. She opened the book to find its pages illustrated with maps stained by age and spilled coffee. Two names were scrawled on the cover page:
Ellen Byrd
and
Roland Childe
. It was a journal—and there were photographs that looked as though they'd been taken in the 1930s. In one of them, Ellen and Roland, in aviator caps and jackets, crouched before a small plane. “They were
explorers . . .”

“They got lost and they were found by Lot. Let's see the maps.”

She handed the book to Moth. Experiencing a bitter anger at the fate of Ellen and Roland, she began searching for things that might be used as weapons against the Fatas. No silver. No iron. Those things decayed here.

“Here's Maraville.” Moth was studying one of the maps. “It's not far.”

THEY LEFT THE HOUSE
and Moth led her back into the forest, where Finn felt safe amid the oaks and pines and dark earth scents. They stayed on the road, passing a few decrepit farmhouses, a gas station nested with bats, and two trashed cars.

When they pushed through a curtain of ivy and saw the glisten of metal in the trees, Finn halted. Beside her, Moth also regarded the small airplane molded into the branches of an enormous oak. He said softly, “Betwixt and between. They must have flown through one of the spots where the Ghostlands and the true world cross.”

Finn thought of Ellen and Roland, aviators, explorers who had found an uncharted place that had killed them. She thought of girls and boys like Moth and Nathan, stolen out of their lives. “How do you bear it?”

“I think of the place I came from. There were good things, familiar things. Then I think, if I'd lived out my life, back then, I would have died of plague or starvation. Or, more likely, murder. I realize that now is not so bad. And I'm one of the lucky ones.”

“But you're still broken.”

“But your sister put me back together.”

The road soon narrowed to a lane winding through a wood of gnarled trees draped with cobwebs and creepers. The toadstools underfoot were luminous, producing small puffs of spores when stepped on. Finn kept a hand over her mouth and nose until they'd cleared the fungi. As they passed beneath a vast, glittering spiderweb, she wondered what Ghostlands spiders looked like, shuddered, and attempted another conversation, “Who turned you into a moth? Was it Absalom?”

“I don't know.”

They halted, staring across a field of red flowers at a sprawling building surrounded by dead trees, its windows boarded up, its bricks splotched with lichen and strange graffiti. A giant crack ran up the middle of its stairway, where a
figure lay. Beyond the building, surrounded by a forest of firs and pines, was a town that looked as though it had expired from urban blight.

“I don't like the look of that school.” Finn, thumbs crooked in the straps of her backpack, wondered if the elixir was making her insanely brave. The field, she realized, the red flowers, were poppies.

“And that must be Maraville. Harvest Station should be straight down that road. Past those houses. You did notice the figure on the stairs?”

Finn had seen it. “Let's go.”

The school's shadow seemed to slime their skin as they approached. The sudden gloom cut into Finn's courage a little. The boarded windows and the huge doors made her uneasy. She could smell mold and dead things.

When she recognized the body on the stairs, she began to run, her boots tearing at poppies as a name ripped from her throat. “Sylvie?
Sylvie!
”

She reached the figure on the stairs and knelt beside her friend, pushing the black braids away from Sylvie's pale face. Moth, crouching near, said, “She's breathing. How did she
get
here?”

Finn couldn't answer. “Sylvie. Please
wake up
.”

Sylvie opened her eyes and croaked, “Finn?”

Finn heaved a sigh and sat back on her heels. A world without impetuous, optimistic Sylvie was unthinkable.

“I found you.” Sylvie let her head fall back. “I can't believe I found you.”

“
What are you doing here?
” Finn helped her sit up. The other girl was dressed for winter in tartan trousers and a coat lined with fake fur. Her eyes and nose were red, as if she'd been crying. She hugged Finn. “We sort of got a key.”

“
We?
There's no ‘we,' Sylvie. You're the only one here.”

“
Christie
.” Sylvie scrambled up.

“
Christie?
” Finn stood with her friend as Sylvie looked frantically around and said, “Christie! He came with me—I let go of his hand . . . oh,
Finn
.” Sylvie began stomping in a circle, pushing her fingers through her braids. “I let go of his hand when we came through—it was like we were pulled apart. I walked so far to find him . . .”

“Sylvie,
how did you get here
?” Finn wanted to grab her and shake her as terror for Christie made her almost crazy.

“The Black Scissors. He sent us. He wanted me to tell you about Seth Lot . . .
how he can die—poisoning, pinning, and decapitation. Those three, together, are the only way to kill an ancient Fata.” She unslung the walking stick and handed it to Finn, who carefully accepted it. Sylvie said, “It's a sword, inside. Don't draw it until you're ready to kill Seth Lot.”

“I'm not here to kill Seth Lot.” Finn stood very still—the idea was nightmarish. She was selfishly glad to see Sylvie but, at the same time, furious at her friend's recklessness.

Sylvie glanced around. “Finn—where's Jack?”

“We've lost him. It's a long story. We're on our way to him now. Why did you bring your bow and arrows?” She didn't let herself think of Christie, alone.

Sylvie shouldered her little backpack and the aluminum quiver of arrows, her bow. “The Black Scissors told me to bring weapons. How are we going to find Christie?”

Moth was gazing at the school. “We need to leave here before nightfall.”

“Why?”

“Something is nesting in that building.”

“
Christie
might be in there.” Sylvie took a step toward it, but Moth grabbed her wrist. “No. There is no mortal blood in that place.” He glanced at Sylvie. “And
your
blood will be obvious to whatever hides in there.”

Another chill swept over them as the swings on the school's playground began to sway, creaking. The field of poppies rustled. Sylvie backed away. “What is that smell? Roadkill?”

“Ladies,” Moth said, “we need to depart
now
.”

They all looked toward Maraville, the collection of houses sunk in rot and neglect. Finn said, “Christie might be
there
.”

She strode toward the town. Sylvie and Moth followed, plunging into the field of poppies, occasionally glancing over their shoulders at the school, which seemed to be darkening as evening prowled across the sky. They entered the town through a lot of towering pines and dense firs that would have been beautiful if it weren't for the menace of the nearby school and the hollow and vine-knotted houses without tenants. When they reached a blacktop road littered with crimson leaves and shattered by tree roots, they trudged past more colonial-style houses claimed by the wild.

“Finn,” Sylvie whispered, “ . . . your eyes . . . they just went silver.”

“I took something that disguised my blood,” Finn explained, and she tried not to seem startled—Jack hadn't told her about any side effects from the elixir, such as seeing in the dark and her eyes turning a different color.

“‘
Drink me
.'” Sylvie halted. “The Black Scissors said to drink something when we crossed over . . . I didn't see anything, because Christie was gone . . . I forgot—”

“Here.” Finn rummaged in her backpack and drew out the bottle of elixir.

A rock shattered the bottle in her hand.

They whirled, frantically looking around for whatever had flung the rock. A weird whistle, as if someone was pretending to be a bird, came from within the forest.

Finn dragged Sylvie against her as Moth ducked into the doorway of a little building, its glass window painted with the words
DETROIT'S BEST COFFEE
. She looked around at the shadows between the houses and tensely said, “What is it?”

“I don't know. We're going
there
.” Moth pointed to a rusting school bus parked on the side of the road.

They dashed toward the bus. Moth pushed open the doors and practically shoved Finn and Sylvie into the vehicle before leaping up and shutting the doors tight. He looked around. “It's iron. Sometimes iron remains before the Ghostlands changes it—”

Sylvie screamed.

Finn nearly did the same when she saw the flower-wreathed skeleton, like some kind of grotesque altarpiece, at the back of the bus. She dragged her gaze from it as Moth walked toward it, to examine it. She didn't feel any less horrified when he said, “It's not real bone. It's coral. These are Fata remains.”

“Fata? How did it get past iron?”

“Well, it's dead. There are only two things here that can get past iron—changelings and
sluagh
.”

“You think
changelings
dragged it in here? Or dead—”

Something crashed onto the roof of the school bus. They drew together, away from the broken windows. Outside, a shadow glided past. Something laughed like a deranged schoolboy, and the reek of roadkill drifted in with the fragrance of flowers.

Moth slid two blades from within his jacket. Sylvie glanced admiringly at
them before swinging the bow from her shoulder and drawing an arrow from the quiver. Her hands were shaking.