Nigel’s eyes flared open. He stared into Calista’s hard face, into those reptilian eyes framed in dark mascara. But that was a mistake. Because he could not read her face, but somehow he knew that she was reading far too much in his.
With a sudden wrench, he turned on heel and staggered away from the bar, through the haze of cigarette smoke and tinny jazz. He found the door and staggered out onto the sidewalk. “Damn!” he cursed bitterly as the cold air bit into his unprotected hide. He really shouldn’t have left his overcoat in the Rowdy House. Too late for regrets now, however.
He turned his head, looking up and down the road, his pulse quick in his throat. He knew what was coming. How could he not? He also knew he was completely unprotected. Gods, what had possessed him to make that Sovereign Troth? He should never have done it, not in a million lifetimes. He should have found some other way—anyother way—of convincing Luna to trust him again. Only there had been no other way. And she should never have trusted him to begin with. She should have run from him on that very first day, the moment she tasted that gods-awful tea! She should have run fast and far and never once looked back.
But she didn’t. She stayed. With him. Gave him her friendship. Gave him her trust. Even when he’d done absolutely nothing to deserve it.
He could not let her down now.
Nigel picked a direction and started walking. It hardly mattered which direction he chose. Already he saw the dark things swarming, just on the edge of his vision. Simulacrums—wafting, terrifying, and oh! so many.
Calista’s footsteps sounded on the sidewalk behind him. “Grimm!” she called out.
He turned, looked back at her. She stood beneath a street light, wrapped in her fancy fur-collared coat once more. She studied him curiously, her head tilted to one side, her eyes narrow. “You’re not the sorcerer you once were, are you?” she said.
The simulacrums drew in fast. And he knew what it was that confused their mistress. The Grimshade Lord should have blasted them all with Dire spells by now, disintegrating them to little motes of anti-glitter. It wouldn’t matter if the clever Mrs. Anguish had built an army of them! Nothing that fragile could take out any halfway-decent Dark Sorcerer.
But even the Greatest Sorcerer of the Age couldn’t do much with his magic bound.
Nigel lifted his chin, meeting her gaze without flinching. “Your work is sloppy, Mrs. Anguish,” he said. “No one would mistake these things for anything but a misjudged application of spell-matter.”
“Maybe,” she acknowledged with a little smile. “They serve the purpose rather well though, don’t you think?”
With that, she snapped her fingers.
And the simulacrums swarmed Nigel in a mass of darkness, tattered rags, and savage, gnashing teeth.
By rights, he ought to be able to break free of the simulacrums and their spindly limbs easily enough. But he couldn’t. His own human strength was sufficient to throw off a few of them, but there were simply too many. They threw themselves on top of him, piling up until he was so crushed, he feared his lungs would collapse for lack of air.
Only once they had him thoroughly compressed did they back away again, and Calista stepped forward. Crouching with surprising grace and poise in her high heels, she looked down on him where he lay on the sidewalk, gasping. Then she extended one hand and placed her palm against his forehead. Her flesh was very cold and dry.
“You are going to take me to this flower shop of yours,” she said. “And you are going to show me where you have hidden your father’s garden.Now.”
Nigel tried to shake his head, to throw off her hand. But she spoke a single dark word in a damned language,which made his body go limp and jelly-like. From the corner of his eye, he saw one of her simulacrum’s shrivel up and disintegrate, whichtold him at once from whence she’d sourced her power. She was happy to use her own creations up like batteries, and this, more than anything, disturbed him. Like he’d just borne witness to an uncanny form of infanticide.
He felt her moving around roughly inside his brain. Ordinarily, he would have been able to resist an intrusion like that, cast her from him with a blast of repulsion that left her body and soul scorching. But without his own sorcery to counter her spell, he was helpless.
“What is this?” she murmured, frowning with consternation. His lack of resistance unsettled her. “What happened to you, Grimm? You’re like a racehorse with a broken leg.” Her lip curled. “Pathetic.”
She shuffled through his memories without care for how she tore his brain with her clumsiness. Yet another demonstration of her power without skill. Nigel felt the debris littering the space of his mind, all the little pieces she pulled out and discarded as she rifled through images, impressions, thoughts, feelings. “Ah!” she said at last. “There it is. Addle Street.”
She rose then and motioned to the simulacrums. Three of them closed in. Two grasping his arms, the third scruffing him by the collar like a helpless kitten, they lifted him from the sidewalk, and he hung suspended before his enemy, his body limp and dangling.
“Take me to Addle Street, Nigel Grimm,” Calista commanded. She touched his forehead then with the tip of her finger and spoke a word of dire injunction. Another simulacrum popped out of existence as the spell manifested and entered his head. Nigel felt the compulsion of obedience overwhelming him. He could not move to obey as bidden, but it didn’t matter. His mind immediately turned to the route he would have taken home—Seething Lane to Ingle Pie and on to Nettleton. The simulacrums, looped into his brainwaves with crude lines ofmagic, turned him about and floated with him between them. The other simulacrums flowed in on all sides, surrounding Nigel and Calista Anguish in a dense cloud of churning, anti-glitter-swathed horror.
Calista moved with perfect confidence in the darkness of the city streets. With her small gang of unnatural phantoms, she was by far the most frightening thing to be found anywhere in Ballycastle that night. It was incredible how many of these poorly-wrought creations she had at her beck and call. There must be numerous powerlines drawn from the Dire on which to hang all these lifeforces. An incredible work of sorcery, even if poorly crafted. One had to give Calista her dues. What the formidable Miss Quick might have been had she completed her education and gone on to study at Nocturnus, Nigel shuddered to imagine.
They encountered no one as they progressed through the dark streets. It was late now and bitterly cold. Even the most dedicated wardsmen had drifted away to warmer places, leaving the city to fend for itself. Nigel wondered idly, as he floated along, suspended in the arms of those manufactured fiends, if Luna had made it home all right. Or was she still out with Ward? Perhaps she wouldn’t go home at all tonight. Perhaps their date would run right over into the next day. He hoped so. He hoped she stayed close to her handsome wardsman.Please,he thought, his mind forming the words in something like a prayer,let her stay with him. Let him protect her. Let him be the hero she needs.
They took the turn from Nettleton onto Addle Street, a writhing mass, moving with terrible silence. Somewhere in the distance, Nigel could hear the street fiddler playing a forlorn melody to the stars themselves. He wondered vaguely if a fiddler’s bow would be any use against a horde of simulacrums.But the song was far away, and there was no help to be had from that quarter. He was on his own.
“The Arcane Bouquet.” Calista read the sign out loud and scoffed with eloquent derision. “How veryquaint.”
They crossed the empty street and all too soon stood under the awning. Calista turned to Nigel where he hung suspended in the arms of her creatures and began a hasty search of his pockets. She found what she sought and withdrew a small set of keys from his trouser pocket. Nigel’s heart throbbed with helpless terror as she shoved a key into the lock, turned. There was a littleclick,and the door swung open to a tinkle of brass bells. Nigel couldn’t remember a time when those bells had ever sounded so ominous.
When the bells ceased, however, all was silent within. No croak of greeting from Debbie; she’d probably gone up to bed. The flowers were all still and subdued in their pots and platters and basins.
Calista stood on the threshold for some moments, sniffing delicately. What she searched for among the varied perfumes of all those blossoms, Nigel could not guess. Did she think she could sniff out the sorcery he’d used to hide Garden? That would be amateur work indeed! His spells were far more subtle than that, and certainly left no stink behind.
