Page 25 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

She stumbled forwards when she saw a flash of pink hair.

‘Zuzka,’ she cried.

Zuzka was spooning one of the benches, her tattooed wrinkled face soft as she wrapped herself around it like a cat. The DO NOT RUN tattoo on her forearm glinting in the streetlamp. Next to Zuzka, Sora was snoring like a steam engine. Shaking them made no difference. She scanned the road, praying that Cliff wouldn’t be here, that she wouldn’t find his two gigantic black boots poking out from behind a rubbish bin.

But there he was. Her heart sank as she sprinted over, crouching next to her boss and gazing at his tanned face. He smiled woozily, cuddling the bin.

‘Papa Bear, wake up,’ she begged. ‘We need you.’ Her voice broke. ‘I need you.’

Her boss moaned, ‘No, Gloria, Management picked me!’

She sank back on her heels, putting her hands over her ears. She saw Gloria, sleeping a few feet away. The Head of Sky should have been too canny to be affected by such supernatural magic, but here she was, an angular lump, limbs flung out as if trying to beat Cliff over the head even mid-coma. Frida wrapped her arms around her knees as fake night-time fell over them all. All who enter this wood, prepare to be enchanted. That’s what the sign still said, hanging wryly beneath the oak tree. She laughed bitterly, pulling off her cap and gripping it in her lap. The dark liquid of Dozy’s eyes drifted through her mind as she swallowed a choke.

I trust you.

To do what though? Her whole being sagged like a suitcase that’s been sat on. Dizzily, she watched Gloria’s feet twitching like a dog’s. Cliff’s gargantuan nasal wheezing suggesting he might need a breathing apparatus. She had to be dreaming, but the longer she sat there listening to them, the more terribly real it seemed. She tried pinching herself, but that didn’t help at all and soon, great swollen tears were falling down her cheeks. She hadn’t felt this alone since the morning her mum had died. That day, she’d curled up on the floor of the cold, tiled hospital bathroom and cried herself empty. If Antony and his family hadn’t come to peel her off the ground, she might have stayed on those cold tiles forever.

There was no Antony to peel her off the floor this time though. She didn’t know how long passed but finally, the truth settled over her: she was not going to be granted the oblivion of sleep. So she set her jaw and wiped her tear-stained cheeks. She couldn’t stay here like a discarded crisp packet. She was Frida Rose. Dragon keeper and unicorn butler. Shakily, she lifted herself off the ground, and put her hat back on her head, each determined footstep echoing in her ears as she walked over to Grace, Antony’s zoo buggy. Getting behind the wheel, the smell of Antony settled around her, clearing her head. Mint and freshly laundered uniforms. A stack of Hamish’s new mushroom books in the tray on the back brought a smile to her lips.

With steadier hands than she’d thought possible, Frida turned on Grace’s ignition and set out to save the LEZ.

Chapter Fifteen

Sometimes when Frida, Antony and Hamish had been tasked with dreary jobs like cataloguing the manticore’s stool samples, they’d played a game called Zoo Apocalypse, trying to one-up each other with fantastic scenarios. There’s a mass electricity failure causing the fences to lose their power. The wards all die and the animals escape à la Jurassic Park. Cliff gets impaled on Issy’s horn and Gloria finishes him off with a machete. Fireheart grants you three wishes, a flying turtle bites your arm off, Hamish blows up Ground Control. That kind of thing. By the time she’d pulled up in front of the unassuming grey door of Dragon’s Deep, she’d come up with at least fifty new gruesome possibilities: basilisks in the shadows, hangferns in the branches, homicidal box trees hiding in the yew hedges. If they ever played the game again, she consoled herself with the thought that she’d have a lot to contribute.

From the leshies to the grootnecks to Issy, she’d slalomed through corpses, listening in disbelief as the snores echoed from the rafters, not just humans, but animals too. Dozy’s sleep spell had overtaken the world, insidious and inexorable. And yet. Impossible as it was, there were still wards. Humming on every door, fence and enclosure that she passed.

There was still electricity.

There were still roads and oxygen and streetlamps.

But for how long?

Feeling as if she was traversing a rope bridge that might give way at any second, she walked purposefully towards where she knew Lucky would be waiting for her. Lucky, a baby dragon of infinite power. Lucky, who’d started this. Lucky, who would fix this. Quickly, she hurried down the rabbit warren of soundproofed corridors. When she stepped onto Lucky’s sulphur-blasted avenue though, and moved up to the glass, the headache that had fallen to a background hum blazed, making her grab her temples with a scream. She’d never thought the sight of a sleeping dragon would be so devastating. Lucky lay there, behind his humming wards, purple and gigantic and snoring.

She stood there for a moment, frozen to the spot. Then she turned and fled, her head on fire, thinking nothing but the fact that she had to get out of there.

She stood there for a moment, frozen to the spot. Then she turned and fled, her head pounding, thinking nothing but the fact that she had to get out of there.

Blindly, she drove, pinching herself again and again, praying that she’d just wake up. But there was no salvation, and when a jam of bodies in Forest blocked her way, she had to detour again through Lake where the Welsh afanc, half crocodile, half beaver, glided lazily on his back through his muddy river. At least the climate controls were still working, she told herself giddily as she tested the chilled cerulean waters of the Lagarfljót Worm with one hand. Three years pregnant and counting, if the Worm died from exposure . . .

She couldn’t finish that sentence.

At the Extraordinary Plaza, the carnage took her breath away. Knocked-over popcorn booths, spilled purple Elf Juice, trampled pumpkin pie stalls. The plaza had been turned into a giant sleepover, a Glastonbury Festival of deafening snores. Encircled by a giant thorn hedge where the gates had once been. Blackthorns, those most tenacious of trees, had broken through the cobbles, along with an army of roses, exquisite enough to have given Antony flower-orgasms.

Of all the foliage the fairy could have chosen, Frida thought as she let her eyes drift over the cascades of sunshine yellow petals. Yellow had been her mum’s favourite colour, of course. As if this whole nightmare wasn’t bad enough, it was like Dozy had seen inside her brain and crafted it especially for her.

Management never liked to use the word ‘cage’. Enclosure was better, habitat or exhibit. But this was a cage. Muffling all scraps of data, WIFI, phone service. She may as well have been at the bottom of the ocean. Slowly, she drew closer, stepping over the bodies of guests and keepers alike. When she finally reached the place where the gates should have been, she started tearing at the vines, not caring that the thorns ripped her skin to shreds.

‘We’re in here!’ she cried. Her hands were bloody. Petals carpeted the ground. ‘We’re not dead,’ she sobbed. ‘We’re here! I’m here! Get us out!’ Did the familiar streets of Melody still exist? The grassy sprawl of Liberty Park? Her flat? Were there people out there, wondering why the UK’s only Extraordinary Zoo had just turned into a green and thorny baked Alaska bigger than Heathrow Airport?! She screamed until her voice was raw, but it felt like she was at the bottom of an ocean. Or on the moon, hoping someone on Earth might hear. There was just the roaring in her head, the thunder of the still growing wood as if it would keep going forever, and the echo of her own words bouncing back at her.

‘What do you want from me?’ she shouted.

Neither Dozy, nor the roses, answered.

She didn’t know if anything like this had ever happened before. Maybe not since that basilisk had escaped Forge House and accosted Queen Victoria at dinner time. Before that, she supposed it might have been the kraken massacre of 1786, when a band of the tentacular monsters had swum down the Thames and attacked London. That single event had been so devastating it had caused a national crackdown on anything extraordinary. So many extinctions had happened in the following decades, it was called the Great Disappearing. Many creatures had been killed and many, some conspiracy theorists believed, had purposefully disappeared, seeing the writing on Earth’s wall. Where they had gone though, nobody knew.

The LEZ had been founded to help the victims left behind. Joshua Beaufort, his sisters and the other LEZites had created countless conservation charities, and it was under their patronage that Sir Henry Gladstone, the famous Enlightenment scientist, had started to research the technology that would eventually become the wards. The wards that allowed humans to co-exist alongside extraordinary creatures, rather than massacre them.