Midnight Beauties (Grim Lovelies 2)

“Viggo, stop talking, please. This is all too much.” Anouk set down the tea with a shaking hand. A thousand questions appeared in her head but she chose just one. “We? Who is we?”

“Sinjin and I. He popped up

stairs for a moment. There’s a café. It’s closed now, but they keep microwave pizzas in the freezer. The egg-salad sandwiches aren’t bad either. If you want pastries, though, you’re out of luck. We ate all of those yesterday.”

Her head ached so badly that everything Viggo said felt like it had happened to her in a dream. Sinjin—?that was the hacker who supposedly knew what to do with the amethyst chess piece to turn them human. She looked down at her feet and saw a fine powder of purple-tinted crystal. Was that what was left of the amethyst? Then her gaze fell on a taxidermied lion with worn fur in need of repair.

“What is this place?”

“The British Museum.” Viggo perched on the edge of her sarcophagus and sipped his own cup of tea. “Part of its basement. It makes for a brilliant base of operations. The Pretties closed it when the plagues began, so we have it to ourselves. Lots of ancient magic here. Old herbs and charms. Plus the café—?well, I already told you about the café.” He motioned to a stack of greasy paper plates that bore the British Museum’s logo. She noticed that over his usual black shirt, he was wearing a fleece jacket from the museum gift shop.

She sat up straight and gripped the edges of the sarcophagus. “So it worked? We’re human again?” She pressed a hand to her face, feeling for a beak, for feathers, almost crying in relief to find her own nose.

“Yes—?didn’t you hear what I told you?”

“Tell me everything.” Her voice was breathy and quick, but as soon as she said it, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“You were the least of my worries.” Viggo leaned back, swirling his tea. “As soon as Petra’s spell took effect, you perched on my shoulder for most of the walk through the Chunnel, except once, when the mouse slipped out of my pocket and you dived for it. You nearly ate Luc.”

Queasy, she pressed a hand to her stomach.

“Beau was Beau—?even as a dog, he’s deliriously happy. But Cricket! And Hunter Black! Naturally, they were awful. She got loose and hid in a drainpipe and Beau had to sniff her out. The wolf was insufferable, even though I eventually got the muzzle on him.” As evidence, he held up his arms, which were covered with bite marks.

“But I got all five of you through,” he continued proudly. “Took all night to walk the tunnel. Sinjin was waiting on the other side with a taxi. He’d gotten our message.” He gestured to a spot behind her, and she turned to find an entire wall of taxidermied animals, a lion and a badger and a falcon. The falcon’s head suddenly turned in her direction. Not taxidermied after all.

“Saint!”

Viggo nodded. “Saint got through first and delivered Rennar’s message to Sinjin, so everything was set up.”

Her headache worsened at the thought of Rennar. She collapsed back in the sarcophagus with a sigh. The lights overhead made her wedding ring gleam. She worked it anxiously between her fingers. Did Rennar toy with his ring too? Did he think of that last kiss before she left? She shook her head to banish such thoughts and then sat back up. Her gaze again fell to the glittering purple powder on the floor. “Is that the amethyst chess piece?”

“You should have seen it,” Viggo said, guessing her thoughts. “Sinjin had tools to extract the spell. It took a special kind of hammer, nothing magical, but a technical one that could shatter the amethyst in just the right way so as not to damage the spell inside.”

“And it worked?”

He reached out and pulled on her ear and she winced. “What do you think? As soon as the amethyst powder landed on the five of you, you turned human. I dressed you all. Didn’t think you’d mind. Look, I even remembered that jacket you like.”

She was relieved to see she was wearing her Faustine jacket. She rubbed her sore ear. “And the others?”

“Should be waking up soon. Sinjin warned it would take a while for all of you to recover. You’ve been out for two days.” He opened a greasy pizza box, but it was empty, and he frowned. “I’ll go upstairs and get you something to eat. You’ll feel better.”

Before she could stop him, Viggo grabbed a flashlight branded with the British Museum security logo and disappeared into the cavernous basement. His footsteps echoed. Anouk hugged her jacket around her. It was eerie down here. What she’d mistaken for swinging moons were, of course, overhead lights. The whoosh of wings was the air-conditioning unit. They must have been in the portion of the basement used for constructing exhibits. Cautiously, she climbed out of the sarcophagus. She checked on the others, but they were deeply asleep, their pulses slow and steady. All around her were tables full of cataloged bits of broken ceramic, hunting spears, bronze vases. An assortment of long white feathers that, judging by the size, had belonged to an owl; they made her shudder and she quickly stepped away. She moved to a table that held a collection of Victorian clocks in various states of repair. The smell of polish and oil laced the air. She picked up a massive pocket watch that was bigger than her palm. It ticked softly.

A dream pulsed at the edge of her memory. Only it hadn’t been a dream, had it? When she’d entered the Coal Baths, reality and the dream world had merged—?instead of a bed of coals in the Cottage courtyard, she’d been thrust into a den of witches with an eyeless owl overhead.

She found herself absent-mindedly tracing the shape of Jak’s symbol in the dust on the clock-repair table. A circle. The two lines. It looked like the owl from her vision, a face with a mouth and nose but no eyes. An idea rustled at the back of her mind.

A face with no eyes . . .

“Well, well. The sleeping beauty awakens.”

She spun around so fast that the pocket watch slipped from her hands and fell to the ground. Viggo was back with the Pretty broker she remembered from the engagement party. He held his golden hare in the crook of one gloved arm.

“Sinjin,” she said. “It’s nice to see you again.”

He was holding two paper plates of pizza. He thrust one at her, and she found that she was ravenous. She perched on the edge of her sarcophagus, stuffed pizza in her mouth, and groaned contentedly. Greasy perfection.

Sinjin leaned over Cricket’s sarcophagus and lifted one of her eyelids. “This one’s waking too.”