Midnight Beauties (Grim Lovelies 2)

Cricket made her way out of the back storage rooms, her pockets bulging suspiciously. Always the thief, even now. Cricket said nothing about her stolen treasure and simply said, “Well, don’t leave us wondering.”

Sinjin raised an arched eyebrow. “What’s this about a riddle?”

Anouk pointed to her drawing in the dust and said in an excited rush, “A face with no eyes. Hands with no arms.”

Luc and Beau stared at her blankly.

“A blind man?” Viggo attempted. “A blind man with no arms? A victim of some freak accident? Anouk, this is getting grisly.”

She groaned. They were all staring directly at the answer. It was right in their faces, ticking away, big ones and small ones and broken ones and repaired ones.

Luc started laughing. He grinned and picked up the oversize pocket watch. “I get it now. It’s a clock.”

Cricket perched on the edge of her sarcophagus, picking at her fingernails with a blade. A few scraps of dusty parchment stuck out of her back pocket, nothing nearly as valuable as the gold vases and statues all over the basement shelves. Anouk felt a ripple of curiosity. If Cricket wasn’t lifting valuables, what was she taking?

The papers crinkled in Cricket’s back pocket and she casually shoved them down deeper. “The Noirceur is trapped in a clock? Oh, great. There must be millions of clocks in London. How are we supposed to find and destroy the right one?”

Anouk set aside her curiosity about Cricket’s pilfering and paced across the basement to the stage set under construction. Her foot scuffed a brochure.

SPECIAL EXHIBITION.

Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Ballet.

Original set and costumes.

She turned to Cricket abruptly. “Can you summon snow?”

Cricket’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s not safe outside. The plagues strike without warning. You really want to go out there?”

“I don’t mean outside.” She pointed to the painted backdrop of the forest and the frozen lake. “I want you to summon snow here.”

“Indoors?” Cricket grunted. “That’s harder. But yeah, I think I can.”

She took out a pouch of eucalyptus. The others drifted closer, watching. Both Viggo and Sinjin eyed the scene hungrily—?as Pretties, they’d never cast a whisper. Cricket swallowed the eucalyptus and closed her eyes. Her lips moved slowly. The whisper was so quiet that Anouk felt it more than heard it. She was used to seeing the Goblins’ magic, insects and spat whispers, or the Royals’ spells, with their elegant flourishes. Cricket wielded magic differently. It seemed to come not from her fingertips or the end of her tongue, but from her core. She rooted her feet firmly on the floor. Flexed her fingers back so that she could cast with her palms.

A chill spread around Anouk’s ankles. Slowly, as though someone had slammed a door and loosened dust in the rafters, a light snow began to fall over the Nutcracker Ballet set. No snow fell anywhere else in the museum basement. The entire snowstorm was six feet across, as though suspended within a giant snow globe. Anouk stepped into the enchanted diorama, holding out her hands. Real snow landed on her palm and dusted her eyelashes and hair. The others looked nervous, like they were afraid that the costumes of Nutcracker soldiers might come to life.

Anouk turned in a slow circle. The snow was thickest near the Nutcracker throne. Slowly, piece by piece, a boy with icicle hair took shape amid the flakes, perched on the throne.

He grinned.

Quick as a flash, Hunter Black threw one of his knives, but it soared right through the snow, straight through the boy, and lodged in the wall on his other side.

“Hello, Jak,” Anouk said.

“Hello, lovely.” His black eyes glistened. “You’ve solved my riddle. Well done. You’ve earned yourself a story.”

“A story?” This wasn’t what she’d expected. “What story?”

“The only one that matters.”

* * *

Snow Children could exist only where snow fell, so Jak was restricted to the six-foot orb that made up the Nutcracker set. Cricket continued to hold the spell with her left hand and circle her right, whispering soundlessly, keeping the snow falling steadily. The others dragged over medieval ottomans and plywood crates as makeshift chairs.

Jak leaned forward in the Nutcracker throne, a theatrical crown perched on his head, his black eyes shining.

“My story begins ten thousand years ago, before the Age of Order, a time now lost to scholars. The Noirceur was loosed on the world like a spark in a dry forest. But its aim was not to destroy. Did you know there is a certain kind of pine tree that requires fire to reproduce? The cones are sealed with wax and will only open and spread their seeds when the wax is melted. The Noirceur was thus—?to some it brought destruction, to others life. There was no logic to it. No rules or order. All that came much later. The Noirceur evolved as the world evolved. As early humans, Royals, and Goblins began to shape their world, the Noirceur changed too. It fractured into three forces: Magic, the controllable force that could be commanded by the Selentium Vox; the vitae echo, which keeps magic from being overused; and, last, technology. Less potent than magic and bound by rules of the Pretty World, technology still springs from the same force, which is why it and magic cannot be handled together.”