Midnight Beauties (Grim Lovelies 2)

mell of decay was thick in the air. The figure loomed in the doorway. Anouk held in a scream. Desiccated flesh. Rotted brown teeth. Tatters of fabric and a bead necklace tangled in exposed ribs. Anouk felt another scream building in her throat.

Cricket shoved her hand against Anouk’s mouth to keep her quiet.

“Come on,” Cricket whispered. She yanked Anouk toward the Mesopotamian exhibits. They ran through the displays of Assyrian tablets but stopped short when another figure lunged in the darkness ahead. Cricket pressed a hand to her nose against the stink of rot and sulfur.

“It’s another one,” Anouk whispered.

“Damn Sinjin.” Cricket shuddered. “How many mummified bodies does this museum have?”

Anouk fumbled to read the pamphlet in the faint light. “Counting the ones on display and the ones in storage . . . one hundred and twenty.” She looked up from the pamphlet, feeling sick. “And one mummified bird and one mummified cat.”

“Oh, great. Our distant cousins. Well, let’s not join them in the afterlife.”

They ran into the next room and hid behind the curtains of a tall window, trying not to make a sound. Cricket swallowed a few eucalyptus leaves and whispered a spell to make them as unnoticeable as possible. Anouk’s heart drummed in her chest.

Cricket adjusted something in her pocket—?one of the carved bowls from the Assyrian exhibit, Anouk saw.

“You stole that,” Anouk whispered.

Cricket shoved the bowl farther down in her pocket. “Forget it.”

Anouk gave her a suspicious look. Cricket took pride in her thievery, but why risk it now?“What do you want with some bowl? And the parchments from the basement? It’s just old junk.”

“Shh!” Cricket nodded toward the sounds of more footsteps, and Anouk shut her mouth reluctantly. Cricket had been snooping through the artifacts at Castle Ides back in Paris too. What was Cricket looking for? After the siege of the Château des Mille Fleurs, Cricket had talked about tearing down the Haute, throwing the whole system into chaos so that the four orders might start afresh, with Royals and witches and Goblins and beasties on a more even playing field. Maybe that’s why she’d been snooping around Castle Ides—?maybe she intended to whisper a spell on Rennar’s shoes so that he’d slip on the stairs and break his neck. Anouk had to admit she’d had similar thoughts. That arrogant look in his eye. His insistence that there would come a time when she’d beg him to kiss her.

She realized she was toying with her wedding ring again.

Anouk shifted so that she could look out the window. Nightmare was the word Sinjin had used, and he was right. She could barely make sense of what she was seeing. Fallen toads and the bodies of cats and dogs that had choked to death from the black smoke curling out of sewer grates littered the streets. Traffic was a mess; cars were bumper-to-bumper, blocking the roads. The convenience store on the corner kept flickering in and out of reality, trapped in a time loop. The Noirceur had driven the whole city mad.

Hunter Black and Beau were out there in the chaos.

Cricket tapped her shoulder and whispered, “Um, Anouk?”

Anouk thought she saw Sinjin’s white coat below and she pushed the curtain back farther—?but no, it was just a Pretty running in terror. “Yes?”

Cricket ripped the curtain from her hands. “Run!”

Chapter 32

A dozen dead were coming for them. The pale light of the double moons shone on their hollow eye sockets, rotted teeth, and desiccated fabric.

Anouk screamed before she could stop herself. The dead roused themselves at the sound. They lurched in her direction with snapping jaws and outstretched fingers. Their steps grew more certain. They began to move faster.

“They’re remembering how to run,” Cricket moaned.

Cricket and Anouk took off. The pamphlet’s map was useless—?Anouk’s vision had gone blurry from terror. Cricket grabbed her hand and they tore past exhibits of Iron Age tools and Celtic jewelry, a twenty-foot-high statue of the Buddha and tiny jade figurines. They ran over benches and under velvet ropes. It seemed that around every corner, they could hear the dragging of desiccated feet on museum tile.

“I’m going to kill Sinjin!” Cricket yelled as they sprinted toward signs for the museum restaurant. “I’m going to kill him, bring him back with his own necromancy crystals, and then kill him all over again!”

They reached the restaurant and threw open the glass doors. Anouk grabbed a tablecloth and used it to tie the door handles together to buy them a few extra minutes. They ran between the tables, knocking over glassware in their haste.

“Hey, wait!” Anouk grabbed Cricket a second before she darted into the kitchen. “Look!”

The golden hare was just on the other side of the glass wall that separated the restaurant from the rest of the museum. Its nose was twitching and its eyes rolled anxiously, as though it could sense the unholy magic that had taken hold of the museum.

“We can’t go out there,” Cricket said. “We’d have to go back through the restaurant doors. There are dead people out there wanting to eat us!”

“We don’t need doors. You can cast magic, Cricket!”