Midnight Beauties (Grim Lovelies 2)

For a few moments, Anouk felt trapped in time. The snow swirled so thick around them that the city was gone, the lights and the traffic and the smell of burning chestnuts on the air. Her feet no longer rested on the museum roof. If the dead still pressed at the door, their groans were very far away now. She felt burning cold as Jak clutched her hand, but he was gone—?at least his boyish form was. He was simply snow again. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be a bird. To ride the wind. To soar with the snow. She had the sense that the world was passing far below, that they were skipping over towns and valleys and roads as easily as Beau would trace his finger over one of his road maps. Up high, they didn’t need to bother with traffic circles and detours. They could fly as straight as a bird, and almost as though no time had passed at all, Anouk felt solid ground once more beneath her feet.

She crouched, breathing heavily. The snow and wind swirled around her. Her fingers dug into the earth. The grass was stiff with frost. She stood, squinting into the snow and fog. There were no sounds of the city. No sounds at all except the wind. The fog continued to lift until she could make out colossal stone slabs rising around her. There was a hum that was almost deafening and yet somehow didn’t make a sound. It was like the hum she’d felt from some of the enchanted ancient objects in the British Museum, but it came from every direction. An ancient song of the stones.

Jak materialized on the other side of the circle, sitting on one of the stones. She tilted her head up.

“I thought there’d be tourists,” she called.

“Not at night, lovely.” He pointed far off, where she could see a faint light on the horizon. Dawn was coming, but for now, she had Stonehenge to herself.

“What do I do?”

“Wait,” he said cryptically, “and watch.”

As the sun rose, its rays caught the frost on the grass like light concentrated through a magnifying glass, and mystical blue sparks began to appear. Anouk stepped back as if she’d stumbled onto a beehive. The song of the stones grew.

“It won’t last long,” Jak warned. “Once the frost melts, it’ll be over until the next midwinter dawn. It was Pretty women who first discovered this, one thousand five hundred years and a day ago. They saw and understood the power of the stones. And so the Coals rewarded them for their insight. It gave them the chance for greatness. It still does today. But do not mistake a chance for a promise. There is just as great a chance that the Coals will burn you alive, as it has so many women.”

The sparks began to catch and spread. This was no ordinary flame. It took on the blue tinge of the frost. Flames rose, licking at the falling snow. Anouk got the sense she was watching something rare and special. The stones, the frost, the winter dawn—?it had all come together in just the right conditions to create

a naturally occurring Coal Bath.

The flames formed a circle bound by the stones. She was starting to feel cold coming from them, a cold so intense that it was burning. She glanced in the distance. The fog was rising, and she could make out a wire fence and vast fields stretching toward the horizon. There was still time. She could run. Break out of the circle.

But then it was too late, even if she’d wanted to. The flames were too high. Her chance to give up was gone—?but she didn’t want it anyway. The blue flames rose three feet, then six, then nine, almost as high as the tops of the stones. On his perch above, Jak crouched, his icicle hair hanging in his face and hiding his expression. Another ray of sun burst from the horizon, and he called through the snow: “Now, lovely. It must be now.”

The frost was already melting. Her shoes and socks were soaked with dew. The flames burned brightly. No Royals watching now. No Duke Karolinge and his rituals. No acolytes. No robes.

She kicked off her shoes, clasped the owl feather in both hands, and stepped barefoot into the flames.

Immediately, she was burning. Her throat closed up as she remembered the pain from before, the courtyard and all those watching eyes as she screamed, as the flames licked at her skin with their barbed tongues. Burning into her flesh. Scalding her blood. Hot and cold became one: pain. She felt her body being torn apart again. Dimly, she blinked down at her bare toes. The flames had eaten off her trousers. Her underclothes were in tatters, rapidly burning off of her skin. Oh, the jacket! Her beautiful Faustine jacket was falling apart and turning into ashes. She cursed herself for not taking it off. But then the flames rose and she didn’t care about the jacket. She could barely remember what the jacket looked like. The flames were turning her to ash now. Skin and bone and blood and eyes and hair and throat and toes; she was ash, all of her. She waited for the blackness to come. That awful, encompassing, yawning blackness. It licked at the edges of her vision. She felt nothing—?she had no more fingers or toes with which to feel. She heard nothing—?her ears were no longer ears. The blackness overtook every one of her senses and she knew the end was coming.

But then, with a brilliant burst, the blackness shattered. Lights crackled and then the darkness was replaced by the full spectrum of light. Reds and blues and greens and oranges. All the colors of her jacket, all the colors of the world, the colors of frost and grass and dawn and sky, all at once in a single beautiful burst.

So beautiful it ached.

So beautiful it healed.

Part IV

Chapter 35

When Anouk opened her eyes, she was staring into the frowning face of an old man dressed in a navy-blue coat, Wellington boots, and a tweed cap. He prodded her gently with his cane.

“Oy there, girlie. No sleeping in the stones. I don’t have to tell you crazy pagan types that. Now, scamper off and there’s no harm done, eh? Don’t want to have to call the police.”

She stared blankly at the old man. A patch on his jacket declared him an employee of the Stonehenge Visitors’ Center. She must have looked more than a little bedraggled because he cocked his head and said, “Girlie? You okay? Didn’t eat any special mushrooms, did you? I was young once. I remember the thrill of sneaking into a forbidden place after lights-out. Lucky you didn’t freeze to death out here.”

Dazed, she sat up and looked around her, but Jak had vanished from the top of the stones. It wasn’t snowing anymore. Dawn had come and gone, and the sun had burned the frost from the fields. She pressed a hand to her head. Last she remembered, she was being roasted alive. Her skin had sizzled like butter in a pan. Her blood had bubbled like broth brought to a rolling boil.

“Missy?” The elderly man was holding out a hand to help her stand. Instinctively, she took it. He pulled her to her feet and then brushed lightly at her shoulder. “Oops, you have a bit of grass on you. Don’t want to stain such a pretty jacket.”

She jerked her head at the word. Jacket?

To her supreme shock, she was fully dressed. She was wearing the black dress she’d gotten from Galeries Lafayette—?never mind that she’d left it in Mada Vittora’s townhouse—?and her oxford shoes, and her hair was pulled back in a black ribbon. Nothing was burned or singed or even wrinkled; it was as though every piece had come straight off the hanger. And the Faustine jacket! She’d watched it burn! Now it was draped over her shoulders like a cape. She shrugged it off and ran her fingers over every inch, checking the stitching, the red satin fabric, the cuffs and collar. Everything was perfect—?almost. It wouldn’t be her jacket if it didn’t have a few errant streaks of dust.

She hugged the jacket to her chest and then ran her hands up her arms, marveling at how the bruises she’d collected when she’d hit the floor after sliding down the museum banister had vanished from her skin. Even her knuckles, which had been perpetually chapped since the Black Forest, were now buttery smooth.

She laughed aloud. “It worked!” She threw her arms around the first thing she saw, which happened to be the visitors’-center employee.