Midnight Beauties (Grim Lovelies 2)

Petra jerked her chin toward the coals. “Girl, go.”

Her feet started to move as though someone else inhabited her body. With a shaking hand, she took Saint’s bell out of her pocket and pressed it between her palms. Rennar watched with an intense look of dread, but then, as she stepped into the flames, he vanished. Everything vanished. The courtyard. The Royals. The Duke. Petra. Lise and Sam and Jolie and Karla. Her world had suddenly become nothing more than blue, blue as far as she could see, blue in hundreds of different shades, and no one had ever told her that as painful as the Baths would be, they would also be heartbreakingly beautiful. But then pain sliced up her leg and she let out a cry. The coals underfoot were sharp as glass. The heat seared up her legs, and she felt as though the soles of her feet were charring, but when she looked down, she was untouched.

Take a step, she told herself.

Now one more.

How many paces had she taken? Shrouded in the blue flames, she lost a sense of time and place. All she felt was pain. It felt as though each cell in her body were being ripped apart, as if a child had broken her up like a puzzle and was trying to put it back together again to form a completely different image even though the pieces wouldn’t fit. Her skin itched and burned. Beneath it, the muscle rippled as though someone was tearing it from her bone.

Another step.

Was this what it felt like to be reborn as something else? But she had already been reborn as something else. Suddenly she was back on the floor of Mada Vittora’s attic in a puddle of blood with the other beasties standing around her. She’d gone from owl to girl. Now from girl to witch.

Another step.

The pain was almost unbearable. Her hands were shaking. She wasn’t even certain she was still clutching the bell. The audience outside the Baths couldn’t hear her screaming, but she could. Her own screams pierced her ears. The flames were pulling her apart, remaking her. Testing her blood and her bone. Determining whether she’d found her crux. If it was possible for a beastie to become a witch.

Another step. She lost her footing and barely caught herself. The pain in her side flared. The flames were too strong. The wound had weakened her too much for her to take another step. Where was her bell? There, on the coals. Just a useless piece of metal. What if a beastie couldn’t become a witch? What if she was what they said she was—?an animal? A base, lowly thing? Rennar had believed in her. So had Petra. But they didn’t make the decision.

And the flames were turning.

She fell to all fours, wincing against the pain. The flames no longer felt like they were trying to put her back together into something new. They were only tearing her apart. Piece by piece, burned so cleanly not even ash remained. Her vision wavered. The world turned darker. She sucked in smoke. And then an odd image appeared before her.

Black smoke covered the ground. A group of what looked like witches in black robes were chanting. The smoke obscured them so that they were only hazy outlines, and Anouk couldn’t tell if there were five or ten or twenty of them. Their faces were nothing more than blurry ovals of various skin tones, but they were all crying black tears. The smoke rose higher and higher. It looked like they were summoning the smoke. Commanding it. And then, out of nowhere, an owl skimmed over the darkness. It twisted its head, cawing into the void, and she gasped. It had no eyes.

A fluttering of wings erupted in her heart and the vision of witches and smoke shattered. Suddenly she was back in the Coal Baths. On her hands and knees. The pain in her side unbearable.

And she knew.

She knew.

Her crux wasn’t the bell.

The flames burned away the last of her robes. Something clattered onto the coals in front of her. The blue world was fading away, but with her last ounce of strength, she managed to reach out a hand and grab the object.

The round mirror.

A face looked back at her. Not her own, but Rennar’s.

She whispered.

The last thing she felt was a drenching rain like a late-fall shower, but if it was rain, it was thick and heavy as tar, coating her skin and her e

yes until everything was black.

Part II

Chapter 18

“Anouk.”

“She’s still asleep.”

“Look—?her eyelids are twitching.”

“They’ve been twitching ever since the Black Forest. That’s what happens when you’re nearly torn apart by ancient magic. She’ll be lucky if muscle spasms are the worst thing she suffers.”

Voices faded in and out of Anouk’s ears. In her hazy state she wasn’t sure what was a dream and what was a memory. She remembered the blue of the Coal Baths and glass slicing at her palms. The clatter of a mirror and Rennar’s face—?or had that been a dream too?