A Great And Terrible Beauty (37 page)

Felicity gives me a hard look. Things have changed forever. There’s no going back. I follow them into the woods so that they can dress again. Soon, they are ready.

“Take my hands,” I say, hoping for the best, fearing the worst.

THE
DOOR
PULSES
WITH
LIGHT
.
WHEN
WE
STUMBLE
through, everything seems as it was. The river sings sweetly on. The sunset is still a gorgeous spill of colors. Flowers float by.

“You see?” Felicity says, eyes shining in triumph. “There’s nothing amiss. I told you she only wanted the power for herself.”

I ignore her, listening for anything out of place.

They glide down into the meadow ahead of me, walking toward the garden, hand in hand like a trio of paper-doll cutouts from a doily.

The wind shifts, bringing the scent of roses and that other, unfamiliar stench, which sends me running after them.

“Wait! Felicity, please listen, I think we should go back.”

“Go back? We just got here,” she says, mocking me.

Ann’s face is a stone. “We’re not going back without the power to cross over by ourselves.”

The huntress is suddenly by our sides. It startles me. Odd that I never heard her approach. I can’t help thinking of her offering me the berries. It makes me cold all over. She wipes a finger across Felicity’s bloody face, rubs the stain with her thumb. She brings the finger to her mouth, tastes it and smiles.

“You’ve made a sacrifice, I see.”

“Yes,” Felicity says. “Will you grant us the power to enter the realms?”

“Didn’t I promise that I would?” She smiles but there’s no warmth in it. “Follow me.”

I grab Felicity by the arm. “This is wrong. We shouldn’t go,” I whisper.

“No, something’s finally right,” she says, breaking away and running after the others.

I follow them under the silver arch, into the grotto. My mother is nowhere to be seen. The smells of my childhood waft by. Curry. Pipe smoke. And something else. There it is again. That unpleasant stench.

We’ve reached the Runes of the Oracle, the heart of everything.

The breeze shifts. The smell is back. Underneath the memories is something pungent, like meat rotting in the sun. Does no one else smell it?

“What do we do now?” Pippa asks.

“Use the magic to take me through to the other side,” the huntress says.

“If we join hands and take you through, you’ll give us the power we need, to come and go as we please?”

“Not me. My mistress. She will give you what you deserve.”

Wariness steals inside me and takes its perch.

“Your mistress?” Felicity is confused.

Everything in me is screaming to run. I’ve got my hand on Felicity’s arm, and as if she can feel my terror, she backs slowly away from the circle. The huntress seems to grow taller. Her eyes go black; her voice becomes a hiss.

“Come to me, my pretty ones.”

The sky opens into a churning sea of dark clouds. Quick as rain, she rises before us, a towering, screeching wraith, carrying the souls of the damned inside her unfurling black cape. Felicity can’t break away, can’t stop staring at that skeletal face, the eyes rimmed in red with swirling black ovals for centers, the sharp, jagged teeth. The thing clamps a hand onto her arm. Felicity’s mouth stretches into a ghastly O. Like ink, the black floats across her eyes, till they’re bottomless.

“No!” I scream, barreling headlong into Felicity, the two of us sprawled on the ground. She’s shaking all over, her eyes still black. Screaming, Pippa falls to the ground, scrambles down the hill, toward the river.

“Ann! Help me! We’ve got to get her back now!”

We’re on either side of Felicity, running for the river. We have to find Pippa. We have to leave. A storm wind is blowing. It rips blossoms, leaves, and branches from trees, sends them flying over us. A branch narrowly misses my head and scrapes the side of my cheek, drawing blood.

The dark wraith grows another pair of arms and another. She slinks toward us, ready to crush us in her embrace. Felicity is coming out of it now, stumbling, then running. We’ve reached the river, but where is Pippa?

Ann’s scream rips the air apart. “Help me!”

She’s staring into the river, tearing at her hair. Her reflection has turned. She’s covered in hideous boils. Her hair falls out in thick clumps and sores bubble up on her scalp. It’s as if her skin is melting from her bones.

“Stop looking at yourself, Ann! Stop!” I scream.

“I can’t! I can’t!”

She’s leaning closer to the water’s edge. I slip my arms around her chest, but she’s heavy and won’t budge, and then she’s free, falling back in the grass, thanks to a hard tug from Felicity. The gray of Ann’s eyes has returned.

“Where’s Pippa?” she screams over the wind.

“I don’t know,” I shout.

Something slithers over my hand. Snakes wind through the tall grass as it shrivels and dries up. We jump onto a rock. Pears fall from a tree and rot at our feet. Ann is whimpering, watching her skin dissolve into ugliness.

“Help me!” Pippa’s scream tears through us. When we stumble across the brittle grass, we see her. She has taken a large boat, a bier, onto the river, where the wind has pushed her out into the wide deep of it. The wraith paces the bank, forcing us to keep our distance.

“Yes, that’s it . . . come for her . . . ,”
it laughs.[]

“Please! Help me!” Pippa cries. But there’s nothing we can do. She’s cut off from us. We can’t let it capture us. I’m so afraid, I can think only one thing—I’ve got to get us out.

“Through the door—quickly!” I shout.

The wind whips Felicity’s hair across her pale face. “We can’t leave Pip!”

“We’ll come back for her!” I scream, pulling her hand.

“No!”

“Don’t leave me!” Pippa moves onto the bow of the boat. It tips under her weight.

“Pippa—no!” I scream, but it’s too late. She jumps into the river and it closes over her grasping hands like ice, entombing everything but her watery, strangled cry. I remember my vision the day of Pippa’s seizure, of her pulled down into the water. And now, with great horror, I understand at last.

Outraged, the thing howls and the dark races toward us, shrieking.

“Pippa! Pippa!” Felicity shrieks till she’s hoarse.

“Felicity, we’ve got to go—now!”

The wraith is nearly upon us. There’s no time to think. I can only react. I reach the door and pull us through into the caves as the candles flicker and cough with the last of their light. We’re all here, safe and accounted for, it seems. But on the floor, Pippa’s body has gone rigid. It seizes uncontrollably.

Ann’s voice is fluttery. “Pippa? Pippa?”

Felicity is sobbing. “You left her there! You did it!”

The last candle sputters and dies.

“
YOU’VE
GOT
TO
HELP
ME!”

I’m a wild-eyed thing standing outside Kartik’s tent. He doesn’t argue with me, doesn’t say a word, not even when I tell him what’s happened. He hoists Pippa over his shoulder and carries her through the woods all the way to Spence. The only time he stops is when we pass the ravine and the corpse of the deer we’ve left there. He helps us get Pippa to her room, and then I’m racing for Mrs. Nightwing’s door. I bang furiously, calling her name with a desperation I can’t hold back.

Our headmistress throws open the door. Her nightcap is sliding down her long, graying braids. “What on earth? Miss Doyle, what are you doing in your clothes? Why aren’t you in bed?”

“It’s Pippa,” I gasp. “She . . .” I can’t finish, but it doesn’t matter. Mrs. Nightwing has caught the alarm in my voice. She springs into action with that immovable firmness of hers, a quality I’ve never truly appreciated until this moment.

“Tell Brigid to call for Dr. Thomas at once.”

The lights burn through the night. I sit at the window in the library, hugging my knees in my arms, making myself as small as possible. At the edges of sleep, I see her. Wet. Hollow-eyed. Slipping under the smooth surface with a scream for help. I dig my fingernails into my palm to stay awake. Felicity paces past me. She avoids looking at me, but her silence speaks for her.

You left her there, Gemma
.
Alone in that watery grave.

A lantern moves across the lawn. Kartik. The light bobs and shakes in its metal cage. I have to strain to see him. He’s carrying a shovel, and I know that he’s going back to what he couldn’t ignore in the ravine. He’s going to bury the deer.

But whether he’s doing it to protect me or himself, I cannot know.

I sit for a long time and watch the night bruise toward morning, the purple turning yellow, the yellow fading till it’s as if the dark has never marked the skin of the sky at all. By the time the sun peeks over the trees, I’m ready to take one last journey.

“Keep this,” I say, crumpling the crescent eye amulet into Felicity’s hands.

“But why?”

“If I don’t come back . . .” I stop. “If something should go wrong, you’ll need to find the others. They’ll need to know you’re one of them.”

She stares at the silver amulet.

“It will be up to you to come after me.” I pause. “Or close the realms for good. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she whispers. “Promise you’ll come back.”

The scrap of silk from my mother’s dress is soft in my tight fist. “I’m going to try.”

THERE
ARE
NO
BIRDS
. NO
FLOWERS
. NO
SUNSET
.
THERE’S
an eerie grayness to everything beyond the bright door. The empty boat is still on the river, stuck fast in a thin sheet of ice.

“If you want me, here I am,” I shout. It echoes all around me.
I am, I am, I am
.

“Gemma? Gemma!” My mother emerges from behind a tree. Her voice, sure and strong, draws me in.

“Mother?”

Tears spring to her eyes. “Gemma, I was afraid . . . but you’re all right.” She smiles, and everything inside me bends to her. I’m tired and uncertain but she’s here now. She’ll help me set things right.

“Mother, I’m sorry. I’ve made a mess of things. You told me not to use the magic yet, and I did, and now it’s all ruined and Pippa’s . . .” I can’t bring myself to say anything more, can’t even think it.

“Shhh, Gemma, no time for tears. You’re here to bring Pippa back, aren’t you?”

I nod.

“There’s no time to lose, then. Quickly, before the creature returns.”

I follow her past the silver arch, deep into the garden, to the center of those tall crystals that hold so much power.

“Put your hands on the runes.”

I hesitate. I don’t know why.

“Gemma,” she says, green eyes narrowing. “You have to trust me or your friend will be lost forever. Do you want that on your conscience?”

I think of Pippa struggling in the icy water where she fell. Where I left her. My hands hover over the runes.

“That’s it, my darling. Everything’s forgotten now. Soon, we’ll be together again.”

I put my left hand to the rune. The vibration travels through me. I’m weakened from our other trips, and the magic starts to pull me under with its power. It’s too much for me. Mother opens her hand to me. There it is, pink and alive and open. I have only to take hold of it. My arm rises. My fingers reach toward hers, till my skin vibrates with the nearness of her. Our fingers touch.

“At last . . .”

Instantly, the thing that hides in my mother’s shape emerges, rising high as the stones themselves. With a great yell, the creature grabs hold of my arm. I can feel the coldness of it sliding through my arm, into my veins, creeping toward my heart. The heat leaving me. I’m no match for it.

Everything falls away. We’re falling fast together, past the mountain and the churning sky, through the veil that separates the realms from the mortal world. The thing cackles in delight.

“At last . . . at last . . .”

This new magic takes me by surprise as it surges through me, joining to my will. It is overwhelming, the raw nakedness of this power. I never want to let it go. I could use it to control, to wound, to win.

The creature cackles. “Yes . . . it’s intoxicating, isn’t it?”

Yes, oh, yes.
Is this what my mother and Circe felt, what they were afraid of losing—a power they could not have in their own world? Anger. Joy. Ecstasy. Rage. All theirs. All mine.

“We’re almost there,” the thing whispers.

Below me London spreads out like a lady’s fan, ornate and delicate. A city I wanted to see when I lived in India. A city I still want to see. On my own.

The thing senses my discomfort. “You could rule it,” it says, nearly licking my ear.

Yes, yes, yes.

No. Not really. Not attached to this creature. The power would never be mine. It would control me.
No, no, no. Let it win.
Be joined. I’m weary with choice. It makes me heavy. So heavy I could sleep forever. Let Circe win. Abandon my family and friends. Float downstream.

No.

At this the thing seems to grow weaker. You have to know yourself, know what you want. That’s what Mother told me. What I want . . . what I want . . .

I want to go back. And it’s coming with me. Suddenly, London shrinks to a pinpoint, out of reach. I’m pulling the thing back from the world with me, back to the mountaintop, back to the grotto and the runes.

Shrieks and howls, the hideous cries of the damned lash at me. “You tricked us!”

It expands into a ghastly, churning wall that reaches up to the sky. I’ve never seen anything more terrifying, and for a moment, I can’t feel anything but a fear so real I’m frozen there. Those skeletal hands grip tightly around my neck, squeezing. Panicked, I fight back, using the magic to wound it as much as possible. Each time it comes back, taking more and more of my energy.

The hands come around my neck again, but I’ve got very little fight left.