The Fairytale Curse (Magic's Return Book 1) (32 page)

Zac was also here, and I nearly turned and chose another room instead.
Don’t be stupid. He’s in half your classes; you can’t start avoiding him
. Besides, I didn’t want to avoid him. Quite the opposite, in fact. The memory of our kiss was still vivid, and there was a Zac-shaped ache in my heart.

If the warders ever got their act together, and I could finally trust that people were who they appeared to be, I could explain it all to Zac. Everything would be different then. I stole glances at his bent head as I worked on my own worksheets. When he was looking down like that his eyelashes were super long and thick against his tanned cheeks.

Sona started chatting to Zac so I moved off to inspect a case full of pottery showing battle scenes. She hadn’t realised yet there was anything wrong between us, but it wouldn’t take her long if he refused to talk to me. Thank goodness she didn’t know about the kiss. She’d seen our little confrontation in the senior study yesterday morning, but she hadn’t put two and two together yet. Her family’s visit from India seemed to be distracting her.

As I moved down the case, reading the descriptions of each vase and plate on display, a distinct smell hit me.

Uh-oh. This wasn’t good. I looked around for Simon. He was standing against the wall looking just like a museum guard, a bored expression on his face. I caught his eye and beckoned him over.

“Can you smell something?” I whispered.

He sniffed, trying not to be too obvious. “No. Something like—?”

“Burnt toffee.”

His eyes widened. Well, at least he wasn’t bored any more. “Where?”

“In this room. I just noticed it.”

Maybe I’d been smelling it for a while, and had just been distracted thinking about other things. I went back to the Athens room to check. CJ was there, busy sketching.

Nope. Nothing.

Back in the Sparta room, the scent seemed even stronger. I was surprised Simon couldn’t smell it.

He raised an eyebrow questioningly, and I shook my head.

“Just in here.”

“Take off your collar,” he said.

“What?” Things hadn’t gone so well last time, as CJ had put it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that out in public.

“It’s blocking your senses.” His voice was urgent. “Take it off and track down the aether.”

Reluctantly, I fumbled with the clasp. “Why can’t you smell it?”

“Don’t know.”

How very reassuring.

I removed the collar and the smell of aether overwhelmed me. Seriously? He couldn’t smell
this
? It was much stronger than the traces I’d caught at Observatory Hill. What was going on?

Simon put his back against the case and watched the room while I followed my nose. The scent seemed strongest at the far end of the case, right in the darkest corner of the room.

“Here?” He joined me. “Damn, I wish I had a Hendrix counter. I can smell something, but it’s very faint. Can you see anything odd?”

I shook my head. Now he expected me to
see
aether as well as smell it? What did he think I was? I put the collar back on so I could talk again.

There was nothing unusual in the room as far as I could tell. Nothing even about this particular corner of it. Half a dozen people wandered around, none of whom were doing anything even remotely suspicious, and a whole bunch of ancient artefacts sat in their cases looking old. There was certainly some ugly pottery in the case in front of me, but ugly was no crime. The Spartans definitely hadn’t had the artistic flair of the Athenians. The pot on the end wasn’t even decorated. It was just a squat black bowl shaped rather like a chamber pot.

A group of the primary school kids came in, using their best stage whispers, and clustered around the case where Sona and Zac were. The naughty redhead was among them. He waved at me and winked.

Odd kid. Was he seriously trying to pick up a high school chick? I turned back to Simon. I had more important things on my mind.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“I’ll call HQ.” He had his phone out already. “We have to get a Hendrix counter in here and possibly some dampener. One of the warders needs to take a look. If there’s a leak we need to slap a seal on it fast before we have a full breach.”

I nodded, not exactly sure what he was talking about, but getting his urgency. Something bad: check. Need back-up: check.

It was hard to think about Ancient History after that, but I turned back to the case while Simon issued instructions into his phone. As usual, there was nothing I could do to help. Given how catastrophic my “helping” had been so far, that was probably a good thing.

Hoplites on an aryballos from Sparta, 500—460 BC
, read the description for the plain black pot. Huh. You’d think they’d get the labels right for a big exhibition like this.

“That’s weird,” I said.

“What?” Simon was instantly on the alert.

“Oh, nothing, they’ve just got the wrong label on this pot, see? It says there’s hoplites on it and it’s completely plain.”

He gave me an odd look. “You can’t see the figures on that?”

“What do you mean?”

“There are men wearing armour and carrying shields, marching all around the sides. The whole thing’s covered. What do you see?”

“Nothing. It’s a plain black pot.”

“Not a decorated jug, with a handle?”

We stared at each other. Oh, this was bad. I took off the collar again, to see if it looked any different, but no.

The boy who’d winked at me had drifted away from his companions. He was behind Zac now.

I blinked. He was nearly as tall as Zac. That couldn’t be right.

I looked closer, and my blood froze. He winked again, but now it was Puck’s face leering at me.

“Hello, Violet.”

“Simon, look out!”

Simon turned as Puck sprang forward. I screamed, and Simon shoved me out of the way.

And then the lights went out.

Every little kid in the place screamed. Some of the big ones too. Emergency lighting flickered on then off again, on and off like some maniacal strobe, as if something fought it. The flashing light showed glimpses of Simon struggling with the Sidhe man, Sona’s shocked face, little kids scattering.

Kyle and CJ ran in from the next room, Miss Moore just behind them.

“Help him!” I yelled to Kyle.

He rushed forward, looking like a jerky robot in the flashes of light. And then, nothing. The next flash showed him crumpled on the floor. Miss Moore stood above him, the strangest look on her face.

In fact, she didn’t look like Miss Moore at all any more. Her eyes burned red as she raised her arms and cried out in a language I didn’t know, her voice rolling like thunder around the room. Her black hair lifted in a wind that no one else felt, streaming behind her, whipping and snapping as if it were alive. And then ravens burst from its strands and dived straight at me. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them, their discordant voices rising even above the roaring of the wind.

I screamed and raised my clipboard above my head. Wings buffeted me. They were everywhere, pecking at my face, my shoulders, my arms with their savage, sharp beaks. Zac waded in to help, swinging his own clipboard with deadly accuracy. He smashed one bird clear across the room.

But it didn’t seem to matter. They kept coming back. Their harsh cries filled the air and feathers flew. I was streaming blood from a dozen places, including a peck to the forehead that came dangerously close to my eye.

Miss Moore—or whoever she really was—raised both arms and the lights finally went out and stayed out. Blue fire crackled around her, like lightning gone mad. I felt a strange tugging sensation deep inside, and my knees sagged as weakness nearly overcame me. All of a sudden the clipboard felt too heavy to hold up. Behind me, glimpsed between a storm of black wings, the ugly little pot began to glow a deep blood red.

Simon staggered. The birds turned their attention to him, and he had trouble fending them off and Puck too. Puck charged him, and caught him low. Simon hurtled backwards and slammed into the display case.

Glass sprayed the room, and pots that were more than two thousand years old shattered into shards. Puck leapt forward and seized the glowing pot, which was untouched by the destruction. As his hands touched it I felt the strange weakness subside, and stood up straighter.

“I have it, mistress!” he crowed.

“Not for long, buddy.”

Like a pro baseballer, Zac batted a bird straight at Puck’s face with his trusty clipboard. Puck yelped and instinctively brought his hands up, dropping the pot. Zac dived forward and caught it before it hit the floor, earning himself some nasty gashes from the broken glass scattered everywhere.

He hurled the pot to me.

“Run!”

I darted forward and caught the glowing pot. A buzz like an electrical charge surged through my hands.

Ravens dive-bombed me as I ran. Miss Moore was still blocking the exit, framed in blue light that sizzled ominously. She raised her hands—

And CJ cannoned into her with a wild yell. They fell to the floor in a spray of blue sparks.

“Run, Vi!”

So I did.

Outside the exhibition there was a bottleneck as a throng of people all tried to push up the stairs at once.

A security guard saw me and the pot I carried. “Hey! Where are you going with that?”

He tried to push through the crowd toward me but the tide was against him. He made little headway against the rush of panicked people. I turned down another corridor. There must be another way out apart from the main stairs.

A raven darted out of the gift shop at me with a raucous cry. I held up the pot to protect my face and felt the impact of the bird’s body, then a sizzle.

What the hell? I lowered the pot. Where was the bird?

The pot’s blood-red glow brightened. I blinked. Had the pot
eaten
the raven? Nasty. Or maybe, since the raven was magical, the pot had gobbled up its magical essence. That was a slightly less horrifying way of looking at it. Handy, though, if I met any more ravens in the semi-darkness. Out here, at least the emergency lights were on.

A hand caught me from behind and I shrieked.

“Vi!”

It was Zac.

“Oh, thank God! You scared me.” I looked past him hopefully. “Where’s CJ? And Sona?”

“Don’t know. I ran after you. Who the hell was that guy? And what happened to Miss Moore?”

Damn Puck, always turning up where mischief was involved.

“He’s a Sidhe—more like, um … a fairy than a person. He’s the one that cursed us with frogs and diamonds.”

He took that better than I’d expected. I guess all the fairytale curses lately had kind of primed people to expect the unexpected where magic was concerned.

“And that wasn’t Miss Moore. If there even is a real Miss Moore.” Looking back, maybe I should have realised. Our Ancient History teacher’s convenient broken leg. All those damn crows and ravens I kept seeing, and her so beautiful and warlike. I knew enough Celtic mythology to guess her identity now I’d seen her in action. “That was the Morrigan, the Celtic goddess of war.”

Okay, that time his eyes boggled a bit, but I couldn’t really blame him.

We found a set of fire stairs and raced up them to ground level. There was a big warning sign in bossy red letters on the door:
This door is alarmed
.

Yeah, you and me both, door
.

Zac shoved it open and we burst out into the sunshine as the alarm began to shrill.

He took my hand and hurried me across the grass to the front of the building. Even in the middle of all this I felt a thrill of excitement at the touch of his hand.

“The Celtic goddess of war?” he asked. “Seriously?”

“Scout’s honour.”

His eyes gleamed with laughter, though the situation really wasn’t funny. Far out. My life had plunged to new depths of insanity.

People were spilling down the front steps of the art gallery in a torrent of panic. I saw some of the primary schoolers in the crowd, and a couple of our classmates. But not Sona or CJ. I scanned the crowd for CJ’s dark head, a knot of fear in my stomach. She’d thrown herself at the Morrigan so I could escape with the pot, and I had a feeling the Morrigan wasn’t going to be too happy about that.

“I don’t get it.” Zac’s face was a picture of confusion. “Where did that guy come from? He just appeared out of nowhere.”

“The Sidhe can do that. They can disguise themselves as anyone. I could be one and you wouldn’t even know. Or you could be.” This was my chance. Surely we wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation if he was one of them? He was bigger and stronger than me; he could have taken the pot if he wanted it. “That’s why I couldn’t contact you over the holidays. When the curses switched at the formal, everyone around us was a suspect. We didn’t know who we could trust.”

“Oh.” He looked down at his feet.

Not quite the reaction I’d been hoping for.

“I guess it was Miss Moore—the Morrigan—all along, but we didn’t know that at the time.

“So you … wanted to ring me?”

“More than anything.”

He looked up then, and his smile melted my heart. “And here I was thinking you were blowing me off.”

“It’s okay. I probably would have thought the same.”

“I’ll make it up to you.” His voice was husky. “Scout’s honour.”

My hormones stood to attention, but now was not the time, with a magical pot glowing fiery red in my arms.

“We need to get this thing somewhere safe.”

He glared at it as I led him away from the Art Gallery. “What the hell do they want with some Spartan pot?”

“If the Morrigan wants it, it’s not some Spartan pot.”

There was really only one thing it could be. The exhibition had come from the Louvre, after all, where our pot was still supposed to be, safely locked away. Somehow, someone had pulled a switch.

“It’s the Dagda’s cauldron.”

We hurried along Art Gallery Road, away from the milling crowds. I kept looking over my shoulder, but there were no signs of pursuit yet. No sign of CJ either. Where could we go? The Rocks was too far, and I wasn’t convinced HQ could provide much protection against one of the most dangerous of all the Sidhe anyway.