Nathan looked to where Marlin sat with Helen. “They certainly look like they’ve become good friends.”
“Jealous?” I asked.
He began to object, but then laughed at himself. “Yes, I suppose I am. I’ve always taken Helen for granted. She’s just always . . . been there. But seeing her like this, well, she’s different.”
“We’re all different,” I said. “How could we not be after all we’ve seen and been through?”
“You most of all,” he said. “How did you explain to Helen how you can get through the Hellgate?”
“I told her it’s because I’m a chime child. I didn’t like to lie, but . . .”
“You’re still not ready to tell her you’re half-Darkling?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Do you really think it would make a difference to her now?”
I looked at Helen laughing with Marlin and trading quips with Sirena. Cam was standing at the prow of the ship with Buzz, her face turned into the wind, her short hair ruffling in the wind. Dolores and Gus were deep in conversation, probably plotting the geometry of sails. Miss Sharp had accepted that Miss Corey was a changeling, and my friends had accepted the Darklings. Why wouldn’t they accept me?
“Maybe,” I said, “it’s because when they know what I am, I’ll have to make a choice between Blythewood and—”
“Raven?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I may already be too late. If he’s gone . . .”
“He’s not,” Nathan said with surprising certainty. “I don’t believe he let that monster eat him when he had you to live for. He’s in there—and we’re going to get him out. And when we do—” He looked at me. “If you choose to be with him, I’ll understand. But he’s not the only one who loves you.”
I stared at him open-mouthed. Was he telling me he loved me? Before I could speak, he barked a sharp order to “come about” and Helen flew into action, ordering everyone to “watch the boom” and hauling on various ropes. The yacht tacked into the wind and leaned toward the left—or port as Helen called it. The changelings struggled to keep up with us in the choppy water.
“We’re at Spuyten Duyvil,” Nathan cried, pointing to a cleft in the cliffs on the eastern bank. I could see the moonlight shining on a stream rushing into the river from between the steep cliffs. This was where the Spuyten Duyvil creek fed into the river. The whirlpool must be near.
The boat suddenly shuddered and keeled sharply to port.
“Strike down the mainsail!” Nathan screamed.
There was a flurry of confusion as Helen barked orders and she and Marlin and Buzz struggled with handfuls of flapping canvas. Nathan ordered the anchor to be thrown over. The boat righted, but it was still moving.
“We’re too close to the whirlpool!” Helen cried. “It’s sucking us in!”
I stared over the prow at the water. About thirty feet in front of us was a circular patch of churning froth where the current of the Spuyten Duyvil intersected with that of the Hudson River. I smelled salt, and guessed that the ocean tide was exerting its own force—a force stronger because of the full moon. The water spun in a circle, looking like a giant mouth, which now opened.
The boat lurched toward it, throwing everyone hither and thither. Mary nearly went overboard, but Sparrow grabbed her. We were being sucked into the swirling maw, which opened and shut with a wet smacking sound like lips, hungry for its next meal. A long wet tongue slithered out of the whirlpool. The salt smell of the ocean mingled now with the stench of rotting fish. Somebody shrieked. Above us Eirwyn let out a high-pitched screech. I heard Gus soothing Dolores by citing the Latin classification—Microcosmus marinus—given to the kraken by Carolus Linnaeus.
Marlin screamed an order, and the Darklings drew their swords and flexed their wings.
“We’ll attack it,” Marlin yelled at Nathan. “You get the boat away and save yourselves.”
But the boat suddenly wasn’t moving. I looked down and saw the changelings swarming around the boat, their arms straining in the moonlight. They were holding the boat back—but they wouldn’t be able to hold it for long.
Miss Corey came to stand next to me. She had stripped down to a slim, stylish bathing costume. She took my hand. Miss Sharp stood next to her.
I stripped off my dress. Underneath I wore the silly bathing costume Helen had brought for me on our outing to Coney Island. With its ruffles and bows, which hid my wings, it seemed a strange outfit in which to meet a monster, but I found it oddly comforting.
I took a deep breath, expanding my lungs as the Darklings had taught me, and, hand in hand with Miss Corey, dove into the maelstrom.
32
REMEMBERING THE SEA around the Titanic I was braced for the cold, but the water inside the whirlpool was bathwater warm. Somehow that was more shocking, as though we’d dived right into the hot, slobbering belly of the beast.
I opened my eyes, struggling to see through the stinging salt water. At first all I could make out was Miss Corey’s face alternately lit by flashes of light and blurred by roiling foam. Then I saw that the flashes of light were the Darklings’ swords as they slashed at the writhing tentacles of the kraken—
Which was right below us.
It was crouched on a rocky outcrop, its flashing silver eyes large as dinner plates. Although it flailed its tentacles at the Darklings, it didn’t move its bulbous body. It didn’t have to. One tentacle wrapped around Sparrow and drew him toward its gaping mouth, but Marlin hacked the tentacle clean off, releasing Sparrow. The kraken writhed at the shock of losing its appendage and pulsed forward to attack Marlin. Miss Corey jabbed her finger down toward the rocks, and I saw that where the kraken had sat was an opening. Marlin saw, too. He dove forward, jabbing the kraken with his sword and then darting back, using his wings like giant fins to backstroke in the water and draw the kraken away from the gap.
We dove toward the moonlit opening. As we reached it I felt something wrap around my ankle. I kicked out and saw a flash of silver as Miss Corey used her dagger to stab the tentacle that was holding onto my leg. When it released me I plunged headlong into darkness.
I could feel that I was in a narrow rock passage, but no moonlight penetrated here. It was too narrow for me to turn and see if Miss Corey was still following me. All I could do was scrabble forward, feeling my way with my hands, every second terrified that I would run into a wall and suffocate before I could get out. The passage seemed to be getting narrower as I went farther, but I reminded myself that full-grown men had gotten through it before me . . .
Unless this was the wrong passage, and it was a trap meant to drown me and Miss Corey below the Hudson River while our friends were slaughtered above me and the lost girls were used in some nefarious scheme and Raven rotted in a dungeon wondering why I never came for him.
Raven.
As if his name had conjured it, my hand touched something soft stuck in a crevice. I drew it out and felt the silky plume of a feather slip through my fingers. I knew it belonged to him. He had survived the kraken and come through the passage. If he could survive it, if I knew he was waiting for me at the end of it, I could make it through.
I swam faster, pulling myself through the tunnel, which widened and then began to tilt upward until I saw a glimmering light above me. My lungs now burning as though they would explode, I raced upward until I burst through the surface. I nearly blacked out from the shock as air rushed into my lungs. When my vision cleared, I was lying in a shallow fountain beneath a marble statue of a giant man—or at least he had the upper torso and head of a man. His lower body was scaled and cloven-hoofed. He brandished a spear in one hand and a conch shell in the other, through which he spit a stream of water, which arched up and then trickled down into the fountain. A spouting devil—a Spuyten Duyvil.
I looked around and saw that I was in a terraced garden that rose from the riverbank u
p to a marble mansion that glimmered in the moonlight as though it were carved out of spun sugar. Marble statues stood in rows, as though they were guarding the mansion. There was something strange about them . . .
A loud splash drew my attention back to the fountain. A head burst through the surface of the water—and then another and another. I dragged a gasping Miss Corey out of the fountain and then went back to help Sirena and Marlin, whose arm, I saw, was badly wounded.
I tore one of the ruffles off the skirt of Helen’s bathing costume and wrapped it around his arm to staunch the bleeding, tying it with a ribbon from the bodice. When I was done he looked at it and grimaced.
“I look like a blasted Christmas present,” he swore.
“We’ll find you a more masculine dressing when we get back to Ravencliffe,” Sirena snapped, surveying the garden, her sword drawn. Miss Corey also held her dagger ready. “I don’t see any guards, but they could be hiding behind any one of these creepy statues.”
“They are creepy,” Miss Corey said. “There’s something wrong about them.” As we walked cautiously up the hill I noticed that their beautiful faces were chipped and marred, as if they had at some time fallen. There were chips in their drapery, too, and some were missing hands or even whole arms—again, as if they had fallen and tried to catch themselves with their outstretched hands.
I heard Sirena gasp. I wheeled around, expecting an attack, but she was standing alone behind one of the statues, running her hands over its marble back. I stepped closer and saw that she was tracing two rough broken ridges in the statue’s back, where something had been broken off.
I checked another statue and another. They all had the same rough ridges on their backs where once there had been wings.
“They’re angels,” Miss Corey said in a whisper. “But all their wings have been broken off . . . why?”
“As a warning,” Marlin snapped, his voice edged with anger. “To our kind. Van Drood’s declared war on the Darklings, and this is his graveyard.”
I looked over the whole hill. The broken angels glimmered dully in the moonlight like a stack of bones. At the foot of the hill stood the muscular devil, spitting from his shell and brandishing his spear—but no, it wasn’t a spear. From this angle I saw that it was a broken wing, and what I’d thought was a conch shell was a broken-off angel head, water spitting out of its gaping mouth.
“Come on,” Marlin said, tugging my arm. “He means to scare us; we can’t let him. There’s an open door here.”
He led us through a pair of French doors that opened into a long shadowy room. Moonlight poured in through the glass doors and windows onto a floor that gleamed like water lapping against the dark banks of the far walls, where I saw a flicker of movement. I startled—and the figure across the room made the same motion.
“Mirrors,” Miss Corey said. “There’s no one here.”
“Or out here,” Marlin, who had gone out into the hall, came back to tell us. “Sirena’s searching the rest of this floor. As soon as you de-ward the house I’ll go alert your friends.”
We followed Miss Corey across the mirrored hall, our reflections in the mirrors dark twins, and into a foyer dominated by a sweeping grand staircase and mirrored walls lit by a domed skylight. She walked across to the front door, opened it, and stood outside.
We’d rehearsed this. It was the simplest of de-warding spells but required two people to perform. One stood outside of the threshold while one stood inside. We joined hands over the threshold and recited the words Venite, amici. Come in, friends. I felt a shiver of energy as we performed the spell, and then that shiver seemed to go through the whole house, like a cat shaking water from its fur. For a moment I saw the house as it would appear to anyone entering it from the front door—an abandoned ruin. But then it reappeared as the gleaming mansion.
“There,” Miss Corey said to Marlin. “That should do it. You can bring back the others.” Marlin was already out the door. Miss Corey watched him go with a worried look on her face.
“Why don’t you go down to the street to see if they’re coming,” I said, guessing that she would be anxious to see if Miss Sharp was all right.
She smiled at me and then was gone, slipping fast and silently into the shadows. I turned back into the foyer . . . and heard a tiny plinking noise that might have been rain falling. Only it was a cloudless night, and the plinking had a rhythm to it—a familiar rhythm. Sirena was standing at the foot of the stairs listening to it, too. Wordlessly she started up the stairs and I followed, the sound growing stronger. I recognized it as one of the waltzes from Die Puppenfee, only it was being played slowly, as if on a broken player piano. I pictured a corps of tired ballerinas, their feet bloody, dancing to the broken tune. The whole mansion smelled like cold ash, and the mirrors that lined the stairway were clouded as if stained by smoke. Our reflections looked like wraiths in the smoky mirrors, as if we were already dead.
I drove the thought away and followed Sirena down a long mirrored hallway (thinking that the owner of this house must be very, very vain). The music was coming from the room at the end. The other rooms off the hall were empty. Glancing into them I saw scraps of clothing lying on the floors, as if the place had just recently—and suddenly—been abandoned. The stink of ash was stronger up here.
Sirena checked each room, dagger in hand. I wished I had my repeater with me, but I hadn’t been able to bring it through the water. When Sirena came back she confirmed that the rooms were empty.
“They’ve been burning papers in the fireplaces—to conceal clues to where they’ve gone, I wager.”
We moved down the hall toward the tinny music. It came from the last room on the right. As we entered it I noticed a ribbon lying on the floor and smelled the ash in the fireplace. The music came from an open box on a table by the window. I crossed over to it and saw that it was a music box, the kind that had a tiny ballerina inside that pivoted with the motion of the musical mechanism. It was twirling slowly now as the mechanism wound down, its motions jerky and somehow sickening to watch. I moved to close the lid to put the poor thing to rest, but my hand brushed something soft inside the box. I withdrew a downy black feather.
“That’s Raven’s!” Sirena said, snatching the feather from my hand. “I can smell him. What’s it doing here?”
As much as I disliked her taking the feather from me—and how did she know his smell so well?—I was more interested in the folded note in the bottom of the box.
He’s in the dungeons, it read in Daisy’s handwriting.
Then I was running back through the mirrored hallway and flying down the grand staircase, its slick steps too many to bother with. As I ran I heard a high-pitched keening. For a moment I thought I was making the sound, but when I reached the foyer I saw it was Eirwyn, who had flown into the house and was battering her wings against a closed door. I wrenched it open and we plunged into dank blackness, Eirwyn diving straight down and me hurtling behind her so fast I tore my feet on the rough stone. Instead of calling out in pain I screamed Raven’s name, which echoed in the vaulted space, mocking my desperation. But when I paused for breath I heard that the echoes weren’t saying “Raven”; they were calling “Ava.” I ran toward the voice—which was so weak and broken I could only hear it because I’d opened my Darkling ears. Even then it was only a whisper. A dying whisper.
No. He couldn’t die just as I found him. That would be too cruel—but then I knew that was what this place did—what van Drood did. He broke things. He broke people. And if he wanted to break me—which he did—what better way than to have me find Raven just in time to catch his dying breath?
Only it had been Daisy who led me to him, Daisy who had remained whole enough—unbroken enough—to leave me that message.
“Raven!” I called for him. There was no light, so I had to feel my way across each foul, slimy cell, my hands brushing cold metal implements embedded in the wa
lls that made me shake with horror. But he wasn’t in any of them. I stopped and called his name again. Something brushed against my face. I screamed out, but then I heard Eirwyn’s cries echoed by another falcon’s call. It was Gwynfor, her mate. I felt along his matted feathers and found that he was tethered to an iron ring in the floor. He was squawking and beating his wings so frantically I was afraid he would injure himself.
“Be still,” I murmured, “and I’ll let you free.”
In reply he squawked again and suddenly I understood him.
Buried, he was crying over and over, buried.
I sank to my knees and crawled over every inch of the cell, tearing at the rough stones until my fingers bled. Finally I found a stone that rocked loose in my hands. I clawed it up, releasing a foul stench, but also a whisper.
“Ava?”
I reached down and touched mangled flesh and bone and feather. I wanted to scream, but instead I took a steadying breath and spoke with all the calmness and strength I could muster. “Raven, I’m here. Marlin and Sirena are here, too. We’ll get you out—I just can’t . . . see . . .”
He made a noise that I thought for one horrifying moment was a death rattle, but then realized was a chuckle.
“That . . . may . . . be a b-b-blessing,” he stuttered. “I d-d-don’t b-believe I am a . . . pretty sight.”
“Oh, neither am I!” I cried, prying loose another stone. “Would you believe I’m wearing one of Helen’s bathing costumes?”
Another gurgle—and the sound of footsteps, and two voices calling my name.
“We’re here!” I shouted to Sirena and Marlin. “Raven’s here. I need help . . . and light.”
“T-tell me . . .” he croaked, his voice as creaky as rusted iron.
“Tell you what?” I asked, finding his hand and grasping it. “How much I love you? How I plan to spend the rest of my life with you, no matter where we have to go?”