Chapter Thirty-Six
The sky has turned to dark ash. The sun is coming, and I am running.
I will find the Queen and stop Roze from offering himself. The Mirror is gone—the Queen’s power is untethered, unfocused, crippled. I know now that I can face her—that whatever untrained power rests in my bones has to be enough. I only need to find her.
I have no idea where the Queen might be, where Roze might be. The castle is enormous, and that’s to say nothing of Vandenberghe across the glass bridge. They could be anywhere.
Annie.
I freeze. Ice slides down my back. No. I thought this was over with—that this waking nightmare ended after I had that vision of the woods. Slowly, I turn to face the direction I came.
There, half-obscured in the darkness of the hall, is the ghostly image of my little brother. He looks almost solid now, halfway between ghost and boy. His precious face stares at me with dead, unfeeling eyes.
Backing up a step, I whisper, “What do you want?”
Annie.
His mouth moves as he says it, but the sound seems to come from everywhere and from inside me, his childlike voice ringing through my very soul.
“Please,” I choke. “I can’t—not now.”
I need to help Roze. I don’t have time for another delay.
ANNIE.
My brother’s voice is insistent, his little eyes wide now.
“I’m sorry,” I plead. “I’m sorry for what I did to you. Please, I have to go.” I back up another step. I turn to leave, and his voice cuts through the darkness once more.
“He’s in the auditorium.” This time his voice is natural, human. My heart skips a beat and I look back at him. His face is pale, but more solid than ever. His chest rises and falls like he’s truly breathing. “Tell him the truth, Annie. Tell him everything.”
My face feels numb. For several moments I don’t respond.
“Annie—”
“Okay.” I’m not sure what makes me say it—whether it’s because I know I want Roze to know me, everything I’ve learned about myself, everything I’ve been through, or because I can’t say no to my brother when it feels like I’m looking at the real him for the first time since I was small.
My little brother smiles at me—a smile that I can barely remember from long ago. “Sorry I took your locket.” The note of sadness in his voice is unmistakable. “Bye, Annie.” And then he’s gone—vanished like he was never there.
I blink several times, and Waffles whimpers at my feet, staring up at me. Somehow it was easier to deal with seeing my brother’s face when I thought of him as a ghost haunting me, but whatever this was, it wasn’t meant to scare me. Seeing him—it was torture. It was healing.
I scrub away stray moisture in my eyes and take a deep breath. “Come on, Waffles,” I say, and I continue my descent down the winding passages of the castle, now with a direction—Moody Hall, the auditorium of Vandenberghe.
I sprint through the halls of the school, Waffles at my heels, flying past stained glass and Corinthian columns, looking for any sign of the Queen’s spirit or Roze.
But when I pass the dining hall, I freeze. Breakfast has started. Some students are out of bed, nursing cups of tea and oat toast in their seats. Except … they aren’t moving.
I step closer, but don’t dare step inside.
It’s like time is suspended. Eyes are open, but they don’t blink.
Tea is half poured, hanging in the air over empty cups.
I look down and notice—for the first time—black, thorned vines creeping along the ground.
They trail in the corners, crawling over seats, winding up over furniture, and twisting around students’ legs.
Once, all the Queen cared about was maintaining control and the respect of her people.
She relished the formality of Court—the etiquette, the balls, the fashions.
Now she’s a wild thing, the power within her consuming her.
I remember what King León said about magic being driven to greater and greater heights, how without the dark, the light becomes sick, and vice versa.
Whoever Queen Maria once was, she is something entirely else now.
I follow the vines with my eyes—they’re growing toward me, their source somewhere deeper in the castle.
I force myself to turn away from the dining hall, away from the students caught up in the Queen’s magic, and follow the path of the vines.
They grow thicker as I move down the hall, occasionally punctuated by roses of such a deep red that they’re almost black.
Waffles begins to hunch his shoulders, a low growl in his throat.
Soon, I struggle to step through the vines and have to climb on top of them.
The thorns tear at my shins and skirt. Finally, we reach their source—Moody Hall, the auditorium where I have spent countless hours for schoolwide events.
The doors are gone, ripped away by vines as thick as my legs, those sinister roses blooming everywhere.
I peer around the arched doorway, and air freezes in my lungs.
Every inch of the room is covered in briars, snaking over chairs, clinging to chandeliers, ripping through the banners of each house and covering the crest of the school that hangs above the stage.
The floor is so thick with them that it’s hardly visible.
And of course, it’s all spotted with roses of deep blackish red.
I sat in the auditorium’s worn, wooden seats my first day at Vandenberghe, so in awe of the school and its history that I could almost cry.
And now the hall is covered in the Queen’s strange growth, a monstrous garden, barely recognizable.
There’s no sign of anyone, but this is certainly where the vines are coming from.
I take careful steps inside, Waffles flying close to my shoulder.
There’s something on the wall, between the high windows.
It’s small—hardly visible—but it can’t be roses.
It’s a pale cream color, mostly obscured by branches.
I climb over several huge vines to get a better look, reach up to grab hold of the branches on the wall, pull myself up until my face is level with—
I fall back, a scream caught in my throat, landing painfully on a thorny branch. My stomach roils—there, barely visible through the vines, is Ed’s face.
His eyes are closed, skin pale, and blood is trickling down his forehead and from his mouth. The vines hold his body against the wall, leaving just his face visible.
And then I notice the others. My eyes pass over the rest of the wall, and I make out each one of them, almost completely obscured in growth—the rest of the Grimmstones.
Are they dead? No, no they can’t be.
Saints, I told them to find Roze. I sent them here. This is my fault.
A woman’s voice, eldritch and echoing, breaks the silence. “Miss Sinclair.”
The Queen.
Her voice, unmistakable in its coldness, says my name like it’s a sin. But I don’t see her anywhere.
“I’m here for Roze,” I call. The fear doesn’t control me anymore—it’s a part of me now. “Where is he?”
“My son is safe from you,” she says, the sound coming from everywhere all at once.
A movement by the stage catches my eye. I squint. A pool of water begins to billow from the floor like from a spring, pitch black, a void. A head emerges from the pool, then a pair of shoulders.
Belladonna.
She rises from it like she’s suspended, her hair long and stringy, her eyes sunken and red-rimmed. She looks up toward me and grins, cruel and inhuman.
My breath hitches. What happened to her? She looks so different from just a day ago—like she’s several days dead.
She tilts her head up, and for a second, I know I’m looking into the eyes of the daughter, not the mother. Her eyes are wild and desperate, and her mouth forms a word that her voice doesn’t produce—Help.
Then her head snaps back. And slowly, she lowers her gaze to me. This time, when she speaks, the Queen’s voice is back. “Hello, Miss Sinclair,” she says.
Waffles charges, his claws tearing through thorny vines as he attacks, launching himself into the air toward her.
Belladonna merely raises an eyebrow. “Enough of you, foul creature.”
She waves, and I hear a heartbreaking, world-ending whimper, and Saint Waffles’s form freezes midair. His eyes are open, his mouth frozen in a snarl, his teeth and claws bared.
He falls to the ground, thumping on the steps. She’s turned him to stone.
Waffles.
Rage wells within me. “You’re going to regret that,” I snarl.
I’m the other side of the coin, the equal to the Queen’s power. I have the secret of the Book of Odds now, the secret to end the Mists, end her. I just need to figure out how I can do it without hurting the Grimmstones or—Saints help me—Belladonna. And I need to find Roze.
I glance out the windows. The sky is still a deep ashen gray—the sun hasn’t risen. There’s still time. There has to still be time.
“My power has allowed me to do unspeakable things,” the Queen says through Belladonna, stepping out of the pool and sauntering toward me.
The vines don’t obstruct her path—she passes through them like water.
I back up a step unconsciously, and she observes the hands that don’t belong to her, the hands that she controls, like she’s trying on a body.
“But my daughter serves me willingly. All my children do. Even the wretched Prince.”
“Where is he?” I spit.
“You want to see him?” says the same voice, but from a different direction.
To my left, Princess Wisteria emerges from a second pool of water like a marionette.
Her eyes are just as deep and bloodshot as her sister’s, glazed over like she’s been through something harrowing.
She too speaks with the dead Queen’s voice.
“Fair warning—he’s looking rather wan. Finally, he appears as weak on the outside as he’s always been on the inside. ”
A giggle echoes through the room, and I twist to my right as another princess emerges from a pool of water—Oleandra.
“Oh, poor little Viola,” she says in the Queen’s voice. “How you’ve underestimated the hopelessness of your situation.”