Chapter 26
By rights, he ought to be able to break free of the simulacrums and their spindly limbs easily enough.
But he couldn’t. His own human strength was sufficient to throw off a few of them, but there were simply too many.
They threw themselves on top of him, piling up until he was so crushed, he feared his lungs would collapse for lack of air.
Only once they had him thoroughly compressed did they back away again, and Calista stepped forward.
Crouching with surprising grace and poise in her high heels, she looked down on him where he lay on the sidewalk, gasping.
Then she extended one hand and placed her palm against his forehead. Her flesh was very cold and dry.
“You are going to take me to this flower shop of yours,” she said. “And you are going to show me where you have hidden your father’s garden. Now.”
Nigel tried to shake his head, to throw off her hand.
But she spoke a single dark word in a damned language, which made his body go limp and jelly-like.
From the corner of his eye, he saw one of her simulacrum’s shrivel up and disintegrate, which told him at once from whence she’d sourced her power.
She was happy to use her own creations up like batteries, and this, more than anything, disturbed him.
Like he’d just borne witness to an uncanny form of infanticide.
He felt her moving around roughly inside his brain. Ordinarily, he would have been able to resist an intrusion like that, cast her from him with a blast of repulsion that left her body and soul scorching. But without his own sorcery to counter her spell, he was helpless.
“What is this?” she murmured, frowning with consternation. His lack of resistance unsettled her. “What happened to you, Grimm? You’re like a racehorse with a broken leg.” Her lip curled. “Pathetic.”
She shuffled through his memories without care for how she tore his brain with her clumsiness.
Yet another demonstration of her power without skill.
Nigel felt the debris littering the space of his mind, all the little pieces she pulled out and discarded as she rifled through images, impressions, thoughts, feelings.
“Ah!” she said at last. “There it is. Addle Street.”
She rose then and motioned to the simulacrums. Three of them closed in. Two grasping his arms, the third scruffing him by the collar like a helpless kitten, they lifted him from the sidewalk, and he hung suspended before his enemy, his body limp and dangling.
“Take me to Addle Street, Nigel Grimm,” Calista commanded.
She touched his forehead then with the tip of her finger and spoke a word of dire injunction.
Another simulacrum popped out of existence as the spell manifested and entered his head.
Nigel felt the compulsion of obedience overwhelming him.
He could not move to obey as bidden, but it didn’t matter.
His mind immediately turned to the route he would have taken home—Seething Lane to Ingle Pie and on to Nettleton.
The simulacrums, looped into his brainwaves with crude lines of magic, turned him about and floated with him between them.
The other simulacrums flowed in on all sides, surrounding Nigel and Calista Anguish in a dense cloud of churning, anti-glitter-swathed horror.
Calista moved with perfect confidence in the darkness of the city streets.
With her small gang of unnatural phantoms, she was by far the most frightening thing to be found anywhere in Ballycastle that night.
It was incredible how many of these poorly-wrought creations she had at her beck and call.
There must be numerous powerlines drawn from the Dire on which to hang all these lifeforces.
An incredible work of sorcery, even if poorly crafted.
One had to give Calista her dues. What the formidable Miss Quick might have been had she completed her education and gone on to study at Nocturnus, Nigel shuddered to imagine.
They encountered no one as they progressed through the dark streets.
It was late now and bitterly cold. Even the most dedicated wardsmen had drifted away to warmer places, leaving the city to fend for itself.
Nigel wondered idly, as he floated along, suspended in the arms of those manufactured fiends, if Luna had made it home all right.
Or was she still out with Ward? Perhaps she wouldn’t go home at all tonight.
Perhaps their date would run right over into the next day.
He hoped so. He hoped she stayed close to her handsome wardsman.
Please, he thought, his mind forming the words in something like a prayer, let her stay with him.
Let him protect her. Let him be the hero she needs.
They took the turn from Nettleton onto Addle Street, a writhing mass, moving with terrible silence.
Somewhere in the distance, Nigel could hear the street fiddler playing a forlorn melody to the stars themselves.
He wondered vaguely if a fiddler’s bow would be any use against a horde of simulacrums. But the song was far away, and there was no help to be had from that quarter. He was on his own.
“The Arcane Bouquet.” Calista read the sign out loud and scoffed with eloquent derision. “How very quaint.”
They crossed the empty street and all too soon stood under the awning.
Calista turned to Nigel where he hung suspended in the arms of her creatures and began a hasty search of his pockets.
She found what she sought and withdrew a small set of keys from his trouser pocket.
Nigel’s heart throbbed with helpless terror as she shoved a key into the lock, turned.
There was a little click, and the door swung open to a tinkle of brass bells.
Nigel couldn’t remember a time when those bells had ever sounded so ominous.
When the bells ceased, however, all was silent within. No croak of greeting from Debbie; she’d probably gone up to bed. The flowers were all still and subdued in their pots and platters and basins.
Calista stood on the threshold for some moments, sniffing delicately.
What she searched for among the varied perfumes of all those blossoms, Nigel could not guess.
Did she think she could sniff out the sorcery he’d used to hide Garden?
That would be amateur work indeed! His spells were far more subtle than that, and certainly left no stink behind.
She turned to him at last, her eyes narrow. “Have you no guard on the premises?”
He could not answer, not paralyzed as he was. But she placed a hand on his forehead and dragged the response she needed directly from his mind. He gave her the truth readily enough: Only the flowers.
Her lip curled. “Pathetic.” Withdrawing her hand, she shook her head. “I take back what I said earlier. I cannot for the life of me understand what the Shadowbane Lady saw in you. In the end, you’re still that sniveling little boy in a bowtie you always were.”
Nigel’s head was too heavy, his face too slack with the spell she’d placed on him to offer any reaction.
“You first,” Calista said and, with a wave of her arm, sent the simulacrums gliding over the threshold.
They hastened to obey, some oozing strangely, while others made a bizarre, ratcheting, clacking sort of noise, their bodies jerking with the effort of animation.
Soon The Arcane Bouquet was packed with more than a dozen hideous, wafting phantoms, which darted here and there, inspecting behind the counter, behind every pot and plant.
The three supporting Nigel carried him through next.
It was not quite dark within—Luna had taken care to turn off all the lights save the lamp behind the desk.
This she’d thoughtfully left on to greet him when he returned from his date.
Luna.
Oh, Green Mother, please don’t let her come back here! Send her a warning somehow!
Calista Anguish stepped inside last of all, not bothering to close the door behind her.
She peered around the shop, her eyes on alert.
Nothing but flowers met her gaze, even as Nigel had said.
She turned to him again. “Where is it?” she demanded, stretching out her arm and placing her palm to his forehead once more. “Where is your father’s garden?”
He tried to resist, but it was useless. Without even the most rudimentary counter spell at his disposal, he could not stop her from simply yanking the information she required straight from his brain.
It hurt, but he couldn’t cry out, could only utter a low, involuntary moan.
Calista made no effort to be gentle. Perhaps she simply didn’t know how.
But she got what she wanted, however inelegant her technique.
Nigel felt the secret of the boiler room door pass from his head into her palm.
“Ah!” She smiled like a tiger. “Of course. In the back. A simple portal spell.”
If Nigel’s tongue wasn’t currently a loose, floppy piece of meat in his mouth, he might have argued that there was nothing simple about that spell, but . . . alas.
Calista dragged the location of the key from his mind next.
Leaving him to the simulacrums, she stalked across the shop to the storage room and disappeared within.
While she was there, Nigel cast his gaze about the display floor, searching for a particular set of blooms. They were nowhere to be found, however.
Even the pot was empty. Nigel averted his gaze quickly and drew a slow breath into his nostrils, trying very hard not to give away anything.