Chapter 18
Jagger, as in most things, was right.
The conjurers were coming to dinner.
After the violent destruction of their ancestral homes, Jagger had sent out an army of slipshots to find and deliver invitations to the Bards, the Clarks, and the Wards. The Bards and the Clarks had accepted. The Wards couldn’t be found.
Since the moment Griff, Justice, and I had returned to Hell Gate reeking of anise and smoke, everyone had been in a state of glee-filled terror.
It was that sharp euphoria that extended just beyond the edges of fear.
It was probably exactly what mice felt when they were clutched in an eagle’s talons, soaring over endless green fields: they’d moved beyond fear and were now blissfully viewing the world from on high.
What did it matter that death was only seconds away?
They were flying, while every moment before that, they’d merely crawled on the ground.
The euphoric terror had a specific taste.
Surprisingly, it was the exact taste of Rou’s cinnamon and clove roast ham, raisin and brown sugar sweet potatoes, and seaweed and vinegar salad.
The smells from Rou’s kitchen permeated Hell Gate, bitter seaweed and sweet caramelized sugar, the taste of a mouse’s dying whimper.
Hell Gate, though, had always thrived on the ecstasy of fear, death, and pain, so it wasn’t unusual that the hall and all its denizens would be so aroused.
The consensus among all of Jagger’s creatures was that the conjurers would either align with Hell Gate or crush it.
Both were terrifying prospects in their own right.
It was incredible that the Bards and the Clarks had accepted Jagger’s invitation.
For centuries, conjurers had ignored creatures of mud and blood, figments, spirits, and leggerocks.
A conjurer accepting a leggerock’s dinner invitation was like the aforementioned eagle accepting a mouse’s invite for tea.
It was just as likely the eagle would eat the mouse as the tea cakes it served.
Jagger wasn’t concerned at all though. His gloating happiness filled Hell Gate in a perfumed fog.
“You see what I’ve done,” he boasted. “Push someone into a corner, destroy all exits, and then kindly open an escape hatch for them? They’ll take it. Every time. In their hurry to flee, they won’t bother to see that the escape hatch leads into a dragon’s open mouth.”
“If we’re the dragon,” I said, tired from a night of fire and sore-hearted from seeing Luvic, “we’d better hope that when we swallow the conjurers, they don’t poison us.”
Jagger laughed. He was in a buoyant, jubilant mood I’d never seen before. “They won’t. I’ve hinted we have the only means to defeat the Smith and retrieve their crown.”
Me.
He meant me.
The smile he gave was full of smug satisfaction.
It left me with a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I’d eaten sour yogurt and was going to be sick.
It stayed even when I slept, tossing and turning through the morning and the early afternoon.
It stayed after I ate a quick lunch in the kitchen and asked Harry the slipshot which families had accepted Jagger’s invitation.
The queasy feeling only left when I found a black silk dress hanging on my door with a note in Jagger’s hand: Wear this.
The queasiness was replaced with cold resolve. Even the terror-tinged euphoria leaking through the halls lessened its hold.
I immediately recognized the dress for what it was.
My unveiling.
* * *
I glided down the stone hall in the diaphanous black silk gown, a dark thundercloud sweeping across the gray skies.
I hadn’t taken much time to look at myself since becoming a mine.
Every time I did, I could only see my dad staring back at me.
A Ward. It gave me a strange disjointed feeling, as if I didn’t know myself at all.
It was disorienting to see the evidence of someone else in the mirror.
My features had always been forgettable. I was made to be the indeterminate shade of everything and everyone, so I was nothing and no one. How had I described Philoneas? As a boringly average middle-school teacher? It was surprising I’d never realized the connection. I was exactly the same.
The dress flew around me, catching air currents and billowing in sweeping clouds. It was beautiful, which it was supposed to be, but in the way venomous snakes were beautiful.
Strapless. Floor-length. Cut low in a sharp sweetheart neckline that offered my chest to anyone stupid enough to take their eyes off mine. A quartet of silk panels slit to my upper thighs, flowing around my legs, giving tantalizing glimpses of everything.
The silk fell over my skin, caressing me with soft whispers. The last time I’d worn a silk dress, Finn and I had danced. That dress had felt like kisses. Like a prelude to love.
The smooth glide of this gown didn’t feel like kisses; it felt like seductive glide of silk chains as they wrapped around you.
The dress had taken my forgettable, average features, wrapped them in silk, and turned me into an erotic nightmare.
Every creature, living being or spirit, fled from my path. I’d never seen the halls cleared so quickly. It’s interesting what becoming a mine will do.
I wondered if the Clarks or the Bards would be as intimidated. Doubtful.
I held up my hand to knock on Jagger’s door and heard the muffled tail end of his conversation.
“. . . will give her to you if you succeed.”
“That’s not what I want.”
That was Justice. His voice was quieter than Jagger’s, as if he were standing on the far side of the office.
I leaned forward, carefully pressing myself closer to the door. I kept my breathing slow and even and my mind as clear and calm as the surface of a glassy lake. Sometimes, I wondered if Jagger knew someone was close by sensing their fear or agitation.
“But it is,” Jagger drawled, using the voice that meant he was dangling a gift in front of someone.
You didn’t reject Jagger’s gifts—even when they hurt you.
“You forget, I saw you the night the rag man dropped her at our gate. Three years old, and you looked on her as if she were the sun in your dark, dingy world. All you’ve ever wanted is her. Succeed, and I’ll give her to you.”
There was silence for so long I wondered if Justice had nodded and accepted Jagger’s word. Maybe they were now only waiting for me to arrive.
But then Justice said in a cold voice, “I’d rather she were dead than mine by your will.”
I waited, breath held, expecting Jagger to erupt in a rage. To punish Justice. Instead, his rocklike laugh tumble through the door.
“She would be yours by my will, but she would still be yours. Don’t be so quick to reject my gifts, Justice. It makes me angry—”
“What are we listening to?”
I whirled around at the loud whisper, my heart leaping.
Winnie was standing behind me, a knowing smirk on her heart-shaped face.
I pressed my hand to my chest and willed the frantic beat to slow.
I hadn’t seen much of Winnie since waking as a mine. It wasn’t that she avoided me like Griff and Justice—she just wasn’t in residence. She came and went as she liked, and no one, not even Jagger, said anything about it.
She was the monster that monsters were afraid of.
She was the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the executioner’s tree.
Tears swept through her leaves; weeping rattled her branches; death prayers soaked into her bark.
Executions hold a lot of power and a lot of emotion—none of them pleasant—and Winnie’s tree drew them in like minerals from the soil.
When her tree had died, she was born. When she spoke, it sounded like grief.
Like the last dry leaves on a dying tree about to be ripped free by the wind.
Most creatures avoided her. Even Jagger. It was uncomfortable being around someone born from the pain of hundreds of deaths. Winnie had a way of looking at you like she’d seen all your nightmares and had already heard all the pleas you’d utter in your last breath.
I smiled, and her own smile grew.
“Are we eavesdropping?” she whispered.
“No,” I mouthed, shaking my head.
I wondered if she realized the conjurers were coming tonight. They’d be here in less than an hour. Would she stick around for the party?
“Too bad,” she said, her voice still quiet. “I love eavesdropping. You always learn things you wish you never had. It’s full of regret.” And then she added, as an afterthought, “Do you know how many people have regrets when they die?”
I shook my head.
Her eyes lit up, a frozen black expanse. “Almost all of them.” She took a small step forward and pressed her ear to Jagger’s door. “Oh. Justice is still alive. You didn’t return his knife. Huh.”
Winnie was small, as if the writhing mass of grief could only be contained in a tiny urn.
Since she was hundreds of years old, I’d only ever known her as an adult.
When I turned eleven and hit a towering four foot eleven, I surpassed her in height.
She kept her black hair in a messy pixie cut and had wide-set dark eyes.
You might think her adorable features put people at ease, but the opposite was true.
She frowned at something she heard and then shook her head. “That’ll come back to bite him.”
“What?” I whispered.
She waved off my question, listening through the wood. A slow smile spread over her face, hollowing out a dimple in her left cheek.
“Did you know I was there when the passenger pigeon’s died?”
I blinked. “No.”
She nodded, her hand still pressed to Jagger’s door. “1883. Jagger was there too. There were billions of them, you know? They flew in flocks of hundreds. Thousands. Everyone says, ‘Oh, they were hunted to extinction.’ But that’s not what happened. Not really.”
Winnie paused, looking up at me, maybe making sure I was paying attention. I nodded and bent my head so I could hear her bare-branch whisper better.