Chapter Thirty-Four
The sixth jar contained the glittering silver horn of a unicorn.
About the length of her forearm. To call such an object it seemed wrong, for if a Jewel was a dragon’s heart, then this horn was soul and heart and core of the wounded unicorn sleeping a hundred or so metres away.
She knew, in her own heart, that this was the truth.
The horn leaned on a tilt against the side of the jar.
The tip seemed sharp enough to tear the universe, and the severed edge was like looking at an inverted black hole.
The power pulled at her, sucking at her very essence, and the longer she looked, the more of herself it consumed.
Everything about this was an abomination.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! How could the Beauforts countenance this?
They were good – they rescued creatures. They didn’t do things like this.
Dian’s fingers clamped around her elbow.
‘Why are these here?’ Their voice was a thorn pricking the matter of Frida’s brain and scoring a length.
Moth had found his way into the hollow of Dian’s throat, the sensitive spot where their heartbeat pulsed, and curled himself into a ball, pressed up against Dian’s ashen skin.
She, ridiculously, suddenly wanted nothing more than to do the same.
To curl up around Dian’s warm flesh, to beg them to take her back into the raindrops.
To get them all far, far away from here.
Instead, she just stared, stomach dropping, at the broken spire of the horn that had been ripped from the unicorn’s body.
‘I don’t know.’ She felt herself teetering on the edge of that spiralling black hole.
What kind of people would hold objects like this?
Collectors. Hunters. Poachers. Creature haters.
Self-obsessed scumbag fuck-ups. Somewhere, she felt her carefully built scaffold start to waver, but she shook herself, telling herself to focus.
There was an explanation. There had to be an explanation.
Her gaze darted again and again across the objects.
Looking closer now, she saw how fragile they all were.
The glossy turquoise of the phoenix feather, which had seemed to ripple with the memory of flames – each blue strand as if it might turn to cinders at any moment.
The etched map of the ridged hoof was ancient, white keratin crumbling.
The eyeball’s lightning ready to wink out, and the lung?
It was bloated. Swollen as if it might burst. Ba-boom, ba-boom.
She couldn’t actually hear the weak rhythmic pumping through the glass, yet the sound pounded in every corner of her brain.
‘They’re looking after them, keeping them safe,’ she tried hoarsely, but even as she said the words, they sounded brittle, washed in the afterglow of the dragonflies’ caged sunlight.
Aware that her hands were shaking, she shoved them deep in her pockets.
Dian’s face clouded, the light of the wards giving everything an otherworldly shine, and she bit her lip hard.
‘If it’s not that,’ she stammered, talking as much to herself as to Dian, ‘if it’s something .
. . different . . .’ She couldn’t bear to say worse, but she wasn’t na?ve, she had to admit that the worst might be true.
‘The people who look after this place, they can’t all know about this,’ she said fiercely.
‘This has to be Henry Gladstone’s doing. ’
She’d always been suspicious of the scientist, she told herself.
In his portrait, hanging above the cappuccino machine in the Extraordinary Café, he was pictured in an ornate godly tower, a golden manticore in the background, a globe in his pale hands.
His slick blond hair was smoothed over his high forehead, like the kind of person who’d have an oily sort of voice.
Hamish had always called him the least-likeable of the LEZites.
She shuddered. This wasn’t how you cared for objects that had been rescued.
If they’d simply been in jars, perhaps, but the way they were hooked up?
As if they weren’t being protected at all, but their magic was being sucked out, causing them to wither.
Her eyes darted again, over the set-up. As if .
. . their magic was being converted into creating the wards themselves?
She was shaking so hard, her mind at once considering all the very worst. Could this be what the wards were?
Magic that had been stolen, and twisted and – stored?
She wouldn’t have believed it, if she hadn’t felt it for herself; if she hadn’t seen these jars.
Suddenly, she remembered something she’d read in the library.
Something about hanging a siren’s vocal cords from the rafters and sprinkling ground-up giant’s teeth across your threshold if you wanted to protect against a fairy.
What if this was a version of that? Taking powerful objects and using them in your own protection.
She backed away from the jars. Dian was watching her, their eyes like black coals, as if they could sense her world collapsing.
‘We have to fix this,’ was all she could say, looking to Dian for help.
Something complicated crossed their face, something like pity, just before their pointed ears pricked, swivelling towards the door. The sickly grey staining their cheeks turned positively ivory as they rasped urgently, ‘Someone’s coming.’