A Drop of Night(32)

When I return to the door, I see the servant. A leg. A hand. He is standing, facing the bedroom door.

I want to curse. Was I too quiet? Does he suspect, does he see that the door is unlatched?

The floor in the boudoir creaks. I glimpse a heel again, a leg. The servant is turning away, moving to another part of the chamber. I ease the door open, barely a fraction of an inch.

I see his back now. It is a man in fine livery, a waistcoat and white stockings. He is clearing away the breakfast dishes, replacing them with marbled wafers and candied fruits that have been cut into bright squares, like soft jewels. He is young. The slope of his shoulders is vaguely familiar to me, as are the brown curls on his head. Have I seen him before?

An unpleasant needling sensation besets my shin. I try to shift my position as delicately as possible. The floor gives the tiniest of creaks. When I look again, the servant is gone.

My eyes dart throughout the room. I did not hear the panel close. Has he gone? He must not escape. Not before I catch him. I wait, frozen in place, gathering the courage to burst into the room. I take a slow breath—

His face appears between the door and the frame, exactly level with my own. Our eyes lock. I rip the door wide and hit him hard across the side of his head with the vase.

He goes spinning to the side, loses his balance, and crashes to the floor. I lunge at him again. He raises an arm in defense. “Stop!” he shouts, and now he seems to remember himself, and says more quietly, urgently: “Stop, Mademoiselle, please.”

I stare at him, wide-eyed. He is the guard. The young guard who tried to save Mama. He is not a day older than I am. I whirl and head for his secret panel. It is closed, but surely not locked.

I tug on it. It does not move.

I go back to the boy who is just starting to stand, wobbly on his legs. I raise the vase again.

“I don’t care who you are,” I say. “I don’t care what they told you. I am held prisoner here. My sisters are lost. You will help me find them.”



It’s a library. Long, dim—a shadowy gallery of books. It’s got that same faint ultraviolet glow that the hall full of razor wires had, just enough to see by, but still somehow pitch-black. The ceiling arches into a map of the heavenly bodies, gold-leaf planets and star creatures against a blue plane. Mahogany bookshelves reach all the way to Cassiopeia’s toes, twenty feet above us. At the end of the library is a massive marble fireplace. The floor is thick with pelts and furs.

Gross. It’s like a freaking Narnian battlefield in here. I swear one of them is a polar bear.

“The doors,” Will says, and we huddle around them, trying to get them locked up. A floor peg is jammed into its rut. That’s all we’ve got. All that’s standing between us and the outside.

“They’re coming!” Jules whispers, high-pitched and panicked, and Will and Lilly start dragging a massive table toward the doors. The noise is excruciating. I run over to help. We lift it the rest of the way and shove it crosswise against the wood. Jules hooks his fire poker through the handles.

We back up, our hands tight around our weapons. My head feels like it’s about to blow off like a firecracker.

I can’t hear anything from the other side of the doors. No footsteps. Nothing but that scratchy, almost subliminal whine. It’s like they stopped right outside the doors, or kept running. The pale man has turned into a weird statue again, his shoulders tense, fingers curled and posed like he’s trying to imitate one of the painted figures in the Sistine Room.

We wait, frozen. Minutes pass. My joints start to feel like chewed-up rubber.

“Are they gone?” Lilly whispers.

Or are they waiting right outside? I imagine them out there, inky figures standing like black pillars, silent and tense.

“I think they kept going,” Will says under his breath. “We should keep barricading the door. In case they come back.”

We break into frantic motion, trying to stay as quiet as possible, but our clothes whisper and the wood floor squeaks. Will stacks a few heavy chairs on top of the table. I climb up them and heave an eight-legged bureau with peacock mother-of-pearl reliefs on top. Then a leather-padded stepladder. A footstool. We climb higher, higher, until the entire twelve-foot-high doors are covered with a grid of furniture.

As I’m scrambling down I hear something from outside. An awful rough, grating sound, like claws on wood.

I freeze, clinging precariously to a chair, one foot dangling in the air. My eyes flick frantically toward Lilly on the other side of the stack.

The sound seems to go on forever, scrrrrtch-scrrrrcth, echoing in the hallway, so close to the other side of the door. And finally it breaks off. It doesn’t pass, doesn’t fade into the distance. It’s just gone.

I hop the rest of the way down, land quietly on the pelt of a wolf. Jules catches my arm and pulls me upright. Mutters in my ear, his breath hot: “You need to talk to him.” He cuts his eyes toward the pale man. “What was that outside? You need to ask him why they brought us down here?”

I nod. Will gestures toward the back of the library and we move farther in, our group splitting around side tables and sofas like water. My feet sink into fur and bristles, skin-crawlingly crunchy. The pale man stays close to me, still limping along, his wounded arm cradled against his chest.

We reach the huge marble fireplace and press ourselves into the shadows of one of its carven pillars. The library is silent. The pale man stands slightly apart from us, staring at the doors. I inch over to him.