Only a Monster(Monsters #1)(52)

‘What device?’ Joan said. They were so close to learning what she needed to know. If there was a way to get her family back, she had to have it.

‘All I can tell you is that it’s held at a place called the Monster Court.’ Ying was still looking at her with that new attention. ‘The seat of the King’s power. And you don’t need to ask me how to get to it.’ He picked up the necklace, and, to Joan’s surprise, placed it back into her hand, coiling it slowly before letting the end drop. ‘You have a key.’

Joan stared at him.

Ying stood up. ‘We’ll call on you when we need a favour,’ he said.





TWELVE




Joan and Aaron walked away from the Liu family gallery. Joan couldn’t stop touching the necklace Gran had given her. Could it actually be a key to the Monster Court? The seat of the King’s power?

‘You talked about the King when we first arrived,’ Joan said to Aaron as they walked.

‘Get that pendant out of sight,’ Aaron said, clipped. He was very tense. He’d insisted on walking back by a different route, and now he was checking over his shoulder.

‘Why didn’t Ying take it?’ Joan wondered. She tucked it carefully under her jumper. ‘I offered it to him.’

‘He probably didn’t want it anywhere near him,’ Aaron said. ‘And neither do I.’

They reached an intersection. Joan pressed the button at the lights. Aaron’s fingers twitched, as if standing still were intolerable.

‘Why are you so scared?’ Joan asked him.

‘We need to get back to the market,’ Aaron said. His mouth was tight, and the pale press of his lips reminded Joan of how ill he’d looked when Ruth had spoken of seeing Court Guards at the hospital.

‘Who is he king of?’ Joan said. ‘All the monsters of England?’

Aaron didn’t seem to want to answer. When he did, it was curt. ‘Our borders don’t match what you’d think of as countries,’ he said shortly. ‘They were drawn in a different time.’

What you’d think of as countries. Joan had that feeling again of seeing a crack through a curtain—a glimpse of another world. There was so much she didn’t know—so much Gran had never told her.

A red Royal Mail van trundled past them. Aaron tracked it until it had turned the corner. He was watching every car that passed. The lights changed. ‘Come on,’ Aaron said. He’d already started walking.

‘Aaron—’ Joan said.

‘Keep walking,’ Aaron said. He waited for Joan to catch up. ‘The King is never seen,’ he said, still curt. ‘He rules through the members of the Monster Court: the King’s arms and executioners. We sometimes call them the Curia Monstrorum.’

Joan matched her pace to Aaron’s. She tried to make sense of the pieces she had. The monster world had a hierarchy of authority. Ruth had talked about Court Guards; Joan guessed they were something like police officers. Above them were the members of the Monster Court. And above them, the King himself.

The King is never seen. Joan imagined an invisible presence that permeated the monster world. ‘Do you think it could be true?’ she asked Aaron. ‘What Ying said? Do you think the King once changed the timeline? Do you think he erased the true timeline with a device?’

Aaron shot another reflexive look over his shoulder. ‘Don’t say things like that,’ he hissed. He caught Joan’s confused expression. ‘True timeline,’ he clarified. ‘Don’t say those words in public.’

They were walking alone beside the road. Hardly public. And Ying hadn’t seemed afraid to say them. ‘No one can hear us,’ Joan said.

Aaron looked around before he spoke, and when he did, his voice was soft, as if he was afraid they might be overheard, even though there was clearly no one in earshot. ‘There is only one timeline. The King’s timeline,’ he said. ‘Events are just as he wishes them to be. To speak of another timeline, to call it the true timeline . . . it’s dangerous. It’s—it’s blasphemy.’

‘Blasphemy?’ Joan repeated. It was an unexpected word for the context. She would have thought treason would be a better fit for a king. ‘But, Aaron, if—’

‘Please,’ Aaron ground out. ‘Please can you wait until we’re somewhere safe before you ask any more questions?’ He ran a shaky hand through his hair. ‘What have we got ourselves into?’ he asked, almost to himself.

The Ravencroft Market was busier than it had been when they’d left. As they wove through it, Joan finally saw how the main area was structured: divided into periods like the sections of a department store. Over there was the twentieth century; and over here the twenty-first, the clothes becoming less and less familiar in colour and cut with each decade after Joan’s own, until they were as strange as clothes from the distant past. It made Joan want to walk through to the far end of the market—to see the contraband technologies there.

‘There are Court Guards patrolling the market,’ Aaron murmured. ‘Keep your head down.’ He ducked his own head, but Joan was curious enough to look around. Monster police, she thought. She remembered again Ruth’s story of seeing Court Guards at the hospital.

She didn’t spot any of them at first. And then she turned into an aisle where a man was saying mildly to a stall owner: ‘Give me all the cell phones.’