pull away.
“Fine,” Pikey said. “But if someone sees, I’m going to shove you at ’em and get outta here, you hear me?”
The feathers felt smooth and oily between Pikey’s fingers, strangely immaterial, like smoke. He felt gently along the bone. He didn’t know a great deal about doctoring, but Bobby Blacktop, the old chemist’s boy, had gotten run over by a gas trolley a year ago and had both his legs broken. Pikey had learned a few things from that.
Suddenly the faery sat up, ears twitching, as if picking up a sound only it could hear. “Quickly,” it hissed. “Quickly!”
“Ow, aren’t you one to make demands. What’s the hurry, then? Where you gotta be?” Pikey’s fingers found the joint, clicked it back in place. “It was just banged out o’ the socket is all. Is that better? Does it work now?”
The faery’s eyelids snapped, once, across its eyes. In a flash its wings unfurled, faster than Pikey would have thought possible. He jerked back. The faery peered at him a second longer, its tongue slithering between its teeth. Then it whirled, wrapping itself in its feathers. There was a brush of wind, a chorus of whispers, like many little voices calling to one another, and then the faery was gone.
It didn’t exactly vanish. Pikey thought it might have, but it was more as if it had moved into a pocket, as if the stairs and the street and all of London were painted on the thinnest of veils and the faery had simply slipped behind it.
Pikey stared at the place where it had been. Then he stood quickly. Lights were coming on in the servants’ hall below. He could hear voices raised in excitement, the clatter of metal. A hand began to fiddle with the lacy curtains over the window.
Time to go, Pikey thought. He vaulted over the railing and set off briskly along the side of the street.
But he had only taken a few steps when a deep, skull-shivering shudder almost tossed him from his feet. He stumbled. The shudder grew in strength, pounding and stamping louder than all the steam engines of King’s Cross station, all going at once.
Pikey turned. It was the house. Fissures were racing up the windows, splitting smaller and smaller. The walls shook and swelled, as if something were straining against them from inside. And then, with an almighty shriek, every window in the house burst outward. All those bright windows, exploding into the night in sprays of gold. The roof blew into the sky. Stone rained down, glass and green metal and shreds of colored silk. Pikey yelled and raced into the street, dodging the falling debris.
An oil trolley skidded around him. Steam coaches honked, belching fumes. Men leaned out of vehicles, ready to shout at Pikey, but their words stuck in their throats. All eyes turned to Wyndhammer House.
Piercing wails were coming from within, swooping down the winter street. There was another resounding boom. And then the house began to fall.
Of course, Hettie didn’t know if it had been six nights. It always felt like night in this place, or at least a gray sort of evening. The sky was always gloomy. The moon faded and grew, but it never went away. She trudged after the wool-jacketed faery, over roots and snowdrifts, and the little stone cottage remained in the distance, unreachable. A light burned in its window. The black trees formed a small clearing around it. Sometimes Hettie thought she saw smoke rising from the chimney, but whenever she really looked, there was nothing there.
“Where are we going?” she demanded, for the hundredth time since their arrival. She made her voice hard and flat so that the faery butler wouldn’t think she was frightened. He better think she could smack him if she wanted to. He better.
The faery ignored her. He walked on, coattails flapping in the wind.
Hettie glared and kicked a spray of snow after him. Sometimes she wondered if he even knew. She suspected he didn’t. She suspected that behind the clockwork that encased one side of his face, behind the cogs and the green glass goggle, he was just as lost and afraid as she was. But she didn’t feel sorry for him. Stupid faery. It was his fault she was here. His fault she hadn’t jumped when her brother Bartholomew had shouted for her. She might have leaped to safety that night in Wapping, leaped back into the warehouse and England. She might have gone home.
She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the red lines through the sleeves of her nightgown, feeling the imprints the faeries had put there so she could be a door. Home. The word made her want to cry. She pictured Mother sitting on her chair in their rooms in Old Crow Alley, head in her hands. She pictured Bartholomew, the coal scuttle, the cupboard bed. The herbs, drying above the potbellied stove. Pumpkin in her checkered dress. Stupid faeries. Stupid butler and stupid Mr. Lickerish and stupid doorways that led into other places and didn’t let you out again.
She paused to catch her breath and noticed she had been clamping her teeth shut so hard they hurt. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and looked up.
The cottage was still far away. The woods were very quiet. The faery butler barely made any sound at all as he walked, and when Hettie’s own loud feet had stopped, the whole snowbound world seemed utterly silent.
She squinted, straining to make out the details of the cottage. There was something about it. Something not right. The light in the window did nothing to dispel the hollow, deserted look of the place. And the way the trees seemed to curl away from it … She closed her eyes, listening to her heartbeat and the whispering wind. She imagined walking forward under the trees, hurrying and spinning, gathering speed. Her back was to the cottage. Then she was facing it, and for an instant she was sure it was not a house at all, but a rusting, toothy mousetrap with a candle burning in it, winking, like a lure.
“Come on.” The faery butler was at her side, dragging her along. “We haven’t got all of forever. Come on, I say!”
She stumbled after him. The cottage was normal again, silent and forbidding in its clearing.
“I can walk by myself,” Hettie snapped, jerking away her arm. But she was careful not to stray too far from his side. They really didn’t have all of forever. In fact, Hettie wondered how much longer they could go on like this. They had nothing to eat but the powdery gray mushrooms that grew in the hollows of the trees, and even those were becoming scarcer as they went. There were no streams in this wood, so all they had to drink was the snow. They melted it in their hands and licked the icy water as it ran over their wrists. It tasted of earth and made Hettie’s teeth chatter, but it was better than no water at all.
Hettie crossed another snarl of black roots, stomped over another stretch of crusty snow. She was so hungry. She was used to that from Bath, but there it was different. Her mother was in Bath, washing and scrubbing and making cabbage tea, and Hettie had always known that she’d never let her and Bartholomew starve. Hettie doubted the faery butler would care much if she starved to death. He didn’t give her anything. He hadn’t told her to eat the mushrooms or melt the snow. She had watched him and had stuck her nose up at him, and then she had gotten so hungry she’d had to copy him. But what would happen when
