The Stroke of Eleven Read online

  “Ugh.” I shuddered. “So what sort of story are marraines connected to, then?”

  “Romances,” said Levesque.

  “That doesn’t sound too bad. I’d take a living romance novel over a living horror story any day.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said Cordelia. “According to all the lore I’ve read, marraines are considered to be the most dangerous legendarium species of all.”

  “Why on earth would that be?”

  “No one is entirely sure,” said Levesque. “Much of the information on such creatures is either vague or lost entirely. I do hope you’ll survive your encounter with the marraine so you can write a full report. It will make an excellent addition to the Council library.”

  I glowered at her. “Seems to me we don’t have much chance of surviving.”

  “Nick, we have to try,” said Cordelia. “And not just for Crispin and Molly. If Malcolm and the Mythfits are gone too, we can’t leave them in there. Not after all they’ve done to help us.”

  “Of course not.” I turned on Levesque. “But let me tell you something, ‘Madame.’”

  She regarded me with hauteur. “Yes?”

  “The way I see it, you’re pretty much responsible for everything that’s gone wrong in my life this year.”

  “Really? And how do you arrive at that conclusion, Mr. Beasley?”

  “You told Lord Whitlock to get the Clawthorn Rose for you, which ultimately led to me being cursed. Everything else followed from there—and your chasing us across the Afterlands made matters worse. And now, you’ve captured my brother and Cordelia’s cousin, and sent all our friends on a suicide mission.” I leaned closer to her. “So you’d better hope that I don’t make it out of that stupid castle. Because if I do…I’m coming for you.”

  Levesque gave no reply, and her stony gaze never wavered. But I saw her face pale slightly.

  Whatever happened next, at least I had the satisfaction of knowing I’d struck a tiny bit of fear into Madame Levesque.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Time-Travelling Pumpkins

  When Levesque spoke of dropping us into the Castle of Basile, I hadn’t realized she’d meant it literally.

  As it turned out, she and her minions had no intentions of getting anywhere near the castle themselves. They were scared to death of the place. So, they came up with the bright idea of flying over it in a zeppelin and making us parachute in.

  “Why can’t we use your flying carpet spell?” I asked Cordelia before we left. “We know that works.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to use that one in this situation. If the magic around the castle disrupts the spell I’ve cast on the carpet, then…” With her hand, she mimed the carpet plummeting to earth. She also made exploding noises with her mouth to drive the point home.

  I nodded wearily. “Thanks. I get it.”

  The castle didn’t look that scary or magical from the air. It looked like…a castle. Perfectly ordinary in every respect. Spires, turrets, parapets, et cetera. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have assumed it had stood there for ages. It certainly didn’t appear to have dropped out of the sky, or anything like that. Once in a while, as I gazed at it from the windows of the airship cabin, I did think I saw it going translucent for a split second at a time. But it happened so quickly that I couldn’t be sure. The Black Forest stretched away from it in every direction, all the way to the horizon.

  So…parachutes. Not fun. I’ve never liked heights. I like them even less when I’m falling from them. The big flapping canvas thing overhead did little to make me feel better. The armed Council agents in the airship had lowered the ramp and pushed us off without giving me any time to prepare myself. I mentally added them to the list of people I’d be looking up for revenge once I got through this.

  Then again, I might just die when I hit the ground, I mused, as the woods below sped closer and closer.

  I didn’t die. I did get my clothes torn up, and I think I swallowed about a bushel of pine needles. Everything was a green, prickly blur until I finally found myself hanging from a tree by the remains of my parachute, roughly twenty feet off the ground. I set to work slashing myself free with my claws and soon dropped the rest of the way. I think Levesque’s idea had been to land us directly inside the castle courtyard, but this scheme had been thwarted by the slipstream or the prevailing wind or whatever it was called. Don’t ask me, I’m not an aviator.

  “Cordelia!” I cupped my hands to my mouth to project my voice. “Where are you?” The afternoon sun filtered down through the canopy of trees, but the woods were so thick that I had difficulty seeing through the shadows.

  “Get me down from here!” I heard Cordelia shout. She sounded furious. I followed her voice through the forest until I found her, dangling from a tree the same way I had been. Her hair was wild and full of pine needles, and there were scratches on her arms and face.

  “Hang on,” I told her, as I dug my claws into the bark of the tree and started climbing up to rescue her.

  “Is that a pun?” Her eyes narrowed. “Because if it is…”

  “No. Not at all. It’s only an expression. Relax.” Once I reached her, I extended a claw and started cutting away at her harness. “Are you hurt?”

  “Not yet. Are you planning to let me fall fifty feet to the ground?”

  “It’s twenty feet, and no, I’m not going to let you fall. Hold on to the straps higher up while I cut you loose.”

  She grabbed the parachute, and I soon had her free. Her hands were the only thing holding her up. “Now what?”

  I leapt down from the tree and stood directly underneath her. “Let go. I’ll catch you.”

  She looked dubious. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.” I spread my arms. “Go ahead. It’ll be fine.”

  “Do you have a lot of experience with catching people?”

  “What do you want, written testimonials?”

  “It’s just that I’ve never been very good at spells for mending broken bones. Especially when it’s my bones that are broken.”

  I clicked my tongue in frustration. “Will you—”

  “Aah!” Cordelia lost her grip on the parachute at this point. I stood ready as she plummeted toward me.

  However, I wasn’t standing in quite the right spot. I did catch her, but not with my arms. She landed directly on my head. A second later, I was in a heap on the ground, and she was sitting on top of me.

  She breathed a sigh of relief. “Well. That actually wasn’t so bad after all.”

  “Mmph.” My face was pressed into the ground. Once she got off me, I spat out a mouthful of pine needles and rolled onto my back. “Let’s never jump out of an airship again,” I suggested.

  “Hear, hear.” She was casting mild healing spells on her scratches—strings of tiny runes that settled on her skin and knitted the wounds. She’d explained to me once that weaker spells like these were called “ephemeres.” They were small and weak enough that the magical rule about not being able to cast the same spell on the same thing twice didn’t apply to them. Which was a good thing, given how often we needed to mend minor injuries.

  I got to my feet and stretched in a futile effort to relieve the soreness in my limbs and back. “So. Here we are.”

  “Shall we get it over with?” said Cordelia.

  “We could try to run,” I suggested. “Now that we’re away from Levesque, I mean.”

  “She’s probably having us watched by trained ravens or something. She’d find out. And then Crispin and Molly would pay the price.”

  “We could head straight back to Warrengate and rescue them. It’s a long trip from Grimmany to Caledon, but still…”

  “What about Malcolm and the Mythfits?”

  I sighed. “Cordelia, I hate to say this, but they’re probably already dead. No one who goes inside the Castle of Basile ever comes back, apparently.”

  “Nick, we have to try. We won’t be able to live with ourselves if we do
n’t.”

  “You’re right.” I gave a weary sigh and rubbed my eyes. “Why do we have to be heroes? Can’t we try being villains sometime?”

  “No thanks. Been there, done that. And besides, you’d make a terrible villain.”

  “Would not.”

  “Would too. Come on.” She began to trudge through the forest toward the castle.

  Before long, we reached the massive stone wall surrounding the mysterious edifice. The place didn’t look any less ordinary from down here than it had from the air. “Are you sure this is a magic ghost castle?” I asked Cordelia. “Because it doesn’t seem like one to me.”

  To my surprise, Cordelia was squinting at the wall as if she were trying shield her eyes from the sun. “If you saw it the way I do, you wouldn’t say that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m a Charmblood. That means I can see magic. And that wall is bursting with it. So many runes, so much light—it’s blinding.” She rubbed her eyes. “Do we even know what we’re going to do once we get inside? Assuming we can accomplish that in the first place?”

  “Depends on what we find. First, we’ll have to walk around the wall until we find the entrance.” I froze in my tracks, and my ears pricked backward and forward. “Wait. Did you hear that?”

  Cordelia looked around. “Hear what?”

  “Sounded like footsteps.”

  “Probably one of the locals, come to gawk.”

  “Not unless the locals have hooves.”

  “They might. There are lots of magical species living in this forest.”

  That was when The Thing I’d heard jumped out of the trees and reared up with a horrible shriek.

  “Magical species,” I repeated. “Like that one, you mean?”

  Cordelia gaped at the creature—or rather, the creatures. “That’s not quite what I had in mind.”

  At first glance, it appeared to be a man on a horse. A second glance revealed a lot of disturbing additional details. The man was part-lizard. Not in the way Nadia had been part-snake, however. While her form had been graceful and symmetrical, despite being somewhat frightening, this creature was a hideous patchwork quilt of human and reptilian traits. One of his hands was gnarled and pale-skinned, the other was covered in scales and had claws. His feet were similarly mismatched—one a reptilian paw, the other a deathly-pale human foot. Blotches of scales were scattered across his bare chest. He had a pitted, snake-like nose, one lizard eye and one human eye, and only a single ear, on the left side of his head. He wore a tattered pair of old-fashioned breeches, and a long tail curled behind him. His steed was malformed as well. In its overall shape, it resembled a horse. But the face belonged to a rat, as did the hairless tail and the coarse grey fur all over its body.

  I curled my lip in disgust. “Oh, that’s just wrong.”

  “I think we should run now,” said Cordelia.

  “We can’t! We have to get inside the castle.”

  “I don’t see how getting killed by a lizard-man on a rat-horse is going to help with that, do you? Come on!” She seized my arm and tried to drag me away.

  “Wait.” I pulled free from her grip and turned to the lizard-man. “Look…we come in peace.”

  “No, we don’t!” cried Cordelia. “We don’t come in peace! We go in abject terror!”

  I frowned at her. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “If you must know, I despise rats. Especially gigantic ones.”

  “Well, I’m not the biggest fan of lizards, but let’s both try to soldier on regardless, all right?” My eyes went to the reptile man again. “We want to speak to whoever’s in charge of this…ghost-castle situation. We represent the Council of Scions.”

  The lizard-man tilted his head and tasted the air with a forked tongue, as if intrigued. His steed clacked its jaws and lashed its tail.

  “I thought that would get your attention.” I drew myself up and gave the rider a haughty look. “I’m assuming you work for the Fairy Godmother? We happen to be the personal emissaries of Madame Levesque herself, sent to parley with your mistress. So, if you wouldn’t mind trotting off and telling her that we’re here—”

  The rat-horse reared up again with a screaming whinny, and the lizard man let out a hissing laugh that sounded like a death-rattle.

  I held my ground. “Is that a yes?”

  The lizard man twisted in the saddle and motioned to something behind him. To my astonishment, a jack o’lantern nearly as large as the rat-horse rolled out of the shrubbery and stopped right in front of us.

  I cast a sidelong glance at Cordelia. The only thing I could think of to say was “What?”

  The jack o’lantern’s grinning, glowing mouth opened wide—so wide that it seemed to swallow up the whole world around us. I could feel myself being pulled toward it.

  “Nick!” Cordelia seized my hand and tried to pull me back from the pumpkin, but she ended up getting dragged along herself.

  This isn’t good, I thought, as the orange light from the heart of the jack o’lantern enveloped us. Getting eaten by evil pumpkins was very low on my list of preferred ways to die.

  A clock was chiming. Six…Seven…Eight…Nine.

  “Good evening, sir. Madam. How shall I announce you?”

  This was definitely not what I had expected to hear upon arriving in the afterlife. Then again, up until recently, I’d been fairly certain there was no afterlife.

  I looked at Cordelia, who was still holding my hand. “Are we dead?”

  “I don’t think so, but…what happened?” She took in our surroundings. “Where are we?”

  “You are in the Castle of Basile, madam.” The man standing before us was tall, thin, and bald. He wore a stupid-looking white uniform with big gold-braid epaulets. A broad smile seemed to be permanently fixed on his face. “My name is Gervase,” he informed us.

  “My condolences.” I turned around in a circle, taking in everything. “This can’t be the Castle of Basile. It’s too…new. Ish.”

  We were in a huge, opulent ballroom. It had a white marble floor, walls adorned with brightly-colored tapestries, and a ceiling covered in lush, oil-painted murals. We stood at the top of a wide stairway leading down to the dance floor. Below us, couples twirled to the strains of a full orchestra, the members of which stood on a dais near the back of the ballroom. Not all the dancers were human. I saw quite a few other species represented as well—fairies, dryads, fauns, even an orc or two. The men were dressed in stiff, brass-buttoned jackets, the women in billowing, elaborate ball gowns. There was a pillar in the very center of the dance floor with a huge clock set into it. Its golden hands marked the time as a few minutes past nine. Given the lack of windows in the ballroom, I couldn’t be sure whether that was nine A.M. or P.M., but either way, it was hours after we’d first arrived outside the castle.

  Something about the scene struck me as odd. It wasn’t just the time that had elapsed, or the fact that we’d gone in an instant from being devoured by a pumpkin to arriving at a formal ball. There was something else amiss, but I was too overwhelmed right at that moment to put my finger on it. All I knew was, I had an overwhelming sensation of déjà vu.

  “How shall I announce you, sir and madam?” Gervase spoke more firmly this time.

  Cordelia quickly regained her composure. Maybe it was the aristocratic backdrop. She was accustomed to this kind of setting, after all. “Lady Cordelia Beaumont and Mr. Nicholas Beasley.”

  “Excellent.” Gervase’s voice rang out across the ballroom. “Lady Cordelia Beaumont and Mr. Nicholas Beasley!”

  A few of the dancers stopped and bowed or curtsied to us. The others ignored the announcement and kept on spinning across the room.

  “Thank you for coming.” Gervase beamed at us. “I do hope you enjoy the ball.”

  I laughed. “We’re not exactly dressed for—” I suddenly noticed what Cordelia was wearing. Her street-urchin costume was gone, replaced by a yellow gown. Her hair was done up with a jeweled pin,
and she wore long yellow gloves.

  “You…look amazing,” I stammered.

  She laughed. “You look rather dashing yourself.”

  “What?” I looked down. I was wearing a long blue coat with gold buttons over a dark brown waistcoat and black trousers. The outfit was perfectly tailored to my monstrous form. “How in the world…”

  Gervase smiled. “All guests are provided with the appropriate attire.”

  “But we weren’t invited!”

  His smile widened. “Everyone is invited, Mr. Beasley.”

  I found that vaguely sinister. But before I could ask anything else, Cordelia took my hand.

  “We came here to investigate,” she said in a low voice. “So let’s do that, all right?”

  “How?”

  “Mingle! How do you think?” She pulled me down the steps the to dance floor.

  I almost tripped and fell flat on my face as I struggled to keep up with her. “But—I don’t know how to dance!”

  She clasped my left paw, and guided my right down to her waist. “I’ll teach you.”

  I glanced down at the enormous claws on my toes. “If I step on your feet—”

  “Don’t step on them, then.” She squeezed my hand tighter. “We’ll start slow. Just move with me.”

  I gulped and concentrated very hard on every motion of my feet as we twirled into the dance. “Is this real?”

  “I’m not entirely sure.”

  “What happened out there? With the lizard-man and the pumpkin?”

  “We must have been drawn in by the same thing that’s taken all the other visitors to this castle over the years.”

  “Yeah, but…a dance? Seriously?” I surveyed the ballroom. “Do you think this is what happened to everyone else? They got kidnapped by time-travelling pumpkins, and then they were made to…dance to death, or something?”

  “I don’t feel any magical force compelling us to dance, so I doubt that’s it.” She continued to guide me across the floor. I was starting to pick up the rhythm now.

  Suddenly, Cordelia stumbled and clutched at her arm.

  I caught her before she could fall. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. But my arm hurts.” She stopped dancing and pulled back her sleeve. We both gasped as we saw the long scar extending down her forearm.