An Artificial Night

His hand shook as he pulled the knife away. The thorns stopped screaming, but didn’t let go. I stood there blinking back tears, listening for sounds of alarm. We couldn’t afford to attract attention to ourselves. If we got caught . . . I shivered. If they caught us, we were worse than dead.

Fine: we couldn’t cut through the thorns. What else could we use to open the door? Blood obviously wasn’t the answer; it had plenty of my blood already. I could try a spell, but I don’t know any make-the-living-lock-let-go spells. I might have been able to manage an illusory key, but I didn’t know what it needed to look like, or how to make the lock believe it was real. Quentin wasn’t going to be any help until he calmed down, and the candle flame was so high that it was almost scorching my skin. I paused. Everything in Blind Michael’s lands had been affected by the candle. Why should the lock be any different?

I brought my free hand up and around, shoving the candle into the brambles. The vines wrapped around my hand let go, and I staggered backward, swearing. The cuts they left behind were small but deep and ran across the length of my hand.

“Are you okay?” Quentin asked, moving to brace me.

“I’m fine,” I said. The vines were continuing to retreat. The flame returned to its normal height as the last bramble pulled away, dimming to a placid blue. It looked like we’d reached our destination, whatever it turned out to be. “I think it’s safe to go in.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.” Unsurprisingly, the door wasn’t locked anymore. I pushed it open, stepping through into a narrow stall full of dusty straw and strange, unpleasant shadows. A trough stood along one wall, half-filled with murky liquid. It was too dark to see anything clearly. I lifted the candle almost without thinking about it, letting it illuminate the area.

The light wasn’t merciful. I closed my eyes, whispering, “Oh, sweet Maeve . . .” Quentin stepped up next to me and stopped, putting his hand on my shoulder. I could feel the tension in his fingers, and so I opened my eyes, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It wasn’t easy.

Katie was in the far corner with her back pressed against the wall, watching the open door with obvious terror in her face. She wasn’t visibly injured, and her clothing was mostly intact; she hadn’t been beaten or raped. That was a point in Blind Michael’s favor. It wasn’t nearly enough.

There’s an art to transformation. Lily once described it as being a sort of sculpture, using flesh instead of wood or metal: you take something that is and turn it into something that isn’t. Like any art it takes talent and practice. Someone truly skilled in the transformational arts can finish a change in an instant or stretch it out into a year. It all depends on the work itself . . . and on how cruel the artist wants to be.

Streaks of white radiated through Katie’s hair, longer and visibly rougher than the human hair around them. Her ears had grown long, flexible and equine, sprouting a fine covering of short white hair and moving up the sides of her head until they were clearly more horse than human. She flicked them back as Quentin started to approach her; it was an instinctive gesture, and that, in and of itself, was chilling—how much humanity had she already lost? Her hands were splayed on her knees, like she was trying to force the fingers to stay apart, and her fingernails had spread to cover the first knuckle, taking on a dark, glossy sheen as they warped into hooves.