The Darkness Dwellers Page 10

  “No, that’s not what I—”

  “There you are!” They looked up to find Marcel looming over them, and Kiki’s mouth clamped shut. Marcel clearly had a bone he wanted to pick.

  “Hello, Marcel,” Etienne said with a weary sigh. “Did you manage to meet everyone?”

  Marcel ignored the question. “Were you listening the other day when I told you about the two tourists?”

  “Tourists?” Etienne droned.

  “I told you I heard my father talking to one of his men. He said two tourists have disappeared down here in the last three weeks.”

  “Yes, I remember you mentioned something about that,” Etienne replied.

  “And you don’t think there’s any connection?” Marcel demanded.

  “To what?”

  “To the things that are going on in the ossuary! That’s where the tourists were when they vanished!”

  “It’s tragic, Marcel,” Etienne said. “But we both know people lose their way down here all the time.”

  “One of the tourists was with two friends. They said she walked a few meters ahead and was never seen again.”

  “If there’s someone kidnapping people in the ossuary, the Darkness Dwellers will catch them,” Etienne said.

  “The tunnels are no place for vigilantes!” Marcel insisted.

  “Vigilantes?” Etienne replied coldly. “For some reason I thought we were discussing your heroes.”

  Chapter 14

  The Stalker in the Mercedes-Benz

  NEW YORK CITY: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 17

  DeeDee Morlock lived in a brownstone on 106th Street, not far from Columbia University. My apartment was located on the opposite end of the island of Manhattan—sixteen subway stops and over a hundred traffic lights away. Yet of all the Irregulars who might have volunteered for the job, I was the one knocking on DeeDee’s door at the crack of dawn. The baldness cure was finally finished and bottled. As soon as school was out, I’d be rushing back downtown to deliver it to Betty Bent before she hopped on the plane to Paris.

  I’d asked Luz to run the errand, but she swore she would be performing community service until six in the evening. (There had been a little incident involving Luz’s sister, a rude neighbor, a handmade Taser, and a carton of rotten eggs.) Oona also refused to help. She was going to skip school and stake out Chinatown restaurants, in the hope of ambushing Lili Liu. So I was the one who crawled out of bed while the city was still dark and slogged uptown to get the goods.

  One knock on the Morlocks’ front door and a scrawny, burn-speckled arm reached out and dragged me into the living room.

  “Look out the window,” DeeDee ordered, pulling the curtains aside. “D’you see her?”

  “See who?” I almost snapped. I’d had to skip my morning coffee in order to make it to the Morlocks’ on schedule.

  “The woman in the Mercedes!” DeeDee exclaimed.

  I scanned the line of cars across from DeeDee’s house. Sure enough, there was a fortyish blonde in a pin-striped suit sitting behind the wheel of a black Mercedes-Benz.

  “Who is she?”

  “Dunno,” DeeDee said. “But I’m pretty sure she was watching me yesterday when I got home from the Golden Lotus.”

  “I wouldn’t worry. She doesn’t look all that dangerous.” It was a stupid thing to say.

  “Most dangerous people don’t,” DeeDee wisely pointed out. “What if she works for Livia? Or Con Edison? Or the FBI?”

  “Is there any reason the FBI might have you under surveillance?” I wasn’t joking. You never knew with the Irregulars.

  “Not anymore,” DeeDee said. “Unless it has something to do with Kiki.”

  “Okay. We’ll deal with your stalker. But first things first. Where’s the cure?”

  I followed as DeeDee bounded up the stairs to her bedroom laboratory, her dreadlocks bouncing like springs. Though a nasty smell still lingered in the air, the room itself was immaculate. Even the glass bottles filled with DeeDee’s various chemicals and concoctions were lined up in neat rows.

  “Wow, you cleaned!” I exclaimed. DeeDee’s room was usually filthy, and her idea of tidying up was to sweep everything under the bed. (And I do mean everything. Oona once discovered a take-out container filled with something that looked like rice—until it started to wriggle.) But when I bent down for a quick peek beneath the box spring, I spotted nothing but a solitary dust bunny.

  “Yeah, the parents weren’t happy to find out I was experimenting on myself again. I thought tidying up might earn me a few brownie points, but they haven’t even noticed.”

  “At least you got rid of your beard,” I noted.

  “Most of it,” DeeDee confessed. “I had a little shave this morning. I guess I’ll pay another visit to the Golden Lotus after school. Anyway, here you go.” She plucked a glass jar off the lab counter. The goop inside was a rather unappealing shade of brown. “I call it Lots O’ Locks.”

  “Catchy.” DeeDee always gave her formulas cheesy names.

  She looked disappointed by my reaction. “Don’t you get it? It’s LOL for short. As in, the joke’s on Livia.”

  “Clever. I gotta tell you, DeeDee, this stuff looks just like …”

  “Yeah, and it smells like it, too. But I’m proof that the goop really works,” DeeDee said. “The instructions are printed on the label. If Livia doesn’t follow them carefully, she’ll need electrolysis on her palms.”

  “Wouldn’t that be terrible?” I giggled.

  “I doubt I’d lose sleep over it. But listen, I need Betty to get Kiki’s promise about something. As soon as she’s done with Livia, Kiki has to find a way to get the stuff back to me. It hasn’t been properly tested, and I couldn’t live with myself if it fell into some innocent person’s hands. You never know what the side effects might be.”

  “You mean they could be worse than full-on facial hair?”

  “It’s possible,” DeeDee admitted. “Even medicine you can buy at a deli can have some pretty weird side effects. Amnesia, black urine, hallucinations, sleepwalking, loss of bowel control …”

  “Eww. Enough said.” I gingerly placed the jar in my backpack and wiped my hands on my jeans. Then I checked the clock on my phone. “Gotta go,” I announced. “I promised my principal I wouldn’t miss any more classes this week. I’ll drop the cure off at Betty’s house this afternoon before she leaves for the airport.”

  “Are we still sure Betty’s the right girl for the job?” DeeDee asked. “She’s so …”

  “What?”

  “Sweet.” DeeDee made it sound like a dirty word. “And remember when Betty was kidnapped at the Bannerman Ball? She was trying to be helpful, and she almost got herself killed.”

  The memory made me shudder. “I know. Betty’s not ideal. I wish we could send someone else, but it’s not possible. All Betty has to do this time is get the cure to Kiki. We’ll just have to hope nothing goes wrong.”

  “But something always goes wrong,” DeeDee said.

  She had a point. “Look, I’ll stay in constant touch with Betty while she’s overseas. If there’s a problem, I’ll deal with it when the time comes. But right now, I need to get to school, or I’ll be in stuck in detention for the rest of the week.”

  “So, you’re just going to leave?” DeeDee was wringing her hands. There was something else she wanted from me. A leader’s work is never done.

  “What’s wrong now?”

  “The woman in the Mercedes-Benz, remember? You were going to help me find out if she’s really following me.”

  “Right. Sorry, I almost forgot.” I sighed. “Your parents have any surgical supplies lying around?” DeeDee’s father was a chemistry professor and her mother was a doctor. The house was stocked with all sorts of goodies. A single Morlock family medicine cabinet contained all the supplies you’d need to perform emergency brain surgery.

  “Sure.”

  “I’m going to need two pairs of thin latex gloves and some super-greasy salad dressing.”
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  “Why?” DeeDee asked with an uncharacteristically wicked grin. “Are we going to be doing some probing?”

  “You’ll see,” I told her.

  No one could impersonate innocent schoolgirls like DeeDee and me—we’d been wearing that particular disguise for years. We charged down the front stairs of the Morlocks’ brownstone, whispering and giggling. A few yards past the black car parked at the curb, I fished a compact out of my coat pocket, puckered up my lips, and pretended to check my lip gloss in the mirror.

  “The Mercedes just pulled out behind us,” I told DeeDee.

  “I knew it!” DeeDee whispered.

  “Let’s make sure we’re being tailed before we take evasive action,” I said. “As soon as we get to the end of the block, bend down and tie your shoelaces.”

  The traffic light was green when we reached the corner. The Mercedes should have sped past. But it was still lurking behind us. As DeeDee paused to tie her shoes, the car came to a complete halt.

  “Well, there’s our proof,” I said. “But if it makes you feel any better, she’s not a professional detective. Whoever this chick is, she’s never tailed anyone before.”

  “Nope,” DeeDee replied with a shake of her head. “That doesn’t make me feel any better at all.”

  “Maybe this will.” I unzipped my backpack, and each of us took out two hand-shaped balloons filled with salad dressing. “Aim for the windshield.”

  DeeDee’s first balloon splattered across the Mercedes’ hood, but our other three missiles found their mark. Just as I’d expected, the woman in the driver’s seat immediately switched on the windshield wipers, smearing salad dressing across the glass. I almost wished I could have seen the surprise on her face, but she’d disappeared behind a thick film of grease.

  “You’re right,” DeeDee said. “That did feel good.”

  “See you later,” I told her before we bolted off in opposite directions. “Let me know if she has the guts to come back!”

  I caught a bus across Central Park and hopped out on the corner of Sixty-Eighth Street and Lexington Avenue. I had less than three minutes to get to class, but I already could see the snow-covered spires of the Atalanta School for Girls in the middle of the next block. As I waited for a light to change, two of my classmates appeared beside me. Though I normally found Dylan Handworthy and Ginger Altschul about as fascinating as dung beetles, I couldn’t peel my eyes away from them. They both seemed different somehow. The miniskirts and painful-looking heels they’d once favored had been replaced by prim ensembles that were better suited for a tea party than a high school classroom.

  “I hear she’ll be on the throne of Pokrovia by May,” Dylan confided.

  “I do hope the coronation will be televised,” Ginger gushed in an accent that sounded vaguely British. “I would love to see what Princess Katarina looks like. She must be stunning if she’s Sidonia Galatzina’s cousin.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.” She may have been dressed like a goody two-shoes, but Dylan hadn’t lost her taste for gossip. “I have a feeling there’s a very good reason that Sidonia never bothered to mentioned any relatives.”

  “Oh no!” Ginger gasped. “What if Princess Katarina is horribly deformed? You know, I read somewhere that she has weird white hair. What if she was born with one of those disorders you get from too much inbreeding? My mother told me there are royals who are so hideous that they’ve been banned from showing their faces in public!”

  “No, I don’t think that’s it,” Dylan said. “You can work wonders with plastic surgery these days. But I did hear one of the girls at the institute say that Princess Katarina was raised by some old peasant woman. She’s probably just incredibly vulgar.”

  “Poor Sidonia. She must be so embarrassed to have a cousin like that!” Ginger said. “Do you think there’s still time to train the princess to be queen?”

  “Why do you suppose Princess Katarina is in Paris? Do you think it’s a coincidence that she and Madame Beauregard are visiting the same city at the very same time? I suspect Madame has been called in for emergency damage repair.”

  “Oh, thank heavens! If anyone can fix the princess, Madame can!”

  The light changed and the two girls left me frozen behind on the curb. I watched the way they glided across the street. There was no doubt about it. That rigid posture and those dainty steps were the undeniable marks of a very familiar beast.

  For the first time in weeks, I walked down the halls of the Atalanta School for Girls with my eyes open. And I saw them—everywhere. Students walking as though they were balancing invisible books on their heads. Girls with naturally booming voices speaking in ladylike whispers. Classmates whose formerly untamed tresses had been straightened or set. If I hadn’t known better, I would have wondered if their bodies had been snatched by unusually prissy aliens. But now I realized I was dealing with a far more sinister force than extraterrestrials. I was dealing with Amelia Beauregard.

  “It’s not polite to stare,” a freshman chided me.

  A friend of hers joined in. “A lady doesn’t let her mouth hang open.”

  “I used to wear jeans like that before I knew any better.” They were ganging up on me. I’d battled evil princesses, smugglers, and man-eating rats. But I had never expected to find myself faced with a zombie invasion. I took one clumsy step backward and bumped into someone standing behind me.

  “Get to class, ladies,” ordered the principal.

  “Yes, Principal Wickham,” the zombies all sang in unison.

  “Did you see that?” I gasped once the girls were gone. “Did you see what Madame Beauregard has done to them? She’s stolen their souls!”

  “It’s happened every year for as long as I’ve been at Atalanta,” Principal Wickham confided. “Two or three girls enroll in after-school classes and by winter break they’re wearing their mother’s pearls. But it seems Amelia’s institute has grown quite popular among the Atalanta student body this year. Hopefully some of Amelia’s pupils will forget their training over summer vacation.”

  “And the rest?” I asked.

  “The rest will send their daughters to the institute.”

  I thought of Betty. In a few hours she’d be leaving for Paris with Amelia Beauregard. Would she be the same person when she returned to New York? Or would Madame work her black magic on Betty as well?

  “I’ve got to warn her,” I muttered.

  “I was thinking the very same thing,” Principal Wickham agreed.

  THE FISHBEIN GUIDE TO … FLOWER ARRANGING

  Are you the sort of person who has a hard time saying “I’m sorry”? (Or “I was wrong to accuse you of murder at dinner the other night.” Or “I had no idea that a hamster could be such a dangerous gift.”) Then don’t say it. Send flowers instead! They’re the perfect way to express all of those ooey-gooey emotions that your mouth refuses to utter.

  If you are looking for handy tips that will help you create stunning arrangements, please enroll in classes at your local finishing school. I like pretty things as much as the next person, but I’m here to dispense only useful advice.

  Express Your Feelings with Flowers

  A bouquet can express many lovely sentiments. But not all flowers are as sweet as they smell. Ask a florist to teach you the secret language of flowers (or look it up online), and you’ll discover that every bloom has a hidden meaning. A flower arrangement can say exactly how much you care—or it can warn the recipient that she’s cruising for a bruising.

  Add the Perfect Touch

  In my opinion, no flower arrangement is complete without a bug or two. I’m not referring to the six-legged sort. (Though a few of those could be amusing additions to the right arrangement.) Tiny listening devices are difficult to detect when hidden among petals and leaves. A simple centerpiece on the dining room table can provide a few days of beauty—and hours of priceless entertainment.

  Always Choose the Right Vase

  Whenever I receive flowers, I sincerel
y thank the person who sent them. Then I remove the arrangement from its vase and take a quick peek inside. I’m not just searching for bugs. Practically anything can be smuggled inside an opaque flower vase. If the bouquet is particularly fragrant, even the smelliest of substances might be hidden within.

  Repel Unwanted Pests

  There are certain flowers you wouldn’t want to sniff. They can fill a room with the delightful aromas of smelly socks, skunk juice, rotting meat, or putrid corpse. Put a bunch of these blooms together in a lovely arrangement, and you have an ideal pest repellant. Some will keep flies or mosquitoes away. Others are certain to send unwanted guests fleeing for fresh air.

  Survive in the Wild

  Flowers aren’t just pretty, of course. Some are edible. Some have medicinal properties. And some are poisonous enough to kill an elephant. Don’t set off into the wilderness (or hide out in a florist’s shop) until you know which is which.

  Chapter 15

  The Doppelgänger

  Betty was dressed like a secretary from the 1950s. Cashmere sweater, tweed pencil skirt, sensible heels, and horn-rimmed glasses. She took the cure from me and carefully tucked the jar inside her large, faux-alligator suitcase.

  “What if they stop you at customs? What are you going to tell them?” Kaspar didn’t seem pleased to see Betty setting off for a trip with Amelia Beauregard. The worry written on his face made him even more appealing than usual. I tried my best not to stare.

  “I’ll just say it’s homemade hair gel,” Betty replied.

  “Hair gel that smells like sewage?” Kaspar asked. “Who’s going to believe that?”

  Betty shrugged and reached for her coat. “Does it matter if they believe it? Are there any laws against taking a jar of poop to France?”

  “Betty, are you sure you’re up for this trip?” I inquired for the twentieth time.