Page 115 of Once a Villain
“Please, Joan,” Mum said softly.
Joan swallowed hard. “Only if there’snoother way,” she promised.
Mum looked at Aaron and Nick.
“As you wish,” Aaron said. There was a lie in his eyes, though. Joan knew that if he had the chance to kill Eleanor, he’d take it.
Nick considered it for a long beat, and then sighed. “I don’t think thereisanother way to fix this timeline,” he said to Mum. “To fix itandto protect all the people she’s been harming, now and in the future. To stop her from killing Joan and the rest of us.”
Mum took that in with a pained breath.
“I can promise thatI’lldo it if I can.” Nick’s gaze was steady. “That if it’s in my power, it won’t be by Joan’s hand.”
Mum bowed her head. For a long moment, it seemed like she might not say anything more. Then she spoke again. “I do know how to get to her. But it will mean breaking into the Monster Court itself.”
Thirty-Two
“The Monster Court?” Aaron said slowly. The Court was a mythical and perilous place at the very heart of the monster world—it sat outside time itself.
Aaron didn’t remember going there, but Joan did. She’d stepped through a gate into a palace surrounded by the endless nothingness of the void. She’d felt like a rowboat, floating in an ocean of shadows. If she’d taken a single step outside the palace, she’d have been lost.
The people of the Court had been as dangerous as the place itself, powerful and cruel; people who’d cut your throat for the pleasure of watching you bleed. Joan had never wanted to go back there.
“The public centerpiece of the jubilee celebration this year was the massacre at the arena,” Mum said. “But the jubilee isn’t over until the twelfth strike of midnight tonight. I have reason to believe that the gates of the Monster Court will open on the first strike.”
“Tonight?” Joan said. She’d known they’d need to move quickly—the timeline was in a dire state. But tonight was so soon.
“At the end of every jubilee, Eleanor hosts a celebration at the Court itself. She sends invitations to a select few on that verynight. They’re told never to speak of it.”
“So we could have multiple chances at her,” Aaron said. “If there’s a celebration every fifty years—”
“No,” Mum interjected. “Every jubilee, the gates open to invited guests. But they always open onto the same celebration. The same night at the Court.”
Joan folded her arms around herself, feeling cold suddenly. “Who gets an invitation?”
“All of theCuria Monstrorumattend,” Mum said. “The hundred people who control the breadth of the timeline, under Eleanor.”
Joan had only ever encountered two members of the Court: One had been Eleanor herself, before she’d ascended to the throne. The other had been a man named Conrad. Joan had only seen him from afar, but he’d had so much power that she’d almost been able to taste it, like snow on the wind.
“There are courtiers too,” Mum said. “People who live permanently at Court. They’re almost as deadly as theCuria Monstrorumthemselves. As for ordinary people... only a handful receive invitations every fifty years. And they only receive one invitation in their lives. No one can attend the celebration twice. I have no idea who’ll be invited tonight—most people are never invited, not even heads of family. I never have been.”
“I think we can assume we’re all off the guest list this year,” Aaron said dryly. “So how do we get through the gates?”
“I don’t know,” Mum said. “All I know is that it’s impossible to cross into the Court without an invitation or an escort. It’srumored that a few people have tried to break in, but they all fell into the void.”
Joan shivered at that.
Nick saw the shiver, and his jaw tightened. “Whatisthe void?” he said. “I mean, I’ve seen it, but I don’t understand what it is.”
“It’s the nothingness that surrounds the timeline,” Mum said. “Our minds can’t really comprehend it. When we look into it, our brains add things: shadows, images. But the truth is, there’s nothing there at all. If you fell into the void, you’d cease to exist—not just the current version of you, but every version that ever could be again. You’d be lost to the void forever.”
Joan suppressed another shiver. She tried not to think how close they’d come to falling in when they’d escaped the Court last time. Theyhaddone it, though. They’d gotten in and they’d gotten out.
“We’ve broken into the Court before,” she said. “All of us broke in.” It hit her again that she was the only one who remembered that.
“What?” For all the windows Mum had made into other timelines, she hadn’t known that. She looked appalled now, as if she wanted to scold Joan for something that hadn’t even happened in this lifetime.
“We gate-crashed a party that time too,” Joan said. It had been the timeline when Nick had been a monster slayer; they’d gone in trying to undo his massacre of the Hunts and Olivers. “It wasn’t as exclusive as this one—there were hundreds of people waiting at the gate with us. We couldn’t forge the invitations, butwe acquired other people’s chops.” The monster form of ID. “We stamped them next to similar ones in the invitation book to look like we’d been invited.”
