Page 126 of Once a Villain
Two guards came into view from the direction of the house, walking across the snowy lawn. Joan held her breath as they drew closer and closer, until they were right alongside her and the others, barely twenty paces away. Was this just a patrol, or had something raised their suspicions? Did they have any clue that six people had just broken into the Court without invitation?
To her horror, one of the guards glanced in their direction. “Is that gate supposed to be open?” he asked his partner.
She chuckled. “What are you worried about? You think someone jumped in here from the void?”
The first guard rolled his eyes. “Go and close it.”
“Youclose it. There’s no way I’m getting that close to the edge.”
Joan exchanged a look with Nick. She and the others were on a walking path that ran past the gate. The protective hedge bordered the path, but it wasn’t nearly high enough to truly hide them. If the guards came over to close the gate, they’d see them crouching here.
Joan turned slightly, wanting to see what the guards were so afraid of. Then she wished she hadn’t. The open gate showed a shadowed world of trees and a row of Georgian houses beyond. But some lizard part of Joan’s brain knew that the view was an illusion—created by her own brain to mitigate the true horror beyond the door. In actuality, she was crouched at the edge of nothing. Of annihilation. If she fell out of that gate, she’d fall for eternity, without even the eventual comfort of death.
“I thought I heard something when we were walking up here,” the first guard said.
His partner laughed again. “Maybe acreaturecrawled out of the void. Maybe it’s lurking.”
“You’re not funny.”
“Are you actually scared? Don’t be daft—nothing can come out of the void. There’s nothinginthe void.”
To Joan’s relief, they kept walking, their bickering fading into the distance as they headed into the outer gardens. A few minutes later, they were out of sight, out of earshot.
Joan stood slowly, and the others followed. “We should get to the house,” she whispered. “Before that patrol comes back.”
They stuck to the edge of the wall, behind the hedge line, to conceal their footprints.
Joan shivered, even in her coat. Tom had told her once that when the Court manifested, it stole houses like this for a frozen moment in time. For tonight’s party, it seemed that Eleanor had chosen a moment during London’s Little Ice Age—one of the winters before 1850. Joan guessed that the cold weather was asmall power play from Eleanor—a way to make her guests feel off-balance and uncomfortable. Most people would have dressed for a warmer night.
“I never imagined I’d see the Court itself,” Tom said, looking around wonderingly at the snow suspended, unmoving, in the air.
“It’screepy,” Ruth whispered.
“Feels like we’re cut off from everything,” Aaron agreed. “There’s nothing outside these garden walls, not even time. Those bricks are the only thing separating us from oblivion.”
Joan looked up, half expecting to be able to see some line in the sky where the Court ended and the void started, but the whole sky was full of bright stars. Her internal monster sense had never been as strong as Ruth’s and Aaron’s, but she was disturbed too—even more than when the Court had manifested at Whitehall Palace. Because she knew these grounds—she’d worked here for months. She could have navigated this whole estate blindfolded. And at the same time, this didn’t quite feel like Holland House. It was more like the Court was possessing it, wearing it like a costume. Joan had the unsettling feeling that the true entity underneath had a different shape entirely.
“Can you hear that?” Nick whispered.
Joan strained and faintly heard thready flutes and strings. A high wall had come into view—the one that separated the lawn from the house and inner gardens. She pictured a small group of musicians on the other side.
As they walked, a spray of light rose above the wall, makingthem all start back. It formed the shape of a dragon, and then exploded in midair. It was a firework display, but not made of fire and sparks; it seemed bioluminescent. More fantastic creatures appeared now—a unicorn, the winged lion of the Monster Court—rising and falling without sound, glowing in eerie blues and whites against the dark sky.
The shapes were slightly distorted from this angle; this was the back view of the jubilee celebrations, Joan guessed. The display wasn’t supposed to be seen from this side of the wall.
“How do we get in?” Ruth murmured.
“There’s a path around,” Joan whispered. Not so much a path, really—more a stretch of cobwebby bushes that led around the gardener’s shed. When she’d worked here, she’d often used it as a shortcut.
“We need to dump our stuff,” Aaron said.
“I know a place.”
When they reached the shed, Joan pointed to where they could hide their bags in the bushes. Even this part of the estate was spooky; the leaves here usually rustled with birds and mice, but right now everything was silent. No crickets chirped; no moths fluttered around the path’s lights.
Joan smoothed down her dress. Aaron and Ruth had put together all the outfits, quizzing Mum about what people wore to formal parties in this timeline, and borrowing clothes from the Graves.
Joan’s dress was a rich plum color; she was beginning to think that Aaron liked how she looked in jewel tones, because he tended to favor them for her. It was sleeveless and backless, andit fit her perfectly, the satin gleaming like moonlight on water. Her hair was half-down, protecting her neck. The half that was up was pinned into a braid, wreathed in flowers the same shade as her dress.
