Read The Whatnot for Free Online Page B

cellar, glimmering in the puddles on the floor.
    â€œ Now , you dimwits! D’you want the whole house coming down on our heads? Get in!”
    Shouts. The glow of the lamps grew, spreading. Shadows appeared on the walls. The shadows began to run.
    Even Grout looked frightened now. “I—I didn’t mean nothing by it! I didn’t, I’m sorry!”
    But the pale woman wasn’t listening. “I used to be his favorite,” she said. “I am the Door to Bath. I am the greatest door of the age. He’ll be pleased with me again.”
    She began to run, straight toward the oncoming English.
    â€œCome back!” Nettles shouted. “Come back!”
    The wings swelled, darker than night. The ceiling gave a wrenching grunt. Grout leaped onto the cliffs.
    A deafening screech filled the cellar. It came from Wyndhammer House above and the hall full of heat and dancers. Feet, hundreds of them, battered the floor, pounding on and on like thunder.
    Wyndhammer House began to fall.
    Â 
    The bells of St. Paul’s were tolling thirty-five minutes past midnight, but Pikey was not even thinking about going to bed. He scratched through the ankle-deep mud, his shoulders up around his ears to keep them from freezing. He didn’t count the strikes of the bells.
    There was no moon in the sky. The clouds drifted, black and endless, snagging on the spires of St. Paul’s, on weather vanes and gable tips. It was so dark.
    Only dead folk and the fay come out on moonless nights. Dead folk and those soon to be dead. Anyone wanting to keep the blood inside his veins and the coat on his back would not be found alone in the streets after eleven o’clock. But Pikey didn’t have a choice. He needed to find his patch.
    After the fall of Wyndhammer House he had fled straight back to the square in front of St. Paul’s. He had searched for hours, bent double, picking through the muddy cobbles like an old farmer seeding a field. He was on his seventh time now. The cold was sinking into his bones. His legs had gone stiff as posts. But he couldn’t find his patch. It was gone, taken away or trampled deep. When a gang of draft dodgers came, whooping and shouting into the square, Pikey ran off in a fright.
    He limped toward the warren of alleys that led to Spitalfields, rubbing his hands to keep the dull ache of the cold away. He tried to stay in the shadows, darting from doorway to doorway, running whenever he heard footsteps. He didn’t know what had happened at Wyndhammer House, but he would bet his boots it had something to do with faeries, and he was beginning to be afraid. What if someone had seen him there? What if they were following him, right now? He couldn’t be caught like this. Not with his bad eye in full sight.
    He tried to go faster. The city became a beast after dark; the streets were its throats and the graveyards were its bellies, and ever since things had started going rotten between the English and the faeries the beast had gotten hungrier. The leadfaces had appeared first, hired by Parliament to chase the faeries from the city and then gather soldiers to fight them once they’d fled. After them had come the highwaymen and gunslingers, the thugs and ruffians and faery hunters with their iron teeth and packs full of knives and nets. Since the Ban had been declared they had been popping up in London like mushrooms. They set about in the night, searching for any fay that had not already left. Sometimes they found one. Just last week Pikey had heard of a whole colony of nymphs and water sprytes discovered in the Whitechapel sewers, hiding in the green and stagnant water. Where they were now Pikey didn’t know, but he did not want to join them.
    He was just turning the corner at Glockner’s Inn, shuffling along the edge of the gutter, when he saw the girl.
    His heart stopped, just like that, as if it had frozen stiff.
    She was standing about ten feet away, staring at