The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass Read online

  The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass

  The Metamorphosis Duology

  The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass

  Coming Summer 2021: The Boi of Feather and Steel

  The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass

  ADAN JERREAT-POOLE

  Copyright © Adan Jerreat-Poole, 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Rachel Spence | Editor: Whitney French

  Cover design and illustration: Sophie Paas-Lang

  Printer: Marquis Book Printing Inc.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The girl of hawthorn and glass / Adan Jerreat-Poole.

  Names: Jerreat-Poole, Adan, 1990- author.

  Description: Series statement: Metamorphosis ; 1

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200178822 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200178830 | ISBN 9781459746817 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459746824 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459746831 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8619.E768 G57 2020 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

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  For Mom, who first gave me magic, books, and feminism

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  What the Humans Left Behind

  Acknowledgements

  Tav

  One

  Eli popped an extra-strength Advil and downed it with a mouthful of lukewarm coffee. She hoped that would stop the ache in her chest, although it would do nothing for the rattling cough that kept her awake at night. Bronchioles turning to thorns and spiderwebs were hell on a body. Eventually, she would turn back into the parts the witch had used to make her — a girl stitched together out of beetle shells and hawthorn berries and a witch’s greed.

  Eli took another sip of coffee and flicked her eyes to a corner of the café. The ghost had taken the form of a middle-aged man in Clark Kent glasses — he must have been watching old films to think those were still in style — and was fumbling with a MacBook. He hadn’t touched his coffee, which was a dead giveaway. Caffeine short-circuited a ghost’s nervous system.

  She drew a dagger of glass, enchanted to be invisible to human eyes. Pasted on a nervous smile, the one she saw often on teenagers in the human world. Then she stood up.

  It was time.

  Eli wasn’t just a teenage girl with heavy bangs falling over round glasses, fighting with her mother and writing bad poetry in her journal (although she did some of that, too). Eli was an assassin.

  She bumped into Clark Kent’s table as she walked past, spilling his coffee.

  “Shit!” He grabbed his computer and jumped up, but not before some of the liquid had spilled onto his crisp tan pants. He hissed in pain.

  “Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” Eli did her best squeal. “I’ll get you some napkins!” She lightly pressed the flat of the blade against the back of his neck, reflecting the magic inward. Trapping the ghost inside.

  Eli ran back to the counter to grab some napkins. “I’m sooo clumsy,” she told the barista, who smiled sympathetically.

  The blade had rendered the man docile. The body looked sick and confused. She’d never seen one so weak. Unless it was a trick.

  Coffee dripped onto the floor — a lulling, rhythmic soundtrack to everyday murder.

  Eli picked up the laptop, wiped down the table, and then carefully placed it down again. She eyed him warily, looking for evidence of the ghost. Sometimes they came out of the ears like steam and tried to escape, even when she used the glass knife. Hunting down a cloud of steam was a pain in the ass. This one seemed safely neutralized.

  “You should go wash up,” she told him. He nodded slowly. The man stood up, unsteadily, and walked to the bathroom at the back of the café. She followed him.

  “I’m so sorry,” she repeated, trying to remind herself to walk noisily, clumsily, like a human would. Her blades swung in a gentle, familiar rhythm at her hips.

  Through the door, into a room with flickering fluorescent lights and dirty linoleum. The glaring afternoon sun pouring in through a window. A mirror reflecting their images back at them: a girl and a man. Hunter and prey.

  Usually the ghosts resisted, and the trick was to keep them in the human body by magic and force. But this one seemed tired and ready to die. Eli wondered for a moment if she found that thought comforting — that she was helping him find peace. Exorcising the demon. Putting the body to rest. Then she shook her head.

  She was made to kill.

  She was created to derive pleasure in a job well done. And she was close to completing another assignment.

  She pulled out a different knife, cloudy, its colour shifting and changing between greys, blacks, and pearl-toned whites. The man’s eyes widened. “What —?”

  Eli drove it into his skull. It went through easily, and she rooted around inside for a few moments, trying to catch the sleeping ghost. Trying to drag the magic out of its human shell.

  Nothing.

  Blood poured from the shattered skull, shimmering across her face like a red galaxy as she pressed deeper into his brain. The body collapsed on the floor in a heavy, meaty pile.

  Eli stepped back, heart racing.

  That wasn’t supposed to happen.

  Once she knifed a ghost, its body transformed back into what it was made from — a dog bone or an old biscuit. />
  This body remained stubbornly human. Eli heard footsteps outside the bathroom door and she was standing in blood, in the blood of the man she had just murdered — a human — and if someone saw her they would call the cops, they would track her down. Human bullets would hurt her as surely as they puncture holes in trees, and she would bleed, too. Even if she survived, her handlers would come for her and finish the job.

  A thought jarred her out of panic: this man was the mark. She wasn’t mistaken.

  Which meant someone else had fucked up and put her here.

  Fear and fury burned through Eli’s body, making her cough violently as stone turned to ash in her lungs. (She had been warned about strong emotions.) Her hand tightened on the knife and she made the split-second decision to live. She was, after all, made to possess strong survival instincts.

  As for the anger? That was entirely her own.

  As the bathroom door opened, Eli threw herself at the window, cracking it with her elbow. She fell into the back alley behind the café. Taking a breath, she checked that her glamour was still in place — brown eyes, blonde hair, mouth heavy with lipstick — and that her blades were still shielded from human eyes. Then she forced herself to walk slowly into the bustling downtown, into the heart of the City of Ghosts.

  Above the city, invisible to the human eye, darkening to a deep blue speckled with stars, hung the monstrous and magical City of Eyes.

  Home.

  Two

  Once safely a few blocks away from the café, Eli ducked into an alley and let the glamour fall away from her body like dead leaves, tearing the last few pieces with trembling hands. It felt like a damp paper bag on her fingertips in the moment before it dissolved back into dust and dirt. Now she was herself again: poorly cut hair, pale skin with a few freckles, face flushed from the escape. The yellow eyes of a crocodile with black slits for pupils. Glasses that sharpened the world when her black eyes showed her the magic lurking in seemingly harmless things — a powerful tool that impaired her everyday vision.

  Seven blades hung from a thick belt around her hips. All of them were killers, but the art of assassination required many shapes of death. There was the frost blade, the revealer, that cut through illusions and lies. The bone blade, the tracker, that took a piece of any body it touched and remembered its DNA. The blade of thorns, the ensnarer: when it pierced a body, the thorns would grow into a rosebush of pain and fury. The glass blade, the mirror, that harnessed the energy of an attacker and reflected it back on them. The stone blade, the shield — the largest and heaviest of the knives, almost like a short sword — that could kill as well as save. The pearl blade, shifting between white and black pearl: the divider, with the ability to separate the corporeal and the incorporeal, a knife that could tear magic from flesh, could hunt through any world or body or material.

  And finally, the thinnest, sharpest weapon: the obsidian blade. Secret death. A blade that could cut through any magic. A blade that could destroy the most powerful beings in the worlds. The assassin.

  Eli ran her thumb over the obsidian as she closed her eyes and prepared to cross the threshold between worlds. She blinked, and a new set of eyes replaced her reptilian pair. These were pure black, and through them Eli could see the border between worlds, could watch as a magical rift formed to carry her away from here. A column of shadow fell from above, and suddenly Eli couldn’t see. It was pitch black inside the Vortex, but the quality of darkness wasn’t like that of a darkened bedroom or claustrophobic closet.

  It was the darkness of a sea that covered continents.

  It was a darkness that whispered secrets from the past and future.

  Eli hung, weightless, the fragments of her glamour scattered on the pavement below in the human city, along with blood from the man now lying dead in a bathroom.

  No human could cross the threshold.

  The Vortex shifted, the core growing darker, as black as dead eyes and the hole in the head of a needle. The darkness threaded Eli through the fabric between the human city and the witch city. There was an uncomfortable tug, and Eli clutched her chest. It never got easier.

  And then she was back, her feet on the ground, the afterimage of the alley fading on her eyelids, replaced with the painfully bright soil of the main square. Eli looked up at a different pattern of stars and, somewhere out there, the City of Ghosts. She had come so close to being discovered. To being trapped there. She shivered. The shiver wracked her magic-constructed body, but nothing broke or burned.

  Eli sat down for a moment to catch her breath. The witch had not been entirely forthcoming about what had gone into the stitching of Eli’s flesh, but Eli had figured out a few years ago that some of her components were human. It was why she was able to pass undetected among their kind. It also meant the Vortex fought over her every time she travelled between cities, welcoming only part — but not all — of her. She suspected some assassins were torn apart by the Vortex’s magic or tossed back to the human city. She had never shared these thoughts with Circinae.

  Witches and shadow-girls and great horned beasts moved through the streets without even glancing at Eli. Her appearance was not out of the ordinary. A steel carriage pulled by jade steeds whipped around a corner and nearly ran Eli over, but she rolled out of the way just in time, wincing at the screech of stone on stone. She grabbed her glasses, which had fallen off, jammed them on her face, and forced herself to stand. Then, turning down the first invisible pathway her palms found, she prepared to weave her way through the back alleys and return home. Circinae would be waiting for a report.

  The City of Eyes was overlaid with a maze that stretched across the city. The entrances, being invisible, were naturally difficult to find, but once she had learned to seek the scent of sea glass and dried blood, it was easy to slip away from the angry lights of the main square and the wide promenades that cut through the city like sheets of ice.

  Checking that she had chosen the correct entrance-way and wasn’t instead caught in a young witch’s dream-world, Eli flicked out her lizard tongue to lick the wall. Seaweed and the corruption of dead fish. She sighed in relief and let her hand gently stroke its soft surface. In this part of the Labyrinth, the stone was the colour of snow tainted with a single drop of blood. Underneath her gentle touch, the wall shuddered as if in pleasure. Nothing in the witches’ world was without feeling.

  Eli’s shoulders prickled, and she had that familiar feeling of being watched. It was a comfort, returning to a place where everything had eyes. Everyone was known, if only by a rotting branch or a luminescent scrap of architecture held up by faith and will.

  “I missed you,” Eli told the wall. A thousand invisible eyes blinked at her in welcome. Eli felt the brush of their eyelashes against her face. This was her home, more than the mossy structure where Circinae waited. Reluctantly, Eli removed her hand from the gentle pulse of the Labyrinth and started walking.

  She had only gone a few turns before she heard her name vomited from the mouth of a taxidermy vulture, its body stolen from the human realm.

  “Eli lies, Eli dies, Eli sighs, Eli why,” coughed and hacked the bird, perched on a branch of white iron that stuck out from the wall.

  Eli crossed her arms and flicked her bangs out of her eyes. “Very clever, Clytemnestra,” she said. “Did you miss me?”

  A moment later, a little girl popped out of the wall, the surface stretching into a thin, slimy bubble. The bubble burst, and the girl shook her head, spraying Eli with water.

  “Cute, isn’t it? I stole that while you were gone. I tried to find you in the City of Ghosts, but you never let me see your glamours.” She twisted her mouth into the shape of a pout.

  Eli rolled her eyes. “If you stopped stealing from the human world, they’d let you join the Coven.”

  Clytemnestra grimaced. “The stupid old Coven. So many rules. Magic is meant to be chaos. Chaos is beautiful!” She threw her arms up in the air and the vulture exploded, splattering the walls with feather and bone.<
br />
  “Now you’ve gone and ruined your plaything.”

  “I have other playthings.” Clytemnestra smiled. “Won’t you play with me, Eli?”

  Eli shifted her body very slightly, preparing for a fight. “I’d rather not.”

  For a long moment the two stared at each other — the teenager with crocodile eyes and a human body, the tiny witch with a Cupid’s bow mouth and sharp, sharp teeth.

  Then Clytemnestra laughed. “Oh Eli, I missed you. Promise you’ll visit again soon?”

  “I always make the time to visit you, little one.”

  “Yes, well, I waited for years this time. It was boring.” She frowned.

  Eli didn’t bother to correct her sense of time. She bowed slightly, not breaking eye contact. “My apologies, child.”

  “I forgive you! Oh, do come visit again. We’ll have a tea party. Oh, and don’t take the next right turn — there’s an angry dragon-bird. Someone woke him up from his nap.”

  An object flew through the air. Eli snatched it and leaped back as Clytemnestra was sucked back into the wall. Eli felt the wall tugging on her clothing, but she braced her legs, and it sealed shut.

  She looked down at what she held in her hand: a shard of bone china painted with blue petals. After a moment, Eli tucked it into her pocket. She had learned never to turn down a gift, especially from someone who might kill you one day.

  Heeding Clytemnestra’s advice, she turned left at the next fork instead of right.

  Behind her, the remains of the vulture had vanished.

  Three

  Circinae had not always been called Circinae. Like all witches, she was born nameless and had to travel to the human world to steal a name.

  “Mother?” Eli knocked exactly four times on the great charcoal door. Even the cottage door glowed with a terrible light, although not as harshly as the main square or the Coven. After a moment, the door crumbled into a pile of ash, and Eli carefully stepped over it and into the house. Behind her, the ash re-formed into a thick charcoal slab.