Hazel & Gretel (The Clockwork Fairytales Book 2) Read online

  Finding the lost fruit took five minutes, and she let out a long breath as she tried to get her bearings. She knew how to get back to the Witch’s cottage. That would be no trouble at all. It was fulfilling the last of her grocery list that would be a problem. She only knew how to get to the mushrooms from the bramble, and she was not going back the way she’d come.

  Letting out a long breath, she closed her eyes and thought of what she’d learned from the forest so far. Her answer was disappointingly insufficient. If she wanted to get the rest of her list dealt with, she would have to go back the way she came.

  She turned back to the path she’d just run down and clenched her basket more tightly. If the irzahara didn’t want to eat her the last time it had the chance, reason dictated that it was possible she could get by it once more… right?

  Taking a step forward she swallowed the lump in her throat and then… the ground shook.

  The guttural cry that she knew came from a fiery mouth echoed through the trees around her and she didn’t hesitate. Terrified, she ran back to the witch’s home uncaring of what spilled from the basket as she escaped.

  When she broke out of the forest, the screeching lessened. Her speed did not. She flung open the door, slammed it shut behind her. Her footsteps rapped out a hard staccato and dredged up clouds of dust from the hard planks on the floor.

  Bursting into the kitchen, she stumbled and fell to her knees. It was ridiculous to think this place was safe, but some measure of comfort came from being back in its familiar terror.

  “You are back too soon.” The witch grabbed her up, her claws biting into her neck. “Where is your muzzle?”

  Gretel only just realized she wasn’t wearing it. It was no longer in her basket and she cast a quick glance toward Hazel whose hands gripped the bars, her mouth a flat line of anger.

  The witch grabbed her face and forced her to look at her. She inhaled deeply and with clenched, broken teeth, she inhaled deeply and let out a growl. “Why do you smell like fear?”

  “I saw it.”

  Carcenia’s eyes narrowed and she shoved her up against the wall. Feet dangling, Gretel swallowed against the harsh grasp of the witch’s hands.

  “What did you see?”

  Fighting out a rasp of breath, Gretel said, “The irzahara.”

  Cloudy eyes flared and the witch dropped her. She held tight to the floor as the full rush of blood returned to her head. She’d barely stopped seeing double when the witch grabbed her by the hair and dragged her back to the cell, slamming the door shut behind her.

  “Someone has been telling tales,” the witch said, pointing a curved finger at Edina. “There will be no food tonight. Displease me again and there will be no food for a long time coming.”

  Holding tight to her bruised throat, Gretel watched the witch storm away, noticing only briefly that her limp was gone.

  Falling back to sitting, she finally looked at the cell around her. “Where’s Krell?”

  Hazel turned her eyes to the floor. “He’s gone.”

  Swallowing the bile that tried to rise in her throat at that answer, she looked from Hazel to the oven and wondered if the irzahara might have been a better way to die.

  SEVEN

  The witch did not reappear the next morning. There was no sound above them, and Hazel let Gretel and Edina sleep while she worked on the lock. She had grim determination on her side this morning. Before the witch had cooked, carved and eaten Krell, storing what was left of him in a mechanically cooled icebox tucked into the far corner of the room, she had thought this was all a matter of biding her time. Now….

  She glanced back at Gretel and chewed on her cheek at the thoughts that ran through her head. Edina might believe the witch would keep from eating either of them because she only ate boys and men, but there was nothing holding her to that. And Hazel would die before she let the witch consider even licking Gretel.

  Her third pick broke and she pulled the second to last from her hair. If she didn’t get it open with one of these last picks, they wouldn’t be getting out today. She’d have to wait, carve more, and hope that the witch left them alone for any stretch of time again.

  Behind her, Gretel shifted, stretching with a yawn and a shiver. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to get us out of here before she can change her mind and eat you next.”

  Gretel recoiled at the words, but recovered quickly. “What can I do to help? I’m not about to let her eat you, either.”

  “Any chance you’re good at picking locks and never told me about it?”

  “I did it once when my mother locked me in my room….” She pulled a hair pin from her already mussed hair and a tumble of curls fell. “Let me give it a try with this.”

  Stepping forward, she motioned for Hazel to move, and reluctantly, she pulled her bone pick from the keyhole and shifted to the side.

  “I didn’t need to escape after I met you.” Gretel smiled over her shoulder. “We can thank your climbing ability for that.”

  Gretel had the cage open in less than a minute, and Hazel kissed her for it. “You constantly surprise me.”

  Shrugging, Gretel smiled as she used the hairpin to drag some of her hair back up and out of her face.

  The room was oddly dank and musty, as though their cage bars shrouded them from the worst of it. Hazel swallowed back the disgusted sound she might have made and moved into the kitchen, avoiding the oven, even though she knew it would not jump out and bite her.

  The doors were her first priority. If they could get out, they had a chance at safety. The furthest corner of the kitchen held a crooked door she hadn’t seen from the cage. Dark mold bled up from the floor like the tendrils of a weed. Its top edge was crumbling and left an uneven gap against the frame.

  Gretel murmured something behind her—low enough she was certain she wasn’t meant to hear it.

  Her hand rested on the handle a moment longer and she took a deep breath, afraid of what she would find.

  Sliding it sideways, she blew out that breath as the darkness that greeted her seemed harmless. She didn't step inside. Didn't know if it was a root cellar with dark steps that would send her tumbling downward and break her bones.

  She couldn't move forward, but something kept her from closing up the door and moving away. There was something in here that she needed to see. Something she needed to know.

  Her fairy blood had a funny way of doing that—telling her what to do.

  Annoying as it was, she'd learned to trust it.

  Gretel came beside her with a candle. What it illuminated made them both scramble backward. The space, roughly the size of their cage, was lined with piles of blackened bones. Sorted out, they filled in the macabre pantry and sent a chill down Hazel's spine. The light faded and behind her, she heard Hazel vomit.

  Krell's bones were in those piles.

  She closed the door and reminded herself to breathe.

  Gretel looked paler. Not so much green as washed out. Her eyes darted away before they managed to fall on the closed door.

  There was an ugliness Hazel would save her from if she could, but ignorance wouldn't do her any favors.

  Thumbing through a stack of yellowed and curled parchment, she set to planning their escape in earnest. They could get out of the cage, but could they get out of the house?

  Glancing at the door, she considered the possible spells laid there. Best not try it until they planned to leave. If they had to run, they did not want the witch aware of their plans ahead of time.

  The witch was a predator. But she wasn't a hunter.

  "What if we poison something in these jars? It could kill her."

  "She makes our food too... who knows what we've eaten since we wound up in that cage."

  Grimacing, Hazel moved to the baskets that lined the other wall. Hazel picked up the jar and felt her stomach turn as the cloudy eyes there in shifted with each movement, as though they were watching her. They were labeled “failed attempt three.�
� If she was blind save for what little her magic let her see, Hazel had no idea why she’d use hand written labels.

  “What on earth?” Gretel held up a bag full of blue pinecones. “She calls these grinder clots. What does that even mean? And those are boom pots.”

  She pointed to what looked like green mushroom caps and shook her head.

  “There’s nothing down here we can use.” Hazel glanced first to where Edina was still huddled in the corner, her eyes fixed on them, and then to the stairs Carcenia had disappeared up.

  “Think we should risk it?” Gretel asked, coming to stand beside her, still holding a bag labeled poppy flour.

  “If she’s been taking that, I imagine we’ll be fine.” Hazel had only dealt with one other opium user, and she had been malleable in her stupor.

  Swallowing the trepidation clawing at her throat, Hazel took Gretel’s hand and together they crossed the kitchen to the stairs Carcenia disappeared up each night.

  The stairs bowed beneath her weight, but didn’t make a sound. Thirteen steps to the top.

  Gretel pressed against her back, hands gripping her upper arm and they waited. Gaze sweeping across the dark hallway, looking for any sign of life. The only movement was the fluttering of gauzy, dust-grayed curtains.

  The hallway seemed to stretch into eternity. Hazel knew that was a trick of magic, but she couldn’t stop the shiver that wracked her as she stared into the darkness that swallowed up the very end. Dark magic had an inescapable, decaying effect.

  Paint peeled from the walls in the first room and its floor was covered in debris from those flakes and from the half fallen ceiling. If anything natural lived here, it was not by choice. That was the only reason she did not expect to find a nest of birds or a hive of bees. Both were good creatures that would die under the darkness here.

  So too would Gretel and Edina if they did not get out soon.

  The next three rooms were the same. Decaying and empty. If the pattern continued, Hazel was going to have to rethink their search plan.

  By the seventh door, she was ready to skip the rest and head straight through to the curving stairwell she saw at the end of the hall—now that she could see the end of the hall.

  She’d already taken hold of the handle, so she opened it. One more decaying room wouldn’t keep her from getting to those stairs.

  Pulling it open, she stepped back as Gretel sucked in a staggered breath.

  A treasure trove filled the room in front of them and let out a near-blinding light.

  The mound of golden objects seemed too large for the room, and Hazel had no idea how the floor held their weight. Magic again, she suspected. Still, it was mesmerizing.

  The room was bright and glaring. Hazel glanced around her, looking for any sign of the source. It was the golden objects themselves.

  “Can you imagine what you could do with all that gold?”

  “In this house? I’d imagine you could fall through the floor.”

  Gretel snickered and held more tightly to her arm. “Come on. We can’t take it with us.”

  Hazel nodded and stepped away. Nothing good would come from the objects ferreted away in this house.

  Stepping carefully down the hall, she ignored the rest of the rooms. After all, now that she knew there was a way into the tower she’d seen before they’d been trapped, she had no doubt that was where Carcenia lived.

  Witches love towers.

  These steps were sturdy, as if they had received the care and maintenance the rest of the house lacked.

  This was Carcenia’s domain, the place she felt safe. That was a problem. If she counted this as her sanctum, it would be better protected than the rest of the house. Grimacing at that thought, she started up the spiraling steps and waited to see what lay at their top.

  *

  Their exploration had been uneventful until the treasure room, and Gretel couldn’t help thinking of what her mother would do for even a quarter of the riches piled therein. She’d sold her only daughter for far less.

  Lucky for her, and the entire village, her mother had only been born with the greed of a witch and not the power. She winced at the thought. Leilei made her ever mindful of evil thoughts. And her mother’s priorities would be sorted out in the afterlife.

  A wicked part of her hoped her mother would be reincarnated as a frog or perhaps a sow. The huntsman, she hoped would return as a cockroach.

  Pressing her lips together, she forced herself to not think about that again.

  Staying close behind Hazel, Gretel watched her feet more than anything else. It was why she almost bumped into her when she stopped.

  Peeking around her shoulder, Gretel saw why. The landing in front of them opened to a circular room with an enormous canopied bed. Shrouds of white fabric hung around Carcenia like a wedding veil as she slept. The sound of her snores echoed lowly in the room. The bassinet tucked into the corner made her stomach lurch as its mobile twisted in slow circles.

  The thought of this woman with an infant made her want to throw up.

  If only they had a knife. Gretel would cut her black heart out.

  When she moved forward, eyes searching for a blade, Hazel held out her arm to stop her. She pointed to two glowing white stones on either side of the landing and shook her head, motioning her back down the stairs.

  Hazel went, but Gretel couldn’t force herself to move yet. She needed… something. Her jaw twitched as she searched for anything that might help. The clean white room was only marred by the witch’s presence.

  With a final glance to the darkened room, Gretel reluctantly led the way back to the second floor.

  “Why didn’t we go after her? We could have killed her in her sleep and this would all be over.”

  “We could have tried. Those were weirstones.” Hazel looked back up the stairs as though she might be able to see them. “If we’d gone past them, she would have woken immediately.”

  Gretel’s shoulders sank. “And then we’d be worse off than we already are.”

  Nodding back toward the kitchen stairs, Hazel led the way back through the seemingly abandoned hallway.

  The place gave her the creeps. Everything was too neat. There was a precise order to things. The paint was too fresh, the floor to polished.

  Not even a room full of gold could distract her from the pristine condition of the second floor… a trick of magic, she was sure.

  “What do you see up here,” she asked Hazel in as low a voice as she could while still being sure Hazel would hear her.

  “I see rot and decay and cobwebs.”

  “I thought so. There is a spell here, one that works even after the one that drew me to the house was broken.”

  Hazel stopped and peered around. “Maybe she’d deluding herself… which doesn’t make sense because she’s blind. But if she was, why not spell the kitchen too?”

  “She’s a witch, who knows what her motives are?”

  The kitchen was the same as they had left it, save for Edina, who stood at the open cage gate instead of cowering in her corner.

  “What are you doing?”

  Hazel tossed the girl a roll from the kitchen table. “We’re figuring out an escape plan and trying to decide how to kill Carcenia.”

  “How? Not if? So you’ve already decided that you have to kill her?”

  Nodding, Gretel shuffled through their bags and pulled out the box of matches buried deep inside. “Fire is the best way to kill a witch.”

  Edina looked into the kitchen with a scowl that was too old for her face. “I have tried to push her into the oven. It won’t fit her.”

  Looking from the oven and back to her, Gretel said, “She can’t leave her house because of the irzahara, right?”

  Edina looked between them with a suspicious frown and nodded.

  “Then we burn the house down around her.”

  Swallowing, Edina shrank away. “We’d burn with her.”

  “No we wouldn’t.” Hazel shook her head emphatically.
“We can get out. We can avoid the irzahara.”

  Edina didn’t look convinced.

  Gretel went back into the kitchen anyway and began rooting around for flammables.

  She gathered up the dried herbs and a roll of parchment. Neither were ideal, but with the brittle bones of the house, she had to hope they would do the trick.

  Edina knocked against her side. “Those,” she said, nodding at the blue stone pinecones. “They explode.”

  Again, the girl looked too sullen.

  “What does she use them for?” Gretel asked, picking one up and handling it with more care than she had before.

  Edina shrugged. “The always disappear, but I don’t know why or where to.”

  “Anything else that would be helpful?”

  “Only my recommendation that you not do this.”

  Gretel gathered up as many of the pinecones as she could carry, using her skirt as a makeshift bag.

  While Hazel worked on a way to get out of the locked doors, she snuck back up the stairs. Each room she passed, she tossed a pinecone into. They were going to burn this place to the ground, and she was going to make sure it was a spectacle. If nothing else, she wanted to be sure it was a fast burning inferno.

  She opened the first door they hadn’t yet come to when Hazel had lead their search, and drew back immediately.

  Men and boys sat perfectly still, their faces flat, their eyes unseeing. Like dolls. Out of her periphery, she saw glittering strands that connected them to the ceiling as though they were marionettes waiting to be commanded in a pantomime.

  The youngest boy looked as though he was under ten, the oldest man had a long white beard that dropped over his lap and coiled around his feet.

  Krell sat in a chair at the far end of the room. Staring at her without seeing her.

  Specters of death.

  She did not want to know what Hazel would see if she looked inside.

  Swallowing the disgusting feeling in her throat, she threw in five of her pinecone stash. This room needed to be erased from existence. She knew it would never leave her memory.