Howl's Twisted Castle

37: All polished up

Falling through space felt nothing like I imagined it would. I was weightless and heavy all at once as I plummeted through the unknown. As I dropped into the chasm of swirling light, the image of Howls hand reaching out to mine burned into my memory.

But a question lingered.

Had I reached out and took the hand he offered, what would have happened?

The ground appeared out of nowhere and before I could answer that very question, the force of the impact knocked the wind clean out of me. It took me a moment to get my bearings before I could attempt to move but something grumbled beneath me that made me jump.

"It's a good thing I happened to be standing here," Alex groaned as I scrambled to get off him. Dusting off his jacket, he moved his neck from side to side, giving it an experimental crack.

"You should have considered moving then," I replied indignantly, adjusting my jacket so that it hid most of my features. 

It was hard to say where it was that we were, for aside from the climbing brick walls surrounding us, there was nothing else that could tell me our location. All I knew was that if Alex's spell had truly worked, then Calcifer had to be close by.

"Perish the thought, Sophie. Who knows what kind of damage you might have caused to the pavement," Alex's lip quirked. Rummaging around his satchel, he produced a flask and took a long swig. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he offered the rest to me.

"So, where are we?" I asked, taking the tiny metal container from him. One whiff was all I needed to identify the strong odor. Whiskey, I shuddered, handing the offending drink back.

"Not a fan, I take it?" he guessed, taking another healthy quaff.

I pulled a face and turned away. "I don't take pleasure in drinking something that smells like it could pull the varnish off a table. Howl seems to enjoy that sort of thing as well, but I can't possibly figure out why."

"You could say that it is a Highland tradition," he replied, tucking the flask away. Sifting through a small pile of trash by out feet, Alex straightened out a newspaper and held it at arm's length. He pulled out a pair of spectacles and perched them on the bridge of his nose. "Aha, to answer your earlier question, it would appear that we are not far from Kingsbury."

"Kingsbury?" I said in disbelief, reaching for the paper. Alex peered over my shoulder as I tried to interpret the smeared ink blots on the dirty paper.

"Yes, see here?" he pointed to a smaller heading that had the words Kingsbury Herald inscribed in barely legible ink.

I peeked around the corner of what I now gathered to be an alley to get a better look at our surroundings. The roads were spotless, with few street vendors to be found. As for people, there were plenty. Not the market place that I remember going with Markel then.

"It looks like the richer side of Kingsbury," I remarked, watching a pretty woman step out of a carriage, her cream chiffon gown flowing behind her like a cloak.

Everywhere I looked, men and women were dressed so elegantly that I tugged at my tattered outfit nervously. Our disguises weren't going to work with these people; we stood out for all the wrong reasons. I hoped that Alex had a plan because at this point I wasn't feeling entirely confident we could get anything accomplished looking the way we did.

"Sophie, he's here," Alex said quietly, ducking out of view. He inched forward, pulling me with him. I followed his gaze across the road and found myself gripping his arm for support.

It didn't take me long to identify who it was that caught Alex's attention. Neatly combed into a soft wave, his oiled hair gleamed in the midday sun like a beacon. His clean-shaven, sharp jaw displayed a perpetual smirk as he played with a coin in his hands, giving a nod to the ladies as he passed them by. But it was more than that that had me staring like a lovesick girl. It was that he looked so alarmingly like Howl that my breath caught.