I frowned. “Can you read my mind?”
“No. The others on your team have a lot of firewalls, but you—I can’t get through your head at all. If I tried right now, migraines aside, I’d hit a wall. It literally feels like that, like I’m hitting a big, dark wall.” I couldn’t sense any deceit coming off her, only embarrassment and guilt. I realized that, in feeling out for her emotions, I was being a bit hypocritical, but, hey, I had to know she wasn’t lying to me.
“So, you’ve tried to read my mind, then?”
“Like I said, I can’t control when it happens, and I don’t like to do it with these headaches. It’s different with Astrid—I can do it no problem—but with magicals I have to concentrate super hard. I thought I’d give it a go with you and your team, and risk a migraine, but your mind can shut me out completely. It’s weird. You’re doing it now and I bet you don’t even know you’re doing it.”
I didn’t know whether to feel proud or worried. In the end, I figured it was something to do with my Empath abilities, though I wasn’t going to tell her that. If she was going around, secretly trying to use her abilities on people, then I needed to keep my cards a little closer to my chest.
“You know, you should leave that stuff to us—the intel stuff,” I said, leaving the Telepathy for a bit.
She shrugged. “You didn’t seem to be making much progress with that snake thing on the loose, so I thought I’d see what I could dig up. I’ve always been good at research.”
“Even so… you shouldn’t be worrying about this kind of thing.”
Her eyes hardened. “How can I not, after what she did to us? You didn’t have to watch those two boys get murdered in front of you, just because they weren’t powerful enough for her. You didn’t see her do what she did. You didn’t have to wait each day, wondering if you were next on the chopping block, because you might’ve disappointed her or weren’t ‘rare’ enough for her liking.”
“Is that what this is, then? Is it—”
“Revenge.” She finished my sentence before I could. “Yeah, it is. For my foster parents, and all those whom Katherine has hurt. And all the people she wants to hurt. I’m going to punish her, any way that I can, and I’m starting with these rituals. She has to be stopped, Harley. You have no idea what she’ll become if she manages this.” She shook the book at me.
“I do have some idea, believe me. However, there’s not much in there,” I said, my tone softening. “We’ve already looked.”
“Well, you didn’t look hard enough. You’ve got to read between the lines.”
“You found something?”
She bit her lip nervously. “I’m not sure yet.”
A thought popped into my mind. “Could you read any of Katherine’s thoughts, when she was holding you hostage?”
“No, she’s like you. I tried it before Kenneth poured that stuff down my throat.”
My heart jumped in panic. “What do you mean?”
“That wall you’ve got in your head. She’s got it, too. I couldn’t even get close, and believe me, I tried,” she replied. “If you’re an Empath, maybe she’s one, too.”
My blood ran cold as a chilling realization dawned. Maybe Katherine did have some kind of Empath abilities, or some kind of power that allowed her to block out the feelers of other magicals. She’d blocked me when I’d tried to feel her out, back at the warehouse. Empathy seemed like an ironic ability for her, but there was definitely something about her skill set that suggested a blocking power. After all, she’d used something to stop us from finding the kids with a tracking spell. She’d blocked their magical signature. Maybe that was her skill, though I had no idea what it’d be called.
“Wait… how do you know I’m an Empath?” There went my closely-held cards.
She frowned. “Oh, is that what you are?”
“What did you think I was?”
“I thought you might’ve been like me. Still, Empathy isn’t far off. See, even with that stuff in me, things slip through from time to time. That Wade guy was thinking, ‘Please don’t let Harley know I’m still thinking about her being in my bedroom,’ all the way through breakfast this morning. I think I heard it because he was repeating it so much, but I kind of guessed what you were from that. I was wrong, but I’d say close enough.”
What? A flood of girlish happiness swept through my veins. The timing wasn’t great but, damn, it was good to hear that he was thinking about me. And in a kind of saucy way, too.
“I want her dead, Harley,” Louella spat suddenly, her cheeks inflamed. “I want to kill her. I want to kill her, the way she killed my foster parents. Yeah, they were strict sometimes, but they were kind to me and I was happy there. They didn’t deserve what she did to them. That evil bitch has ruined my entire life, and the lives of the other kids, and I’m not going to stop until she’s dead.”
I held up my hands. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Slow down, there. We all feel the same, but you can’t let your anger cloud your judgment. It’ll only make you weaker—I learned that recently,” I said. “I’ve got a thousand reasons I want to see her dead, too, but thinking only about vengeance isn’t going to get any of us anywhere.”
“I can’t make it go away,” she muttered, sitting back in her chair with a sigh.
“I’m not asking you to. I’m just saying, work with us, not away from us.” I glanced at the rest of her book selection, a couple of them piquing my curiosity. “Where did you find these? I haven’t seen them before.” I pointed to a stack at the end of the table. From their spines, they didn’t seem to have anything to do with the five rituals: The Ancient Ways; Particles, and the Mythology of the Universe; The Fabric of Stars; Traversing the Cosmos. I felt like Neil deGrasse Tyson was going to pop up and give me an impromptu lecture on Astrophysics for Dummies.
She smiled slyly. “Before Kenneth got the chance to pour that stuff down my throat, I heard him—he kept thinking about the five rituals. Like, it was all he could think about. The details were fuzzy, but I think Katherine might’ve given him a role to play in her plan, and he was so proud that he kept repeating things in his head. Things I shouldn’t have heard. He didn’t even realize it, the freaking dumbass, but it led me to these.
“See, they aren’t specifically about the rituals, but that’s the beauty—reading between the lines, like I said. The rituals are hidden inside, told through vague stories, scientific studies, and mythology. It’s not about the Children of Chaos, not really. There are some essays about it, too, but they were all dumped in a box marked ‘miscellaneous’ up there.” She gestured to the top shelf of a nearby bookcase.
“Geez, you’re sharp,” I blurted out. Frankly, I was astonished. I’d known she was bright, given the way she’d avoided the Ryders twice, but this was phenomenal, even with a little super-sensory help.
“Thanks. I guess sharp is better than geek.” She flashed a wry smile, bordering on haughty.
I walked around to her side of the desk and sat down. “So, what did you find, since you’re clearly a freaking genius?”
She pulled out the book called The Ancient Ways. “Well, see, each ritual has to do with one of the Children of Chaos, separately. It can’t be done in one go—at least I don’t think it can, not if I’m right. This book, for example, tells it in stories, of a warrior performing five tasks so that he can face one of the Children and gain untold power. It doesn’t say what the tasks are precisely, but they seem to be linked to the attributes of the different Children. He succeeds in the tasks and the fight, and he has to decide whether to take the place of Nyx as a result. The warrior doesn’t, but if he had, he would have become Nyx. Instead, he walks away with the power of Nyx, and is hailed as a kind of demigod. Anyway, what I can gather from the story is that a person can be transformed by sapping the energy from a Child of Chaos, most likely through that final fight, and taking on their abilities once they’ve done that.”
“Holy crap,” I mumbled. “What is this book?”
“Children’s s
tories.”
“Geez, that stuff would’ve given me nightmares as a kid. And you’re sure it doesn’t say what the tasks are?”
“Afraid not. It just says, “…each more dangerous than the last.” There are pictures, but they’ve been worn away over time. I can’t make anything out from them, other than a few bursts of light.”
“Can I see?”
She showed me the book. I’d been hoping to find something she’d missed, but she was right—the yellowed pages had seen better days, the pictures fuzzed out beyond all recognition by age and water damage.
“That’s a pain in the ass,” I muttered.
She smiled. “There’s more. One of the essays has a theory in it, that each ritual is very specific and has to be fueled by an enormous amount of power—the kind that no one is born with. If we reference this back to the myth, we can kind of tell that the only reason that the one warrior won was because they were already blessed by the gods. Hercules vibes, if you see what I mean?”
“So, already super powerful?”
“Exactly. That’s why I think Katherine’s collecting kids like us, because she wants to take our Chaos energy, to make herself even more powerful. That would be the only thing that would give her the ability to do these rituals-slash-tasks, whatever you want to call them. I mean, there were more kids in that ferry port than just us—she moved them before the security dudes came to get us. We were just the San Diego ones. She’s got kids from all over.”
I gaped at her. “Are you serious?”
“Do you think I’d lie?”
“No… no, I guess not. Have you told Alton?” He hadn’t mentioned anything to us about extra kids.
“I told Alton about it, and he said he’d check with the other covens to see if they were missing anyone. Then again, they might be kids like us, who didn’t belong to a coven.”
I peered down at the book, swallowing my horror, letting it all sink in. Now, the lack of retribution for us taking back the kids made sense. She had backups. This way, by making it easy for us to get them back, she’d gotten us off her case. Why hadn’t Alton mentioned anything to us about it? I guessed he might’ve wanted to run checks first. “Does it say what absorbing the energy of the Child of Chaos, in the final challenge, actually transforms a person into? I mean, do they become the exact same as the one they’ve defeated?”
Louella shook her head. “It’s hard to tell. With the winning warrior, it simply mentions the word ‘Ascension.’ Here, it says, ‘He had been marked for Ascension, whenever he chose to part with his mortal form.’ Now, it doesn’t say anything else about this warrior, so we don’t know what happens next.”
I shuddered at the thought of Katherine becoming some kind of avenging angel or Ascended being, or actually embodying the Goddess Eris whom she seemed to like so much. She was bad enough as a plain human.
“How do you even go about challenging a Child of Chaos?” I mused out loud. I knew, firsthand, that they could be summoned, but surely they’d know what was coming and just disappear before anything could happen. I doubted they were bound by duty to take challenges.
“The stories mention different places, where each Child of Chaos lives. Their home, kind of thing. They seem to be the locations where the five tasks have to happen. Tartarus is one of them, which seems to be Erebus’s jam. Elysium is another, though it’s not clear who that one belongs to. The Asphodel Meadows is number three. The Garden of Hesperides is four. And Lethe is the fifth, which seems to be some kind of pool. No clue where the final fight happens, though. I guess you have to pick, maybe?”
I frowned. “Tartarus?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a real place?”
Louella shrugged. “No idea—those are just the places in these stories. Each one is linked to a different Child of Chaos, though indirectly. It’s all in the mythology.”
All this time, I’d thought that places like that were just stories, but now I was starting to think that they might be very real. Moreover, that they might have something to do with Katherine’s pursuit of this Children of Chaos idea. Were these the locations where the five rituals had to take place, like Louella had guessed?
“Crazy, right?” Louella said.
“Yeah, you could say that.” I had one more question that I wanted to ask her. “I don’t suppose you found anything about a Librarian—capital ‘L’—in any of these books, did you? They’re meant to know everything there is to know about these rituals. More than a story can tell us, anyway.”
Her face drained of color. “What did you just say?”
“The Librarian. Did you find anything in here about them?”
“Katherine had someone else captive,” she said, after a tense pause. “Before the headaches came, I could hear a bunch of stuff going on in that woman’s head. It was almost like she wanted me to listen. Not that it made much sense.”
“What kind of stuff?”
She shrugged. “Words, Latin mostly. At least, I think they were Latin. I can’t really remember. Even when I can use my Telepathy, the retention afterwards is pretty bad.”
“How do you know that’s her—the woman we’re looking for?” I asked.
“Katherine called her the Librarian, just like you did. She never called her by her name.”
My pulse quickened. “Is she alive? Does Katherine still have her?”
Louella nodded. “I think so. She took away the woman at the same time as the rest of the kids.”
I was glad to hear that the Librarian was alive, but she was obviously in a heap of trouble. No doubt, that lady’s knowledge was what Katherine needed to figure out the rituals. How is she always one step ahead of us? It was starting to piss me off.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” Louella asked.
“No, not at all. We need her, that’s all—this woman. Without her, we’ll have to guess how Katherine’s going to do all of this. We need facts.”
Determined, I flipped through the pile of essays Louella had gathered. Nothing really caught my attention, and I’d never heard any of the names before: Alfonso Cotillo, Joel Pennington, Lisbeth Tawny, Foster McGinty, Finnoula O’Rourke, Aziriphale Gaiman, Remington Knightshade, Harriet Clarke, Marianna Gorge. My eyes widened, my fingertips flipping back two pages. Wait—what?!
Remington Knightshade had written an essay on the Children of freaking Chaos. My eyes drank in his words, picking out the buzzwords I was looking for: energy, transformation, rituals—the whole shebang.
Katherine might have had the Librarian, but maybe all wasn’t lost. I needed to give Remington a call.
Twenty-Five
Astrid
Feeling drained after yesterday’s memorial service, my eyes scratchy from so many spilled tears, I stretched out my arms and sat up in bed. Jacintha’s loss continued to haunt me, and I hadn’t slept well, thinking about her. Her body on the plinth, wrapped in the colorful silk, was an image that would take a long time to leave me. Attempting to put myself in a more positive mindset, as we had to head out into the field later to search for Quetzi, I pulled Smartie out from under my pillow and unlocked the screen. He chirped happily.
“Morning,” I said, out of habit.
“Good morning,” he replied. “Would you like a morning playlist?”
I shook my head. “No, thank you.”
“No playlist. You have one note.”
I frowned at the screen. “Open the note.”
The screen flickered and shifted to one of the virtual post-its. I’d written it last night when I got in. Check camera loop, was all the note said. I must’ve fallen asleep before I could examine it further. I wanted to relieve the nagging feeling that had been plaguing me since the spy was captured. He’d mentioned how easy the system was to hack, which wasn’t entirely false, but I wondered if there were more glitches like the one I’d found on Garrett’s body cam footage. Had John Smith tried to set anyone else up to take the fall for his crimes?
With a yawn, I opened up the ope
rating system that was in control of the cameras, and asked Smartie to find all the footage between the hours that Garrett’s had been doctored. A flurry of windows opened. I spent the better half of an hour scanning through each one, but Garrett’s seemed to be the only one that had been tampered with. Determined to find out what had actually gone on in that window of time, I went back to the most important cameras—the ones I’d initially checked when the Bestiary had been thrown into mayhem. The cameras in the Bestiary itself had malfunctioned during the energy overflow, but there was one still working in the hallway outside.
Squinting over the top of my glasses, I watched the footage. Four security guards stood in the hallway, barely moving. For five minutes, they continued to do nothing. And then, very subtly, the screen flickered. It was barely noticeable, but I was looking out for the tiniest of glitches. The security guards continued to stand there, but it was clear the footage was on a loop. The tap of one of their feet on the floor gave it away.
A few minutes after that, another flicker shivered through the image. The moment it glitched, the image changed to one of the security guards running toward the Bestiary. I hadn’t noticed it before, when I’d first looked over the cameras after the incident, but the security guards were very clearly running much faster than I’d have expected, with it being such a short distance between the hallway and the Bestiary. It almost looked as if they’d come from farther away, like they hadn’t been standing in the hallway when the blast went off. Someone had doctored this footage and pieced it back together to make the timeline fit.
“Smartie, can you retrieve deleted video files from before the explosion in the Bestiary?” I said.
“I can, though it may take a moment. Would you like to proceed?” he answered, in his soothing, clipped voice.
“Yes, please.”
“Very good.” The screen turned black, showing a whirling circle that chased its tail. I couldn’t tear my fatigued eyes away from it, the movement hypnotic. “Deleted files recovered,” Smartie chirped. The screen shifted back to the camera footage, showing the same four guards standing languidly in the hallway. Once again, the closest man to the camera tapped his foot in apparent boredom. However, as the clock ticked past the five-minute mark, where the doctored footage had shifted to the loop, this one didn’t. A figure stepped up to the security guards with their hood up. I couldn’t hear anything, but the figure was clearly speaking to them about something. They looked at him like they knew him, exchanging glances before wandering off down the hallway, out of shot.
Harley Merlin 4: Harley Merlin and the First Ritual Page 28