I froze, breath held in my lungs, barely a quarter of the way to the doru. What was he implying? Was he saying that my mom was dead?
He sighed. “Diana will be glad to hear that you are all right . . . though less glad, I think, to learn that you are here.”
I exhaled shakily. Relief flooded my body. I’d been preparing for the worst, but now I knew there was hope that she—that we—would make it out of this situation alive.
I was desperate to demand that the man in the suit tell me where my mom was, but I was fearful of drawing attention to myself. He seemed perfectly content to continue his bad-guy monologue while making his slow journey around the vault. How cliché. But, so long as it kept him distracted, I wasn’t about to interrupt him.
I was mere steps from the doru when he stopped. He was almost directly across the room from me, his stare locked on the cube.
“It’s a box,” he said. “And you opened it.” He looked at me suddenly, eyes widened by shock. “I’d long suspected there was more to the artifact, but now . . .” He shook his head. “How did you open it?” His eyes narrowed, stare going hard. “Tell me.”
I opened my mouth, but I wasn’t sure what to say—all I’d done was touch the thing—so I simply shook my head, shoulders rising in the slightest of shrugs. Until I had the chance to translate the writing on its pedestal, I would be as clueless as the Order was about the nature of the box.
“Unless it is not something you did,” he said, thinking aloud. “It is who you are—or what you are. You are the key.” He laughed, a feverish glint to his gray eyes. “I knew it! It will work . . .” He glanced at the arched doorway blocked by a slab of stone, and let out another, shriller laugh. “It will work.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. More than a little unsettled, I took another step toward the doru, bringing the weapon within arm’s reach.
“You have been holding back on me,” the man in the suit said. He wasn’t talking to me, not anymore.
He was looking at Raiden—talking to Raiden. Like he knew him. And based on his words, it sounded a lot like Raiden had been feeding him information. Information about me.
I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be true. This was Raiden, after all.
My brows drew together, dread coiling in my gut. I shifted my gaze to the man I’d entrusted with my life. “What does he mean?”
Raiden’s jaw was clenched, his shoulders stiff. For several long seconds, he didn’t move. He didn’t even breathe. But then he exhaled, and his shoulders drooped. He lowered his gun and bowed his head.
“Look at me,” I said, voice cracking.
He closed his eyes.
“Look at me, Raiden,” I demanded. “Look at me and tell me you’re not working for them.” My chin trembled as an invisible knife slid into my chest, puncturing my heart. “Raiden, please . . .”
Ever so slowly, Raiden shook his head. “I’m sorry, Cora,” he said, finally opening his eyes and meeting mine. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“Oops,” the man in the suit said. “I guess the cat is out of the bag now . . .”
So it was true. Raiden was working with the Order.
The knife in my chest twisted, shredding bits of my heart. I had no words. No breath. I was frozen in that moment, paralyzed by this revelation. By Raiden’s betrayal.
Had Persephone suspected this? Was that why I’d initially thought he had trapped me under Castel Sant’Angelo, and why I’d had such a hard time lowering the rifle when it had been aimed at him? Had she seen the truth, where I’d been blind?
“Look in my head, Cora,” Raiden said, taking a step toward me. “Like you did with the dream . . .”
“Not so fast,” the man in the suit said, pulling a silver revolver out from a shoulder holster hidden within his jacket.
Raiden’s only acknowledgement of the revolver was to stop moving, but his attention was still locked on me. “I know you can, Cora, so just do it. Then you’ll see . . . you’ll know . . .” There was desperation in his voice. “Do it, Cora,” he begged. “Please!”
I stared at Raiden, tears streaking down my cheeks.
“What is Mr. Cross talking about?” the man in the suit said. “What does he mean?” But his demands went in one ear and out the other. He didn’t matter, not right now. Not when faced with the reality of Raiden’s betrayal.
Numbly, I pulled the regulator out from my T-shirt by the chain and traced my fingers around the amber stone, knowing that by the time I completed the circle, it would be glowing a brilliant, electric blue. And with the change in the stone’s color, there would be a change within me, as well.
I just had no idea how extreme that change would be.
The instant my fingertip traced all the way around the stone, the mental floodgates opened. I was inundated with voices in my head, with thoughts and memories that weren’t my own. I squeezed my eyes shut and clutched the sides of my head, knocking the headlamp clean off. One voice stood out above the others, the voice that had been there all along: Persephone.
. . . surrender . . .
I felt like I’d been fighting the current of invading thoughts, emotions, and memories for hours. For days. In reality, it had probably only been a matter of seconds. A matter of seconds, and in some ways, an entire lifetime.
Persephone’s voice cut through the miasma, a lifeline yanking me out of the grip of deadly psychic undertow.
. . . surrender . . .
“I can’t!” I wailed. Was she crazy? What was she thinking? If I stopped fighting the flood of thoughts and memories, they would drown me.
. . . surrender, and you’ll be free . . .
I shook my head, hunching over and gasping for breath.
. . . surrender, and you’ll regain control . . .
“How?” I gasped. I was desperate, fighting a losing battle and quickly running out of time, and Persephone’s words weren’t making any sense.
. . . stop fighting . . .
. . . let it in . . .
. . . let it all in . . .
She wanted me to stop fighting? Easier said than done. I’d been fighting my “condition” my whole life, to the point that preventing another “episode” had become my main goal. Fighting this—this whatever it was—had become second nature. It was more than habit; it was an obsession. The worst thing about my life had become my reason for being.
It was sad. And disturbing. And above all else, really damn pathetic.
I hated that fear had overtaken my life. That I had let it.
So, I listened to Persephone. On my next exhale, I relaxed my mental guards. I stopped fighting the foreign input inundating my mind. I let it in—the thoughts, the emotions, the memories. I let it all in.
And in doing so, I realized that it wasn’t foreign at all. At least, not any more than the light my eyes processed or the sounds picked up by my ears. Like sight and hearing and touch, my “condition” was the furthest thing from the accursed illness I’d always thought it to be—it was just another sensory inroad allowing me to perceive more about the world around me. Just another way for external data to enter my brain and be processed into something comprehensible. Just another sense. That was it. That was all it was.
And just like that, by surrendering for a single moment, something that had been a struggle my whole life became easy. It became natural.
I could feel anger and confusion, annoyance and heartbreak. And fear. So damn much fear. It saturated the room, thick and suffocating. Everyone was afraid. The goons were afraid of me, as was the man in the suit, though he was also intrigued by me, as well as slightly peeved. His name was Henry, and he was the head of the Custodes Veritatis—the Primicerius—and his carefully laid out plans were being derailed. He’d accounted for all the factors, or so he’d thought.
But he hadn’t accounted for me. For Persephone. For what I—we—could do.
And then there was Raiden. He was the only one who wasn’t afraid of me; he was afraid for me. He wa
nted to come to me, to hold me and to keep me safe, but he didn’t want to die. I could sense that he wasn’t afraid of death; rather, he was afraid of dying without purpose. He would welcome the quiet, the peace, but only if it came as a result of a worthy sacrifice. Dying to save his mom was first and foremost in his mind.
That thought struck a chord within me, and I followed it. I could sense that Emi was the reason for his betrayal. Henry had approached Raiden while he was on his way back from the bank, earlier this morning. Henry had shown Raiden a video of his mom, tied to a chair in the kitchen of Blackthorn Manor. In the video, she was bruised and bloody from hours of torture. Beaten and broken. But she was still alive, and she would remain that way, Henry had promised Raiden, so long as he delivered me to the Order.
Raiden had said no, at first. Refusing was what his mom would’ve wanted him to do. It was what he had been trained to do in the Army. No negotiating with terrorists. Never bargain with the bad guys, because they rarely held up their end of the deal.
But Henry had told him things—about me. About what he wanted from me. About what he wanted me to do for the Order. He had convinced Raiden that the Order didn’t want to hurt me. That they didn’t want to hurt his mom, or mine. That they didn’t want any more pain or bloodshed. That he was sorry for it, but that it had all been necessary. That there was a bigger picture. That the safety of humanity—of the world—was at stake.
Henry had made Raiden believe. He’d had to; it was the only way to convince Raiden to help him. Because there was one other person in this world besides his mom who Raiden would die to protect.
Me.
Despite the betrayal, the knowledge that Raiden cared so deeply about me—as deeply as I cared about him—soothed the ache in my heart. I could see that he had wanted to confess the truth to me the whole time we were in the catacombs, but that he had been afraid doing so would trigger the alter-ego that had been emerging more and more frequently—the alien warrior woman who had taken him down in the hotel room. If he had tripped her survival instinct, he never would have gotten me here, and his mom’s life would have been forfeit.
I understood why he did it—why he had been willing to trade my freedom for his mom’s life. In his shoes, I probably would have done the same thing. His betrayal still hurt, but not like before. I had already forgiven him.
I straightened and lowered my hands, and when I opened my eyes, I sought out Raiden’s face.
Except, he wasn’t where I expected him to be. The situation had changed while I was wading through his mind.
Raiden was lying face-down on the floor, two of the guards holding him down. Henry stood just a few steps away from him, gun pointed at his head. The other two guards remained near the open door, handguns still trained on me.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Henry said, glancing at me. “You are going to walk through that doorway”—he nodded toward the blocked stone archway—“and find your way through the labyrinth that lies beyond. And once you are through, you are going to bring me whatever you find at the end, or every single person you care about will die.”
His threat triggered something within me. Within Persephone. In the moment between heartbeats, she took over, balling my hands into fists and gritting my teeth.
“No man gives me orders,” I said, my voice sounding foreign to my own ears.
I grabbed the doru off the stone pedestal. The instant my fingers closed around the weapon, the ridges carved along its golden surface flared with the same electric blue light as the regulator’s stone. I flipped the doru over the back of my hand, and when it was once again in my palm with my fingers curled around it, it was three times as long as it had been before. Now, it looked much more the weapon it was.
I twisted the doru around so one end was tucked under my arm, snug against my body, and aimed the glowing focus crystal at one of the guards restraining Raiden. A bolt of blinding, deadly energy shot out of the staff, blasting into the guard’s chest. He flew back, slamming against the wall just a moment before a second burst of energy struck Raiden’s other detainer.
I shifted my aim, locking on Henry.
But before I could get off another shot, the deafening crack of gunfire filled the room. A bullet struck the doru, knocking it out of my grasp, and the staff flew several yards away. It hit the wall with a clang, then clattered to the floor.
“Stop!” Henry shouted.
Ears ringing, I froze, very aware of the fact that the tide of the battle had turned against me. Against Persephone. Against us.
Raiden now knelt on the floor where he’d been laying before, hands raised as he stared down the barrel of the revolver.
The remaining guards still had their pistols aimed at me.
Persephone returned control to me, and ever so slowly, I raised my hands in surrender.
“If you have to shoot her,” Henry said, “aim for a leg or an arm. We need her alive.” He glanced my way, just for a fraction of a second, a tight, humorless smile curving his lips. “Now, ancient one, here is what is going to happen. You will enter the labyrinth. You will find your way through to the end, and you will bring me whatever you find in the final chamber. If you fail, you will die in the labyrinth—none who have entered the labyrinth have ever returned—and out here, Diana, Emiko, and Raiden will meet the same end.”
I held in the hundreds of caustic remarks dancing on my tongue.
“But,” Henry continued, “if you are successful, you will have earned my gratitude, as well as my mercy. Nobody else has to die today.”
I cleared my throat. “What if there’s nothing at the end of the labyrinth?”
Henry’s cheek twitched. “That would be unfortunate, for all involved.”
I pressed my lips together, reading his meaning loud and clear. If I reemerged from the labyrinth empty handed, my mom, Emi, and Raiden were as good as dead.
An errant thought slipped from Henry’s mind to mine. He fully intended to follow through on his threat to kill my mom and Raiden, should I fail to comply, but not to kill Emi.
My eyes opened wide. Henry wasn’t planning on killing Emi, because he didn’t have her. The woman Raiden had seen on the video—the woman tied to a chair in the kitchen of Blackthorn Manor—wasn’t Emi. It was a charade, a performance, convincing but fake. Emi had evaded the Order. They hadn’t captured her. She was still out there, and they didn’t know where.
“Raiden, they don’t have your mom,” I said in a rush. “It wasn’t her on the video. It was a—”
“Shut up!” Henry shouted, punctuating his words by shifting his aim down to Raiden’s thigh. He squeezed the trigger.
Once again, the crack of gunfire was deafening.
I slapped my hands over my ears even as I screamed, “NO!”
Raiden shouted out in pain and rolled onto his side, hands clamping down over the gunshot wound in his thigh.
I took a lurching step toward Raiden, but Henry turned his gun on me, halting me mid-step. He made a tutting sound with his tongue, then shifted his aim back to Raiden. “No medical attention for your friend, here, until you’ve returned from the labyrinth.”
My eyes bulged. “He could bleed out!”
“Maybe,” Henry said, “but that is entirely up to you . . .” He gave a sideways nod toward the impeded archway. “Best hurry, ancient one.”
I glared at him for a long moment, then crossed the room to retrieve my bag. Out of spite, I pushed down on the lid of the cube until it clicked and was, once again, sealed shut.
When my eyes returned to Henry’s, he was mirroring my glare.
I hoisted my backpack onto my shoulder, then raised my other hand, flipping up my middle finger.
Raiden made a choking noise, and I glanced down at him. His face was taut with pain, but when I met his eyes, and saw the grim humor dancing in their depths, I realized he was suppressing laughter. I could feel the amusement wafting off of him. And the relief at knowing his mom was all right. And the pain radiating out
from the gunshot wound in his thigh. It hurt like hell, but he was certain nothing vital had been struck, and he already knew the bullet had gone clean through his leg. He wasn’t the least bit worried about bleeding out; his biggest concern was about infection. And about me.
“Hold on, Raiden,” I told him and, with a nod—a silent promise—I turned my back to him and headed for the archway.
Henry claimed that no person to enter the labyrinth had ever made it back out.
Well, all evidence pointed to the fact that I wasn’t a person, at least, not in the human sense. I would succeed where all before me failed. For Raiden, and for my mom.
I had to.
33
Very aware of the four sets of eyes staring at my back, I approached the archway, sliding my left arm through the other strap of my backpack and settling the bag on my shoulders. When I reached the stone slab blocking my way, I paused and gave the archway a quick scan from floor to keystone and back down.
The top of the arch was constructed of seven larger stone blocks, the largest being the keystone. Smaller stone blocks were stacked one upon another on either side all the way down to the floor. A single word had been inscribed into the keystone, the Latin word for truth: Veritas.
Interesting. It seemed the Order’s name—translated to “Guardians of the Truth”—was more literal than I’d thought.
I scanned the stone slab next, from keystone to floor and back up. I stopped halfway, eyes landing on a line of writing carved across the center of the massive stone. This, too, was in Latin.
THE ONLY WAY IN IS THROUGH
Through the archway? That seemed too obvious.
I narrowed my eyes.
Or through the stone?
Tilting my head to the side, I leaned in closer to the stone slab and raised my hand. I hesitated only for a moment before pressing my palm to the smooth surface.
My hand passed straight through, like the barrier was no more substantial than air. Air charged with static electricity, but air, nonetheless.
Pulling my hand back, I scanned the stone slab again, brows drawing together. It looked solid, but clearly it wasn’t.
Legacy of the Lost Page 23