“I’m trying to help you.”
“Right now you need to do it from somewhere else.”
“Nora—”
I threw the folder. Incriminating evidence fluttered and flapped, drifting gently to the ground. “Go.”
Once I was alone, I collected the pages from where they had fallen and stuffed them into my backpack. Then I returned to the bed, picked at loose threads in the stained floral spread, imagined the weight of him on the mattress, on me, the creak of the bed-springs beneath us, the flutter of moths and the scuttle of rodents in shadowed corners, the things he whispered to me in the dark.
The best lies, the most believable lies, are mostly truth. I read that once, somewhere.
In a world without absolutes, the truth is whatever you choose to believe. I read that, too. But I never understood how you choose. Or choose not to.
Adriane came back from the shower damp and radiant. “Your turn,” she said. Then, “You okay?”
I stood up. “Eli’s not who he said he was.”
“Then who is he?”
I could admit I didn’t know, and didn’t know if it mattered.
Or I could lie.
7
“Seriously, what kind of PI doesn’t carry a gun?” Adriane complained. She pulled on her hood, casting her face in shadow.
“If everything goes smoothly, we won’t need a gun,” Eli said. It was strange to see the black robes billowing around them, stranger still to feel the scratchy wool of my own robe brush against my ankles, to peer out from beneath the hood that cut off all periphery vision. So this was how the world looked to the Hledači: narrow and rimmed with darkness.
“Well, in that case, I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Adriane said. “Things have been going so smoothly for us up till now.”
Eli stopped. The Letohrádek Hvězda, the Star Summer House, was in our sights, a glowing, six-pointed oasis in the dark field. It was a moonless night, and our path was lit only by the light of his phone screen. “If you don’t want to do this, you can wait here. But decide now.”
Adriane raised her hands, palms up, balancing the options. “Hmm. Sneak into the hornet’s nest, or wait here, alone and defenseless, for hornets to come to me.”
I let their bickering wash over me. They were both afraid, and this was how they hid it. But not me. I’d buried my fear along with my grief. It was too big—too dangerous. Feeling anything would mean feeling too much.
“Let’s go,” she said, then, as we padded through the grass toward the Hledači hive, added, “but just in case circumstances prevent me from saying it later, let me add a preemptive ‘I told you so.’ ”
I’d given her a choice. Not the real one, of course. But a choice nonetheless. Eli, the private investigator, wanted to handle this himself, I’d told her. Go to the authorities about Max’s death, the Hledači, all of it. The all of it that she knew, at least. I couldn’t tell her about the folder. Too humiliating, if she believed the evidence, if she looked up from the emails and photos with eyes full of pity for the pathetic loser who’d been so easily deceived. And if she didn’t believe it, if she believed in Max … what would that say about me, and whatever weakness made me so eager to doubt?
Eli would take care of things, I offered, and we would go home.
“They can come after us there just as easily as they can here,” she’d said. “Look at Chris. That’s not going to be me.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“We go after them,” she said. “We take it all back.”
The clues, the stolen pieces of the Lumen Dei.
Our lives.
I didn’t ask which.
The Letohrádek Hvězda, a daytime tourist attraction, was locked down at night, but Eli, the fake PI without a real weapon, had a knife and a paper clip, and within minutes, we were inside. I couldn’t imagine what it would have looked like in the benevolent daylight, but at night, with its unsettling angles and bas-relief stone gods watching us from every surface, it was too easy to understand why a sect of religious fanatics had chosen the Star Summer House as their home base. Rudolf’s grandfather had built it as a hunting lodge-cum-sacred site, perfect for whatever weird mystical rituals he—and apparently five subsequent centuries of gullibles and nutcases—chose to attempt. The building foundation was set in the shape of the Star of Solomon, the better to connect with the powerful forces of the macrocosm, and everything—the number of levels, the floor colors, the painted walls and stucco-carved ceilings depicting heroic Greek gods—was dedicated to aligning with the four elements and thus turning the building into some kind of magical lightning rod for divinely approved conjurers. The Hledači—as apparently everyone who was anyone in the secret-society crowd knew—had bought it hook, line, and sinker. According to Eli, that is. Another thing I didn’t tell Adriane: the not-insignificant possibility that Eli was still lying, and we were walking into an ambush.
I believed that Eli hated them—that, for motives of his own that had nothing to do with helping us, he was nonetheless helping us.
But it had become clear that my beliefs were no longer to be trusted.
The robes had been easy to acquire. The plan was simple: We would descend into the bowels of the Star Summer House, the secret chambers supposedly dug out beneath its basement, and, costumed as rank-and-file Hledači, we would float past the guard posted by the hidden doorway, infiltrate the nest of murderously busy bees, then seek out incriminating evidence we could photograph, record, or steal.
The backup plan was simpler: We would run.
8
We didn’t have to run. The robes proved the only password we needed, and we were waved into a warren of cavelike chambers and corridors lit only by dim gas lanterns and flickering candles. Hledači scuttled past us with urgency, and we kept our heads down, our bodies turned inward, as if engaged in intense conversation not to be disturbed, and hugged the shadows as we followed behind.
We had delivered ourselves into the hands of our would-be murderers, and still, I was not afraid.
Adriane held the phone, its camera activated, her finger on the shutter. And we joined the flow of Hledači into a dark chamber, round as the building above us was sharp. Atop a golden altar stood a man whose robe was white and whose eyes, from where we hovered at the back of the crowd, seemed bottomless and black. The stone behind him was inscribed with a familiar symbol: an eye speared by a lightning bolt, painted in dark red, twenty feet high.
I hadn’t expected a crowd.
I’d pictured the Hledači as a ragtag collection of eccentrics, the crumbling remains of what had once been a fanatical army, now dwindled to ten or fifteen at the most. Eli had apprised me of my mistake, but seeing it was different. Now I believed: The Hledači was still an army, hundreds strong. A cult, a people, all draped in the same heavy black, their voices raised in a unifying chant, their words echoing off the curved stone, swelling to fill the chamber, until they fell into abrupt silence at the sight of their leader’s raised fist. He shouted in Czech, and the crowd thundered.
Adriane hid the phone beneath her robe, its recording function taking in the leader’s voice as it rose and fell with mesmerizing rhythm and Eli whispered the only translation we needed: “He says he’s called them together because the Lumen Dei is closer than it has ever been before, and they need only one more piece to meet their destiny. That nothing will stop them.”
And then the man stopped, and his masses filled in the quiet left in his wake with a new chant, which needed no translation, for mixed into the alien words was one I recognized, one that was repeated, an angry drumbeat driving them to a fever pitch.
Vyvolená!
Vyvolená!
VYVOLENÁ!
The fear had come back. And every time they said that word, it grew.
“Maybe we should get out of here,” Adriane whispered.
This time there was no bickering.
With the Hledači absorbed by their bloodlust rally, the other chambers w
ere largely empty, giving us free rein to wander, searching for anything we might use as leverage with the cops or the Hledači themselves. We found it behind a wooden door carved with a woman mounting a centaur. The room, its walls lined with fraying, leather-bound books, may have begun life as a library but now clearly functioned less as a storehouse for ancient wisdom than it did a repository of information on the search for the Lumen Dei, beginning in the sixteenth century, ending with us.
This was what we hadn’t dared hope for; it could save our lives.
Adriane snapped photo after photo while Eli and I leafed through stacks and files of personnel dossiers, crumbling newspapers, journal articles about the Voynich manuscript, paintings and photographs of those who studied it, potential vyvolenás from nineteenth-century London, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, all of them discarded without care or organization, like trash, in favor of the documents and photos that papered the back wall. It was the wall of crazy found in every Hollywood serial killer’s lair: Surveillance photos of Chris and Adriane and me. Our birth certificates, our report cards. Photocopies of the Voynich symbols. Arrowed diagrams connecting us to each other and to the Hoff and his book. Crowd shots with blood-red circles marking my face. Intimate pictures capturing the faces we saved for when we were alone.
There were no pictures of Max.
We had dropped our hoods to paw through the treasure trove, so when the door swung open, the man with slender hands and white-blond brows—who looked like he was only a few years older than us and, in another life, could have been a real librarian, in charge of a book collection rather than a murder plot—knew us for exactly what we were. The enemy.
He snapped something in rapid Czech and, because Adriane was the closest, grabbed her wrist, swung her into his arms, and braced one hand on her head and the other on her shoulder. “Tell me what you do here,” he said in halting English when the Czech drew no response, “or I break her neck.”
Adriane went pale.
Eli, who had been on the other side of the room when the Hledači burst in, crept slowly along the wall, out of sight, toward us, but still too far away to stop the angry wrenching of muscle and snapping of bones, if it came to that. He drew his knife.
The Hledači snatched the phone from Adriane’s hand and flung it against the stone floor, grinding his heel into the cheap plastic casing until it split. It didn’t seem to matter much. Evidence wouldn’t help us if we never lived to use it.
“Let her go,” I said. Not pleading, but ordering.
When I spoke, his eyes met mine and widened. “Vyvolená,” he whispered.
“That’s right. Let her go.” I couldn’t believe the imperious voice coming out of my mouth.
“And this is the other,” he said, turning to Adriane, who was still immobilized by his grip, “the friend of the chosen one.” He pressed his lips to her ear and whispered something—and whatever it was made her draw in a sharp breath and go even paler than before. “I will not harm the vyvolená or her people,” he said aloud, and let her go.
Adriane flew toward me, and in the same moment, moving so fast it seemed like he wasn’t moving at all, Eli was across the room. He seized the Hledači from behind and raised the knife to his throat. “No screaming, understand?”
“Ano,” the man said. “Yes.” His eyes were still locked on my face.
“Adriane, get the door. Nora, find something to tie him up with.”
We used his shoelaces. While Eli held the knife steady at the man’s throat, I yanked his wrists behind his back, looped the laces around once, twice, focusing on the small hairs sprouting from the knuckles and the grubby, broken nails. These hands might have held down Chris, I thought. Trapped him in place as the knife slipped in.
These hands might have forced Max over the side, into the water.
I pulled the knot tight, tight as I could. The laces bit into his flesh. Good.
“What did he say to you?” Eli asked Adriane.
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she whispered, like she couldn’t draw enough breath to speak. “It was Czech.”
“What did you say to her?” Eli asked the Hledači.
The Hledači said nothing.
“Not feeling chatty? Good. Because now we’re all going to walk out of here nice and quietly, and if you make a sound, or do anything to alert any of your friends, I’m going to shove this knife straight into your kidneys. Oddělám tě na ulici a vykuchám tě jako rybu. Got that?”
The man nodded.
“You want to take him with us?” I said.
“We can’t stay here. Too risky. But we need information, and we need evidence, and our new friend broke the camera. So grab as many files as you can stuff under your robes. I’ll grab him.”
Adriane’s face was still emptied of color. But she didn’t argue, and neither did I.
“You walk in front,” Eli said. “I’ll follow behind. With the knife. And just to make sure our friend doesn’t get any bright ideas—”
The knife flashed. A narrow slash of red streaked across Hledači scalp. Eli’s hand slapped over his mouth just in time to muffle the scream.
“What did you do?” Adriane said in a choked voice as a curtain of blood streamed from the gash. The man blinked wildly and flung his head back and forth as rivulets of red flowed into his eyes.
“It’s shallow, but it should keep him blind and docile at least until we get him out of here,” he said.
“You know this because?”
“Saw it in a movie. Trust me.”
Adriane looked away. But I watched the blood cloud his eyes and, again, wondered if those eyes had watched Chris’s blood pool from his body, watched and then turned away and let him die.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. But as the Hledači gasped with pain, I felt it growing inside of me: a smile.
9
The room we found was five flights up, rented by the hour. I’d seen enough Law & Order episodes to imagine what it was usually used for, but if I hadn’t, its multicolored stains and moist, overripe perfume would have given it away. It stank of sweat and sex. The three of us had easily managed to half walk, half drag the Hledači out of the Star Summer House, down two empty blocks, and up the decrepit staircase. The man sleeping on the stairs didn’t even stir when we stepped over him.
A tattered gray shade blocked the only window. A single bare ceiling bulb cast more shadows than it did light. Bound to a chair, the Hledači was gagged by a pillowcase Eli had stuffed into his mouth. It seemed like overkill. The room delivered its message from every inch of peeling paint and rotting floorboards: Even if anyone could hear you scream, it was a sure thing no one would care.
Eli paced, holding the knife he’d promised not to use again. He spoke in Czech, firing rapid questions, then pulled out the gag.
The man pressed his lips together.
“Mluv!” Eli shouted.
“I speak to the vyvolená,” he said, in halting English. “Not to you.”
“Nemusíš se rozhodnout,” Eli snapped.
I stepped forward. “The vyvolená, that’s me, right? So here I am. Speak.”
“They will come.”
“No one’s coming for you,” Eli said.
“Not for me. For vyvolená. You will not stop them.”
“Actually, we will,” I said. “And you’re going to help.”
“I respect the vyvolená,” he said. “You will lead us to the light.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked. “What are they planning to do once they come for me?”
“You will lead us to the light,” he repeated.
“Let’s say I’m not interested in doing that. What’s it going to take to get you to leave us alone?”
“We can pay,” Adriane said. “A lot.”
“We need only vyvolená,” he said.
“And the rest of the Lumen Dei,” I said. “There’s not going to be any light without that, right? So if it stays hidden, you’re screwed
, and you don’t need me.”
“We will all always need you.”
“We brought you here to help us,” Eli said. “If you can’t do that, we’ve got no use for you.” He fingered the knife, running a thumb along the blade. “Think your friends will be jealous when you get to meet God face to face? You don’t need a machine. Only this.” He raised the knife.
“You will not harm me,” the Hledaši said.
“So where’d you get that nasty cut?”
“You stand so far away,” the Hledači said. “Do you fear me?”
Eli crossed the room in three swift steps. His blade slashed down, stopping just short of piercing the man’s flesh. “Do you fear me?”
The man threw his weight forward, tipping the chair onto its front legs, and snatched a handful of Eli’s shirt, yanking it down so hard it exposed the dark tattoo over his heart. Eli twisted out of his grip.
The Hledači spit in his face.
“You are a child,” he said. “But you are still scum. You will never stop us.”
“Nora. Adriane. You should leave now,” Eli said, circling the Hledači. “You don’t want to see this.”
Maybe I had known it would end here. I was probably supposed to care. “We agreed.…” But the objection died on my lips.
“He knows things,” Eli said. “He’s going to tell us what they are.”
“Oh yes, I know many things. I know what you are. Kolik toho vědí? Co když jim řeknu všechno?”
“What’s he saying now?” I asked.
“Trust me,” Eli said. “Leave.”
“Stay,” the Hledači jeered. “I have many gifts for you.”
“We’re leaving,” Adriane said, pulling me out the door, and I let her, because closing the door behind us meant we weren’t a part of it, whatever it would be. Our hands were clean.
10
No one screamed.
Muffled voices, thuds, scratches, breaking glass.
A dark stain blotted out most of the hallway ceiling, bloody against the rust-colored walls. Just water, I told myself.
The Book of Blood and Shadow Page 32