Vault of Shadows

by Jonathan Maberry

  They stepped carefully around the faerie ring and approached the front of the antiques store. The window glass was still intact, though a jagged crack ran from upper right to lower left. The lock and door handle were burned, and the wood around them was charred. Milo touched them—and snatched his hand away.

  “It’s hot.” He pushed against the door with the toe of his shoe and it swung inward, the lock destroyed.

  Shark looked deeply uneasy. “You think Queen Mab’s in there?”

  Evangelyne didn’t answer, but her silence seemed more like an evasion than a lack of opinion. Shark sighed.

  “Swell,” he said. “Does that mean we’re walking into a trap?”

  Again she didn’t answer.

  “You got to tell us something,” persisted Shark. “What kind of magic stuff can she throw at us? Are we talking death spells or is she going to turn me into a frog or what?”

  “I don’t know,” said Evangelyne. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t. You boys keep asking me as if I know everything about the magical world. I don’t. No one does. You don’t know everything about your world, do you?”

  “Well, no,” conceded Shark, “but we don’t know what you don’t know and we don’t know what you do know.” He paused and smiled. “You know?”

  That put a faint smile on her face. “Look, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be difficult.”

  “Too late.”

  She punched him on the arm. Pretty hard, too.

  “If Queen Mab’s been trapped for all this time,” said Milo, “won’t she be pretty rusty when it comes to fighting?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” said Evangelyne.

  “What about tech? Shark has a pulse pistol. No way she’s ever had to deal with that kind of thing before. Won’t that give us an advantage?”

  The wolf girl brightened. “That’s a good thought. I’m not sure if the gun would kill her, but it might weaken her enough for one of us to finish her off. If we can remove her golden torc, then she’ll lose much of her power. Without the torc she would be as vulnerable as anyone.”

  “Moooook,” said the rock boy, drawing the word out to suggest that he would be happy to take a swing at the evil faerie queen. Shark patted his shoulder, clearly getting Mook’s meaning.

  “I’m with Stony McRockshoes here,” he said. “That’s the first good news I’ve had since . . . let me think . . . ever?”

  “Don’t be overconfident,” warned Evangelyne. “Even if she is unfamiliar with your gun, Queen Mab is still incredibly dangerous. Underestimate her at your peril.”

  “Sure,” said Shark, “’cause why should we be optimistic for more than a nanosecond?”

  “Look,” said Evangelyne, “I’m not trying to depress everyone. You asked.”

  “It’s cool,” said Milo. “Shark’s just messing with you.”

  “It’s what I do,” admitted Shark.

  Evangelyne gave a grudging nod. “If I were a sorceress, I wouldn’t turn you into a frog.”

  “That’s nice—”

  “I’d turn you into a rabbit. Wolves eat rabbits.”

  “You,” said Shark, pointing at her, “made a joke. A very, very scary joke.”

  The wolf girl turned aside to hide another smile. Then she straightened. “I just thought of one thing,” she said. “There are a lot of stories and legends about Gadfellyn Hall. It’s supposed to be very strange inside. Bigger than you’d think, and filled with many halls and corridors, cellars and attics, and countless rooms.”

  “So—?” asked Milo.

  “So no one knows exactly where the library is. It can only be found by luck or instinct.”

  “Again, so?”

  “So even if the Aes Sídhe are inside, it doesn’t mean they’ll know how to find the library. Some of the legends say that most of the people who enter Gadfellyn Hall get lost. Forever lost.”

  “How’s that help us? Are you saying we’re going to spend the rest of our lives playing hide-and-seek with faerie warriors?”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. Queen Mab doesn’t know how to find the Impossible Library. Neither will the Huntsman if he gets here. But Milo, you dreamed of it. You watched the Heir find his way there. You can follow memories of those dreams, can’t you?”

  “I can try,” he said doubtfully.

  It seemed like a thin thread of hope, but it was something, and Milo felt the ground to be more firmly under his feet. He glanced at the others and they shared a nod.

  Shark drew his pulse pistol and Milo fitted a ball bearing into his slingshot. Evangelyne morphed into wolfshape, and Iskiel—now grown nearly to full size—scuttled onto Mook’s shoulders and uttered a low hiss of challenge. His eyes blazed with heat. Even Mook’s placid face seemed to change into a brutal war mask.

  Milo went first, his slingshot raised.

  Shark held his flashlight in one fist and rested the pulse pistol atop it. As he came in, he shifted right to cover Milo but also keep him out of the line of fire. Evangelyne crept along on silent paws. The only sound was the dull thud of Mook’s heavy feet.

  From outside, the antiques store looked like what it advertised. Through the grime on the windows they’d seen old Victorian chairs, crystal chandeliers, ornate wardrobes, and tall, delicately painted vases.

  Once they stepped inside they saw none of this.

  Stepping through that doorway was like stepping into another world. It was colder, older, and stranger, and nothing they’d seen from outside was in here. They entered the large vestibule of what was clearly a huge old house. The vestibule was wider than the entire facade of the store.

  “Okay,” murmured Shark, “this is freaky.”

  They walked to the end of the vestibule. There were dried leaves and the white skeletons of small animals on the tiled floor. An urn made of hammered brass stood against the wall, and from it sprouted a dozen walking sticks and umbrellas that were draped with dusty cobwebs. The desiccated husk of a long-dead spider hung inside one web.

  There were three doorways at the far end of the vestibule. The left one led to a small sitting room furnished with ugly and uncomfortable-looking chairs. A dusty piano stood in one corner. The doorway on the right opened into a larger room with leather chairs, a massive globe hung inside a wooden frame, and a huge old oak desk. On every available piece of wall were the mounted heads of animals Milo had only ever seen in books. Wild rams, lions and tigers, bison, moose, zebras, and even a rhinoceros. They were ancient and covered with dust, their fur or hide worn away, their glass eyes dull and empty. Milo hated that room. Like everyone in his pod he was a hunter, but everything he killed went into a stew pot. The thought of hunting just to gloat over the stuffed heads seemed weird to him.

  They moved back into the vestibule and approached the last doorway. This one brought them into a long hallway with framed pictures of disappointed-looking people in old-fashioned clothes. None of them looked any happier than the animal heads they’d seen on the wall.

  At the end of the hallway was a long stairway that swept upward into shadows.

  “What is all this?” asked Shark. “How can all of this be in here?”

  “We’re in the ghost of a house,” said Milo, remembering what Evangelyne had told him. “This is Gadfellyn Hall.”

  They stood at the foot of the stairs and listened for any sound. The old building creaked and moaned as cold winds blew through its bones. Milo had expected the place to feel dead, like a spent battery or a crashed drop-ship, but it wasn’t. It looked dead, but it felt . . .

  He tried to put it into words in his head. When he’d piloted the red ship, there had been a sense of resistance and resentment, but that’s not what this was.

  It knows we’re here, he thought.

  A small gust conjured a tiny dust devil on the landing above them. It dissipated and the dust floated down toward them.

  It knows we’re here and it doesn’t like it.

  He almost said that to the others, but when he
glanced at them, he saw they were all looking nervous enough already. They were feeling uneasy, too.

  Evangelyne changed back into girlshape and stood chewing her lip, one foot on the bottom step.

  “I don’t see any footprints,” said Shark, trying to sound hopeful. “Maybe no one’s come in yet.”

  “Faeries don’t leave footprints,” she said.

  Shark sighed.

  “The Huntsman would, though,” said Milo. “We saw him flying the other way. I don’t think he’s been here yet. That’s something.”

  Evangelyne said nothing, which Milo assumed was not a good sign.

  “Look,” said Shark, “tell me this much at least. These dark faeries . . . can we fight them if they’re here? I mean, we’re not exactly a pack of bunnies. I got my gun, Milo’s an ace with that wrist-rocket, and you three are all sorts of creepy-weird-dangerous. Tell me we at least have a chance.”

  Mook clacked his fists together and gave a single stern nod. “Mook.”

  As before, the rock boy’s meaning was clear enough.

  “Glad to hear it,” said Shark.

  Milo didn’t feel too reassured. If Queen Mab was here, they were about to face a dark sorceress of legendary power. He wasn’t all that confident in a bunch of kids—however tough they were—fighting someone like her.

  He didn’t say it, though. No one needed to hear that right now.

  Without another word they all began to mount the stairs.

  Chapter 46

  When they were halfway up the stairs, Shark asked, “Maybe I don’t want to know the answer to this, but how did Queen Mab even know we were coming here?”

  Evangelyne climbed several steps in silence, clearly unwilling to answer.

  “Yo, Vangie,” said Shark, “if you know something, maybe you’d better share.”

  She paused and her hand strayed to the leather pouch. “It’s the Heart of Darkness.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s hurt.”

  “Yeah, we kind of know that. It’s pretty much why we’re here. What does that have to do with Queen Mab?”

  Evangelyne sighed. “The stone isn’t just a piece of rock, it’s not a simple piece of quartz. It’s alive. It’s attuned to the heartbeat of the world.”

  “So?”

  “The heart of this world is the heart of magic,” she said. “It is the heartbeat of all shadows. This jewel is the last of its kind left on this Earth. All of the others have been destroyed or have been taken into the shadow worlds. That’s why this stone is so important. Now that heart is wounded to its core, and anyone who is in harmony with the magic of our world can hear it scream.”

  Shark’s mouth hung open.

  “Mook,” said Mook sadly, nodding.

  “Queen Mab can hear the Heart of Darkness?” gasped Milo.

  “Yes. And she would know that we wanted to heal it, just as she would know that we had to seek out the last doctor of magic. The Heir.”

  “I’m going to bang my head on a wall for a while,” said Shark. “Really, I think it’ll help.”

  “When were you planning on telling us?” demanded Milo.

  She gave him a funny look. “Never. I thought we’d get here long before Queen Mab escaped. I never thought it would come to this.”

  Milo wanted to yell at her. Instead he ground his teeth together and pushed past her as he ran up the steps. The big clock inside his head was starting to ring its alarms.

  The others followed at a run.

  Evangelyne caught up to him as he reached the landing. “Do you know where you’re going?” she asked. “Are you being guided by your dreams?”

  He grunted, realizing that he probably was but hadn’t been aware of it until she asked. He looked down the shadowy length of the second-floor hall and all at once knew that this was familiar to him. These were the halls the Heir had walked all those years ago. There were doors on either side of the corridor, and he immediately knew which ones would open onto drab rooms filled with sheet-draped furniture and which doors would be locked. None of these doors led to where they needed to go.

  He rubbed his eyes and then blinked to clear his vision. His feet had never been here, but somehow he could remember each quiet footfall of the Heir as he prowled this vast and ancient house in search of . . .

  Of what?

  He hadn’t been looking for the library. The Heir had found it by accident.

  What had that lonely kid been looking for? Why had he been abandoned here? What had happened to the people, the adults, who should have lived here?

  None of those answers were in his dreams, and therefore they were not in Milo’s head.

  “This way,” he said quietly, and moved forward.

  “You sure about this?” called Shark in a low, urgent voice.

  “No, of course not,” said Milo. But what he wanted to say was, Yes.

  The corridor ended in a T-junction. Each of these halls was even longer than the one down which they’d come, and there were at least twenty closed doors on each wall. Milo took a step toward the left hall, then stopped and shook his head.

  “No,” he said.

  Mook walked a couple of paces past him; then he also stopped and retreated, shaking his head.

  “Why?” asked Evangelyne. “What’s wrong? What’s down there?”

  “I—don’t know,” admitted Milo. “But it doesn’t want us to go that way.”

  “What doesn’t?” asked Shark.

  “The house.”

  Shark stared at Milo. “The house,” he echoed flatly.

  “Yes. Don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t. I just know that we’re not supposed to go that way.”

  “Why not?”

  Milo just shook his head. He didn’t tell them the thoughts that filled his head, because it was hard to put his feelings into words. There were secrets down those halls, maybe important ones, but they weren’t today’s secrets. Maybe, if he lived through this afternoon, through this day, he’d return to Gadfellyn Hall and go exploring. Like the Heir had gone exploring.

  Maybe he would get lost in this house.

  He was almost certain he would. The house wanted him to go that way, just not now. Not today. The longer he lingered there, the more a coldness built up inside his chest.

  Come back, a voice seemed to whisper. Come back and stay.

  “No,” murmured Milo.

  Come back and play with us.

  Milo almost took a step forward. Almost.

  But the more he thought about his dreams, and the more he listened inside his head to that whispery voice, the more he heard something else.

  A sound, deep and low. A thump, like a weak hand striking a drum. Not in a rhythm. It was awkward and painful to hear. It shouldn’t have been, he knew that with every fiber of his being. It should have been a strong, steady, beat.

  No . . . not just a beat. A pulsing beat.

  A heartbeat.

  The chill in his chest swept through his entire body as he realized what he was hearing.

  It was the dying, struggling throb of the Heart of Darkness.

  So weak. So fragile.

  Milo made himself turn around and look down the other hall. The sound was louder that way. Or . . . maybe not louder, but clearer. More correct.

  He could feel everyone watching him, but they said nothing. They knew that this was his to do, this part of it at least. Finding the way.

  “Come on,” he said hoarsely.

  Milo began walking quickly, then broke into a run, passing door after door, knowing they weren’t the right ones even though he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. He could remember his dreams as something hazy and indistinct. They were, after all, only dreams. In dreams, nothing looks the way it does in the real world.

  Not that Gadfellyn Hall was within a million miles of the real world.

  Absolutely not.

  The corridor ended at another T-junction and again Milo took the hallway on the right, increasing h
is pace, racing now, with the others following as fast as they could. Mook lagged behind, his rocky feet pounding on the old floorboards. Evangelyne could have turned into a wolf and outrun them all, but she didn’t know the way. So instead she ran at Milo’s left side and Shark huffed along on Milo’s right, with Killer at his heels.

  “How big is this place?” grunted Shark as they ran down a hall that seemed to grow and stretch out before them, adding more and more doors that were shut and locked against them.

  “A lot bigger than this,” said Milo, though even he didn’t know what he meant by that; he only knew it was true.

  At the end of the next hall they slowed to a stop at what appeared to be a dead end. Instead of a door, there was a huge picture mirror that stretched from wall to wall and from ceiling to floor. The glass was shattered, though, and pieces lay everywhere on the floor. Some jagged splinters were still stuck in the edges of the frame.

  Milo stepped forward and stood amid the glittering pieces of mirror. At first he only glanced down to see his reflection, but then he did a double take because the reflection in those pieces was all wrong.

  So wrong.

  In one he saw himself as he was. Eleven, on the skinny side of slim, short, with a scuffle of brown hair and dirt on his face. Haunted eyes that were filled with sadness and fear. That’s how he knew he looked. The real him.

  But there were other versions of Milo Silk. Some were memory images, others were not.

  He saw himself as a little boy in the days before the Swarm came. Wearing footie pajamas with the Ninja Turtles on the chest. Rosy cheeks and bright eyes that were filled with laughter. But right next to that image was one whose nature horrified Milo. It was a broken, distorted version of himself. No longer entirely human. His body had been torn apart and rebuilt with gleaming metal and patches of ugly green-brown Dissosterin armor. Clicking mandibles forced their way out between teeth and cheeks, stretching his mouth into a permanent grin of alien hunger. Instead of his own eyes, he had the multifaceted eyes of a monstrous fly. It sickened him, because in that image he was a miniature and tortured version of the Huntsman. A pet or, worse, an apprentice.