“Get here, like I just did?”
He went still. “You’re wasting your time.”
“Listen to me,” she urged. “I sought out your grimoire because he’s been releasing Maleficts from the Great Libraries. Dozens of people have died. I need to find out why he’s doing it, so I can bring proof to the Collegium. Otherwise, he’ll never face justice.”
Silence reigned. “So he’s begun, has he,” said Prendergast finally, weary. “He’s trying to finish what Cornelius started.”
“If you would only tell me what he’s planning. I know that whatever it is, it hinges upon the Great Library of Harrows—”
Prendergast’s voice lashed out like a whip. “Enough! Leave me be. It doesn’t matter what he’s planning, because”—he bent over, bracing his hands on his knees, and forced out the rest—“without me—he cannot succeed.”
She hadn’t come this far, stolen from the Royal Library, sought help from a demon, only to give up now. She strode up behind Prendergast and seized him by the arm. At her touch, his entire body shuddered, and he collapsed to his knees. Pain twisted his gaunt face.
Guilt overwhelmed Elisabeth. “Are you all right?”
But as soon as she spoke, she saw that whatever was going on, it wasn’t limited to Prendergast. The candles sputtered, guttering in pools of wax. Darkness fell over the workshop. Then the floor heaved, a seismic convulsion that almost threw Elisabeth from her feet. Jars rolled from the table and shattered.
“The Codex Daemonicus,” Prendergast gritted out. “Something is happening to the grimoire. You’re in danger, girl. Your body is still in the mortal realm.”
Her heart pounded in her throat. “How do I go back? I don’t even know how I got here.”
“Jump!” he snarled.
She didn’t have time to think about his order—not with the world shaking apart around her. She sprinted toward the edge, gathering her strength, and hurled herself over the jagged ends of the floorboards, thinking, This isn’t real. It’s only in my mind. I will not fall.
But it felt like falling: tumbling end over end through the air until she had no sense of up or down, the bitter taste of ink filling her mouth, flooding her nose, choking her—
She woke with a gasp and a sense of impact, as though her soul had been slammed back into her body by force. She sat on the floor of her bedroom, dazed, with the Codex cradled on her lap.
The candle had gone out. Not because it had finished burning, but because she had slid sideways in her sleep and bumped her shoulder against the nightstand. This had knocked the candlestick over, drowning the flame. She counted herself lucky that the tipped candle hadn’t started a fire. But she quickly changed her mind, because it had done something even worse.
Droplets of hot wax had splattered across the Codex’s pages. As she watched, ink spread outward from the edges of the wax like a bloodstain, soaking through the paper, turning the pages black. She scrambled upright, flipping the grimoire onto the carpet. Overturned, its cover heaved and bulged as though something inside were trying to escape. Its moonlit shadow lengthened across the floor. Elisabeth tore a salt round from her belt, not a moment too soon, for the second she reacted, a thin, scaled hand stretched twitching across the floor and seized her ankle in its shriveled grasp.
The Codex had transformed into a Malefict.
TWENTY-THREE
ELISABETH TASTED SALT as the round exploded, filling the room with glittering particles, unexpectedly beautiful in the moonlight, like snow. The fingers loosened enough for her to wrench her ankle free. The Malefict answered with a ragged shriek. There came a confused flurry of movement, scaled limbs lashing out in every direction, and then the bedroom door tore straight from its hinges, letting in a spill of light from the sconces in the hall. A stooped, long-eared figure stood silhouetted in the doorway. Another shriek, and it flung itself around the corner.
She snatched Demonslayer from the floor and set off in pursuit, leaping over the splintered remains of the door. The Malefict sped down the hallway with a limping gait, the origin of its binding now clear. It resembled the imps from Ashcroft Manor, but its crimson scales were dusty and desiccated, and seams of stitching ran across its hide. Booklice had left its ears tattered. Patches of gold leaf clung to its body, dull and scabrous with age.
When it reached the stairs, it skittered down on all fours, its claws leaving gashes on the carpeting. At the bottom it careened into a table, sending a vase toppling to the marble tiles. Roses tumbled across the floor amid a cascade of water and broken porcelain. How long had there been fresh flowers in the foyer? Elisabeth hadn’t noticed.
She dismissed the steps in favor of sliding down the rail, leaping into the fray while the Malefict scrambled to regain its footing on the slick tiles. She advanced on it slowly, Demonslayer held at the ready. It cowered away from her, clutching its emaciated hands to its chest, its ink-black eyes round and glistening. She suppressed a surge of pity as she cornered it against the wall. She wasn’t about to underestimate its strength—not after what it had done to her door. An agitated Class Six was more than capable of overpowering a warden.
“What on earth is going on out here?”
Elisabeth froze at the sound of Nathaniel’s voice coming from the hall. A moment later he stepped into the foyer’s moonlight, fully dressed despite the hour. He stopped and leaned against the entryway, calmly evaluating the scene, as if he walked in on this sort of chaos daily.
Her stomach performed a strange maneuver. Her last memory of him, pale and trembling, reaching for Silas’s hand, still felt recent enough to touch. Now that she had seen him that way, it seemed impossible for him to look so collected. So normal, as though nothing about him had changed. But then—nothing had. He had been hiding his pain from her all along. Not just her, but everyone save Silas, who alone had understood.
“Scrivener,” he sighed. “I should have known it was you the moment I heard my great-grandmother’s priceless antique vase hit the floor.” He turned his assessing gaze to the Malefict. “And who’s this? A friend of yours?”
The Codex bared a mouthful of fangs and produced an ear-splitting shriek. Above them, the chandelier trembled.
“Charmed,” Nathaniel said. He turned back to Elisabeth. “If the two of you feel the need to destroy anything else, I’ve been meaning to get rid of Aunt Clothilde’s tapestry for years. You’ll know it when you see it. It’s mauve.”
Elisabeth opened her mouth several times before she could speak. “I need your help.”
“What for? You look like you have the situation under control.”
“Can you turn a Malefict back into a grimoire? With sorcery?”
“Possibly, assuming it’s not too powerful.” Nathaniel raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
She resisted the urge to grit her teeth. Nightmares aside, he was as infuriating as ever. “This grimoire is important evidence against Ashcroft.” Pained, she admitted, “It’s the only thing I have.”
Both of his eyebrows shot up. “I knew you were up to something at the Royal Library. Theft, though? Really, Scrivener?”
Blood rushed hotly to her cheeks. Her grip on Demonslayer loosened. She sensed the mistake the moment she made it—she couldn’t afford to become distracted—but she reacted a split second too late as the Malefict sprang into action, striking her aside and barreling past her guard. The next thing she knew, she lay sprawled on the floor, the air slammed from her lungs.
Don’t let it escape, she thought desperately. If the Codex escaped, all would be lost.
The syllables of an incantation scorched the air. Emerald light swirled above her, reflecting on the wet tiles, limning the petals of the scattered roses. Elisabeth raised herself on one elbow, coughing, to see the Malefict frozen in midleap a mere hand-span from the windows. Nathaniel stood behind it, one arm outflung, so rigid with tension that a vein stood out in his neck. His hand shook with effort as his lips formed the words of the spell.
Slowly, surely, the
Malefict began to fold inward on itself. The limbs curled, the head bowed, the scaled hide shrank inward. Its shape grew smaller and smaller. And then the light vanished, and the Codex dropped to the floor, intact, with a slam that resounded through the foyer.
Gingerly, Elisabeth scraped to her feet as Nathaniel doubled over, panting. He bit back a muffled groan, and she realized that she had asked far more of him than she’d imagined. She had felt confident Nathaniel could handle magic like this—Nathaniel, who brought stone to life and summoned storms—but in truth, she had never heard of a Malefict’s condition being reversed. If it were easy, there would be no need for the Great Libraries or wardens.
“Nathaniel,” she said. She stepped toward him, and collapsed.
Darkness swam before her eyes. Blood roared in her ears. Through the crashing waves of dizziness, she grew aware of someone holding her. She blinked rapidly, and the world filled back in. Nathaniel was touching her. His hands coursed over her sides, her arms, the contact at once impersonal and fraught with urgency. He was checking her body for injuries.
She didn’t want him to stop. She had never been touched like this before. His hands left impressions across her skin like the trails of comets, urgent and tingling, her body yearning for more. A breathless ache filled her chest. The intensity of the sensation overwhelmed her.
“Where are you hurt? Can you tell me?” When she didn’t respond, Nathaniel cradled her face in his hands. “Elisabeth!”
The sound of her first name spoken in Nathaniel’s voice, in that tone, finally jolted her to her senses. “I’m not hurt,” she said. Her pulse raced beneath his fingertips. “I just stood up too quickly. I’m . . .”
“Exhausted,” he finished when she trailed off, his gray eyes roving over her face. “When was the last time you slept?”
Three nights ago. She didn’t say that out loud. Nathaniel’s expression had already withdrawn. A muscle tensed in his jaw as he helped her stand and guided her to a chair. He looked sick, as though their shared touch had turned toxic, or the air was swirling from the room like water down a drain. Confusion pounded in Elisabeth’s head. As her dizziness receded, her mind caught up. The explanation became clear: he thought this was his fault.
“Wait,” she protested, but he had already stepped away.
“Silas,” he said.
The moment Silas appeared in the shadows of the foyer, Nathaniel went to him. Elisabeth felt fine now, barely light-headed at all, but the tangle of emotions in her throat formed a knot so large she could barely breathe. Whatever was about to happen, she wished she could stop it, reverse time, give herself a chance to talk to Nathaniel first. Helplessly, she watched him lean over Silas and speak in a furious undertone.
“Why didn’t you tell me I’ve been having nightmares? I’m not a child any longer. If I use sorcery while I’m asleep, while there is someone else in the house, I need to know about it! For heaven’s sake, Silas, I could have hurt her!”
“Master,” Silas said, quellingly.
“What was it this time?” Nathaniel went on, relentless. “Blood dripping from the walls, or corpses crawling along the hallway? Or perhaps it was my personal favorite, the apparition of Father staggering around with his throat cut. That one got rid of the butler in a hurry.”
“They are illusions, master. Harmless.”
“Don’t.” The word landed like a slap. “You know the magic that runs in my family’s blood. You served Baltasar.”
Silas inclined his head. “Therefore, I should think that my opinion—”
“I said, don’t. Don’t argue with me. Not about this.” He added, expression cold, every inch a magister, “That’s an order.”
Silas’s lips thinned. Then, impassively, he bowed.
Nathaniel dragged his hands through his hair and paced across the foyer. He wouldn’t meet either of their eyes. “I’ll locate alternative lodgings for you, Miss Scrivener,” he said. “It shouldn’t take more than a day or two. This arrangement was temporary from the start.” With that, he headed for the stairs.
Elisabeth tried to understand how she had gone from “Elisabeth” to “Miss Scrivener” in a matter of seconds. The situation was tumbling away from her at horrifying speed, unraveling like a dropped spool of thread. She sensed that if she didn’t intervene, she and Nathaniel would become strangers to each other, and she wouldn’t be able to put things back the way they were before. She drew in an unsteady breath.
“I don’t want another place to stay!” she shouted up the stairs.
Nathaniel took one more step and halted, his spine straight. He didn’t turn around, as if he couldn’t bear to face her.
“I like it here,” she said, the truth surprising her as she spoke. “It almost feels like—like a home to me. I feel safe. I’m not afraid of you or your nightmares.”
He laughed once, a bitter, humorless sound. “You barely know me. You haven’t seen what I can do, not truly. When that happens, I expect you’ll change your mind.”
She thought of that night in the Blackwald, when he had sat gazing through the forest at his ancestor’s work, a wound hundreds of years old and still festering. Was that what he feared—that Baltasar’s evil lived on inside himself? Every beat of her heart hurt, like a knife sliding between her ribs.
She lifted a rose from the floor. Its petals were damp, and the thorns pricked her fingers. A symbol of love and life and beauty, so unlikely to see in Nathaniel’s empty, despairing manor, though in truth she hadn’t thought of his house that way in quite some time. Now she understood that the roses had been for her. A sign of hope, struggling up through the ashes.
“Perhaps I haven’t seen what you can do,” she said. “But I’ve seen what you choose to do.” She looked up. “Isn’t that more important?”
The question slipped past Nathaniel’s guard. He gripped the rail, off-balance. “I chose not to help you fight Ashcroft.”
Her heart ached. She gazed at his shoulders, the line of his back, which expressed his unhappiness so plainly. “It isn’t too late to change your mind.”
Nathaniel bent and leaned his forehead on his arm. Silence reigned. The foyer stank of aetherial combustion, but beneath that, there was the faint scent of roses. “Fine,” he said at last.
Joy rushed through Elisabeth like a gulp of champagne, but she didn’t dare ask for too much at once. “I can stay?”
“Of course you can stay, you menace. It isn’t as though I could stop you even if I wanted to.” He paused again. She waited, breathless, for him to force out the rest. “And fine, I’ll help you. Not for any noble reason,” he added quickly, as her spirits soared. “I still think it’s a lost cause. We’re probably going to get ourselves killed.” He resumed walking up the stairs. “But every man has his limits. If there’s one thing I can’t do, it’s stand by and watch you demolish irreplaceable antiques.”
Elisabeth was grinning from ear to ear. “Thank you!” she shouted after him.
Nathaniel waved dismissively from the top of the landing. But before he vanished around the corner, she saw him smiling, too.
TWENTY-FOUR
WHEN ELISABETH BROUGHT the scrying mirror to Nathaniel’s study the next evening, he didn’t seem surprised—even though, according to him, it had been lost for the better part of a century.
“It belonged to my Aunt Clothilde,” he explained. “She died before I was born, but I always heard stories about how she used it to spy on her in-laws.”
Elisabeth hesitated, remembering what Mistress Wick had told her the other day. “Wasn’t that after the Reforms?”
“Yes, but you wouldn’t believe the number of forbidden artifacts squirreled away in old homes like this one.” He closed his eyes and ran his fingers over the mirror’s edges, concentrating. “The Lovelaces found ambulatory torture devices in their cellar, including an iron maiden that chased them back upstairs, snapping open and shut like a mollusk. Personally, I won’t even go into my basement. There are doors down there that have
n’t been opened since Baltasar built the place, and Silas tells me he had a bizarre obsession with puppets. . . . Ah.” His eyes snapped open. “There we are.”
She leaned over on the couch for a closer look. The glaze of frost had receded from the mirror’s surface. According to Nathaniel, there was nothing wrong with it; its magic had only needed to be replenished after lying dormant for so many years. Now, she and Katrien should be able to talk for as long as they wanted.
A delighted laugh escaped her. She looked up to find Nathaniel watching her, his eyes intent, as though he had been studying her face like a painting. A shock ran through her body when their gazes locked. Everything shifted into sharp focus: the study’s instruments glittering over his shoulder, the softness of his lips in the candlelight, the crystalline structure of his irises, infinitely complex up close.
For a heartbeat, it seemed as though something might happen. Then a shadow fell across his eyes. He cleared his throat and passed her the mirror. “Are you ready?” he asked.
Elisabeth bit back a rush of embarrassment, struggling not to let anything show on her face. Hopefully, he wouldn’t notice that her cheeks had turned pink, or if he did, he would mistake the flush for excitement about Katrien.
“Yes, but I want to try something else first.” She brought the mirror close to her nose, ignoring the jitters in her stomach. “Show me Ashcroft,” she commanded.
Nathaniel tensed as the mirror’s surface swirled. When it cleared, however, it didn’t show an image. A pool of shimmering golden light filled the glass instead. Elisabeth frowned. She had never seen the mirror do anything like that before.
“I don’t understand. Is he in a place with no mirrors nearby?”
“That’s Ashcroft’s magic.” Nathaniel’s tension had eased. “It looks as though he’s cast protective wards on himself. They’re intended to stop malicious rituals, but evidently they block scrying mirrors, too.”
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