It got colder the higher we climbed, but I shook it off with a shiver. Looking over the edge of the metal poles, we could see the entirety of Wenceslas Square, the streets lit up gold, the white blinding lights of cars scuttling up and down their length. It was a breathtaking sight. But soon we found the old square window the museum’s director had told us about. Third one on the west end. Belle pounded it open with a fist, and it swung with a labored creak. One by one, the four of us dropped into a room of paintings—paintings of clowns.
“Why clowns?” Lake cringed as she scanned the oil and colors etching out, in an exaggerated, avant-garde style, a rather pessimistic portrayal of their work endlessly entertaining insatiable crowds of ravenous spectators. Creepy. Depressing.
“Brings back memories,” Chae Rin said with a wistful sigh. “Anyway, we’ve got to get down to the first floor. Let’s go.”
Shadows of this place remained in my memories from the time I’d watched Natalya in my dreams. Down the flight of stairs, slipping through the golden arched doorways, I scanned the black marble walls and columns, white streaks scribbling beautiful patterns across their length. It was because of Natalya’s memories that I knew right away where I needed to go—the shadowed archway in the forgotten corner of the building still, maybe always, blocked off by yellow tape. We rushed through the long, dark hallway until we reached the security pad at the end of the path.
“Wait,” Lake said, “the code—”
“I know it.” Indeed, I did. My fingers were quick, pressing in each key. The metal door next to it shuddered and slid open with a groan.
The Little Room, Baldric had called it. Well, it was certainly higher than it was wide. I remembered these bookshelves spanning the two semicircular stories. Tomes of texts. Unhung portraits on the floor, propped up against the walls. We were in. This was as far as the director could help us. Now I’d have to rely on Natalya. If she was up for it.
We spread out. It was dark. I had to search around for the light switches, but when I found them, strange lamps ahead snapped on. Lamps of different shapes, dangling from thin wires, cast an orange, red, and yellow wash over the marble floor, like glowing pendants.
“Who the hell designed this place?” Chae Rin shielded her eyes from one pendant directly above her.
“Maia, what do we do?” Lake asked.
She weaved between two globes that have been knocked off their stands and stopped at a display blocked off by chains. The fossilized phantom. Yes, I remembered this all too well. Natalya had been mesmerized by this too, this phantom crystallized—no, “petrified” was the official term, though it certainly glittered like crystal. The phantom was like a dragon about to take flight, its wings spread out, its jaw gaping as if prepared to swallow any of us whole.
“This is all well and good,” Lake said, “but how do we find the volume? There’re two stories of wall-to-wall books here.”
Belle was staring up at the portrait hanging above the fireplace at the west end of the room. Bartholomäus Blackwell II: 1849–1910. Blackwell’s ancestor. He had the same wild, long, dark curls and the same ridiculous, elaborate sense of fashion. The moment I saw him, something stirred inside me. Natalya.
I pressed a hand against my forehead. There was something there. Something I was missing.
“You okay?” Chae Rin walked up to me and shook my shoulder.
I’d seen the memory through Natalya’s eyes. It wasn’t the right way of scrying. It left you vulnerable to someone else’s emotions and feelings . . . but at the same time, the chaotic nature of intertwining your mind too tightly with someone else’s made the process unwieldly, untrustworthy. I may have felt emotions that were wrong, or not felt emotions I should have. The thoughts I’d heard could have been heard incorrectly. I had to think back to it. Back to that dream.
I closed my eyes. It was months ago, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember it completely, but shadows of old feelings crept back inside me. Natalya’s fear and urgency as she walked through the room to leave her message for Belle. She’d walked over to the shelves on the first floor to get to the Castor Volumes, the first ever printed, preserved in this secret space. But there were only twelve of them, each bound in velvet. What was I missing? And why did my eyes keep slipping back to the portrait?
Natalya had stared at the portrait too for a moment before moving on.
It doesn’t matter.
That’s what she’d thought to herself. Natalya was being chased. She’d only had a moment’s worth of time, but the portrait had still managed to capture her attention.
It doesn’t matter. . . . It doesn’t matter now. . . . It doesn’t matter anymore.
But it did matter. Something in me screamed it.
“Help me take this down,” I told Belle.
Belle had to raise me above her head so I could reach the portrait and bring it back down. The black letters written in cursive on the wall behind it were so tiny I had to squint to read them. But I recognized the Latin immediately.
“Et in tenebris invenies,” I finished slowly. “And among the shadows, you will find them.”
“What does that mean?” asked Lake as I hopped down from Belle’s shoulders.
“Among the shadows.” I remembered the paintings of phantoms all along Pastor Charles’s church: shadows dancing across the walls, bathing only in the light of the stained glass windows. “The shadows are phantoms.”
I pivoted on my feet, my focus on the petrified phantom at the center of the room. “I think this is it.”
I joined Lake by the phantom. She eyed me as I hopped over the chains and began sweeping my hands across the hard crystal. “What exactly are you looking for?” she asked.
I didn’t know. All I knew was that the thirteenth volume wasn’t here. No way would Baldric just place it, handily available, among the other books. There was something I was missing.
“Wait.” I stepped onto the platform itself and lifted myself up on my tiptoes. “What’s that? There something in its mouth?”
Carefully, I climbed up its bent knees, jutting out just far enough to make a pretty good foothold. As I came almost eye to eye with the phantom, I remembered, looking into their hollow, black depths behind the sheen of crystal, that this thing was not a “fossil” at all. It was alive. Its flesh and exoskeleton may have transformed into a different substance, but like Pete and Mellie had demonstrated in the London facility, with the right material it could be called back to life. It was an unsettling thought. More unsettling when I stuck my hand up its exposed throat, my arm avoiding its long teeth, sharper now inside the crystal coating.
My hunch was right. Deep inside its mouth, jammed neatly into the roof of its mouth, was a key. I grimaced, trying to yank it out without impaling my arm on its jaw.
“Yes,” I whispered when it finally came loose, but the deep rumbling behind the bookcase caught me by surprise. Startled, I turned too quickly, slipping off the phantom’s knee and falling off the platform.
“What’s going on?” Lake said, helping me up from the other side of the chains. “Is the bookcase moving?”
Chae Rin scoffed. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief as an invisible force dragged the shelf out at an angle, revealing a black space behind it.
There was nowhere else to go but into the passageway. It had opened only a sliver, so we had to slide ourselves through one by one. The girls followed me down a set of creaking stairs, deeper and deeper, and then into a dimly lit corridor of red brick until we came to a locked iron door. The key fit perfectly. The lock clicked, and after swinging the door open, we entered a vast space that could have been another exhibition area anywhere else in the museum.
It was a little dusty in here, but otherwise, the area was well kept. Perhaps Baldric visited from time to time during his tenure as the secret volume keeper. The elaborate white border stretching across the four corners of the ceiling had beautiful patterns in the plaster: rose vines twisting and
sprouting blooms across the wide strips. On each side of this secret area were three tall suits of armor carrying real spears, standing guard in their rows. I walked across the marble floor, marveling at the two crystallized phantoms on display at the front of the room with only a velvet rope separating them from the rest of the hall. Dragons, like the one upstairs, though these were even bigger, their outstretched wings almost touching the ceiling. And in the middle of the wall between them hung a beautiful painting—a portrait, rather—of a plump, rosy-cheeked girl in a lavender Victorian dress, her charcoal hair swept up at the top of her head. At the bottom of the frame read a dedication:
For Patricia Haas: 1848–1865.
“Patricia Haas,” I whispered as the other girls spread to different corners of the hall. Naomi had said that Baldric’s family had kept the secret volume safe through generations. But the girl’s first name caught my attention also. “Emilia, Abigail, and Patricia . . .” The three girls Alice had mentioned in her letter to Marian.
“Guys, come look at this!” Lake said excitedly, disappearing behind one of the two open doors. We followed her inside.
“Okay, I think we can agree this place is hella weird,” Chae Rin said as Lake motioned to the three stone statues in the center of the room.
I’d seen them before. These women, their bodies carved out of white stone, naked but for their hair wrapped around them like ancient robes. They were exact replicas of the statues stationed around Blackwell’s mansion. And like Blackwell’s statues, each held a pearl in her hands, their bodies only slightly different in position. The mysterious “knowing” in the hollow grooves meant to represent their eyes was the same for each of them. As if they saw us. As if they’d known we would be coming here.
It was like the statues were just another exhibit. Well, secret room or not, we were still in a museum. The three statues faced each other in a triangle on top of a wide, circular platform at the center of the room. And next to the platform was another golden stand with a plaque telling its visitors the name of this exhibit. This time it was only one word: FāTUM.
“ ‘Fātum’ . . . does that mean ‘fate’?” I asked.
Belle walked up to the velvet rope surrounding the platform. “Fate. Destiny. Sometimes ‘death.’ Though other times it refers to the words uttered by gods. Their words . . . their will . . .” Belle went silent, but her eyes never left the statues. “What are these? Why are they here? Who are you three supposed to be . . . ?”
“We tried to get into the other room, but it was locked,” said Chae Rin. “I have no idea what these statues are. Or that.” She pointed at the digital clock screwed into the front of the room behind the statues: 20:00. Twenty-four-hour time. But that couldn’t have been right; we’d left after midnight.
Belle stepped over the velvet rope and knelt down next to the platform. “These depressions . . .” At the foot of each statue was a straight, sunken path that stopped just at the edge of the platform. “It’s leading the statues away from one another.”
After a long moment of considering the pathways, she hopped onto the platform and tried to push one of the statues.
“This is so weird.” Lake shook her head and snapped her photos.
Chae Rin walked up to the rope. “What are you doing?”
Belle gave her best effort, but they didn’t budge. They were a little taller than us and made of marble. Heavy. Too heavy to move yet. “It’s no use,” she said, righting herself. “The inoculation is wearing off, but I’m still not strong enough to move these on my own. Chae Rin, what about you? You could use your power to move the stone.”
It was true that it had been a while since we’d inoculated ourselves. I could start to feel the beginnings of magic struggling awake deep within my body. It must have been the same for Chae Rin, who sighed.
“I don’t know what you think is going to happen, but all right. Why not?” She lifted her hands, grimacing as she struggled to channel the power through her body. Gradually, one statue began to move, dragging along the depressed path in the stone platform with a terrible screech. Our powers were coming back, but that also meant we had to finish up here and get out fast. It was hard to tell how long we had until the Sect could track us again, and with Naomi’s ring bugged during our conversation with her in Madrid, we couldn’t be sure who was already on our tail.
Still, Belle was serious about this, so Chae Rin pushed herself despite the strain it caused her. She heaved each statue until they’d reached the edge of the platform. The moment the third statue clicked into place, a buzz rang out softly from outside our room, but it was the clock that took my attention.
“It’s counting down,” I said. Nineteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds, fifty-eight seconds . . .
It wasn’t a clock at all, but a timer.
“Okay, counting down to what, exactly?” Lake looked from one statue to the other. “Should we be worried?”
“What was that sound back there?” Chae Rin nodded toward the door, breathing heavily as she recovered. “Did anybody else hear that?”
Jumping off the platform and stepping over the rope, I ran back out of the room. Just as I thought—the second door. Directly across the hall, it was open just wide enough for a soft light to slide through the crack. Whatever we’d done to the statues must have triggered the door. But if the countdown was any indication, we wouldn’t have much time to inspect it. Calling the girls over, I strode across the floor and entered the room.
I felt the change in the air immediately. The way gravity suddenly weighed my body down the moment I crossed the threshold. Each step felt alien atop the stone floor tiles. The air was rich with an unspeakable energy. Familiar. I’d felt this before.
“What is this?” Shutting the door behind her, Lake drew her hand to her chest. “I feel really . . .”
“Calm.” Closing her eyes, Belle raised her chin and soaked it in. “I feel calm.”
“Belle, it’s the same as the chamber at that church,” I told her.
Pastor Charles’s cellar. A place of pure calm.
This room was a cellar too, the walls, the floors, the ceilings, all stone. But when I closed my eyes and listened to the quiet, when I let the thoughts slip out of me, I could almost feel something slithering by my arms, my legs—a whisper of a touch. It’d happened in the church, but I couldn’t ignore it this time. No, it wouldn’t let me ignore it. Whatever they were, the air was dense with them, and I was connected to them. Or maybe we were connected to the same force, the same energy flowing through us, sparking the magic in me that began swelling up from the depths of my soul. I lifted my hand, considering the fingers that curled inward, twitching whenever one of them glided by. It didn’t take any effort: a little flame burst from my fingertips.
“Woah, okay.” Lake shivered. “Something just grazed my cheek. This room isn’t haunted, is it?”
“Haunted” was one word for it. The cellar was cylithium-rich, but it was more potent than what I’d felt in Pastor Charles’s cellar. Still, it couldn’t have just been the cylithium I felt.
Spirits? Pastor Charles’s ramblings suddenly didn’t seem so unreasonable.
“There’s something there.” Chae Rin walked up to one of the tiles at the very center of the room. A longer slab, it stood out from the rest, with its larger concrete frame, its clearly defined edges, and the handle protruding from the surface. “Looks like a trapdoor.”
But the etchings made it look more like a grave—not only words but also a symbol was carved deep into the gray concrete. I could only make out the drawing’s pointed talons, but I could tell it was a drawing of a beast. Of a phantom.
“What does it say?” I asked, but as we drew closer to it, we could read for ourselves the words written above the symbol.
Belle bent down by the door, brushing off the dust that had settled on the surface. “ ‘Summon calm,’ ” she read.
Calm. Castor had mentioned it too, in his first volume, that there were places like this. The doo
r looked heavy, but the four of us were brimming with power here in this mysterious room. Gripping the handle, Belle lifted the door up with ease.
The secret volume. Placed only two feet beneath the door in a darkened pit, it sat atop another solid surface. There was nothing ceremonial about its burial, nothing to signal its importance. It looked the same as any of the other Castor Volumes—same binding, same silver engravings. I bent down and picked it up, running my hand along the Roman numeral on the cover. XIII.
And something else.
“ ‘And among the shadows, you will find them,’ ” I read. It was in English, written in small plain letters toward the bottom of the cover, just below another strange symbol—the flame I saw in Saul’s bunker, the symbol Natalya drew.
“For only in calm,” Belle said, “can you hear them speak.”
She was reading too, but not the volume. This time, the words were etched upon the floor on the very space the book had rested. And below the single line lay a symbol of three swirls, three energies, joining together to make the whole.
Only in calm. I felt another sudden chill whisper along my skin. Like eels in a tank, they fluttered past us, saying nothing, saying everything. Were they really spirits? The sensation was overwhelming, making every cell flare to life inside of me. Belle, Lake, Chae Rin, and I were moving toward one another. No words passed between us. Nothing told us to stand in a circle, and I didn’t know why I stretched the volume in my hand out into the center. One by one, the other girls placed both hands on the book as if fate compelled them. Whispers only our souls could hear, secret truths binding us together. My hand was last.
It happened so suddenly, I barely had a chance to breathe before my soul ripped out of my body, away from the girls, away from the room, through many doors, through infinite space. Scenes flashing one after another, faces blurred as they whipped past my face like the wind.
I’d felt this before. Yes, La Charte hotel, that night Saul attacked New York. The night he kissed me. The touch of his lips had forced me away from myself, and now here I was again, flying, but to where? I was in my own consciousness. I knew that much. But I glimpsed the shallow stream only once as I rocketed past too many red doors too quickly, each of them blowing open for me so fast, I hadn’t a chance to see the girls guarding them. I was skipping the line. Going back, back, back. Back through memories, back through fire, through tragedy, through death. Back to the beginning. I closed my eyes.
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