by Jenn Stark
There was no denying the energy beneath my fingertips, that much was certain. Maybe there was a keyhole in this globe?
I slipped off the other glove and shoved it also into my hoodie pocket, again checking for the docent. He was apparently off dusting a bookshelf. I pulled out the baroque ornamental key.
“Hey, guys.” I waved the key over the globe as Nikki turned toward me. The energy of the globe felt warm and inviting, lifting up toward me with the slightest frisson of attachment. “I think I found something here.”
My hand jerked downward with a sickening lurch. The key smacked into the globe—
And I was lost.
Chapter Ten
I sprawled forward, arms windmilling, crashing to the floor of a chamber not dissimilar to the one I’d just left, but much, much darker. Fires burned in grates at either end of the space, casting shadows as well as light. Huge statues surrounded me, crafted with the same beautiful baroque artistry of the Clementinum Library, but the effect was of creatures looming over me from every direction.
I turned around, taking an experimental breath.
Yep, Hell had oxygen. Already things were looking up.
The key was gone—not on my person, not anywhere around me. Dusting myself off, I got to my feet, then walked carefully down the middle of the chamber, giving the statues a wide berth. The fire at the far end seemed realistic enough, but I noticed it gave off no heat. Despite the whole brimstone atmosphere about the place, the temperature was moderately cool, about what you’d experience in any suburban house that didn’t crank the A/C. Also a bonus.
As soon as I got close enough to the flames to see by the light, I took inventory. The key was still missing. Soo’s amulet and the pouch of chips remained around my throat, however, ditto my clothes and shoes. Everything a girl could need. I tilted my head, listening for water, but there was no sound of a rushing river anywhere close. The dark mages would have to wait. My first responsibility was to Soo—and then to find Armaeus, if I could. That dream of him watching and rewatching ancient history of the Arcana Council…that seemed dangerously close to the Spinners’ and Kreios’s warnings. I had to make sure the Magician wasn’t getting wrapped up in the spells this place was casting.
Part of that was because he was needed by the Council, certainly. But part of it was because I needed him too. Over the past year, the Magician had worked his way past more than my mental barriers, he’d gained a foothold in my heart. He didn’t know it—couldn’t know it, or I’d never hear the end of his smug I-told-you-sos. But Armaeus’s smugness I could handle. It was his absence from my mind that I was finding increasingly difficult to bear.
“Focus,” I muttered. The Magician wasn’t my primary purpose in Hell. Not yet. Soo was.
Bypassing the pouch of chips for now, I slipped my fingers around the jade amulet. It was warm to the touch, and I could feel the crackle of electricity off it. I swung left, then right, and it grew distinctly warmer with the second option. So right it was.
I frowned as I stepped carefully forward into the shadows that stretched along the room. There was a doorway here, but the room beyond was equally dark. I hadn’t thought to bring a torch, and cast a glance toward the enormous fire. There were several long sticks in a bucket by the blaze, but as I stepped toward them, I hesitated. This baroque wonderland had been exactly what I was expecting, down to the creepy statues. What if I expected something different out of the next room than a dank and cheerless hole?
A sudden brightness to my right made me jerk around, but there was nothing there…other than tiny flames suddenly dancing in the sconces of the next room. I realized that I was standing in some sort of interior courtyard dotted with columns and sporting walls riddled with window-like holes.
As I watched, the rooms all around the center chamber lit up with sconces in a rush of light, brightening the entire space. Staircases arched into shadows, promising yet more discoveries in every direction. I glanced up and saw a lushly painted ceiling roiling with stars and angels and clouds—far, far above me, too high to ever reach.
Heaven.
I started moving.
The room immediately next to the fire-hearth courtyard was another enormous chamber, this one covered floor-to-ceiling with paintings I didn’t recognize, but that I probably should—works of art reminiscent of every major artist known to man. Had those masters spent time in this place, suffering in purgatory before ascending to heaven or simply finding their final rest? Or was this all a figment of what I expected Hell to look like? I reached out a tentative hand and tapped the edge of a gilt frame. It stayed firm.
There was no way to know how real an illusion might be, of course. Kreios had gone on and on about keeping true to my path, and I began to get a tiny sense of his concern. I could spend hours studying these works of art, drowning myself in them, completely forgetting why I’d come here in the first place.
I was on the clock, though. So that couldn’t happen.
Resolutely, I stepped back from the paintings and kept moving, gripping the amulet tightly. As I neared the far door, a sudden bolt of fire shot through my hand, and I dropped the amulet against my neck, wincing as it seared my skin.
“Ouch ouch ouch!” I scrambled to remove the thing, playing hot potato until I was able to hold it by its string. The amulet swayed, fairly smoking, and I scowled over it to the room beyond. “I get it, I get it, we’re closer,” I muttered. “Take it easy.”
As I made my way through the palace of stone chambers, however, I noticed something else peculiar. There was absolutely no sound in this place. No screams of the righteous or howls of the damned, no cries of lamentation or passion. There wasn’t even a mouse scurrying around down here, and the silence closed in on me. Resolutely I kept walking, the heat of the amulet growing stronger and the rooms becoming smaller and more sumptuous with each new corridor I breached. Finally I reached one that had the amulet practically sizzling with excitement, but which made me slow my steps. I held the amulet by its strings again, ignoring its urgent, flaring heat.
I’d…seen this place before, I thought.
But that was impossible. I would have remembered it if I’d ever stumbled into a hallway like this. So, a dream? A nightmare? A late-night horror flick?
Something.
Ahead of me, a long corridor stretched with a sort of altar at the far end. Something large, stone, and green sat on top of a marble base that rested on that altar. It could have been a chipmunk, or a scarab, or a blob of fossilized Play-Doh. I couldn’t tell from this distance.
Rooms opened off to either side of the corridor, and I stepped uneasily down the path, Soo’s amulet hot enough to roast marshmallows. I swung it in front of me, hoping I wouldn’t have to put it on again anytime soon. I didn’t need an imprint of Soo’s ancestral dragon burned into my chest.
Halfway down the corridor, I realized what the thing on the altar was—a frog. A jade frog, almost identical to one I’d handled over a year and a half earlier, in the dirty streets of Rio de Janeiro. What did that job have to do with this one—or was my mind simply conjuring up connections to give me any sort of context?
Another few steps and the reason didn’t matter. Two rooms opened on either side of me, entryways with no doors. They appeared identical, and the amulet burned with equal violence at both. So we were at an impasse.
Or…not quite.
Holding the amulet carefully, trying not to burn myself, I fumbled open the pouch around my neck. Loosening the top, I reached into the bag with two fingers, snagging the first chip I could grab. It was about the size of a thumbnail and made of something that could have been plastic or ultrathin glass. I pulled the chip out and squinted at it by the light of one of the sconces. Emblazoned in perfect clarity on its surface was the Queen of Pentacles, showing a seated woman surrounded by riches, staring to her right.
“Right it is.” I dropped the chip back in the bag and tightened the opening, almost feeling grateful for Kreios. He might not b
e willing to interfere with others’ futures in this war on magic, but he cared enough to interfere with mine, which was all right by me.
I entered the chamber to my right, only to find it wasn’t a chamber at all, but yet another long corridor filled with mirrors on either side. As I walked by them, the images on the mirrors shifted. So not mirrors but windows, or screens of some sort, wobbling with shadows. I reached out, and my fingers connected with a solid surface.
The moment I touched the window however, the scene changed, the lights coming up on a suburban park. I stopped short as I saw myself, but it was a much younger version of me, simpler. I was maybe sixteen—no, seventeen years old, and the park evolved subtly too as I watched, until it became the neighborhood green space near my house in Memphis. The house I’d shared with my mother until I was seventeen.
One hand on the glass, the other holding the amulet by its laces, I stared at the scene before me.
I was sitting on one of the picnic tables, my books balanced on my knees, my head bent. I couldn’t remember what I… No, no, I did remember, I realized with a smile. I was studying French that day. French! I’d forgotten I’d tried to learn that language. It was the end of my junior year, and I’d nearly made it through two whole semesters under Mrs. Tisch, who insisted we all go by a made-up French name.
My hand spasmed against the window. How long had it been since I’d remembered that? This was April, I could tell by the trees blossoming around the park, before any of the events that had happened a few short weeks later. A few days after my birthday, actually, when everything had seemed full of promise and sunshine and—
“Sariah! I hoped I would find you here.”
The man’s voice came through the glass as clearly as if he was standing next to me, and I stared as my younger self on the other side of the glass looked up, eyes alight. My heart took a hard thump to the right as Officer Brody Rooks strode up, his uniform dark blue in the bright sunlight, his hair blonded from too many days outside, his skin tanned. I tracked the blush climbing up my younger self’s cheeks as she fumbled with her books, barely able to get them closed before Officer Brody reached her.
“Hi—do you need anything?” the seventeen-year-old Sariah blurted, trying so hard to sound adult that I winced. “Is everything okay?”
“Of course it is.” Officer Brody grinned and held out a small package wrapped in brown paper. On this side of the glass, my chest had gone hollow with remembered pain. “Your mom yelled at me for not getting you anything for your birthday. She was right, I should have realized it.”
“You didn’t have to get me a birthday present,” the girl who I’d been mumbled, but she reached out and plucked the gift from Brody’s fingers so he wouldn’t feel awkward. With her head bowed, Brody couldn’t see her face. But I could. Plus, I’d been there. I’d been her. All the pent-up teenage hunger for someone to care for me, someone to appreciate me, to respect me, had been centered on the clueless police officer, and I watched my younger self struggling with the enormity of it all.
A present! He’d gotten me a present!
I didn’t want to open it then. I could tell that, and remembered it as well. But Brody shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, clearly unsure, and I’d made him unsure. I’d made him unsure because of my stupid, adolescent, moony-eyed crush.
“Open the package already,” I groaned on this side of the glass, knowing how this movie ended. “It’s not an engagement ring. It’s a book. It’s only a book. Come on.”
But the Sariah on the picnic table took an inordinately long time about it. I didn’t remember taking that long. She flipped the package over, weighing it with what probably passed as an arch smile for her, and laughed at Brody’s exasperated hand flapping.
“It’s really not much,” he insisted, but the expression that my younger self wore arrowed through me. It was so…happy. So carefree and full of possibilities, and before I realized it, my other hand was up against the glass as well, feeling that moment, those emotions, my whole life before it was broken up and wrecked and—
Sariah opened the package and held up the book to the light, struggling to hide her disappointment. Because of course she had the book already. She’d read it when she was twelve. And she was seventeen now, seventeen! Didn’t Brody know that? Did he think she was a little girl?
“Oh, thanks,” she said, and it was her turn to be awkward. She didn’t get many gifts. She certainly wasn’t going to reject this one. And yet it burned some small, pathetic corner of her soul for him to think that this was a book she hadn’t heard of, this was a book she didn’t already practically have memorized.
“It was my favorite book,” Brody said, and I could see his embarrassment through the glass, even if my younger self couldn’t. “I-I thought you might enjoy it, but you’ve read it already, haven’t you?”
“No—I mean, yes—I have. A while…it doesn’t matter. I appreciate it, really I do.” My younger self opened it up and flipped to the front page, and I could see the tide of hope grow again, only to be dashed when she realized he hadn’t signed it to her either. It was a book, like any other book. “Oh, come on! You didn’t sign it?”
“What?” Brody asked, his eyes wide. Clearly he was thinking he should have gotten Sariah a Starbucks card. How could a cop know how to navigate the murky waters of giving a book to a teenage girl! I groaned on his behalf as my own younger, stupider self shoved the book back at him. “Sign it,” she ordered imperiously. “And say something nice.”
Brody wordlessly took the book back, his mouth twisting into a grimace as my younger self handed him a pen. I watched him, a witness to an impending train wreck. He couldn’t sign anything personal, I knew that. My younger self knew it too, yet she was not at all hiding the fact that she wanted that personal touch, wanted something that she could hold close and remember him by.
Poor Officer Brody clearly realized the danger of what she was asking, maybe for the very first time. I winced at the sudden dismay in his eyes, so embarrassed for my younger self that my stomach churned. Brody’s pen jerked in his hand, and he glanced hard at Sariah as she bent to shove her books in her bag, giving him the illusion of privacy. Then he finished what he was writing and handed the book back to her.
“Sorry,” he said gruffly. “I don’t have much experience with signatures.”
“Then I won’t read it in front of you.” The glance Sariah sent him was so full of adoration that he stepped back, clearly nonplussed.
“Give your mom my best,” he said.
“Is there anything new on the Degnan case? I could come to the station—”
“No, there’s not,” Brody shook his head hard, but it was no use at this point. With his signature, all had clearly been forgiven. My younger self was in full-on crush mode, and even the dumbest adult could have figured that out. I could practically see the terror in Brody’s eyes, but he tried to tough it out, tried to be chill, resting his hands on his belt to avoid giving Sariah Pelter the hex sign to keep her back. “I’ll call if anything comes up.”
“Sounds good!”
Though my younger self was clearly about to ask him for a ride home—never mind that it was two blocks—Brody stepped back quickly and nodded again. “Gotta bolt. Happy birthday,” he said, before pivoting and walking swiftly toward his car.
A different girl would have been chastised. Not me. Not then. I surreptitiously watched Officer Brody until he got into his cruiser and peeled off, the whole time busying myself with my pack as well so he wouldn’t see me staring moony-eyed after him. And then I ran, breathless, all the way home.
The scene seemed to collapse on itself then, to blur, as my own mind took over, serving up images I’d thought I’d completely forgotten, images I’d certainly never thought about again. Not later. Not after.
Because I’d never looked at Officer Brody’s signature. I couldn’t. It was too much fun imagining what he would say, conjuring up different words, phrases, veiled promises, possible p
ledges. The possibilities were endless, and there was no way I would break that spell, no way I would cut off all that hope, all that thrilling potential.
So I’d put the paperback up on my highest shelf in my bedroom and promised myself that I’d wait exactly one month and then I’d open it up.
Three weeks later, I’d been running for my life.
I jerked myself back to awareness. The window was back to being a mirror, and the other glasses were shifting now, images coming into focus. I didn’t feel up to playing musical memories anymore, so I pushed back from the wall and strode quickly down the corridor until I reached the far door. With a relieved breath, I stepped out of the hallway of yesterdays and into the next job.
The next job, I could handle. Yesterdays needed to stay where they were.
Shaking off the weird ache in my chest, I focused on the room around me.
It was a woman’s bedroom, which made sense given that I’d drawn the Queen of Pents. And similar to what that card depicted, the room was filled with treasure. Gold, jewels, and fine wood carvings spilled out of chests along the floor, and the carpet was a deep sumptuous cream. There was a cheerful fire burning in the far grate with some bundles of cloth beside it, and rich textiles spilled out of chests to either side of the flames. The bed was piled high with pillows—too high for anyone to clamber over, all of it purely for show.
“A chamber fit for a Queen of Pents,” I muttered.
And then one of the huddled lumps in the corner shifted. It stretched, elongating and all I could do was watch—unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to do anything but stare.
The figure stood, facing away from me.
“You came,” she said.
Chapter Eleven
I finally was able to step back as the woman sighed deeply, staring into the fire. When she turned, though, it was all I could do not to run from the room.
Her hair was a mass of blood, her skull caved in by a devastating wound. Her shift was simple and dirty, the shift of a slave or a prisoner. It hung off her emaciated frame, and her hands were clasped in front of her. Her entire body trembled, and she appeared to be held together by grit and hope alone, her eyes enormous as they fixed on me. “You have come, finally. After all these years.”