Chapter Five: The Weight of the Lost

 

The world became a jumble of flipping pages and a mass of data and emotion. I held tightly to Constantine's arm.

When it expelled us into a decrepit front yard, we both stumbled and nearly fell into a gnarled jumble of cacti seeking to impale trespassers.

“That is a horrible way to travel,” Constantine said, flicking a vine with his foot. He straightened to his full, impressive height, and looked around in disdain. Beyond the dusty, gnarled vines was a twisted mass of landscape—like pieces from a thousand jigsaw puzzles. I could see the faint tremble in his fingers as he flexed them.

The book swooped down; buzzing his head in what could only be a rude, laughing gesture. “Stupid papered beast,” Constantine muttered.

“Whatever, I could feel your magic trying to embrace it.” I elbowed him, feeling better already, knowing I was going to release the knots I'd been building. Knowing I wasn't alone. A simple thought, and yet, powerful.

The guilt at putting another in danger was still there, as always, blubbering in the back of my mind, but it was muted. Constantine was a master at sidestepping the emotion as both purveyor and recipient.

I skirted a vine and barely looked at the twisted edges of reality beyond it as Constantine stabbed a trailing plant with the blade end of his long ribbon that had formed itself into a solid shaft. He, too, felt oddly relieved and content—as if he were feeding off my emotions.

“I think I'm becoming inured to normalcy.” I dodged another carnivorous plant. “I keep expecting the plant life in the First Layer to reach up and grab me when I'm there.”

“Beyond boring, the non-magic world. And my magic was only trying to embrace that blasted book to ensure I survived.”

But I had felt him in the split-second journey—he'd held no fear for himself, his trust in me absolute. He was continuously surveying my mental state, though. I could see the thin threads of his watchfulness, and the way he was allowing himself to be influenced by my contentment and fondness.

Guard Rock jumped off my shoulder and flipped onto the ground. He approached the door on small, fast legs and did something complicated with his pencil. The book landed in front of him. Guard Rock stabbed toward the door. The book shook its pages. The stab-shake communication continued for a few more moments, then Guard Rock thumped his pencil and lifted his arms.

The book swooped forward; grabbing an arm in each of its bottom cornered claws, then lifted him into the broken sky. The book took flight across the pieces of sky—appearing in one shard, then another far to the west, disappearing to reappear in another far to the east, winging off to wherever it went when I was otherwise occupied on an outing.

This was the first time I had seen it take off with Guard Rock dangling in tow, though. I didn't know whether to be amused or concerned.

“There's plenty to fear and anticipate without magic,” I said, as we watched them go. “You just have to look at the First Layer without a magic eye.”

“Boring. That hell-bound volume looks like it’s off to cause mayhem, by the way.”

“Only boring people are bored. And probably.”

“Only tedious people are tedious,” he sniped back.

I shoved him, trying to hide an unanticipated grin, and looked at the wards. There were a complicated series of them, which I'd expected. The unexpected part was how old they were.

“The book took your rock,” Constantine said.

“I noticed.”

“Are you sure? I feel like you might not care if I'm next.”

“A sweeper over the ridge looks hungry.” I pointed vaguely in the carrion animal's direction. “Watch out.” I waved a hand in a dismissive gesture meant to agitate.

“I could be amid a harem right now.”

“You said a harem was too time consuming,” I said, and turned from him, satisfied that his internal emotions about this outing were positive—anticipation, elation, curiosity, dark excitement—and set to work, pulling magic along the wards while also filtering in some of Constantine's so that he could enter as well. As relieved as I was to have him along, my number one priority was his protection.

The wards were old, but the coded set of magic the book had taught me caused the magic to reluctantly give way under the recognition of kinship.

“It really was.” Constantine sighed jadedly, examining the small crumbling house with a critical eye. “You couldn't have chosen a building with indoor plumbing?”

“I'm sure there is a bathroom in there somewhere.”

“A single brass pot in a corner is not a bathroom.”

“If it's the kind that doesn't fight back, it counts.”

We stepped through the door to find a single room. The floor was covered in a thick layer of dust and the room was stripped bare. The structure was more of a small barn, really.

“Not even a pot, Crown.”

I laughed, moving inside. The room might have been empty, but a feeling of kinship and magic permeated the air and put a spring into my step. This had been the right move.

“I regret this already,” Constantine said behind me. “Forget the harem. There was a beautiful woman looking for zero attached strings back in that base—”

“I saw twelve such women. You could tempt a new one every other hour without having to keep any and stray to harem territory. And those were the ones I saw eyeing you in the halls. I'm certain you could pull far more.” I examined the room, looking for a good spot.

“One who was completely willing to—”

“And now let's discontinue this conversational direction.”

“—play and had the loveliest pair of—”

I used a sliver of magic to seal his lips together just long enough to stop the flow of words. “I'm going to save us further embarrassment and cut you off there.”

He started laughing, caramel eyes twinkling in the rare way he sometimes allowed, and his lips peeled the magic away with a smile. “All you had to say was—”

The dust coating the floor slowly rose into the air, twinkling in the rays of light brokenly piercing the poorly-sashed window coverings.

I heard Constantine sigh wearily in stark contrast to the dark excitement suddenly flowing through him. He flicked the rock on his signet ring and a shield activated around him. It was always strange to me how much he loved watching me use and fight magic, but hated watching me fight the Department. As if he only considered one of them a true threat.

I threw another shield around him, and dove to the side.

The dust swirled into a chromatic tornado and I thrust out my palm, sucking the vortex into my skin and holding it just beneath the surface.

“Don't move your feet!” I yelled and dove to the other side as I felt the world shift the slightest bit. The wards warped inward, then pulsed outward.

Constantine rolled his eyes, but continued to keep his lower body still as he pulled a device from his long coat and held it out. We'd gotten good at these types of defensive maneuvers when we'd first created world-changing paint—before we’d quite gotten the paint right.

I grabbed the device in a sprinting slide, channeled the magic from my palm into the device then cast the device at the floor. Blue lines pulsed outward, mapping each point from where the magic was originating.

A slice of magic cut through the air and I used a puff of air to vault over the top.

I plucked a second device from Constantine's other hand.

“Remind me to record this next time, so your boyfriend can view it,” Constantine said, picking a nail with the thumb of the same hand as the magic tried to attack him under the erected shield. “He will be so proud.” He lifted a third box from his pocket and held it out in his free hand.

I pulled it from him and used it to capture the rest of the magic event.

The magic was sucked inside in a long intake of sound. I flipped the lid and all sound ceased—the dust motes the only players left in the air. Just fighting the magic had made me feel better—like the enchantments held a dual purpose as a warm-up for an Origin Magic purge.

Constantine looked at me through his lashes. “Now the question is...what are you going to do with that box?”

“Very funny.”

“Only to you, darling,” he said silkily. “To everyone else, each one of those boxes you fill grows closer to priceless. Just like those lovely little gifts you keep giving each rescued feral.”

I looked at the box wrapped in my fingers and felt the weight of it in my hands. “The Department, Stavros, all the ferals' magic...” I looked up at him. “What do you think he is using it for?”

“Nothing good.”

I nodded grimly, stepped forward, and stuck the box in his pocket.

He stared at his pocket, like he always did when I gave him magic. He looked up, finally, when his expression was suitably bored again, hiding his true feelings—though they could never be secret from me now. “All done with your feats of glory?”

“Yes, you can stop being the damsel in distress.”

“With the shield we constructed wrapped around me? Hardly,” he scoffed. He twirled a hand and the shield wrapped around his ring finger again like a living signet of swirling copper and turquoise, then sunk inside.

He lifted his foot and I looked at the floor in front of him.

“Wait!”

He froze. The easy lines of his body were absent for the first time since we'd entered the house.

I bent down and nudged the small beetle to the side. “Okay,” I said cheerfully.

He stared at me for an intense moment. “It is possible that I might do the house's job and murder you myself.”

I lifted my bag. “What do you mean?” I turned to hide my smirk. “There was a bug. It was innocent.”

“Murder, darling.” He began checking the nooks and crannies of the place. With only a single room, it didn't take long. “Well, at least it is lacking surprises.”

I handed my shrunken portal pad to him. He lifted a brow. “Setting up for success?”

“Just in case.”

I considered pulling a table into existence, but the floor was strangely calling to me. I set my bag on the floorboards and pulled out the carefully designed insert Constantine, Stevens, and I had created. It was made of a soft canvas Stevens had provided and Constantine had enhanced. I opened the drawstring bag so that it lay flat on the dusty scarred oak revealing my supplies. I removed the brushes and opened my palette box.

Leaving everything on the drawstring canvas bag meant that I could secure everything for emergency travel with a pull of the string and a swing of it around my shoulder. Everything was designed to be wrapped up quickly, if needed.

I couldn’t afford to leave anything behind for Stavros to find. That had been another perk to the book swallowing my paintings.

A thin but massive pocket that was enchanted not to crinkle its contents ran the width and length of the bag and held my specially made paper. I pulled out a twenty by twenty piece.

Constantine had seen me paint before, but I didn't paint in front of people often. There was an unmasking in it. This was me, the Origin Mage, showing my true self without a shred of barrier, showing my power in the most defining way.

I had figured out almost immediately after escaping with Ori that painting did something that nothing else could accomplish after I used Origin Magic. It somehow allowed my mind to reorganize itself and pull the overwhelming information that I absorbed from the universe into a pattern that kept my mind and magic sane.

I looked over to see what Constantine was up to, but he was already reclining on the seat he always carried in his coat—a thin piece of wood angled up his back, and a small curved area to sit anchored it at the bottom, forming a sixty-degree angle for his body, and letting his legs stretch comfortably on the floor. It was exquisitely created, and the two pieces separated, so they fit in the long wool coats he loved to wear—or were easily depressed into a storage paper.

He lifted a brow, fingers wrapping his thin rope polymers in complicated patterns, like he was challenging a cat's cradle to the death. But lines of color and texture extended from every part of him, connecting to me and anchoring me in place.

And he had the portal pad. He could get away, if things went terribly wrong.

Satisfied, I looked down and examined the canvas. What to paint...

Death, destruction, suffering.

No.

But it was still there, on the edge, no matter what I tried.

But Constantine was still there too. The feel of community was still there. Neither removed the endpoint—I was going to paint something horrific. But I'd be okay.

Death, destruction, suffering.

I took a deep breath. I'd be okay. I wasn't alone.

I opened my mind. The world outside. The in-between of the layers. The million-piece puzzle assembled beyond. The way the magic enfolded in on itself and let me push the ferals between layers and into other worlds.

I touched my dry brush to the canvas and let it glide along while I imagined it.

The way I just knew where magic was happening, the way the map looked from the book, the feel of the magic as it arced from the earth—like a well-spring with spread tendrils hooked over the world, waiting to be tapped.

And the other things...the way that Stavros felt controlling me, that hollow inside, the way it felt to have Raphael use the box, how my magic was pulled from me, how I needed to figure out how to overcome that, the memories of Raphael in the Excelsine yearbooks, the look in Stavros' eyes, Kaine's shadows parasitically dipping inside, a distant recording of the Breaking, being inside Kinsky's painting, how the world opened like a million stars zooming in to form constellations of knowledge.

Paint was now on my brush, pulling from me, and it was gliding along the page, bursting life into the nooks and crannies of the canvas, bleeding its message into the cracks and over the statements.

It choked and pulled my brush in madly swirled midnight strokes. Blue, black, purple, brown death. Streaks of white lightning and crimson blood. Creation and life. A nightmare of slashing color and fiber. I'd constructed each of the fibers in this brush with assistance from Delia, and there was always an edgy quality to everything that Delia made—a bitterness with the world that was reflected in the layer upon which I stood.

But that wasn't the only edged thing in my life. Strange dreams haunted my wakening thoughts; dreams of destruction and despair. Gruesome images that spilled out onto the canvas beneath my brush.

Each carefully applied layer of flowers and birds became a disemboweled nightmare spilled upon the blackened grass.

I dropped my brush to the cloth and planted my palm against the canvas. Immediately, flowers bloomed, animals rose, creation unfolded, the landscape lit with life and promise, bursting at the seams. But like all the others, the longer I held on, the longer I pressed, the decay started to occur, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it, except wait for my magic to power the next cycle.

It was a continually looping piece of beautiful creation and horrific destruction, and the endless cycle and unity between the two.

If I let go, it would still happen, just on a slower time scale. I could never stop the cycle from occurring. I could only slow or hasten it. I twisted my fingers, pausing it at the height of creation, then ripped my hand away.

I stood with my head down, panting breaths heaving from my chest, up my throat, and through my mouth. The paint was still there, inside, but when I wiped my lips, I tasted power.

“Well...that was...enlightening,” Constantine said.

I jerked around.

Constantine's brows lifted, easing the oddly troubled expression on his face into more familiar lines. “Forgot I was here?” His words were sardonic, but his gaze softened. He motioned. “Come on, then.”

I stumbled over and buried myself in his chest. Neph's magic smoothed over me along with Constantine's. It was both a balm to my system and a small shock every time. The sharing was a superior level of trust from Neph to Constantine—a level of trust that had prompted one of the Bandits to mutter the Second Layer equivalent of hell freezing over.

I could feel Constantine looking at the painting. “It's not...completely horrible,” he said, as the decay slowly sped up again.

I laughed around a hiccup. “It's horrible.”

And the worse thing was it wasn't even as bad as the others I’d done. The creation cycles had lasted longer this time.

“It's mostly horrible, yes. In a beautiful, terrifying kind of way. Did you have to mix everything with so much black for the end?”

It made me think of Raphael's remark so long ago, when he'd been my false art teacher—that there was no true black in nature.

“Do you think everyone has a core of something good within them?” I asked into his shirt.

“No.”

At his succinct answer, I curled my fingers in his coat. “No?”

“Some people are rotten all the way through.”

“And some people seem that way, but aren't,” I said, nudging him with a small amount of magic.

He said nothing for a few moments, then, “Perhaps it is best to judge by emotions that you identify with strongly. Like love. If someone has experienced love, loved someone else, something in them, somewhere, is capable of more. But those born without...”

“Raphael was born with plenty of love. He was tainted, twisted.” I gripped harder, letting the comforting magic from Neph and Constantine, along with all the others, increase. “Do you think he could be good again?”

I felt him force himself to loosen from the automatic stiffness his body had assumed. “You test me with such questions.”

“If I get taken, if I get turned—”

“You think yourself like Verisetti.”

“You know him—on paper, you probably know him better than anyone who didn't know him personally. You've researched him. Without bringing an emotional reaction into it, don't you see the parallels?”

“I've long seen the parallels,” he said quietly. “Why do you think I try to keep you from their grasp?”

“Do you think Enton Stavros has a thread of goodness within?”

“I have seen no evidence of such.” Unlike the hot rage felt for Raphael, Constantine expressed only cold certainty discussing Stavros.

“But Professor Stevens...she's good.” I reluctantly let go, not wanting to suck away all his magic.

“A positive can be born of a negative. And Stevens has her own demons to deal with. As do most of us.” Constantine looked at the magic still faintly silhouetting his hand. “I can see why the governments keep the muses chained. Yours is powerful.”

“She willingly gives her magic to you.”

He didn't say anything for a long moment, face unreadable. “Yes. Your lunacy is spreading.”

I patted his shoulder. “You are a good sort.”

“I take comfort in the fact that your raw power will soon overwhelm the need to correct your inability to distrust appropriately.”

“Hilarious.”

He walked to stand in front of my painting again. “The truth is in front of me.”

“It is as I said. Death and destruction.”

“You feel the weight of the world.” He murmured, tilting his head to get a different view of the darkness I had carved into the fibers—a darkness that was shifting and pulling, inviting the viewer inside the tumult. “Literally, as it were. I can see a crumbling globe there with five rotational lines.”

I didn't look at the canvas. I didn't need to.

There was something off about his expression, though, as he looked at my painting. There was a tightness and an immense sorrow.

“You don't need to save the world, darling.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

It was times like this, right after painting, that I felt I could set all the worlds to rights. That I could truly do anything.

And it was terrifying.

I started packing my supplies into the magic canvas wraps that Constantine, Stevens, and I had created for them. “I have a duty—”

“You have no duty but to yourself,” he said fiercely, suddenly, emotions switching from sorrow to fury. “I don't care what the Thirdies try to shame and guilt you with. Or what you feel you owe them. You don't owe this world or the Third Layer anything.”

I looked at my fingers—at the power that ran beneath my skin, highlighted even more now that I had given it outlet. “I owe them for taking in the ferals. For taking on the danger of dealing with me. For—”

He leaned toward me, tension vibrating through him. “All I need do is to stride the halls we came from to see the evidence of what you have given them. That structure was a gutted installation, barely serviceable when you first came.”

“I didn't fix it by myself. Others came to help.”

“Pulled there by you. By the power of you.”

I looked at the power in my hands. “And that is a responsibility all its own. People will come. Scientists, societal magicians, architects. My abilities, my...title. Both hold power.”

“Mmmm. The way you are speaking is what I've long wanted for you.”

But there was a weird coil of something that I couldn't identify in our connection, like Constantine was displeased by his own past thoughts.

“I can fix the Third Layer, Con.” Surrounded by its broken pieces and the essence of the break, it hummed jaggedly in my ear every night trying and failing to find its tune. It called to me, to everything in me, to fix it.

Like a jigsaw puzzle that was missing the final tenth of its pieces. So close.

“More than just the Department will call for your blood once they know you’ve started. Even in a school predisposed to progression, you heard vehement arguments against such a prospect. Seconders don't want to give the magic back any more now than we did seventy years ago when blessed with the bounty. The Fourth Layer will declare war as well. The dwindling people who still live in the Third might want their layer fixed, but they lost the right to that magic years ago. Might makes right in this world, darling. In all the worlds.”

I looked up at him. “If that is true, then I have the right, do I not?”

I felt his thrum of shock vibrantly through our connection, before he schooled his expression to contemplate me more closely.

“If you want to rule the worlds, I will not say no.” He examined the magic around me carefully. “If anyone can build it into a better one, it will be you. But such a strategy needs a different start point.”

“No.” I crossed my arms, slumping. “You know I have no wish to rule. But the worlds need fixing. I can fix it. Mendable things make my fingers and magic ache, and I'm tired of the squabbling over what magic is whose.”

“Taking the magic back will provoke war. A war between three layers. The non-magical world, at the very least, will not survive that intact.”

The same feeling of truth rose in me. I held up my palm and let the magic swirl into the bubbled, recycling layout I had brainstormed with Will weeks ago. Domed cities with safe corridors between efficiently used the magic and recycled it across the entire structure—the layer pulled tightly over the whole like Saran wrap over mounds of rice. Constantine lifted the magic, cupping the image in his palms. He had examined the parts weeks ago.

“It is brilliant,” he murmured, then gave a little twist so it whirled back to me. “A compromise that might work. But it won't please the magicists in any layer.”

“I know it will work,” I said aggressively, compressing the idea and magic back into my skin. “And they can get with the times as I fix this entire blasted layer into something better.”

My eyes caught on a sudden shimmer on the floor. I tugged a cleaning cloth from the canvas bag. I couldn't leave anything behind.

Constantine regarded me for a long moment. “Of that, I have no doubt. In that single moment, you will be brighter than anything I've ever seen.”

“A single moment, before it all breaks?” I carefully captured the paint in the fibers of the cloth, using a tendril of magic to get the whole drop.

“A single moment for you to choose.”

Another drop of paint shimmered a few feet away. When had I gotten so messy?

I wiped a hand across my eyes and crawled over to it. “I told you when we returned to campus after rescuing Olivia that we were going to fix it.”

And then I'd done other things for months, pretended to be normal. Look how well that had gone.

“I remember it well. Watching you ride a wave of adrenaline so fierce that you didn't sleep well for days. With that blasted marble in your pocket, then that demon in your chest.”

My hand drifted down to rub my chest. I could still feel the hollow Stavros's presence had left inside, like a desiccated hole that I couldn't fill.

“I'm going to kill him,” Constantine said blandly.

“I believe Grey mentioned there being a queue for that,” I said, trying to alleviate the darkening mood.

I reached over to get the last drop of paint. It was too risky to leave even a tiny splatter point. As I reached it, the drop thinned and spread in a line, slithering along a path. I stilled.

Constantine came to stand next to me and followed my view as we watched the line become thinner and thinner, trying to reach its endpoint.

“Either there is a sudden tilt to the floor, or your paint is on a quest,” he said humorlessly.

“I should probably wipe it up,” I said, not moving.

“Why spare us whatever world ending event is going to happen?” He didn't move either, but I could feel his emotions and magic gather into a focused point. “It just gives me ammunition against that irritating demolition mage who is always hoping you are in the process of ending the world for him to witness.”

“I need new friends.”

That sparked a small curve of Constantine's lips. “Unquestionably.”

Ten different spells curled beneath the skin of each of his finger pads, ready to be released, whichever spell was needed—held there by a force of will that people rarely realized Constantine possessed. Or rather, the discerning did—and the Bandits knew far better than most—but many mages at Excelsine saw him as a vindictive playboy and nothing more.

I followed the paint drop on my knees as it flowed around one board in particular, then stopped. The trail of paint gathered so that it was outlining the wooden floor board. There was nothing overtly interesting or odd about the board—it was one of hundreds in the room—but when I touched it, I could feel it brimming with possibility. Reaching out to touch the board, I called the magic of the paint to lift it.

I directed the board to the side, settling it on its neighbor, and peered beneath, lighting a small cloud of magic and letting it hover over top.

“There's something in there.”

“Of course, there is,” Constantine said tiredly. “Human remains?”

“What? No.” I reached inside. “Why would you say that?”

“Why would you blindly reach inside a hole in the floor?”

“Yeah, okay. Point.” My fingers grabbed the wrapped package inside.

“Darling, you didn't even check for wards.”

“I don't sense anything,” I said slowly, pulling the package into the light of the room and examining the enchanted burlap and twine. “Except a...vague residue. If I wasn't looking at the spot, I wouldn't even sense that, I don't think.”

“Right. You should obviously unearth the death packet then.”

“I don't think it's a death packet.” The burlap was enchanted, but it was a protection and preservation enchantment curved into the parcel, with no outward spikes.

He sighed, and I could see twelve other spells join his first ten, as he readied whatever he thought he'd need to save the world.

“I could care less about the world,” he answered, reading my thoughts. “That is your burden. I merely exist to save you.”

I shook my head fondly, not keeping my further thoughts secret either. That is why you helped Olivia, then, I said mentally, as I started to unwrap the twine.

“Lies,” he said blandly. But he leaned in to see what the package revealed.

It was a series of exquisitely crafted sketches of the same woman.

Touching the first made the world warp—visually pulling the things close to me, like Constantine and my supplies into macroscopic view, and shifting the rest of the world into a hazy blur. Feelings—deep and crushed with weight—exploded outward, like pollen bursting from an overripe bloom. Emotions and memories fell around me, and I felt the wisp of a woman's ghostly fingers brush my cheek.

Alone. Darkness. Aid.

What do you seek?

“Kinsky did this,” I murmured. I knew this woman.

The brush strokes were long and sensual, lovingly curving the frame of the woman's body, her head was just starting to turn, but it was not filled in by detail—as if the artist knew her enough to anticipate her features, but was rediscovering her as she moved to face him.

Like a man painting a memory that he wanted to experience again.

Despair and melancholy and loss.

“He lost a love,” I said softly. “Such sadness in these strokes.”

Constantine didn't respond for a moment. “I see it,” he said tightly.

“It's the same woman,” I murmured.

The other images were burned into my brain in a soul-deep way. They, too, had held a melancholic tinge.

Sergei Kinsky was a man who had loved deeply and mourned just as profoundly.

“Yes?” Constantine had stepped away at some point while I’d been absorbed and was looking through the window, curtain pulled back, and magic coiling around him. His cloak suddenly secured around him, transforming him into an anonymous wraith.

“It’s the same woman in the portrait at the Library of Alexandria, the same one from Ganymede Circus.” I shook my head. “I never found out what happened to that shop.”

“And you won't find out today.” He let the curtain fall and his magic reached to join with mine, his cloak wrapping him even tighter in anonymous spells.

“Why?” I let his magic automatically connect to mine.

“Because the Department’s flunkies have arrived.”

I put my hand on the floor and felt the reverberations in the layer. I nodded and sent a summons for paper and wings, then carefully wrapped the small portrait back in its burlap and gathered up my supplies. “You ready?”

“Do I have an alternative to letting that blasted book ferry me back?”

“We could take Will's portal pad,” I offered, nodding to his pocket. “It fits two and has an enlargement spell for four.”

“The tunnel of death?”

“It's not that bad.”

“Everyone screams.”

“Most. Most people scream.”

“Right. My mistake. Pass.”

The book popped into the room, dropping Guard Rock on my shoulder and devouring the painting in one fell swoop. Guard Rock hitched his arm through the strap of my bag, and the book enveloped us from behind when a soldier wearing Stavros's face opened the door.

The house roared, and a giant maw of oak shot toward the man with Stavros's face.

He paid no attention to his death. Magic flitted over his stolen eyes—the scrolling magic that the high-level Department thugs used to see beyond disguises and lies. His gaze was affixed to my bag and a look of deep fury overtook his stolen features along with a sliver of unease.

“You’re too late,” I said. I didn’t know what made me say it as the book’s pages closed around me.

Stavros didn't move toward us, nor did he move away as the mouth dove to envelop his puppet. He simply watched us as we disappeared, eyes full of caged fury and cold plans.

He looked at the paint on my disappearing fingers, and smiled as his puppet died.