25
NATALYA STOOD BY THE FOOT of the bed watching as the old man rushed his wheelchair back and forth in his cubicle-like bedroom carrying handfuls of clothes and shoving them into one of several suitcases. I’d slipped into this memory comparatively easily this time, maybe because Natalya was still reeling from her previous banishment. I knew it wouldn’t last long. I could sense her will getting stronger. But Baldric had told only her the way to the secret volume. Whatever I needed to see here, I’d need to see it fast.
Actually, when Naomi had said his name, I hadn’t been expecting the gray hair and small eyes sinking into a bed of wrinkled skin. A black bowler hat obscured most of his head, but his large white mustache covered his lips as it drooped down like a fishtail from his large, bulbous nose—a nose that twitched every time he sneezed from the dust in his room. Natalya was stealthily covering hers, and I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t feel much of anything in this memory, not even my own body. But I could see the particles of dust as they caught the light trickling past the curtains. That was the only distinguishing aspect of this bare-bones space. Besides a bed, a chair, and a table, Baldric hadn’t done much to decorate. Who knew how long he’d even spent here.
“You don’t have to do this,” Natalya said as Baldric beat his hand against her long legs so she would move out of his way. His wheelchair arm brushed against her skinny jeans on his way to the table. “You don’t have to run away. I can go back to Prague and try again.”
“You said you had to leave the Little Room quickly because you were followed.” His voice was low and raspy, his proper British accent mangled by barely concealed panic. “Followed by Sect.”
“Not followed.” Natalya picked up a book that had fallen off the bed. “I bumped into Aidan Rhys.”
Rhys. Like the dream I’d had in Marrakesh. My heart sped up, but I knew the consequences if I couldn’t calm myself here. Natalya’s will was growing. Whatever I heard, I’d have to deal with it if I was going to make it out of this memory in one piece.
“Followed.” He snatched the book out of her hands. “By the Sect.”
Natalya shook her head incredulously. “Aidan is my friend—”
“He is no friend of yours. He’s the son of Director Prince, and believe me, he’s had loyalty beaten into him, the poor boy. It’s in his bones now.”
“He was there with a few others visiting.”
“Visiting? Just happened to be there at the same time, did he? You fool.” The cantankerous man looked like he could throw the book at her, but he dropped it into a suitcase. “He is Sect. Probably an Informer, sent by the Sect to watch you. Which means they’re already onto you. They’re already onto me.” A shadow of fear passed over his face as he considered the implications. “If what I suspect about the Sect is true, then I need to leave. Now. And we must leave the volume where it is. It would be too dangerous to go back there now. You would only lead the Sect right to it.”
“The thirteenth volume.” Natalya narrowed her eyes. “You said that it contained secrets not even the Sect knew. Secrets about us.”
“Among many things. It doesn’t matter. We keep the volume where it is. But to truly keep those secrets out of the Sect’s hands, I need to disappear. Mr. Boones!”
A few moments later a man younger than he, though not by many years considering the gray tinge of his hair, appeared in the doorframe.
“Please proceed to bring the car around,” Baldric ordered. “We’re leaving within the hour.”
“Very well, Mr. Haas.” The man bowed forty-five degrees, his black butler suit crinkling on his way back up, and then left.
“You promised you’d tell me,” Natalya said. “That’s why I helped you in the first place.”
“Helped.” Baldric snorted as he rested an artifact on his gray flannel trousers. It looked like a statue.
“I tried,” Natalya said. “I tried because I wanted to know, and you promised you’d tell me.”
“However you look at it, the Sect’s secrets aren’t for you to know.”
“Not for me to know?” I could see Natalya’s fingers curling into fists. “Baldric, by chance, do you know what my number is?”
Absently, Baldric grabbed another book off of his bed. “Number—”
“Fourteen. Fourteen years I’ve fought for the Sect. And I will probably die for the Sect. I’ve given everything to them. I let them turn me into a child soldier because they taught me to believe it was the right thing to do. And I tried to trust them. I tried. But then Naomi tells me that the Sect could be corrupt. And I— Listen to me.”
Natalya stood in front of him, blocking his path. Baldric strained his neck to look up at her, but he matched the power of her stare nonetheless.
“I deserve to know. I deserve to know if everything I’ve been fighting for has been a lie. I deserve to know what I am. No matter the cost.”
Baldric cast his gaze to the floor. Silence stretched between them until his mustache twitched again, his lips parting to speak. “And among the shadows,” he said, “you will find them.”
Natalya narrowed her eyes. “. . . Deoscali? What does this have to do with that foolish cult?”
“The cult may be foolish, as is anyone who worships the phantoms. However, there’s more to Emilia Farlow’s old teachings than you would expect. The secrets of the shadows . . . and the secrets of the beings who dwell among the shadows.”
“What do you mean?”
Baldric rolled his wheelchair back away from her and over to the open door. With a swift movement, he reached for the knob as if to shut the door quickly, but unexpectedly, his hand rested there.
“Have you heard of Allegory of the Cave, my dear?”
Natalya nodded. “Plato. Of course.”
“Yes, Plato.” Baldric’s fingers tightened around the doorknob. “The unlearned men and women chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads to see the puppeteers behind them. All they can see are the shadows dancing across the cave walls.”
“The shadows are lies,” said Natalya.
“But these shadows are all they’ve ever known. How can they know that the shadows have been cast by the puppeteers under the light of a fire burning behind them? How can they not help but think the shadows real?”
“I don’t take well to riddles.” Natalya scowled. “Tell me plainly.”
“The Haas family has had to speak in tongues since the day the phantoms appeared.” Baldric let go of the knob. “1865 . . . perhaps the skeletons of those days cannot stay buried forever. The sins of those little girls . . .”
He must have lost himself in the riddles of his thoughts, because he trailed off for a moment before snapping himself back to reality. “Don’t go there again,” Baldric told her. “And forget what I’ve told you. When the true battle begins, you will not find me.”
Natalya had just begun to speak again when I felt her hands wrap around my mouth and pull me out of the memory with a violent tug. Baldric’s room ripped away from my sight as I fell into a black void. I should have known she’d take her chance when I least expected it. No matter how hard I struggled, Natalya wasn’t letting me go. We struggled and sank deeper into the ever-expanding darkness. Scenes stretched past my vision as I sank deeper into the depths. Natalya fighting. Natalya speaking to news reporters. Her duties to the Sect. The empty bottles of alcohol around her apartment living room.
And then I saw Belle. Little Belle. Couldn’t have been more than thirteen, though still lanky for her age. Her legs were bent at odd angles as she crouched near a dirty toilet, barely conscious. She was losing too much blood. It was Natalya who’d found her, but it was all she could do to keep pressure on her bleeding wrists. Her phone was on the ground, the paramedic still trying to speak with her on the other end of the receiver. Natalya, whose tears did the speaking for her.
“It’s my fault.” Belle slurred her words. “I killed the phantoms but I couldn’t save them. The agents tell me every night when I close my eyes. They say, what good are you? What good are you? I don’t want to hear them anymore. . . . Please let me die. . . .”
“Let go of me!” I struggled against Natalya until finally my eyes snapped open and the bright white overwhelmed my sight.
• • •
“You okay, kid?” Chae Rin asked from the backseat of our van. I was back in the land of the living, my body jolting to life in the passenger seat. But I could only answer her by rubbing the sweat off my face with both hands.
The old, rusty van Jin had given us was a vintage sixties Volkswagen. It was a classic, but barely maintained. There was rust around the edges. The paint job—white for the top half, red for the bottom—was dull and peeling, and the flannel curtains covering the windows smelled like cat. I guess they couldn’t have given us their best, but they could have spared us one that didn’t give me the jitters with each sudden shake. At least the gas tank was full.
It was going to be a long trip, an almost twenty-hour drive—and we’d just started it. Naomi had wanted us to get to the museum fast before the Sect, but “fast” was a luxury when you were driving across countries in a crappy car. We’d already given ourselves the inoculations so the Sect couldn’t track us. We’d also dropped James off at the first town out of the mountains. It’d actually taken him a while to come to, but after he had, despite still being a bit shaky, he’d scrounged up some money we’d need on the road and promised to let us know if he heard any rumblings from the Sect—or from Naomi. If she was even still alive. For Rhys’s sake, I hoped she was.
“I think inoculating myself made me weaker in there.” I held a hand against my head. “I guess it’s good that I was still able to get there in the first place, but I don’t know if it helped. I know we’re supposed to get into a place in the museum called the Little Room, but I didn’t get a sense of what we’re supposed to do once we get there.”
“It’s okay.” Lake had a whole bench to herself, lying down with her knapsack on the floor of the car beside her. “James told us Naomi already has a guy there waiting for us. He worked for Baldric. He’ll help us get in after hours.”
My phone buzzed with a text: Where are you?
I sucked in a breath. It was from Rhys.
“What is that?” Through my mirror, I could see Chae Rin gripping Lake’s seat to get a look. “Is that your phone?”
Another text: Are you hurt? Are you okay? Mom is in bad shape.
Naomi. I bit my lip as another one came in succession: Tell me where you are and I’ll come help you.
“Turn it off!” Chae Rin threw one of the dirty pillows that came with the van at my head. “We inoculated ourselves to make sure we didn’t get tracked, stupid.”
True. James had even given us a burner phone to use.
“She’s right, Maia,” Belle said. “They can track through Wi-Fi and GPS.”
Belle. She looked rigid in the driver’s seat, her knuckles white as she gripped the steering wheel.
My eyes lingered on her wrist until another pillow hurled by Chae Rin had me turning my cell phone off.
“Did he mention something specifically?” Lake asked, her sneakers pushing the old window curtains back and forth. “Baldric, I mean?”
“A lot of what he said didn’t make much sense.” I laid my head back against my seat. “He talked about shadows on the wall. . . .”
“Like in that desert hideout?”
I blinked. Yes. And that church in London. Shadows that looked like phantoms. But Pastor Charles had been adamant that they weren’t really shadows at all.
There’s more to Emilia Farlow’s old teachings than you would expect, Baldric had said. The secrets of the shadows . . . and the secrets of the beings who dwell among the shadows.
“He also said something about the sins of those little girls,” I repeated, sitting up quickly. “Back in the nineteenth century.”
“Wait!” Lake dove into her knapsack and pulled out the cigar box—the one we’d kept in our dorm back at the London facility.
Chae Rin’s eyebrow arched as she peered down at the box from behind Lake’s shoulder. “You had that in there?”
“Yep, brought it with me. I showed the other two in Toronto.” She cracked the lid open. “It’s just something you said, Maia. I’ve been trying to figure out what’s up with this doll.” Lake didn’t want to touch it, so Chae Rin did. Dried mud still painted its face brown. Chae Rin’s fingers pinned down its maid dress, and when she showed it to me I could see, once again, the torn-out eyes.
Chae Rin shook her head. “Freaky as hell,” she said, tugging gently at its disheveled hair made of black yarn.
“Exactly.” Lake shivered. “Gives you creepy little-girl vibes, doesn’t it? Alice and Nick. Weren’t they around back then?”
“Wait.” I stuck out my hand. “Show me the letter.”
Lake gave it to me, and I scanned it. I’d read it enough times this past month, but there was something nagging at me. I was missing something obvious. . . .
“There it is!” I tapped the paper. “Emilia!”
Chae Rin blinked. “Who?”
“ ‘Two years, my dear friend, my sister,’ ” I read, “ ‘since you passed away, and I find my thoughts are still attached to you, to Patricia, to Emilia, and yes, even to Abigail. Perhaps it is guilt.’ ”
“Emilia?” Lake repeated.
“In Natalya’s memories, Baldric mentioned Emilia Farlow.”
Belle quickly glanced down at the letter in my hands before directing her attention back to the road. “Emilia Farlow. The original creator of the Deoscali cult.”
“The cult that worships phantoms. But her teachings were different.” I remembered the serenity in Pastor Charles’s eyes as he’d explained it. “That the phantoms aren’t really phantoms at all—or that they’re not bad? Or maybe they’re bad under certain circumstances? I don’t know.” I pressed a hand against my forehead. “He said they control life and death. And fate.”
“Well, it can’t be a coincidence,” Chae Rin said.
“I agree.” Belle’s eyes were stern as she gazed into the horizon. “The secret volume has to tell us more. We should hurry.”
She pressed on the gas. Belle didn’t say much as he drove down the highway, the antiphantom nets, much like those in Britain, lining the roads as we traveled. It was only in the seventh hour, when the other two had fallen asleep, when my own eyelids were starting to feel heavy, that I felt comfortable saying anything to her.
“Belle . . . when I was scrying, I saw another of Natalya’s memories. Not just the one with Baldric.”
Belle seemed to understand what I was insinuating, probably from the guilt written all over my face—the guilt of prying into someone else’s darkest moments.
“You weren’t concentrating hard enough, then. Remember that scrying is dangerous, Maia. You should be careful.”
“Is that what you really want?” I mumbled under my breath before I caught myself. But strangely, knowing how horrid it felt to have another person claw at your mind to drag you into the dark with them, I didn’t feel too guilty over that one.
Belle let an almost imperceptible sigh pass through her lips. “I had thought, originally, that Natalya went to Prague in order to leave me a message . . . because she knew I’d be there. Really, I had only wanted to go in the first place because a few weeks earlier, Natalya had begun talking about the museum so suddenly. How could I have known the real reason she was there?”
“I thought you guys would have shared everything.”
Belle laughed sadly. “Natalya shared only what she wished to share. She always kept me at arm’s length. Maybe because she knew she could not live up to the esteem I held her in.”
“Well, I certainly don’t know what that feels like.” I gave her a playful smile and sank deeper into my seat. If I squinted, I might have been able to see the beginnings of a smile playing on Belle’s lips, but it was gone in the next second.
“Perhaps. I know you’ve had a difficult life as well, Maia. And I identify with that. I understand your pain—I truly do.”
I couldn’t respond right away. It was rare to hear her refer to us as sharing something—something other than a destiny and the weight of Natalya’s life and death. The pain of severed connections. It was a pain that cut through the magic and mystery of our Effigy bond and tapped into something frail and human in us. A twisted connection. And though I wasn’t quite the same girl who’d waited for her that day outside Lincoln Center in New York, it was still a connection I strangely craved.
“Still,” Belle continued, “Natalya was the only family I had. And if it weren’t for her, I would have died long ago.”
I lowered my head but stayed silent.
“You must know as well as I do: When you have no family, when you have nothing, the longing you feel is more painful than whatever you could think of,” she said. “You search for anything, anyone to fill the loneliness. Natalya may not have been perfect, but because of her, I wasn’t alone anymore. She helped me. Guided me. Made me something. Someone. I owe her everything.”
“That’s all I wanted too,” I whispered. Sleep was coming fast, but there was still so much to say. “I have my uncle, but it’s not the same. Losing my dad and mom was awful enough. But losing my sister, June . . .”
I didn’t even know how I survived those first few days with Uncle Nathan. Or how he survived my shutting myself off, deadening myself to the world.
“But then this whole thing happened and you guys came along.” I turned, my gaze passing over Chae Rin’s and Lake’s sleeping forms. “That’s why . . .”
That was why, even though holding this secret in my heart was the biggest of betrayals, I knew I couldn’t give it voice. And it wasn’t just about my feelings for Rhys. It wasn’t just that Naomi had begged me not to give up her son. What would happen when Belle turned her sword on Rhys? When she crossed a line she couldn’t come back from? Everything would fall to pieces. We would fall to pieces. All four of us Effigies.
Holding that secret was for Belle. It was for all of us.
Maybe it was for me.
I pressed my head against the window. Finally giving in to the heaviness of my eyes, I let them flutter shut. “I don’t want us to change. I don’t want to lose anyone either. Belle, you won’t hate me, will you?”
I didn’t hear Belle’s answer before I fell asleep.