Chapter 23
23
I didn’t know what to say, but hearing that Lucas’s father was cursed as mine surely was made me feel even closer to him. Someone was responsible for the losses we’d suffered. Someone had done this to us, to our families, to our futures. He was an orphan because of this killer, and I was practically one—my mother lay in a hospital in another world.
“I have to show you something,” I told him. I ran to retrieve my father’s note from the enchanted safe in my dressing rooms.
“Here,” I said, showing him.
Temo was right. It’s time to tell her the truth—
He read it and looked up. “My father was right about something?”
“Wait! Your father was Temo? I thought his name was Timoteo.” Then I realized—Temo was his nickname. Filipinos never used their full names around family and friends. My father, Vivencio, was Jun. Lucas’s father, Timoteo, was called Temo for short. I wondered if Lucas had a nickname, too. Temo was right. It’s time to tell her the truth—
“Your father was head of security at the Court of Sirena,” I said, thinking deeply. There was something here—something we weren’t seeing but was just outside of our purview. “What if...” I said, my thoughts forming slowly, as if appearing out of the waves like a sirena. “What if he found the mambabarang? What if he knew the king was in danger?”
Lucas furrowed his brows. “Maybe?”
“Because your father was killed first. Months before mine. Your father must have known something.”
“And who was this addressed to?”
“I can find out. I’ll ask the pages—they always keep a record of where notes are supposed to go.”
“Have you looked through your father’s desk?” he asked. “Maybe there’s more.”
“I didn’t have time. The last time I was there, I was, uh, interrupted,” I said with a wry smile.
“Then we’ll go back together,” Lucas said.
He waited expectantly.
“Oh, you mean, right now?”
“No time like the present.” He offered his arm. I liked this; I liked that we were a team.
We started for the other side of the palace. As we left my apartments, Ayo was watering the two large pots of flowers outside the doors—in other words, listening at the door for any funny business. He pursed his lips as if he still didn’t quite approve. Royal permission granted or not.
“We’re just going for a walk,” I promised him.
“You don’t intend to leave the grounds, I hope?” he replied.
I shook my head. “No worries. In fact, we’re just staying inside.”
He nodded approvingly. It was sweet that he was so protective over me. In some ways he felt like a surrogate father. I thought of my father and his long letters. I knew he had missed me; he’d said it in every letter. And I knew my mother missed him. I’d wished all my life we could have been a normal family, the three of us, together, but they both told me it was too dangerous. I tried to shake off my emotions and concentrate on the task at hand.
We were getting close to the royal wing. Few sconces were lit, because no one had reason to be walking around there. It was getting dimmer and dimmer as we got farther from the main passages. Shadows danced on the walls as we walked, like ghosts of ourselves. I looked over at Lucas, his handsome face determined, armed with a Biringan crystal dagger at his hip, directing me down a remote hallway in a massive, desolate wing of a huge palace. I was glad to have him by my side.
“Watch out!” Lucas threw his arm across me and pushed me back away at the same time I heard a scraping sound and saw something move in front of us. As he drew his dagger and prepared to take down whatever hid in the darkness, a figure appeared from out of nowhere.
I seized up and touched the anting-anting around my neck just as someone reached toward me and brushed against my shoulder.
“Ouch!” a familiar voice yelped. “That hurt!”
“Nix?” I called.
She stepped into the dim light, holding her finger to her mouth. “Ouch! That burned! How did you do that?”
I shrugged. It was the protection from the amulet, but I didn’t want to tell her that. “Where did you come from?” I asked her. “What are you doing here?”
She ignored the question and instead waved for us to follow. “You gotta see this,” she said.
Lucas was still on edge. He was breathing heavily, his eyes wide and alert, glancing in every direction, like he thought something else was waiting to leap out at us. His adrenaline must have been pumping, ready to fuel a fight.
I put my hand on his arm. “It’s okay,” I told him. “It was just Nix.”
He put the dagger back in its sheath. “After you, Princess.”
I walked in the direction Nix had gone but didn’t see her anywhere. “Where are you?”
I heard “Here.” Then I saw a tiny flame. She’d lit a match so we could see her. I followed it, with Lucas close behind me. “Check this out!” she said.
Nix was inside the wall. Part of it had been pushed open.
“It’s a passageway,” she said. “Can you believe this? Come on, before someone sees you.”
I stepped into the space behind the wall. Lucas did, too. Then Nix pulled the wall back into place. It was pitch-black.
I thought of what Althea had said. The darkness is all around us. It comes out of the walls. “I don’t like this,” I said.
“Me neither,” Lucas agreed. “You have two seconds to tell us what’s going on, Nix—”
There was a click of flint, and then a blue flame came to life. Nix was holding a torch. “I didn’t want to light it until we were safe in here.”
“I assume you’re using that word loosely,” Lucas said. He still looked like he might kill the first thing that made him flinch.
“Calm down,” Nix told him. “I’m telling you—no one will bother us here.”
“But what are you doing here?” I repeated.
“I was trying to visit Althea without being seen. She’s down in the dungeons, and I’m worried about her. All palaces have secret passageways, right? The maids use them all the time. That’s how they pop in and out without being seen. I think this goes all around the palace, but I’m not sure.”
“A secret passageway.” I didn’t like this at all. “Does it go to my room?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Like I said, I haven’t gone far. I just found it.”
“Okay, then what do you know?” Lucas asked.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Nix said, raising her eyebrows. The torch began to bob away into the distance.
Lucas and I looked at each other. It was obvious we were thinking the same thing: This could be how the killer accessed the palace undetected. Who else knew about these hidden walkways?
“Come on, let’s go see where it leads.”
I hesitated. “Guys, guards patrol every hour, on the hour, and they keep tabs on my location. If I’m not back in the queen’s chambers before then and they can’t find me anywhere else, it’s going to be a whole thing.”
Nix and Lucas nodded. “Got it,” she said. “We’ll be fast.”
We walked deeper into the tunnel. It was dark and grimy and smelled like damp stone and something mossy. I wanted to tiptoe, just in case we ran into something gross, but we were moving fast to beat the guards.
The hidden passageways followed the exterior walls of the castle, with the occasional trail branching off somewhere deeper within, but we decided to stick to the most straightforward path. The last thing we wanted was to get lost or stuck—or who knew what else.
A couple of the turns from the main pathway even seemed unfinished or were deliberate dead ends that extended only a couple of feet before ending. I ran my hand across one of them. It felt smooth, like plaster, not like the rough stone everywhere else.
“Looks like those were covered over at some point,” Lucas whispered when we passed one of the nooks.
“Or this was never completed in the first place,” I suggested. “Maybe whoever designed the tunnels intended to but didn’t get the chance.”
Lucas nodded. “Could be.”
Nix turned and held the light up to us. We both flinched away from the glare.
We continued around a corner, inching our way along the wall. The farther we got from where we’d started, the more cautious we became and the more every distant drip sound startled us. Nix began to have doubts, fear lacing her voice. “On second thought, maybe we should go back,” she suggested. “We can try again tomorrow. I’m sure Althea’s fine. Let’s go to the library and see if they have any old maps of the building. Maybe we’ll find something there. Don’t you think?”
Neither Lucas nor I said anything; we just ignored her and kept walking. There was no going back now.
Lucas led on, searching the ground for any clue, no matter how insignificant. But so far, there was nothing other than dirt and cobwebs and tiny pools where condensation had dripped down the cool stone walls.
Nix was leaning into me so hard that I was having trouble keeping my balance. I put my hand up to brace myself against the wall, and then we both lost our footing and began to trip over each other’s feet. “Careful!” I shouted a second too late. We both tumbled to the ground. My knee hit the stone, sending a sharp pain through me. “Ow!”
“What happened? Are you all right?” Lucas rushed to kneel down and check on us. He shined the light on us.
“We’re fine. MJ fell,” Nix said.
“You were yanking on me!” I retorted.
“It doesn’t matter. As long as you’re both fine.” He held his hand out to each of us to help us get up. I got to my feet and rubbed my sore knee. It’d be bruised tomorrow for sure.
Lucas swung the light all around us. “Nix is right. Maybe we should call it a day and try again tomorrow.”
“Wait,” I said. “Give me that.” I reached for the light. “I think I saw something. Did you see that?”
“See what?” Lucas asked, handing me the torch.
I held the light up to the spot where I thought I saw—well, I wasn’t sure what. A glimpse of something. A hollow or different pattern on the stone of the wall, maybe. I kept searching, and then, there it was. “Look!” I knelt, no longer caring about the pain in my leg. I inched the light closer to the wall. “Can you see it?”
Lucas bent down to see. Nix was still busy brushing herself off and fixing her skirts. My heart felt like it was pounding in my ears with excitement.
“Wonder where that goes?” Lucas asked.
There was a small door with a curved top in the wall. No handle or anything, just an indent where it could be pulled or pushed open. If we hadn’t fallen, we would’ve missed it. “Should we find out?” I asked, locking eyes with Lucas.
“No,” Nix said. She stood back behind us with her arms crossed. “I have a bad feeling about this. We need to go.” She pointed her finger at the ground to emphasize. “Now.”
Lucas took out his dagger. “You two stay here. I’ll go.” Before I could object, he was pulling the door open. There was nothing but blackness beyond it. “Hold the light over here,” he said. I held the torch next to the doorway. He began to crawl inside. “There’s no one here,” he called back over his shoulder. And then: “Whoa! You have to see this. Give me the light.”
“Come on,” I told Nix. “Or would you rather stay out here alone in the dark?”
Reluctantly, she got down on the floor by the doorway. I told her to go first. After she went in, I scurried through, feeling like something was sneaking up right behind me, like when I’d go for a snack in the middle of the night and run back to my room as if being chased by a ghost.
On the other side of the door there was a little round chamber. I’d thought we’d end up in one of the rooms of the palace, but this was something else entirely.
“Don’t walk there!” Lucas called out, shoving his arm in front of me so fast it almost knocked the wind out of me.
I looked down and saw that I had nearly stepped over a line on the floor. I held the light up. It was a chalk circle, sprinkled with what looked like salt. My heart pounded furiously, and I brought a hand to my mouth to suppress a scream when I saw what stood in the middle of the circle: a doll.
“What is this?” I asked out loud, though it was a rhetorical question; we all knew what this was. Kulam . Black magic.
“A mambabarang,” Lucas muttered. “I knew it. They use the dolls to send the beetles to poison their victims. Stay back, both of you.”
Nix wrapped her arms tightly around herself and backed up closer to the door like she wanted to flee. “I don’t like this,” she whimpered. She looked like she was about to cry.
“Neither do I,” I said, because I just noticed that the doll was wearing Sirena school robes and wore her hair in a ponytail just like mine.
It was a doll of me.