Chapter 30
CHAPTER
Thirty
What was that for?’ Thea demanded as Talibah bent to one knee and assessed Jasper.
‘He’ll live.’ Talibah stood, joining Thea as both women stared at Zofka. ‘He’s just unconscious.’
‘You asked me to. Message received.’ Zofka blew her sword as if it was a pistol smoking gunpowder.
‘I only looked at your sword,’ Thea said.
‘With intent,’ Zofka supplied. ‘Now, we need to hurry.’ She turned serious. ‘We’re in Jasper’s townhouse – find your heart.’
‘I don’t know if I can, if it’s even here and not in that secret vault . . .’ Thea staggered back a step.
‘That’s right,’ Zofka whispered. ‘You can hear it, can’t you?’
Jasper’s townhouse creaked with age, crackled with candlelight, and ticked with the steady beat of a grandfather clock.
A beat that she couldn’t shake, couldn’t stop tuning into, until it pounded through her head, her chest. ‘It’s not a grandfather clock.
’ She pressed a hand to her mouth. ‘It’s my heart. ’
After Thea fate-wove a blanket of knots around Jasper, knowing it wouldn’t hold him for long after he came to, the women rushed through the rest of the downstairs.
‘How did he manage to put together such a large collection?’ Talibah marvelled as they entered a library.
Walled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, each one was double-stacked with leather tomes in Czech, English, German, and more languages, spanning not just this world, but others, too, judging by the tongues even Talibah failed to place.
‘Well.’ – Thea opened a trunk at the base of one of the bookcases – ‘He’s at least five hundred. I wonder how long he’s lived before he came to the Magic Quarter?’ That single setting at his long dining table haunted her. ‘It must be a lonely life,’ she said softly.
Talibah helped her search the trunk. ‘Not all of these are from this world, either.’ She pulled out a hunk of stone that had been cut to reveal crystal inside, a crystal that looked purple at first glance but was clear as glass, with plum-bruised clouds and the occasional ribbon of lightning.
If you squinted, you could see tiny figures walking through the storm.
‘Yes, yes, it’s a treasure trove,’ Zofka said, rummaging through the other trunk in the room. ‘But we don’t have time. When Jasper wakes up, he is not going to be pleased I whacked him with his own sword. Not when Heloise is coming to raze the Quarter down.’
Thea cringed. ‘Am I being selfish, risking everyone by taking time out to search for my heart?’
‘No,’ Zofka said immediately. ‘Heloise has singled you out, we need to know why. And finding your heart will return whatever memories you might have of her.’
‘We need every weapon we can get,’ Talibah agreed.
‘Then let’s keep looking,’ Thea said. ‘Because I am ready to remember and fight back.’
As time seeped through their fingers like water, they ran upstairs. ‘Can you hear it any clearer here?’ Talibah asked.
‘No, it still sounds distant.’ Thea pushed her hair back. She jerked her head at a second staircase, thinner and steeper. ‘Let’s search the attic next.’
The attic was low, dim, and stacked with crates.
Talibah pulled a face. ‘It’s going to take us too long to search all these.’
Zofka popped one open with her sword. ‘Then the faster we get started, the faster we’ll finish. Let’s hope those threads were thick as ropes.’
Thea cringed; they were fighting against time itself, their capture imminent and unavoidable.
Though it was her own heart they were looking for, she couldn’t stop picturing Jasper’s face when he awoke and realised what they were doing.
She knew well the power that she channelled from him, and if that was only a bit of his power siphoned off, she couldn’t imagine how powerful he could be.
Nor how it would feel when he opened his eyes and witnessed Thea’s betrayal. Well, he had betrayed her first.
She pulled out the topmost item in the crate she’d just opened.
‘Oh,’ she breathed. It was a dress, with long billowing sleeves and wildflowers dancing along the neckline.
Simple and lovely. A quick peek through the rest of the crate revealed more dresses, all in a fashion Thea hadn’t seen before, each one more beautiful than the next, though their silhouettes were clean, needing no stomachers nor panniers, nor assistance in fastening laces and buttons and pins.
She closed the lid, shutting out her guilt.
‘Maybe they belonged to his family.’ A sudden wistfulness overcame her at the idea of the woman who Jasper had loved wearing these dresses for him.
‘I have more of the same.’ Talibah closed another crate. ‘We ought not to look through these.’
Thea nodded. It was bad enough they were snooping through Jasper’s home while he lay unconscious downstairs; she held no interest in searching through his personal belongings. It was disrespectful. And it gave her the strangest feeling that she couldn’t quite pinpoint.
‘I feel like this should be easier,’ Zofka grumbled on the stairs back down to the second level. ‘Are you sure you can’t hear your heart any louder anywhere?’
‘Very sure,’ Thea replied, more than a little tersely. Creeping around Jasper’s house as he was poised to wake any moment and dawn pinkened the sky outside unsettled her. Not to mention that she’d been awake the entire night, as had Zofka and Talibah.
‘Where is it?’ Thea raked her hair back a few minutes later, after they’d raced through the second floor, which was mostly empty bedrooms and a dusty music room.
‘We’ve looked everywhere, even the attic.
The sun’s already rising, and we have to get back to the Magic Quarter; we’ve risked everything by leaving it undefended. ’
Zofka pointed her sword towards Jasper’s bedroom. ‘Actually, there’s one room we have yet to search.’
‘Why would he keep my heart in his bedroom?’ Thea whispered.
Zofka looked enthralled. ‘I keep telling you that the man wants you, Thea. When are you going to wake up and realise his feelings for you?’ She poked Thea’s arm with the blunted sword tip. ‘You have to admit, it would be awfully romantic for him to sleep guarding your heart.’
‘Thea!’ Jasper suddenly roared out from downstairs.
Thea bit her lip. ‘Oh, no.’
‘I’m with Zofka,’ Talibah said. ‘We have seconds left, come on. One last look.’
Zofka raised the ancient sword in triumph.
Thea pushed Jasper’s bedroom door open and ran inside, her friends on her heels.
Jasper’s bedroom was cosy with firelight, more books, and a journal on his bedside table that Zofka immediately gravitated towards. She picked it up to examine it closer.
‘Zofka, that’s intruding,’ Thea hissed, unable to not feel protective over Jasper while he was in such a vulnerable position, tied up with fate as they crept through his bedroom.
‘So is taking your heart,’ Zofka shot back, but she replaced the journal without peeking inside.
Pursing her lips, Thea looked through his books.
Some history, some philosophy, a couple of novels – including one in Chinese, that Talibah read as titled, Journey to the West, though she warned them that her Chinese was rustier than she’d like.
Nothing stood out in Jasper’s bookcase, no margin notes that could be clues, no scraps of paper tucked among the pages.
Thea moved onto an antique dresser, painted with dragons.
It was getting harder to cling onto hope.
Impossible to imagine her heart beating in her chest, her memories surging back.
That she’d ever remember what her name had been before she’d been Theodora.
Sometimes she wondered if she’d miss being Thea, or if Zofka and Talibah would.
There might be others though, friends and family, that knew a different woman by a different name – perhaps a different version of herself was already being missed elsewhere.
Thea’s head spun. She forced herself to concentrate.
She had seconds left. It had to be here, otherwise .
. . No. She refused to finish that thought. It simply had to be here.
The dresser was filled with small boxes.
Sliding out the first, Thea opened it, her hope soaring up to the vanishing stars outside before plummeting back to earth.
Gold and silver and jewels twinkled back at her.
She picked up a necklace without thinking, holding it up to look at the heart pendant.
Writing scrolled across the gold on the back: I am yours until the end of time. Thea’s heart-spell quivered.
The staircase creaked.
Thea froze, necklace dangling from her hand.
Talibah, over by the mantelpiece, and Zofka, rifling through a chest beneath the window, stilled in place, all three women exchanging a look.
‘He’s coming,’ Thea mouthed. Panic slickened her palms, threatening her grip on the necklace as they returned to their search, quieter and faster.
Sensing something, Thea reached past the boxes, to the back of the dresser, and felt around.
There was something there, something she couldn’t quite reach .
. . because she could not see it. Closing her eyes, she cleared her mind, searching with Jasper’s power until she slotted into that other awareness.
On reopening her eyes, she saw it: a heart-shaped box, tangled in three knots of fate, rendering it invisible to the naked eye. Untouchable. Like it resided neither here nor there, but in the between. Thea began unpicking the knots.
The door slammed open.
Thea’s heart-spell shuddered in her chest, Zofka yelped in surprise, and Talibah quickly adjusted her headscarf, which had slipped lower over her hair.
Jasper stood in the threshold. His frown, his glower, were notably absent, his face unreadable. ‘And here I thought you were all wiser than to challenge me.’
Zofka stood, raising her sword.