Chapter 49
The Rare Gems exhibit has always reminded me of a movie theater.
It lives deep down on the bottom floor of the Windsor, below the lobby, hidden from daylight.
All the walls are covered in black felt, the floors a slick black vinyl.
The only color—the only light—is refracted from the gems themselves.
Cases and cases of glass so spotless, you’d swear you could step right through them.
And inside, glittering, radiant treasure.
Craggy geodes, slender crystals, weighty gold.
Every gemstone on the planet, as rare as meteorite and as commonplace as quartz.
Guests mill around inside, their sparkly dresses and shiny shoes even more dazzling in the dark beneath the spotlights. Deacon and my friends commandeer one corner, biding time.
“That was a doozy,” Deacon drawls.
I breathe through the red still clinging to my vision. Not a full-blown episode, it seems. Perhaps I’m more fearful of Caspar than I am angry. Deacon’s skin beckons to me like a heat-seeking missile. I ignore the pull of silver at my hip and thigh until it recedes. “He has Ada.”
“We saw,” Sophia says. “I texted Elliot and Baz, but…I don’t know where they went.”
I bite my cheek hard enough to ground myself. “Ward here yet?”
Deacon eyes the wall behind us. “Any minute now.”
As if on cue, the sound of metal whining hums throughout the room, louder than the music and chatter drifting down from the lobby. Water begins to squirt out from beneath the eastern wall, quickly filling the floor. Guests mutter and squeal, lifting their dresses and scurrying from the room.
“Not to worry, ladies and gentlemen,” Ward says, rounding the corner into the exhibit. He’s in a plumber’s uniform. “Just a minor pipe issue. If you wouldn’t mind clearing the area.”
Some guests listen, but others look to one another in suspicion.
“It’s okay.” I pull myself together enough to stand beside Ward.
“I work here, at the Windsor. We’ve got a team on this that will fix the pipe within the hour.
Please follow the other patrons up the stairs at the end of the hall, into the main lobby, and over to the north wing.
Dinner will be starting soon.” I smile brightly like Fiona taught me to when giving bad news to fancy people.
A smile that says, I’m very nice, but do not argue with me.
When the room is cleared, we put caution tape and a premade sign explaining the closure outside and shut the double doors. I lock them with my Windsor keys and return to the group.
“Ready to blast it?” Deacon asks Ward.
“I’ve always wanted to cosplay as the Kool-Aid guy.”
Peter pulls out his phone and shows Ward exactly which wall will lead down to the catacombs. Peter’s varied interests are equally delightful, but old-world architecture has got to take the usefulness cake.
“The monastery was built like this,” Peter says, angling the phone for Ward to see. “So if you break through right here, it should deposit us on the east side of the tombs.”
But Ward’s not listening. He’s staring at Penny, who’s inspecting one of the glass cases filled with color-shifting alexandrite.
“Focus,” I tell him, snapping my fingers in his face until he shakes off the heart eyes. “Listen to Peter.”
What is with everyone? I at least have an excuse to be out of sorts. But this is like the yearning Olympics. I make a concerted effort not to look in Deacon’s direction.
“What about all the pretty stones?” Penny asks me as Ward and Peter confer.
“That’s why we picked this exhibit.” Contrary to popular belief, I do care about my job, and this museum.
I care about all the people—Fiona included—who work hard to keep it standing.
“These gems are worth more than everything else in the museum combined. I mean”—I point across the exhibit—“that’s the Florentine Diamond.
Between the bulletproof glass, air-filtration system, and the ironclad case construction, nothing we do tonight will damage them. ”
Penny nods, satisfied. Her heart is almost too pure to stand.
“Thanks for helping us.”
“Thanks for including me.”
My chest constricts. “Are you kidding? We couldn’t do it without you.”
Sufficiently prepped, Ward motions for us all to take a step back before he shifts into his golden, wolfen form. I sneak a peek at Penny, but there’s not a drop of fear on her face. They are definitely doing it.
I tell myself that if we are lucky enough to save my life and the rest of Astera tonight, when I wake up tomorrow in my own bed in my Babylon apartment, I will take Penny to Cobwebs, buy her a chocolate-chip milkshake, and bully her into spilling whatever has gone down between her and Ward these past few months.
Ward charges the wall with a roar and, like he’d described, leaves an enormous, gaping hole in his wake. When the cloud of concrete and insulation dust settles, Sophia lets out a celebratory whoop.
Sure enough, we’ve broken through right into a clay-built hall. The musty scent of centuries-old basement fills the Rare Gems room. “Damn,” I mutter. “Nice work.”
“You lost points on the landing,” Deacon muses before following after his furry friend.
“Pen, you know what to do?”
I watch as she fishes through the bag of “plumbing tools” Ward came in with and pulls out a sketchbook and pen. He brought her a sketchbook to kill time while we find the ring. Definitely, definitely doing it.
Penny hands me the bag and sits down on the floor, her dress fanning out around her like clover leaves. “Nobody is to enter this room.”
She’s the perfect person for the job. Unassuming.
Kind. If any guest or patron makes a fuss on the other side of the door, I trust a woman who deals with toddlers all day to talk them down.
God forbid Reid tries to enter the same way we came, I know he’d never hurt Penny.
She poses no threat to him the way Sophia or Peter might.
Citadel hunters have no idea who she is, so no risk there.
Even Caspar, being her father’s closest friend, would leave her be if she feigned ignorance and slipped out of his way.
Penny knows there is no room for a naga repeat tonight.
If anyone dangerous catches on to what we’re up to, she’s supposed to shoot us a text that someone’s coming and get the fuck out of Dodge.
Finn is the only loose end. The only person who might hurt Penny just for the thrill of it.
That debased glee. But I saw him and Caspar the other day in my vision—saw how easily he bends to his father’s will.
He wouldn’t slaughter a high-society heiress at the gala.
Send a naga to kill Penny in our apartment, sure.
But cold-blooded murder of someone who could affect his dad? I don’t think so.
I eye the contents of the canvas bag. Pants for Ward, Soph’s crossbow. “Thanks, Pen.”
“Good luck,” I think she calls, but her voice is swallowed up by darkness as we step into the tombs.
“So what are we looking for exactly?” Sophia asks, voice echoing off the low ceilings. Our flashlights bounce over the dust-caked walls, our feet quiet in the soft dirt floor. Something tiny and multi-legged scuttles across the wall beside my head.
“I’m not sure,” I admit. So far there have been no coffins or bones of lymantrian clergy that have stood out. “A relic this valuable is likely guarded.”
“By what?” Peter sounds a little shaky.
Deacon undoes his bow tie, then unbuttons his shirt a bit as we walk. “Beast of some kind.”
“You think the Elders employ a deviant to safeguard their treasure?”
“I don’t think,” Deacon tells me, voice cool and assured, even in the swallowing darkness. “I know. Last time I was down here was the twelfth century. It was an ogre back then.”
“An ogre,” Peter repeats. “Great.”
“You can turn around,” I tell him when Sophia’s out of earshot. “You don’t have to do this to impress…anyone.”
But Peter shakes his head. “Only person I’m hoping to impress is myself. Bravery’s one hunter ability I’m still waiting on to kick in. Maybe when I turn twenty-two.”
He hurries up to walk in step with Sophia before I get a chance to argue with him.
I’m beginning to worry that searching these catacombs for the ring might be tougher than that needle-in-a-haystack business, when my skin begins to tingle.
“Wait.” I stop in my tracks and allow the aeon ability to ripple through me. I take one step back, then a step forward, before feeling the jolts across my skin intensify. “Up there.”
“Someone should go check it out,” Peter suggests. “To be safe.”
“I’ll do it,” Deacon offers. He turns to Ward, now shifted back and standing beside me. “Stay with her.”
Ward nods once. “ ’Course, Cernunnos.”
My heart hammers beneath my perfectly cinched bodice as I listen to Deacon’s heavy footfalls disappear down the corridor.
Stay with her.
Ward folds his arms, listening just as closely.
My flashlight sweeps over the decaying floor. “Why do you call him that?”
His face is weighing as he studies me in the dark. But there’s a warmth there. Like he appreciates that I even want to know. He waits a minute to answer, and I wonder if he’s making sure his alpha is out of demon earshot. Or that Sophia and Peter are distracted, studying a carved tomb.
“Before even the Old World, Celtic cults and druids worshipped an antlered god of wild things. They called him Cernunnos. He lorded over all creatures on the mortal plane—beasts and men. But he was also said to have ruled the underworld.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question.”
Ward shakes his head like I just don’t get it. “Who else but a god like that could have led us out of hell?”
A low, reverberating roar sounds from deeper in the catacombs. Dust shakes free from the walls. Rats scurry away.
“Deacon?” I call, hurrying my steps.
Silence.
Peter unsheathes his blade, and I ditch my flashlight to grip my daggers. I wish I wasn’t in this ridiculous dress. The roiling under my skin—that craving to kill—intensifies the faster I move.