Chapter 22
Chapter
Twenty-Two
Tia and Riley ring Chase’s bell at seven on the dot, for which I’m grateful. “Any earlier and they might have gotten an eyeful,” I tell Chase as I head over to unlock his door.
“At least they were invited,” he mutters, so low that I almost can’t make out the words.
I turn back slowly. “What?”
He shakes his head and says, “Nothing.” But it’s clearly something, and O-M-G, right then, it hits me. And I know exactly what that something is.
Adric.
I can’t help but grin.
“You actually like the idea,” Chase says, not so much in accusation, but in bewilderment.
“Well, yeah. Maybe a little,” I admit. “Is that terrible?”
He just runs his fingers through his hair, looks baffled, then tells me to open the door in what is very clearly a diversionary tactic.
That’s okay, I can tease him later when we’re in bed. Maybe we can even give Adric a little more to enjoy.
I’m fighting a probably inappropriate smile as the doorbell chimes again, courtesy of my impatient bestie.
I mentally shove the sex stuff aside, then bound across the room.
I open the door to find Tia and Riley bearing dessert—specifically, a box of pastries from the place behind the campus bookstore.
I’m about to squeal with glee, because I am in severe eclair withdrawal, when Tia beats me to it with a high-pitched, “Cora! Holy fuck, girl, you did it.”
That’s when I realize she’s staring around me at the small leather book on Chase’s table. Then she looks at me, her hands together as if in prayer. “Is it really?” Her voice is a reverent whisper.
I nod. “Don’t thank me, though. Thank the book. It found me more than me finding it.”
Her grin is so wide it’s probably painful. “You, my friend, are a steely-eyed missile man.”
I just laugh, remembering the time we’d camped out on her bed with popcorn and Apollo 13. That had been only a few weeks ago, in reality. But, man, it feels like decades.
Already, Tia’s bounded across the room and is now settled with the book at Chase’s tiny dining table/desk/all-purpose flat surface.
“Oh,” she says, now gently stroking the leather binding. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Oh, Cora.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, like seriously...”
“Careful,” I say. “You’re going to make Riley jealous.”
She rolls her eyes and cuddles the book closer, stroking it as if it were a purring kitten.
I take the seat opposite as Riley moves behind the counter to put the pastries on a platter while Chase makes a fresh pot of coffee. Which is a good thing. It’ll probably be a long day, and I figure we’ll need pretty much all the coffee we can get.
Tia cuddles the book for so long, I begin to wonder if she knows something I don’t. Like the book is actually alive, bred in the dream realm to be a pet.
Finally, she opens it and carefully flips the pages. “This really is the book,” she says, almost to herself. “This is it. The book Riley and I have been hunting.” She looks up at me, and there’s something close to awe in her face. “Cora. You realize what this is?”
I shake my head. “You’re lucky I found it. I tried to read it, but it’s gobbledygook. Good luck making progress.”
“It’s gobbledygook on purpose,” she says.
The author wasn’t writing for just anybody.
He was writing for the three other monks in his order who already knew what he meant.
Every word looks like a regular Latin word, but he’s using it sideways.
By the time you figure out one term, you realize you’ve been misreading six others, and you have to start over. ”
She shakes her head. “I’m going to lose my mind on this, but seriously, girlfriend, this is not only gonna be key, but it’s going to be a blast to translate.
I already have an idea how to write a program for the heavy lifting.
” She cradles the book to her chest. “Seriously, I’m going to lose my mind. ”
“You did that yesterday, sweetie,” Riley says, putting the now-open pastry box in the middle of the table and passing out plates before calmly taking her seat. “But don’t let that stop you.”
I share a grin with Riley as Tia scowls, pretending to be offended, but clearly fighting a laugh.
For a few minutes, there’s only the sound of pastries and coffee and Tia turning pages, surveying more than reading as she gets a sense of what’s in the book.
Finally, she stops flipping, frowns at a page, turns to the next, frowns harder, and goes back two pages.
“Okay,” she says, but she’s not really talking to anyone but herself. “Okay. There it is.”
“What?” I ask.
“The private language. He’s using it starting from the fifth page.”
“So what’s it say?” I ask.
She looks up at me. “Haven’t got a clue. We need the gloss.”
I glance at Riley, who’s serenely munching a donut, then to Chase, who thankfully looks as confused as I feel.
“Okaaay,” I say, drawing out the word. “What’s a gloss? And please tell me I don’t have to go back to the Nightmare Realm.” Seeing Adric would be lovely, but seeing Finn just makes me sad. And I’ve had enough Kali for the day.
“A gloss is like a key,” Chase says from where he’s still leaning against the counter.
Tia nods. “Exactly. You need it to translate. And we found a vague reference to it in a journal. Apparently, some seventeenth-century monk in the same order wrote a gloss decades after the main text was finished. Threshold means this. Veil means this. House means this. Get it?”
I nod. “I think so. You need the gloss to translate the book.”
“Pretty much.”
“Well, that sucks,” I say. “Couldn’t a computer figure it out?”
“There’s nothing to feed a program. Even AI needs a pile of existing translations to learn from. And there are no translations. If there were, we wouldn’t need the gloss.”
“So we’re stuck?”
She winces a little. “Pretty much. From what Riley and I can tell, nobody has the thing, but it must have existed because it’s referenced in dissertations as a known lost item.”
“So we’re out of luck?”
“Maybe,” Riley says. “I ran across a paper with a theory that it’s in a private collection.”
“Can we contact them?”
Riley and Tia share one of those this is the bad thing looks.
“What?” I ask, though my sudden queasiness suggests my gut already knows the answer. “The Oneiroi?”
Tia nods. “Which means the only person within shouting distance who might be willing to let us see that gloss is Sebastian Vance. And what do you bet he’ll put a price on it?”
“Yeah,” I say. “And the price will be me.”
Chase, who’d been about to pour a fresh cup of coffee, sets his mug down and looks straight at me.
“I know,” I say.
“You don’t want to be beholden to the Oneiroi,” he says. Or to Sebastian Vance.”
“I know,” I repeat. “But we need that gloss.”
“We don’t even know if the book will have any useful information.”
“We can’t ignore it and hope it’s just the old monk’s calorie-counting journal. You know that as much as I do.”
He pushes off the wall and walks to me so that I have to tilt my head back to meet his eyes. “And you know that Vance is a wild card. All the Oneiroi are.”
“I’m not going to ask him to join us, and I’m not going to be his best friend. But we need this. And right now, we can make this happen on my terms.”
He tilts his head. “Those terms being?”
I shrug. “He hands me the gloss. I return it in a week. And by doing that, he earns my trust, for whatever that’s worth to him. End of story.”
“He won’t agree to that,” Chase says.
“He will.”
He looks dubious. For that matter, so do Tia and Riley.
“He will,” I say again. “He wants something from me, and the only thing he has to offer me right now is access to that gloss. If he tries to leverage it into a sit-down, I’ll tell him no.
And I’ll make clear that every other door he’s been holding open for me—the coffees, the conversations, the Whitehall library—closes the moment he says no. You guys know he doesn’t want that.”
Riley nods slowly, then turns toward Chase. “I think she’s right.”
I look at Chase, too. So does Tia. Eventually, he nods.
I pull out my phone, dial Sebastian’s number, and take my newfound cajónes out for their first joyride.
He picks up on the second ring.
“Cora.”
His voice is warm over the speaker. “What a pleasure to hear from you.”
“I’m glad you think so,” I say. “Because I have a favor to ask.”
“How can I help?”
I glance toward my bestie, my insides tied in knots.
She gives an encouraging nod, and I force myself to talk.
“The thing is, Tia’s been working through a translation, and we’re looking for a commentary on the text.
We think there’s a kind of vocabulary key that was written decades after the original. ”
“And you believe that key is in the Oneiroi’s collection.”
“I’m hoping so.” I take a breath for courage and cross my fingers for luck. “I’d really like to look through your catalog, and if it’s there, I’d like to borrow it.”
For a moment, he’s completely silent. “And where did you come across this reference?”
Beside me, Tia shakes her head.
“Honestly, I’d rather not say.”
Another pause, this time longer, and I swear I can almost hear the gears turning in his head.
“I’m happy to help. We can review the text in the library, and if there’s time, I’d love to share a few items I’ve already put aside to share with you one day. We could make an afternoon of it. Why don’t you come by about eleven?”
He continues on, describing things in the Oneiroi collection he wants to show me.
My stomach twists. I really want off this call, but unlike Tia, I’m no steely-eyed anything.
But I pull up my big girl panties and very firmly say, “I don’t think so.”
Okay, maybe I am a bit steely-eyed after all.
As Tia gives me two enthusiastic thumbs-up, Vance clears his throat. “Pardon?”
“This isn’t your way in with me,” I say firmly, feeling braver by the second. This is you doing a favor for me as a baby step toward maybe one day paving your way to me.”
For a long moment, he’s quiet. “I see. Then by all means, tell me when you wish to come by. We can review the catalog and then pull the material if it is in our collection. Then you can settle in one of our reading rooms for as long as you need.”
Beside me, Tia is shaking her head and mouthing no, no, no.
When she points to herself and Riley, I clear my throat.
“Actually, I think it’s better if Tia and Riley come by to review the catalog this afternoon.
They can bring the gloss back here and return it after we have a chance to review. Three o’clock work?”
“Cora you can’t expect—”
“I can, actually. And I do. And if you say no, the answer to every other thing you have ever or will ever offer me is also a no. And I have a feeling you have a lot of things to say to me. Things that if you help me out today, I might someday agree to.”
The silence after that is long enough that I wonder if the call’s dropped.
Then he exhales and says, “Of course,” very quietly. “Three o’clock. Tell your friends to come to the side entrance and ask for me.”
“Thank you.”
“Cora.”
“Yes.”
“You are very much your mother’s daughter.”
He hangs up before I can answer.
I set the phone down on the table, feeling pretty damn proud of myself.
For a few seconds, nobody moves.
Then Tia lets out a long breath. “Wow,” she says. “You kicked serious ass.”
I shake my head. “Not really. He wants access to me. There was no way he wouldn’t cave.”
“Bullshit. You rocked it.”
I grin. “Yeah,” I say, meeting Riley’s high-five. “I guess I did.”
I turn to look at Chase, who’s looking back at me with pride. He gives me a thumbs-up, and I laugh, then get up and move into his arms.
“None of that,” Tia-the-Taskmaster says. “We have tons of time until Riley and I go fetch the book.” She glances pointedly toward me and Chase, then at the table. “Plenty of time for research.”
I grimace, then brush a kiss over Chase’s lips. “Better make more coffee.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I was just thinking that.”
The morning goes by fast in research mode, and my stomach’s grumbling when Tia scoots her chair back and says, “Oh, this is cool.”
“You found something?”
Tia waggles her eyebrows. “Yeah, a book on your boyfriends.”
“Excuse me?” Chase says, looking up from where he’s camped on the sofa reading a book in some language he knows and that I’ve never heard of.
“Yeah,” Tia says, clearly pleased with herself. “It’s all about the Guardian.”
I hold my hands out and wiggle my fingers. “Gimme.”
“Work now,” Chase calls. “Read the damn book and interrogate me later.”
I meet Tia’s eyes, grinning. “We’ll give him a pop quiz one day. See how well he knows himself.”
“Good plan. Men are totally lacking in self-awareness. It’ll be a hoot.”
I glance at Chase, who just rolls his eyes. I blow him a kiss, then put the book aside for later. “You’re a hard taskmaster, Mr. Chasen.”
“Eons of practice. Now work or accept the consequences.”
“Consequences?”
He says nothing.
“I think he means withholding sex,” Riley says, and my cheeks go pink.
“Right,” I say, picking my book back up and diving back in.
We manage to stay focused on the research until it’s time for Riley and Tia to head out to meet Vance and get the gloss, which isn’t exactly a mission fraught with danger. At least, I hope it isn’t.
Still, when they’re at the door, I hug Tia hard.
“If anything feels off—”
“We turn around. I know. Track us on your phone if you get nervous,” she adds, because she and I set that up ages ago. But this isn’t exactly 007 work. And we’ll text updates.
About thirty minutes later, my phone pings. We’re here—which I already know because, hello, tracking them.
Another twenty minutes pass, then, Got it. Heading back.
Which, honestly, is utterly anticlimactic. But in a good way.
Now we just have to wait and see what the freaky Latin book will tell us now that we have the code to read it.