Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter
Twenty-Four
I take Penny’s call the next morning sitting on the bench by the river.
My eyes are bleary with sleep, the same torturous dream still echoing in my mind.
The hunting lodge, the maze, Aliz’s fangs.
It’s only nine o’clock, so the campus is empty.
Most human students have by now adjusted their sleep schedules to match those of their vampire classmates.
I stare up at the grey sky and the heavy clouds threatening rain.
“Why didn’t you pick up yesterday?” she asks, voice sharp.
I swallow my irritation. “Believe it or not, I’m trying to find the fucking library,” I say. “But I’m getting closer to it. I think I’ve finally figured out the map.”
There’s a heavy pause, and when Penny breaks it, her voice is surprisingly small. “You have?”
“I think so,” I say. We will put my theory to the test tonight, and then hopefully, if it works, by tomorrow I will be free.
“That’s good,” she says. “On Monday night you’re going into Inverness,” she says. “The blood party is being held in the city centre.”
I’d forgotten about the party already. I swallow hard. “Where?”
“Inverness Castle,” she says. “You’ll need a red dress and…” She hesitates. “You’ve stopped taking your supplements, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” I say.
“How did Aliz Astra react to your blood?”
I stare at the river, water reflecting the grey sky. “Have you asked the dean the same question?” I ask and hear an aggravated sigh across the line.
“No, Rebecca. I haven’t.”
“She’s gotten used to it,” I say, ignoring my mistrust. I don’t want to talk about Aliz with her. I don’t want to hear Penny say her name ever again. “I’m fine.”
I spend the rest of the day working on the map.
I sit at my desk, an empty cup of coffee at my side as I try to line up the tunnels I’ve drawn so far with the hedges of Ada Astra’s maze.
I have a picture on my phone, not the best quality, but it’s clear enough.
At one o’clock, the coffin in my room creaks open.
Aliz crawls out in an unceremonious manner, practically falling as she fights with the lid of her coffin.
She yawns into her elbow before glancing over at me.
“Tonight’s the night,” she says, looming behind me.
Her sleep shirt is half open, with just a few buttons keeping it closed, and I try my best not to look at her.
Her hands rest on my shoulders, kneading my skin through my jumper.
“You’re so tense,” she adds. One more day of this.
If I finish the map tonight, this torment, this hyperawareness of her, will finally be over.
But I don’t finish the map.
As much as I try, twisting the page and trying to jam Ada Astra’s hedges into the circle, there are still gaps that don’t fit, and worst of all, with each new line, I find myself getting more and more tired, my exhaustion mixed with dread.
Monday’s mission will not be like my previous trip to Inverness.
As the day goes by, Penny sends me more information.
My target is a vampire called Eugene Trellis.
He is the organiser, roughly six hundred years old.
Until now he has worked exclusively in Edinburgh, and this is his first foray into the Highlands.
A note, between parentheses, says that he’s seeking to turn Inverness into a new “vampiric destination.” The party is a way for him to find investors for a club. So, it’ll be a show of wealth.
And power.
My hand aches as I scratch lines onto paper, searching for the quickest way to the centre, as though it’s no more than a puzzle, a mere diversion. Perhaps to Ada Astra it was.
“You can’t miss another Integration class,” Aliz tells me, just as I propose we continue our search.
“How are we going to find the library if you get kicked out?” I can’t help but laugh at this.
Now that I know the dean wants me here, I doubt I’ll get kicked out.
But all the same, I go to class, listening to Clemence’s lecture on sixteenth-century vampires and their impact on modern feminism.
All through the class, Aliz’s name flickers across my phone’s screen, random messages popping up in our shared chat.
If Stephan sees them, he doesn’t say anything, extremely focused on the lecture.
What does pizza taste like? she asks, followed by, What do you think would happen to a vampire if they went to the moon? Should I go to the moon?
And all through her nonsense, I try to not smile, taking notes instead.
After dinner, Aliz and I head down into the tunnels.
If I’m right about the maze, if it really is a map, tonight might be the end of our search.
We’ll find the library and The Book of Blood and Roses, and the Familiar’s mark will finally vanish from my neck.
The thought alone makes my heart race, but I try to stay calm.
Aliz looks at the map, holding it carefully in front of her.
In the middle of the chaos of the tunnels is the perfectly round labyrinth, with a red line tracing the quickest way to the centre.
She doesn’t say anything, but based on how she looks at me, I can tell she’s as hopeful as I am.
Students turn to stare at us as we walk past them, and I wonder what they imagine we’re going to do down here. Slowly, the straight walls start to curve. The ground becomes flat.
We reach a tunnel with a wide opening and a staircase on one end that’s been bricked up.
“That must be the tunnel to my sister’s place,” says Aliz.
“The hunting lodge used to be connected to the campus, but a century ago it got bricked up to stop students from going there.” I swallow, thinking again of the ache of our proximity by her sister’s window. Her breath on my neck.
“I think this is our way in,” I say, indicating the two entrances separated by two Corinthian columns, with another two on either side. “If I drew it correctly, we should take the left one,” I say.
“Of course you drew it correctly,” Aliz says. “You’re a genius.”
I offer her a blank stare, biting my cheek to keep myself from smiling.
The first five tunnels perfectly match what I sketched, giving me a confidence boost. We’re finally going to find it, despite Ada Astra’s best efforts to keep it hidden.
Aliz starts to slow behind me, putting more distance between us, and I don’t have to ask why; when I last stepped into this maze, even if I didn’t know it was one at the time, the tunnels were just about wide enough for a single person.
Now, if we walk side by side, our arms will be pressed together.
“Why are we stopping?” she asks, a slight strain in her voice. I don’t turn, afraid I might find red eyes boring into mine.
“This wall wasn’t meant to be here,” I whisper, staring at my map beneath the glow of one of the labyrinth’s candles. Aliz leans close enough to see the map, her arm pressing to mine.
“Did we take a wrong turn?” she asks. I glance up at her. Her eyes are black, reflecting the flickering glow of the lantern.
“No, but I must have missed a hedge.” I hand her the map and draw out my phone, trying to make sense of the shadowy lines from the picture.
“Maybe we should have turned left,” I say, and as we do just that, we come upon another wall.
It’s longer, higher, and, unlike the rest, covered with elaborate stone engravings—the same design I saw last time. Roses and thorns. Aliz grabs my hand.
“It’s moving!” She gasps with disbelief. Aliz’s eyesight is better than mine, so it takes me a few seconds more to realise that she’s right: The stone leaves on the rose’s stem appear to flutter, and the petals open just a little wider.
“Maybe this is it,” I say, not fully understanding what I’m looking at. She takes my hand, and we remain still, waiting for the stone to move faster, change, reveal a door. But nothing happens. “Or not,” I add.
I attempt to draw a new path on the map, resting the paper on the wall, afraid the stone might start moving.
“I feel like you’re not freaking out enough,” Aliz says, staring at the engraving, whose stone leaves still flutter, as if blown by an invisible wind.
“Did your sister dabble in witchcraft?” I ask, and it wouldn’t shock me if Ada did, considering what’s in her magnum opus. But Aliz shrugs, whispering that at this point I know as much about Ada Astra as she does.
“If I’m right, we might actually be next to the centre of the maze,” I say, staring at the solid wall. I wait for the Gaelic words to appear on it again, but they don’t.
“The library is behind this wall?” Aliz asks, standing closer.
My gut tells me it is. But there’s no door. And I doubt the dean will approve a request to knock down a wall that is most certainly enchanted.
“We need to get here,” I say, pointing at another line on the map, the south point of the hexagon. It takes us nearly half an hour, running into walls I’d missed, before a distinctly floral scent reaches my nostrils. We pick up the pace, the endless walls coming to a sudden halt.
I expect to find a rosebush like the one in the maze.
Instead, we find an alcove decorated with the same intricately etched engravings as the last wall, surrounding an altar with stone vines.
Inside the alcove is a single rose and, behind it, a black candle.
“This must be it,” Aliz says. I nod, still staring at the altar. “But there are two doors.”
“You take the right, and I’ll take the left,” I say.
“Or”—she grabs my hand before I can step forward—“we can take one door at a time, so neither of us gets lost.”
“Fine,” I say. After a deep breath, I open the left door.
A gust of cold air carrying a faint, damp scent hits me in the face. But I can’t make out a library. Even Aliz with her superior eyesight says there’s nothing beyond the darkness. I tighten my grip on her fingers and without another word we step into the shadows.
The hand that was in mine vanishes. I whip my head around, but Aliz is gone. There are no candles in here, but slowly, my eyes adapt to the thick darkness.
“Aliz?” I call. My voice doesn’t echo. I don’t even hear myself. I just know I spoke. The brick walls are covered in moss and something that looks like kelp and barnacles. And strangely out of place, there’s litter, plastic bottles and empty trays of fish suppers.
I can’t see the end of the tunnel. The ground is vibrating, and just as I reach down to pick up a piece of plastic, I hear it. A roar, something colossal. I stare ahead, stupefied, expecting a monster.
Instead, it’s a river.
A wall of clear water races towards me so fast I don’t have time to reach the door before it crashes against me.
My head hits the wooden door, and water shoots up my nostrils and into my sinuses.
Instead of just dying or passing out as I should, I fight with the handle to open the door, my empty lungs burning.
And then, the voice:
A phiuthar ghràdhach,
tha m’ fluil agad.
Ach tha thu fhathast nad chadal.
I dig my nails into the door even as the current crushes me against it. Then the river is in my lungs, in my eyes, and in my ears, and everything fades, my scream caught in my throat.
When I open my eyes and cough, expecting to vomit a river, I see Aliz. She’s on the ground, covering her head, her breath short.
We’re back out in the hallway between the two doors and beneath the altar with the rose and the candle. And I’m as dry as a bone. “Aliz?” I croak, expecting to find my vocal cords shredded. But they’re fine. I’m fine, somehow. I breathe out, clenching my fists to stop my hands from shaking.
“Did you see a river?” I ask, and she finally looks up, lowering her arms. She’s gone a full shade paler, washed out, her lips purple.
“A river?” she croaks, staring at me. “No. It was—” I hear her clearing her throat. “It was dawn.”
She looks at her arms. Her cheeks are damp, face frozen with panic. And I don’t stop to think about common sense before I close the distance between us and pull her into my arms.
“It wasn’t real,” I whisper.
“It felt real,” she says. Then she’s breathing me in, her damp lashes brushing my neck, the sensation enough to make me forget about the river. But as much as I want to stay like this, running my fingers through her soft hair, I remember what I heard.
“ ‘Dear sister, you have my blood, but…’ ” I start, recalling the translation in my notebook. “I heard a voice say that. But there was something else…‘chadal’?”
“My Gaelic is as good as yours,” she says. “Which I’m assuming is not very good.”
“But did you hear it, too?”
The voice we heard must have belonged to Ada, but Aliz won’t admit it.
“I didn’t hear anything,” she says. “How are we going to get through?” she asks. I draw my hand away, inching back and putting air between us.
“We’ll find a way.”
But though I say that, I know that whatever is beyond the altar might be far more dangerous than the labyrinth.