Chapter 7 #3
“Shouldn’t magic be beyond all this?” Ezra’s question echoed off the armor; his gaze glazed over the display cases. Both were glassy. “War and conquering and looting…”
“It should,” Celia agreed. “To be honest I don’t think the Order even uses half of this stuff. They just keep it locked away so no one else can benefit.”
Like her father, with his rotting arm and rasping breath. He’d reached too far and Celia couldn’t hold on to him, no matter how hard she’d tried.
My death is not worth your life.
Then what is, Papa? she wanted to scream, but the sound would only get lost here, among all these interred treasures.
Ezra looked ready to join her—his mouth tugged to the side. “That or they pull the relics out for a party trick,” the scholar added darkly as they began to walk. “Did you see that Hugo used sarcophagi to decorate this evening’s dinner?” His good hand traced over a case that held a Vedic manuscript.
“He’s done worse,” Celia answered. “They all have.”
Breaking into museums was a breeze. Sitting through a Seek and Find party with a straight face?
Well, that took considerably more effort.
Especially when Hugo was in one of his more…
performative moods. Which tended to happen whenever the senior Mr. Pratt was in town.
He was never at the parties, no, but his presence loomed nonetheless.
Hugo always took more. The Seek and Find’s music blared louder.
The glitter was blinding. Imaginations bubbled faster than champagne.
Celia did her best to play along. She laughed and danced and flirted and steered flappers like Rose out of danger—night after night after night.
But it was never enough.
Some poor girl always slipped through the cracks.
Celia glanced back at the door they’d broken through. It remained open.
“And what will set you apart after you’ve made away with your family heirlooms, Miss Sinclair?
” Ezra’s question sounded extra hollow as they passed more masks from the African continent, a cuckoo clock crafted in Germany, an atlas of maps detailing the locations of phantom islands in the Pacific, and the meteoric remains of a fallen star gathered from Siberia.
“I won’t be throwing parties with corpses as décor,” she replied.
“What do you intend to use your magic for?”
Celia let several steps pass between them as she considered her answer. “I’m going to get my family the hell out of England.”
“That’s it?” There was a challenge to the scholar’s question. She felt the burn of it in her breastbone.
“My mother… She has no idea about magic or the Order or why my father really died. All she knows is that her world ended after she buried her husband. We lost our estate, our fortune…”
“Everything that was worth a damn.”
“Exactly.” Celia nodded. “It ruined her. She’s as much of a ghost as my father. She never leaves our flat. She eats next to nothing. The only time she comes to life is when she pushes me to find a decent marriage proposal—Hugo and Everett are some of her favorite prospects.”
The young man let out a laugh that reverberated over the cases. “I can see why you’d embrace a life of crime instead.”
“Our parents used to run in the same circles,” Celia explained with a grimace.
“My mother can only dream of jumping back in. She doesn’t really understand what she’s asking…
or what’s actually possible. There’s far better gold to dig for than Hugo Pratt’s wedding ring.
My father had a horseshoe that once belonged to the mount of Alexander the Great…
If I can find that, we’ll have enough luck to establish ourselves elsewhere. America, probably.”
Ezra kept wandering down the aisle, sharp eyes skating across the cases. Her answer didn’t satisfy him—she could tell. To be fair, it didn’t exactly satisfy her either. “Why settle for just your family heirlooms? Why not take it all?”
“Because I don’t want to be hunted by shadows for the rest of my life,” she said, glancing at a case that displayed a Fabergé egg. Tempting, yes. “I know every single piece the Order stole from my family, inside and out. I can imagine them perfectly. And I will.”
“You’ll replace the relics with fakes you pulled from your head,” the scholar surmised.
“The Order should be none the wiser. Provided they don’t try to use any of the pieces.” But by then the Sinclairs would be long gone: no more scraping by on a dress shop salary, eating the leftover canapés Celia smuggled from parties.
Ezra grunted.
He still didn’t seem satisfied.
He knew there was more.
He felt it in his bones, just as she did.
“What about you?” Celia challenged. “What will you use your magic for, once we master it?”
This made the man even more tense. So many muscles went rigid—in that toga bedsheet, he looked like one of Michelangelo’s works in progress. Only, Celia had never seen a statue with such a haunted look on its face.
“I’m not sure it should be used,” he said finally.
They continued walking in silence, past crowns and cuneiform tablets and clouded mirrors.
Alas, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the way the vault’s treasures were arranged—when Celia finally stumbled upon the first of the Sinclair family’s relics, it sat alone.
It wasn’t the horseshoe, but a locket that held sunbeams. Acquired by E.
Sinclair. France, 1798. The object wasn’t as useful as it might once have been—here in the age of electric torches—but Celia didn’t care.
It was hers.
She paused, reaching for the chain around her neck.
“Miss Sinclair.”
Something in Ezra’s voice made her freeze.
He stood in front of the adjoining case, his gaze even more haunted than before.
It looked as if the scholar had seen a ghost, but there was a golden pyramid sitting on the display’s pedestal instead.
The figurine was much smaller than the monstrosity in Hugo’s dining room; small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand.
From this angle, it didn’t look like much—not compared to the rest of the vault’s wonders—but the object seemed to have Ezra in some sort of trance.
“She never went into the desert without it,” he rasped.
“Who?”
“My mut.”
Who else? Celia’s mind scrambled over the implications as she read the placard at the bottom of the display case. Golden pyramid: guides the bearer where they need to go. Acquired by T. Ellington. Egypt, 1906.
“T. Ellington? That’s Biz’s father, isn’t it? I always suspected he was with the Ord—”
CRASH!
Ezra’s good fist shattered through the display case’s glass. Celia watched, stunned, as he grabbed the pyramid relic.
“What the hell are you doing?”