Chapter 13 #2
“We should be on the alert for other magicians.” Celia continued scanning the other passengers in the entrance hall. There were no telltale signets in the crowd, by Ezra’s count. “But it looks as if Hugo and Everett are traveling alone. I don’t think they alerted the Order to Ezra after all…”
“So we’ve been running about like headless chickens for no reason?” Vincent proffered.
“I thought for sure they would… but of course, alerting senior magicians would mean sharing the clue…” Her dark brows rose with realization. “Hugo wants that treasure for himself.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Biz wrung her hands, but there was no more diamond to accent the motion.
“Money shouldn’t matter to you, darling,” Vincent said. “We have more than enough. I’m just here for the snacks.”
But Ezra’s appetite had burned away, yet again, anger taking over the hollowness of his stomach.
He didn’t even have words for what he was feeling.
This… imbalance. It wasn’t just the bag of new costumes slung over his shoulder.
He was on the cusp of losing everything he never even knew he had.
Again. At the same train station his father had dragged him through nineteen years ago.
Why couldn’t he just go home? Why did everything have to be a fight?
A war? A loss? What gave Hugo Pratt the right to be here, yelling at the beleaguered ticket agent in very loud English?
“It’s not just gold he wants,” he told his friends bitterly.
“Right.” Celia was watching the ticket booth exchange like a hawk.
Hugo was tossing a silver cigarette lighter back and forth in his palms. Back and forth.
Back and forth. Her eyes matched the movement.
“He wants power. That’s most likely what’s waiting for us in the fourth pyramid: objects imbued with magic, like this locket, only much more powerful.
British magicians collect them.” She sighed, taking on the tone of a professor during their last ten minutes of lecture.
“The more they acquire and tithe, the more they work their way up in the ranks of the Order. Hugo and Everett aren’t very high-ranking, yet.
They’ll be wanting to establish themselves. ”
“They sound like a bunch of tossers, these Order blokes,” said Vincent.
“They are,” Celia grunted. “Tossers who’ll stop at nothing to get what they want.”
“Ezra’s treasure, you mean.” A fire seemed to light behind Biz’s eyes. She glared back at the ticket booth. “I’ll be damned if I let that happen.”
Ezra, for his part, felt the same.
This was no longer a simple treasure hunt.
It was a race.
And, Ezra thought as he watched Hugo and Everett walk away from the ticket counter, we’re already behind.
They managed to stay out of sight by waiting until the last minute to board the train to Cairo.
The conductor’s whistle had barely finished blowing when Ezra and his friends took their seats in a private first-class compartment.
Celia shut the small curtains that afforded the group some privacy from the corridor, but lent the space a stuffy feel.
Biz slid open one of the windows, smiling with glee as the train began to pull out of the station and through the outer edges of Alexandria, where cooking fires laced the air, teasing the passengers with smells of grilled fish and fried eggplant.
These faded as the train began to pick up speed, rushing past brick factories and mosque minarets.
Ezra watched the buildings whip by. It felt odd, sitting.
Not because the cushioned seats were uncomfortable, but because he’d been on his feet ever since returning from Thornhill.
Stay away from the fourth pyramid, boy. It will be your tomb too, if you aren’t careful. Thomas Ellington’s rant reamed through his head, keeping time with the clack of the train. Dead, dead, dead.
Ezra looked back down at the rip in his shirt. The unmarked skin beneath it.
He’d thought he’d known madness.
Now he wasn’t so certain.
“How long is this train ride?” Biz asked as she pulled piles of fresh clothes from the shopping bag.
“Three hours or so.” Ezra had already calculated how much time they had before they reached Cairo. After that? It would be the dead of night. No guides would be renting out camel tours through the sands of Giza.
But would that stop Hugo Pratt?
Probably not…
“We should have bought more snacks,” Vincent remarked. They’d finished the simit rings and bags of pickled vegetables while waiting for Hugo and Everett to choose their seats.
“There’s a dining car,” his fiancée pointed out.
“Which Hugo will no doubt be enjoying.” Celia shook her head and shucked off her mud-caked shoes. “It’s best if we stay hidden.”
“What more can he do to us?” Biz challenged.
“Plenty.” Celia’s answer was clipped. It just scratched the surface. It made something deep inside of Ezra stir. “He’s got an enchanted lighter and dynastic shoes to fill.”
“I’ll give him shoes,” Biz muttered as she removed her own heels, swatting at air the way she once did with wishing-tree sticks. Anything could become a sword, if you swung it hard enough. “Then I’ll tip a pot of scalding tea on his nether regions.”
Vincent shuddered. “Toothpicks and boiling water? Remind me never to cross you, my dear.”
Visions of Rose—foaming at the mouth while that blue stone beetle dragged her drool across the table—pressed against Ezra’s thoughts. “What did Hugo do to you, Bitty?”
It was Biz’s turn to shudder. She lowered herself to the bench and hugged her knees—bare feet dragging over the cushion. Ezra spied the white crisscross of scars on her heels, her toes, before they disappeared beneath his sister’s skirts.
“Ask her.” She jerked her chin at Celia.
But the other socialite lay back and rested her head against the cabin’s cushioned walls. Her lids looked caked closed, with so much mascara and kohl. The rest of Celia’s expression was pained. “He did what powerful men do, when no one steps in to stop them.”
“Hugo turned us into puppets,” Biz said. “It’s all coming back to me now. He—he would pull at our shadows, same as he did in the parlor this afternoon. We danced and we danced and we fell at his feet…” She hugged her knees even tighter. “He took our hopes, our dreams, our memories…”
“He couldn’t touch Ezra, though,” Vincent pointed out. He’d collapsed into the seat directly across from Ezra’s, legs sprawled so far out that their loafers nearly met. “Neither could Everett. Not even with an enchanted knife. Why is that?”
Celia cracked an eyelid. “I’m not sure,” she began. “Ezra seems to be something of a mystery, even in magical terms.”
Dimples appeared on Vincent’s cheeks. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
Alexandria’s outskirts fell away, yielding to vast fields and moonlit ribbons of river as Celia repeated many of the things she’d told Ezra over that plate of bacon and eggs.
Gods and angels were real. Devils were too.
Magic made them, and people made magic, which could be harvested just like the wheat outside the train windows.
Biz’s expression pinched at this, hands wandering up to her short blond bob, as if she might be feeling for missing hairs.
She stayed silent, though, her eyes growing wider as Ezra told his story.
How jeweled scarabs and mummified cats crept through his flat when he was a boy.
How his mother had disappeared. How Thomas Ellington seemed connected with everything. How George died. Then the Germans.
This was where his sister let out a little sob, biting her knuckles.
Vincent cast an uneasy glance at his fiancée.
As if her emotion scared him more than the actual confession.
He gave her an awkward hug around her shoulder that only made it shake more.
Ezra would have switched places with him, but he didn’t trust himself to get too close.
You aren’t safe. So much had shifted in the past several days, and yet nothing had changed.
The Germans were all dead. Biz was crying, and Vincent?
Well, Vincent was Vincent. He didn’t seem to view Ezra any differently than he had in the library, all those years ago, when their lips first met and Ezra could finally breathe for the first time since the foxhole.
He wanted that normalcy, now more than ever.
“So, let me get this straight,” his old flame was saying, “over half of England’s peerage are wizards?”
“Magicians,” Celia corrected.
Vincent let out a giggle. “Sorry, I just had this image of the House of Lords all pulling rabbits out of their hats in Parliament.”
Biz blinked, as if a cobweb hung from her eyelashes.
“I’m starting to remember more…” She looked across the compartment at Ezra.
“I’ve seen you shine before… The day the groundskeepers chopped down our wishing tree, you tried to save it.
You picked up a dried branch, and when you held the stick to your chest, there was this light…
New leaves started to spring out. I should have been surprised, but somehow, in the moment, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world… ”
Ezra remembered that day well. A small army of men with axes had descended upon Thornhill—the tree in question was old, too old to count its rings in a single afternoon, much less chop them through.
His heart had broken, watching bare branches fall to the ground one by one.
It was the end of something. He felt as much in his bones when he picked up that severed stick, and he’d wanted, so desperately, for that summer to be like so many others, where they roamed the grounds and pretended to fight dragons, their chins sticky with jam, their hearts full of sunlight.
He remembered looking down and seeing the green leaves, growing from dead wood. Wishful thinking. He hadn’t realized Biz had seen them too—if he had, he might not have tossed the branch back into the wood splitters’ pile.