Chapter 21
She’d finally fled.
Ezra supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised, given how many times he’d already told Celia Sinclair to get out and leave, but he’d come to expect the young woman’s fight.
He’d taken it for granted, that she would stand her ground.
That her ice-blue eyes would meet his with a flint and a flicker.
That she would be there to help him control the shadows and the rage…
But there was too much of it, this time.
He watched the empty doorway. It gaped inside him.
His heart felt like buckshot.
None of this was fair.
Celia knew that.
Celia knew him.
She would come back… She had to…
And yet, the entrance stayed empty. Biz sank into a seat on the water-stained rug as Vincent moved to shut the door.
Something about the way the lock schnicked into place brought Ezra back to the rest of the room.
To the way his sister huddled on the floor.
She looked so small, so fetal, so very un-Biz-like.
Staring down at her, like this, Ezra’s anger started to feel ugly.
She wasn’t the enemy. Not really. None of them were…
“Good riddance,” Vincent said as he reentered the sitting room. “See, Ezra? I told you she was using you—”
Biz looked up. “We’re all just using one another, aren’t we? So let’s keep being brutally honest and say the silent parts out loud…”
Her fiancé halted, his mouth pulled to the side. “What are you talking about?”
“I might be broke, but I’m not stupid. I’ve got two eyeballs and a heart. I see what’s going on between the two of you. I feel it.”
Everything reeled back, then. The shadows. The shine. The rage—yet all of it, tucked back inside Ezra, still wasn’t enough to fill in the spaces Celia Sinclair had left. “Vincent and I are very old friends—”
His half sister laughed at this. “Friends? Vincent doesn’t have friends. He has chauffeurs and acquaintances and me and you. All of us just stuck in his orbit—going round and round and never quite clashing.”
The man in question stood by the stack of empty shoes, looking hurt, though it was hard to tell whose declaration had wounded him more.
“We have a history, yes.” Ezra’s explanation felt thick in his throat, sticking there like thousand-year-old tomb honey. “But—”
“But what?” Vincent’s eyes flashed.
Biz’s gaze held Ezra down.
There was nowhere to hide here, despite all his mother’s treasures.
He couldn’t tuck himself into a sarcophagus, the way he had with Celia in the British Museum.
He couldn’t tell his sister she deserved better, after how he’d lashed out about the gold.
We’re all just using one another. Was that true?
Where did love fit in? Was there any room for such a virtue between them?
Ezra used to think so.
But that was back in the days of the wishing tree.
Back between the black-and-white print pages of the Bodleian.
Biz cleared her throat when his silence began to stretch too long. “We can do better than this,” she said. “We just have to be honest, is all.”
Vincent didn’t speak. He was waiting for Ezra.
“We were more than friends, once.” He looked squarely at his sister as he said this, focusing on the constellations freckling her nose.
“I ended things at Oxford because I was afraid—there were the laws, yes, but—” Ezra let his glance wander past the shelves of totems and tomb jewelry.
He stopped when he found Vincent, leaning against the wall.
“You told me I was scared to dig in and find something real.” Ezra swallowed.
The honey feeling in his throat started to crystallize.
“The truth was… I was scared to go too deep and find… nothing.”
The other young man flinched at this. “I know I’m vain, but did you really think me so shallow?”
“No,” Ezra said quickly. “No. I believed myself mad, remember? And there were times, in the dead of night, where I even believed myself worse… I didn’t want you to see the nightmare you were sleeping beside.”
Vincent made a sound of faint heartbreak.
Ezra dropped his gaze toward the rug. The drying stain. “I still don’t know what I’m going to find, at the end of all this.” His hand clenched around the edges of the basin. “But I owe it to myself to keep going.”
Biz let out a breath so heavy it made her fringe flutter.
Vincent, on the other hand, could have been a statue.
It was too much, staring into those ocean eyes, so Ezra stared past his taut shoulders—at the closed door. He kept waiting for the handle to wiggle. For light to crack through. For Celia Sinclair’s sorry face. She had to be the sorry one, not him, not after everything…
But the way stayed shut.
“Then let’s keep going,” Biz said softly. “Vincent’s right. We’re with you, Ezra. Come hell or high water or bloody sphinxes.” Her gaze flickered across the drying puddle. “Do you think I should go check on Celia? She didn’t seem well.”
The silver basin shimmered, its water as clear as before. If Ezra focused hard enough, he could see the outlines of his own face, but nothing like the darkness Celia had described.
“We’ve wasted enough time,” Ezra told them. “Every minute we spend squabbling is another minute Hugo gets closer to that ivory wand. She’ll come back if she wants to. For now, let’s keep searching for clues.”
Biz nodded and turned back to examine the shelves. Ezra moved to join her, but he couldn’t keep his focus as he handled the canopic jars and statues. They all felt like clay. Apt to shatter.
He had to put George back together again.
“Ezra.”
The sound of his first name coming from Vincent’s lips caught him off guard. Biz stiffened too, looking over her shoulder at where her fiancé had wandered into the kitchen. Gold hair spilled over his temples; his gaze fixed on the tabletop.
“Ezra,” he said again. “Come over here. I think I’ve found something…”
The table itself was nothing remarkable—except for the fact that it was European.
Ezra’s mother had rarely eaten there, preferring instead to sit cross-legged on the living room floor.
Instead, she used the kitchen table as a desk.
It had forever been covered in scrolls and inkwells and whittled reeds.
Most of that was gone now. Only a few spatters of ink remained from Nour’s scholarly pursuits.
Vincent ran a finger over one of these shiny black streaks.
“Have a look at this,” he said.
There was more than just ink, Ezra realized, as he drew closer.
The wood was scarred. His mother had pressed a reed down hard enough to leave marks on the tabletop.
The one Vincent was tracing looked like a cobra ready to strike—like the cobra that had been etched into the side of the mountain on their scrap of map.
Ezra fished the parchment from his utility belt and unrolled it. His heart rattled. Then leapt.
“Oh!” Biz exclaimed. “They match!”
“This must have been where your mother drew the map,” Vincent added, voice taut. His finger followed the engraved lines, through the wadis and up to where Ezra’s parchment ripped. There was no sign of this on the table. Only more mountains and winding paths marked with stars…
“There!” Excitement bristled across Ezra’s skin as he leaned in for a closer look.
The prickle grew even more pronounced when Vincent edged forward as well. Biz had to scuttle around the table to see the three stars overlaid across the hilltops.
“It’s Orion’s Belt again,” she exclaimed.
She was right. Mostly.
“Sah’s Crown,” Ezra murmured, thinking of the story he’d just read in Nour’s notebook. All the echoes of Osiris it held… It made sense that his mother would use such a constellation to point the way, instead of a plain old X. “That’s where we’re supposed to go.”
Rum-dum-dum-dum. There was a dull, drumming sound that made Ezra flinch—but it wasn’t a machine gun nest. Or Celia knocking. Vincent had taken to tapping his fingers on the table’s edge.
“Looks rugged,” he remarked.
There was a loud silence, filled with whatever Celia might have said.
What? Did you expect the treasure to be set on your pillow at the Winter Palace?
With a chocolate to boot? Ezra glanced at the door once more.
He couldn’t blame her for fleeing. But also he could: running off with handfuls of relics that rightfully belonged to him…
He didn’t really care about the stone hippopotamus that squirted water everywhere.
It was the hypocrisy that stung. How, this whole time, Celia had tried to make it seem as if they were the same: victims of the Order’s endless greed.
The connection had felt genuine. Real. But what was it…
really? What was Celia? If she’d been sincere, then she would have returned by now, no?
Back to where Ezra was sitting. To the very same kitchen table where Thomas Ellington had sat him down to say that his mother was never returning.
I’m taking you back to England with me. No quarter offered. No questions asked. Especially not why.
Had the answer been in front of Ezra that whole time?
He looked back down at the trail of stars his mother had blazed.
The one he had to follow through the dark.
Biz had busied herself by the old woodburning stove, retrieving a piece of charcoal. “Are there any blank pages in that book of yours?” She nodded at the journal he’d stuck in his front safari suit pocket. “I can try frottage to copy the map.”
Carefully, Ezra turned to the back of his mother’s journal.
There were other stories, past the one he’d read in the bedroom, but they didn’t reach all the way to the end…
The hieroglyphs stopped several pages short.
He tore a few of the blank ones loose and handed them to Biz, who copied the table’s engravings with a quick swipe of charcoal. Not three pages, but four.
“Right, then,” she said, handing a copy of the table map to each of them, then tucking the extra beneath her arm. “Let’s go chase those stars.”