Chapter 24
Once upon a time there was a knight in shining armor. The Lion Unbowed, many called him. He loved his king like no other—he served as shield and sword and something more. He bled for such love. He branded it on his breastplate, the sigil of his signature beast shot through with three arrows.
Duty.
Honor.
Love.
These were the knight’s true wounds. Yet he never let the last one show.
He stood stalwart at his king’s side on the royal wedding day.
He guarded the queen as closely as his own heart.
He toasted the birth of the first heir, and the next.
He contented himself with burning glances and long rides through the woods to release the king’s falcons, where the two men would kiss under a sky of wheeling wings.
I wish it could always be like this, his beloved would whisper, and everything would ache so much more.
Love was impossible to win. So the Lion Unbowed decided to go searching for more.
Distance was best. Magic was better. He began to quest in his beloved’s name—following the whispers of wizards and slaying monsters for their piles of treasure.
Crowns for his king’s head. Swords for his sons.
Jewels for their mother. Myths for the other knights.
The Lion Unbowed fought for them all.
But then the king fell ill, and no blade or diamond could save him.
The physicians, too, were at a loss. The Lion Unbowed knelt by his beloved’s bedside and prayed for more wing-spun skies: A broken heart was better than none.
He couldn’t bear to stay while his king wasted away, so he decided to chase the faintest hope of all.
The Holy Grail.
God’s own cup. Relic of relics. It was said to cure all ills, even turn back time itself, if you drank.
This quest took the Lion Unbowed to the world’s edge. And beyond.
He fought hunger and hope and unspeakable beasts.
He unraveled mazes. He picked apart legends.
He bled and battled and bled again.
Until, finally, he held the sacred cup in his hands.
It did heal—one sip from the silver edge and the Lion Unbowed’s wounds knit together. He even felt younger. Young enough to ride day and night back to his ailing king. He imagined the look on his beloved’s face as the sickness washed away, taking wrinkles with it.
I robbed heaven for you, he pictured himself saying, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
But when the Lion Unbowed reached the castle, its banners were black.
He was too late.
For while the Grail could wash away old age, it could not touch death.
The knight’s quest had been for naught.
But again, he refused to sit. If the Lion Unbowed could steal God’s cup for his beloved, then surely he could storm heaven once more. He would find a way to raise the dead…
He would turn this world inside out, if he had to.
Love is a wound.
If wounds do not heal, they fester.
And oh, how the knight festered.
Quests became crusades.
Crusades became colonies.
Colonies became control.
The Order was born. The Lion Unbowed shed his armor and placed it beside the other relics he’d collected through the centuries—not all of them were by his own hand.
In fact, most weren’t. He’d used the other knights at first, doling out sips from the Grail as rewards for recovered relics.
But they could not find what he was looking for, and so he began to ask for help from their sons, allowing them to keep some of the trinkets they found instead.
Resurrection eluded him. Age did too. He was in no mind to share the Grail’s power with those who searched, and so the Lion Unbowed hid his face, fading behind a far shorter title.
Apex.
The world kept turning, turning, turning, churning up nothing that would bring his beloved back. He watched more kings rise and fall. He mourned no one, anymore. So many were beneath him, stabbing one another in the back, scrambling for scraps. Duty? Honor? Love?
Ha.
He’d thought all of that was behind him.
But then…
A whisper.
A headline: Hero Holds His Own Against Fifteen Germans.
No armor needed.
Ezra gasped as the darkness kept swirling around, seeping inside him.
Vincent’s story kept unfurling: images laced with understanding.
Ezra saw his own father, trapped in the same shadow, fighting with all his might as the Apex dug through his memories.
Lord Blackwood’s signet ring winked, then shuddered, while hairs wept from the old man’s head.
There were tears in his eyes too. Ezra, Ezra.
He’s the one you want. He’s the key to the dead.
Why didn’t you tell me? Ezra wanted to scream at the broken man, but the scene shifted.
Oxford’s buildings trickled into place, like so many sandcastles. He saw himself walking beneath the Bridge of Sighs, laughing at something Vincent Cain had said. The other young man was luminous. Brilliant, beautiful, rich, bitingly self-aware, wanting Ezra for Ezra…
Too good to be true.
How? How was I so blind?
Ezra asked this, again and again, as the images flickered.
Books at the Bodleian, pints at the Eagle and Child, cups of tea steaming on bedside tables, fingers intertwined like bodice bones.
Vincent. Always with Vincent. He saw now.
While he’d been twisting the sheets to escape his ghosts, Vincent Cain was set on summoning them.
Their closeness was calculated. A way for the other man to study him…
The key to the dead.
The way back to his king.
Long ago, I lost someone. It hurt in ways I still can’t name. It broke me…
Why can’t you just be honest with yourself, Bright? Hm? Or at least with me… You’ve got more layers than a trifle at Fortnum’s!
I’m not a dessert, Vincent. I’m—
You’re scared, is what you are. Scared to dig in and find something real.
Real? You think this is real?
I had…
Ezra had too, he realized, as these conversations came back to haunt him.
The break between them was more jagged, this second time around.
Vincent hadn’t gone to drown his sorrows in ale. Gin was more the Bright Young Things’ style, and even then, he stayed sober. Sharp. He watched Elizabeth Ellington with care while she danced and danced. She, too, was an open wound.
A way in.
He courted her between trips to Egypt.
He did not loot the tombs, as he had before. Instead of gutting the sphinxes from their pedestals, he planted clues. Ezra had to want his fate…
The gate would not open, otherwise.
The dead would not rise.
All of that love, all of that loss, all of their pain would be a waste.
“Don’t you see, Bright?” Vincent—the Apex—murmured, bringing Ezra back into the center of their darkness. Shadows wreathed together just as their fingers once had. “I had to.”
Biz’s body lay on the floor between them. Her lips were the same color as the sprats from Celia’s icebox. Spoiled gray. Parted with surprise.
“I’m sorry it’s come to this,” Vincent went on. “I really am. The truth is I’ve grown fond of the two of you… In another life we might have made a happy family.”
If Ezra hadn’t already been kneeling, he would have crumpled. He reached out for his sister’s hand. It was already cold. As waxen as a figure from Madame Tussauds.
“You used her to get close to me… But why? I would have… I would’ve done anything for you.”
“I know,” said Vincent. “But you’ll do more for your sister. Only your blood can open the door, and only you can offer it.”
He waved his gun down the long line of sphinxes.
The black stone loomed.
“Retrieve the wand.”
Biz’s hand fell to the tiles as Ezra stood.
He thought briefly about lashing out with the same golden magic that bound the other magicians.
But Vincent was far more powerful than those two and the rage felt so far away now.
Ezra’s hurt went too deep, like a burn so bad that one’s body couldn’t register it.
Biz is dead.
A battle wouldn’t help her. A war with the Apex wouldn’t win anything…
Vincent had played his hand perfectly.
There was only one way for Ezra to get his sister back.
Only one end.
He rolled up his sleeves and walked up to the first statue.
The sphinx bowed and sank its teeth into his palm.
Blood poured out of the re-pierced wound, spattering to the grooves in the floor.
The second sphinx bared its teeth. Ezra offered his other hand.
Red began sluicing down the channel, glowing as it made its way to the stone.
But where the two bites in the British Museum had managed to unlock the vault, this was nowhere near enough.
Sixteen more jaws sat between him and a door.
Ezra shoved his sleeves even higher, pushing through the pain as he held out his arms for the third and fourth statue. They punched their incisors neatly into his wrists.
This hurt a hell of a lot more than a smoldering cigarette.
The fifth and sixth repeated the pattern, spacing the wounds an inch apart. It was impossible to judge by skin alone, since so much blood was pouring out, but the injuries felt like rusty nails hammered through his arm.
Again.
And again.
And again.
By the time he reached thirteen—damned, unlucky number—the chamber was swimming. The grooves in the tiles were thick with his blood. There was no turning back.
At the next set of sphinxes, Ezra started to hear whispers.
He couldn’t tell if they were coming from inside his own head or through the glowing red cracks in the stone slab.
This was just a few steps away… His vision flickered even more wildly as he stared at it…
trying to make out the shape of the ivory wand…
It’s your turn now, brother.
He barely felt the fresh sets of fangs in his upper arm.
Ezra’s legs gave way as he tried to reach the final sphinxes. He fell—splashing in a river of his own blood. More hisses reached through the slab. Not George’s voice, but something rougher. His other ghosts, perhaps…
But why wasn’t his mother there?
Ezra knew he was dying as he thought this. Most of the men bleeding out in the trenches had screamed for their mothers, in the end.
“Don’t stop now, Bright.” Vincent had followed his progress from the side, pausing by the final pair of sphinxes. “We’re close… so close… Heaven awaits.”
Those blue eyes that had always reminded Ezra of an ocean started to waver.
He shut his own lids, trying to level off the dizziness. No good. He pictured his sister, his darling, daring sister who’d hoped for such a large, wide-open life, and began to crawl.
The final pair of sphinxes sank their teeth into his back.
Where wings should have bloomed.
He heard Vincent cry—but the sound wasn’t pained.
Britain’s most powerful magician was getting exactly what he wanted.
With great effort, Ezra opened his eyelids, but this didn’t make much of a difference.
His vision was going dim. He could see the glowing parts of the gate, inlaid with his ruby blood, but the stone between it was growing darker, ever darker.
Shards of obsidian hit the floor, and tendrils of blacker cloud began to lick through…
“What’s this?” Vincent’s question sounded garbled, as if he’d screamed it underwater. “Where’s the wand?”
Everything was slipping.
Slipping away.
Slipping through.
Darkness eclipsed Ezra, and all hell broke loose.