Chapter 31 #2
I pushed myself upright, hair in my eyes and something warm and salty on my lips. Blood. I looked down and discovered I had been lying in a smear of scarlet, glistening in a rising dance of firelight.
The smashed lantern had started a fire. The artifacts, the shelves—the vault was burning. It was a terrible realization, but distant, down a dark and echoing well.
Had I been shot? I felt no pain, felt very little at all. My vision was short and blurry, and my ears still rang, loud enough to make me cringe and clamp my hands over them.
Movement pulled my gaze right. There, Wake perched atop Lewis, hands cinched around his throat. Between us, bloodied and waiting, lay the artifact.
I tackled Wake, snatching the artifact on my way by and smashing it into our assailant’s head. It connected with a satisfying thunk, jarring my hand and lancing pain up my arm.
We toppled off Lewis’s other side and into a row of shelves. A box fell beside us, muffled in my damaged ears, and clay dust plumed. Coughing, half-blinded, and tangled in Wake, I struck at him again with the artifact.
He reeled out of the way and grabbed my wrist. With the contact came Leeching, draining the strength from my muscles and reviving his own.
He pried my fingers apart with terrifying ease and kicked me down. The artifact fell and rolled in a tottering rhythm. I barely managed to bring my hands up to soften his next kick, aimed for my head.
“Lewis!” I cried.
The kick never landed. There was movement around me, a scuffle and an impact against the shelves. Another crate fell along with numerous smaller objects, then hasty hands helped me stand.
I steadied myself on Lewis’s arm, partially tucked into his chest, and looked back to see fire spreading through the vault. Heat rolled towards us, scented with the destruction of centuries, millennia, of precious things.
It was an Archivist’s nightmare made real. Old wood flared, tapestries turned to ash, and pottery cracked—all bizarrely muffled to my ears.
Lewis turned to stand between me and the flames. He was speaking to me, I realized, his mouth moving as his hands cupped my cheeks. The firelight illuminated him from behind, outlining him like a painted saint.
“My ears,” I managed, my throat thick for more than one reason. His hands were tender, his expression urgent, and his concern sincere. It was the rawest I had ever seen him, and to be the subject of his care was a momentous thing.
Then, somewhere to the side, the vault door opened. The influx of fresh air made the fire flare, surging closer and throwing us into bright relief. A figure rounded the newly opened door, about to lunge through with the artifact in hand.
Lewis lunged, but he was limping. He toppled into the back of the door and discharged his pistol after Wake. I saw the pop of light, but even the gunshot was a distant muffle to my ears.
Wake hurled himself out into the hallway. The artifact fell to the floor and rolled into the smoke, each side glinting in the firelight as it turned. I instinctively flinched towards it.
Then the vault door closed with a swirl of smoke. I saw the mechanisms automatically spin, felt them thunk into place like nails into my own coffin.
Lewis threw himself down on the internal lever. I joined him, casting a frantic glance for the artifact as I did. Nothing, just thickening smoke and shelf after shelf, relic after treasure, waiting to be devoured by the flames.
I brushed stray hair, smoke, and dust from my eyes and turned my focus to the mechanism, searching for another way to open the door. Surely, there was some safety device, something Wake had used to open it from this side.
“There must be a secondary lever!” I shouted—or, felt that I shouted.
But if there was, we could not find it. We searched and cursed as my eyes ran with tears and sweat, and the smoke sent us into fits of coughing.
The door swung inwards without warning. A dark, moody blue orb rolled before it, tapping a pattern of blood across the floor.
I snatched up the dodecahedron, and Lewis and I charged through the gap.
There was too much smoke to see our rescuer, or if they were indeed a rescuer. Just then, it did not matter. Together Lewis and I pushed the door closed one final time, blocking off the heat of the fire. Smoke curled across the ceiling.
The closing of the door cut off the light of the fire, but the passage was not dark. It was lit by a lantern in the hands of none other than my dear sister, Madge.
Lewis gave a wheezing, coughing groan.
I felt much the same, and wished quite passionately I had not lost my saber.
The artifact was heavy in my pocket.
Madge raised a pistol. Her voice was still muffled in my damaged ears, but the passage was quiet, and I caught enough to understand. “We have little time, so I shall make this quick. I am here only to warn you. Baffin and his people are on their way to secure the artifact. Do you have it?”
“No,” Lewis said firmly.
I conjured a defiant glare.
“You do,” Madge stated and stuck out her hand. “Give it to me and run. It is safest with the Guild, you know that. You have no time to waste.”
No, we did not. Furthermore, the vault door at my back was beginning to radiate heat and hiss unsettlingly.
“Does your husband have a son?” I asked suddenly. I probably shouted it, which was indelicate, but I did not care.
She looked at me with wide, startled eyes. It was answer—and distraction—enough.
I charged. As I expected, she did not fire her pistol, not at me, and especially not in such a small space. She did try to strike me over the head with it, though.
I dodged and slammed her into the wall. Lewis reacted with alacrity, commandeering her weapon despite his lingering limp.
I took advantage of the momentary press—close enough to an embrace to make my sisterly heart ache—to snatch at Madge’s memories.
I saw her slipping into the museum in the shadow of Mr. Moran. Following him with careful, measured distance. I saw a confrontation between the two of them, caught my own name.
“Ottilie,” Lewis broke in.
I broke off and shoved Madge ahead of us. “Move,” I said, though my voice was not as harsh as I intended.
Madge. Me. Moran. Wake. Lewis. There were conflicts and connections afoot that I could only begin to parse.
With our prisoner, we hastened back through the basements. Lewis was limping even more now and I was frighteningly weak, but we kept Madge in check and eventually spilled out onto the marble floor of the corridor above ground in a drift of smoke.
Pretoria and Perry converged on us. Wake was nowhere to be seen.
“You!” Pretoria threw out a pointing finger ahead of her, glaring at Madge. Madge glared right back. “What are you doing here?”
Madge did not speak.
Pretoria made an exasperated sound and hastened to look back down the stairs, batting away smoke that now curled up into the ground floor. Lewis grabbed her, giving some warning that slipped past me—likely of Wake.
Now that we were back in Pretoria’s company my Leeching-induced weakness came on again in full force, my heartbeat fluttering too lightly in my skull, my ears ringing.
Geoffrey, Maddeson’s assistant, was here too, looking pale and haggard.
Maddeson himself gaped at us, his bound wrists held by Perry.
A third figure, a night guard, was trussed up against the wall at the end of the hallway and appeared to be unconscious.
Detective Supford was not present, but I was far more concerned about Wake’s location just then.
“Did you see him?” I asked through the confused clamor. I heard myself, finally. “Mr. Wake? He is Moonless, he can use the shadows. And Moran is here!”
Pretoria visibly grimaced—I must still be talking too loudly. She put a hand on my arm and began to speak to Lewis again, then did a double take and stared at me.
“You’ve been shot!” my sister accused me.
“I have not,” I shouted staunchly. “Where is Detective Supford?”
“Tied up in Maddeson’s office. Ottilie!” Pretoria tore open the last remaining button of my coat to reveal my blouse and a drooping blossom of blood. “This is dreadful!”
“Pfft, it hardly qualifies as being shot, more of a mild goring,” I insisted, squinting at the long wound beneath, scraped across my ribs.
“I, however, have been shot,” Lewis admitted.
We all turned on him and I found the source of his limp—a circular, bloodied hole in his trousers.
I gaped. “Lewis! Why did you not say—”
“I did. You did not hear,” he returned.
I dug into my pockets, shoving around the artifact as I shook out a handkerchief. I pressed it to Lewis’s thigh.
“Can we please run away now?” Perry shouted in exasperation.
That spurred us. Madge crowded in, to help my poor wounded self, I assumed, with the hopeful naivety only a little sister could supply.
But it was at this juncture that my eldest sister, with false gentility, slipped the artifact from my pocket.
In my distraction, binding the kerchief to Lewis’s leg with a belt supplied by Pretoria, it took me far too long to notice.
My delayed, “You hag!” rang out only once she was a dozen paces away.
At that moment Wake stalked from the shadows behind the cloakroom desk and seized Geoffrey by the hair.
The young man died in a dazed way, sinking to his knees as the color fled his cheeks.
I saw his final moment, when the spark of life left his eyes.
My nightmares still paint the image most vividly.
A bafflement, realization, and a terrible, crippling sadness—realization of a life unlived, hopes never to be achieved, loves never to be found. Then, nothing at all.
Wake’s back straightened. Bleeding burns on his face healed, his shoulders levelled, and he spat blood upon the floor.