Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
Which means I was right!
When I motioned to the camera earlier, I was letting Tolliver know my theory. It had seemed odd that the Coven was just putting a whole grimoire on display like that, so we had a plan for if it was actually illusion.
The missing codex proves it, because the case is still intact.
Nothing was getting in or out without the glass ending up in pieces.
And while there’s a lot the Coven can do with this type of magic, there are some limitations.
For instance, illusions can’t be cast from far away.
And re-creating an existing object requires physical contact with the object itself.
Meaning somebody was casting the spell from nearby with the codex in their possession.
I grab the small flashlight from my pocket as I stand in front of the empty display case. Pointing it at the security camera, I flash the light nine times, in three intervals of three. Then I start taking off my dress.
For a moment, Rook just stares.
“Unzip me?” I ask, pulling my hair to the side and peering at him over my shoulder.
He shakes his head and swallows but does as I ask.
A professional would be clinical about it—quick and efficient.
But this is Rook’s first job, and I can feel his hesitation, his breath on my neck, the whisper of fabric against skin as he pulls the zipper slowly down my back.
I turn toward him, slipping the dress off my shoulders.
It falls to my waist, and I have to shimmy to get it past my hips.
I can see Rook watching me, and I might do a little more shimmying than is strictly necessary.
I’m left in a black skintight bodysuit. The neckline of my dress made it so that the suit had to sit under my breasts, so I have to pull it up over my strapless bra and wiggle my arms into the sleeves, then roll down the pant legs. Rook is still staring.
I raise an eyebrow. “Your turn.”
As he removes his clothes, revealing a similar bodysuit underneath, I pull grippy gloves and slippers out of the hidden pockets of my dress. Once Rook is finished, I flash the light at the camera again, this time two sets of three.
I wait for a breathless moment before the camera swivels toward the statue. One of the nearby emergency lights flashes five times, then pauses, then once more.
“Would you care to fill me in on what’s going on?” Rook says, adjusting his sleeves. “First the thing with CJ and Poppy, now this. Is the next surprise that you’ll be leaving me behind as well?”
I’m a professional, so I don’t let my gaze linger on the way I can see the muscles in his chest and arms through the nylon, and I definitely don’t look lower. Instead, I move toward the statue.
“I told you what you needed to know,” I say, stepping behind Hercules and into the alcove. “And I won’t leave you behind as long as you don’t get caught.”
On the back wall I count five blocks of marble up from the bottom on the far left. I take off a glove so I can run my fingers over the cool surface. It takes a moment, but I finally feel a catch where it’s not quite smooth, like there’s a tiny button. And I love pressing buttons.
I push it, and the entire wall moves. The marble groans backward, then makes a scraping noise as it slides to the side. We’re hit with a puff of dust, the air stale and moldy. I wave it away and walk through the opening.
“Secret passage,” I whisper.
Actually, now that I get a good look at it, it’s not so much a passage as it is just some extra space between the inner and outer walls. The ceiling is high, but there’s a small square opening in it, like a trapdoor.
I clear my throat and let it carry in the small space. After a moment, a rope drops from the hole above.
Rook groans. “And why didn’t I need to know that I would be climbing a rope?”
I grin. “Because I didn’t know until just this second.”
He doesn’t look impressed. “But you had a feeling it was a possibility.”
I jump as high as I can and grab the rope. “Try not to rip your pants.”
The gloves I’m wearing have extra grip, as do my slippers.
I’ve also roughed up the inside of the bodysuit’s legs around the knees to help with purchase.
I’m not great at climbing ropes, but there has always been a certain physicality to our job.
Not because we’re actually traipsing over rooftops and jumping over obstacles, but because we need to believe we can.
Technically, I could do anything in the Afterlife if I believed hard enough.
But it’s difficult to trick yourself into believing you can do something that you know you can’t do.
So, I’ve trained for this, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be winning any rope-climbing competitions. I know Rook could have done this faster, but he’s waiting quietly for me below, probably staring at my ass. At least he’s got a good view.
I’m out of breath by the time I reach the top, but thankfully a hand appears. I take it and let it haul me onto the floor of a thin, curved attic. I flop onto my back and take a moment to catch my breath.
“One day,” I gasp, “they should invent a ladder that can curl up like rope.”
“They already have that,” a voice says.
The hand pulls me to my feet, and I’m looking into the unamused face of the New Guy, Ezra Cardoso. He steps aside to reveal an unconscious member of the Coven. In their lap is the Voynich manuscript.
“It’s called a rope ladder.”
Earlier today, just as the sun was setting and before the chaos broke out but after Tolliver had taken over the security system, Ezra approached the Villa from the north, where there are several hiking trails.
He wandered off-trail and made his way down the hill toward the museum.
All he had to do was hop a few fences, dodge a few security patrols, and scamper up the side of the building.
To the roof? Or to a window? I don’t know.
He told me not to worry about it, so I didn’t.
A magician never reveals his secrets, he’d said.
But I know plenty of people who do actual magic, and my job is to get them to tell me their secrets, so.
I’ll figure it out eventually.
Once inside, Ezra met up with Tolliver, who no doubt told him he needed to find and subdue the person hiding the codex somewhere in proximity to the temple. And based on the book I see lying in an unconscious woman’s lap, he was able to do just that.
Rook finishes his climb in much less time and effort than it took me, and he doesn’t accept Ezra’s offered hand, instead pushing himself easily into the attic.
By the looks of it, we must be in a space built around the dome of the temple.
It’s like an unfinished corridor that loops all the way around the outside of the dome, which acts as the inner wall.
The place is dusty, with exposed beams, scattered nails, and that unfinished feeling of somewhere not meant to be seen.
Think if a Bundt cake pan were made of splinters and neglect.
“Well done, New Guy,” I say, leaning over the unconscious member of the Coven, a woman who is obviously related to Hecate—some-fourteen-greats-granddaughter or something—and will be noticed missing before long.
There’s a mist mask over her face connected to an amber glass bottle of Whispering Willow—the same compound Tolliver used to put the head of security to sleep and rewrite their memories.
I’m guessing Tolliver told Ezra it was chloroform or something.
That’s not how chloroform works, but I don’t think he knows that.
I take the codex out of the Coven member’s lap.
“NO!” CJ’s voice calls from behind me as they push themself into the room. “Never wear gloves while handling old books! You’ll rip the pages!”
“Codex,” I say. “And once Poppy gets this thing copied, we’ll be ripping all the pages.”
After Poppy’s outburst during the interrogation, the security guard led her and CJ not to some place of confinement but to the central security room, so they could watch the rest of our caper until it was time for their next part of the job.
Because, come on, did you think it was part of the plan to let Poppy and CJ get carted off and tortured by a syndicate? Absolutely not. That was Tolliver who led them away in his newly procured head of security uniform, complete with a face-obscuring helmet so no one could see him cringe at lying.
We knew we had to make the Coven think they had caught the intruders, and we also knew we had to evacuate the building so we would have the time and space to copy the codex.
So Poppy, who is ever so good at distraction, was given Dot Parker’s identity.
Dot Parker was notorious for being fashionably late but never so late as to miss the bulk of the party.
So, when the real Dot Parker, in the body of the real Laurie Love, showed up, the Coven knew something was wrong.
They were always going to catch Poppy—that’s the point of a pig cadaver—but since we had Tolliver in place as security, she was never in any danger.
And now we have a handful of minutes to swap out the grimoire with the fake.
After Poppy follows CJ and Tolliver up the rope, she takes the codex from me gently and sits cross-legged with a roll of tools we’d packed in the mail drop.
Everyone except Ezra is in black bodysuits. New Guy absolutely refused (“I am not wearing a team uniform, much less one that leaves nothing to the imagination!”), but he had already shown he can get around in street clothes, so I didn’t push it.
Poppy takes her tools and some sheets of vellum out of her bag and sits on the dusty attic floor. “How long do I got?”
“My guess is six minutes until Rook and I need to be back in our clothes and the rest of you need to be gone.”
“Whoa, watch it!” Tolliver says as Ezra steps too close to the bottle still feeding Whispering Willow to the unconscious Coven member. “Don’t touch any of my potions unless I hand it to you. There’s lots of dangerous stuff in here, dude.” He pats his messenger bag.
“Sorry, man,” Ezra says, putting his hands up in defense.
“Uh, gals and pals, we got a problem,” Poppy says.
I frown. “I don’t like problems. Can you fix it?”
Poppy hunches and shakes her head. “I can’t copy this.”
“What?”
“As soon as I look away from the book, I forget what I saw. And if I try to look at the book while I’m drawing, my hand won’t move.”
She demonstrates. It’s almost like some force is holding her back, her hand trembling over the page as she tries to re-create what she’s seeing.
Ezra blinks in confusion. “Are you having a stroke?”
Poppy sets her hand down, gasping as though she hadn’t even been allowed a breath. “I think there’s some kind of spell on this thing so it can’t be copied. And I don’t think it’s the kind of spell that can be broken.”
“Spell?” Ezra turns to me. “Is she having a stroke?”
“Alright, okay.” I run my hands through my hair, thinking. “That’s fine. We knew we weren’t going to have time to do an exact copy. Can you just fudge it? Then CJ can get to work on deconstructing the real one.”
Poppy winces. “That’s Problem Number Two.
There’s another protection spell on it that keeps it intact.
” She shakes her head. “Actually, you could use gloves to handle this. Unless we have some hellfire on us—which Tolliver says is impossible to synthesize—nothing’s going to damage these pages.
” She demonstrates by attempting to rip a page.
It just flutters through her fingers and settles back down, still in one piece.
“Basically, we’d need a demon to tear this thing apart. ”
“Problem Number Three!” Tolliver cries suddenly. “Problem Number Three!”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “No more problems until I solve the ones we already have!”
Footsteps echo from the temple below, and I go still.
We left the hatch to the attic open.
“Shit,” I hiss. “The rope!”
It still hangs down through the hatch. Rook rushes over to wind it up. Once he’s finished, we all stand frozen, holding our breath.
I can tell whoever’s below has reached the alcove, because the resonance of their footsteps deepens when they move from the tile to the marble.
The steps grow louder and then stop. They’re just below, in the secret passage, but there’s no way they’re getting up here without a rope or a ladder.
That’s way too high for someone to jump.
Right?
The silence drags on as we all stare at one another with wide-eyed frenzied expressions.
I bite my lip, berating myself for such a rookie mistake. I’ve gotten all of us trapped in a single room with one exit. Dante would have never. (See Rule #31: Never get everyone trapped in a single room with one exit.)
There’s a loud thud as a clawed hand grabs the edge of the hatch. A second follows, and then a pair of necrotic twisted horns appears. The intruder pulls itself up and stares at us with whiteless eyes.
I turn to Poppy. “What did you say about needing a demon?”