Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
JUPITER
Dinner sat in my stomach like a brick all through the walk back to my tower, and by the time the sky had gone fully dark, I’d changed my outfit three times. It was ridiculous, because the Order of Ophiuchus had presumably not spent several thousand years waiting for me just to judge my wardrobe.
I settled on black. Black sweater, black jeans, and my glorious boots. If I was going to stand in a secret chamber full of ancient bloodlines tonight, I was going to do it in shoes I could run in. Or kick some ass in. Either way.
‘Nervous,’ Noodle observed from the bed, where he’d coiled himself into a neat spiral on my pillow. ‘I smell fear.’
“That’s exactly what I needed to hear right now.”
‘Welcome.’
There was a soft knock at my door. When I opened it, all five of them were standing in the corridor.
Lucas in a dark coat with his glasses on again, making him look much older than his twenty-five years, Rowan beside him with his hair tied back, Theo and Phoenix shoulder to shoulder smiling gently, and Jamie leaning against the far wall with his hood up, a thin curl of smoke escaping from beneath it.
“I do know the way to the library by now.”
Lucas arched a brow. “We’re not going to the library, love.”
I held out my arm and let Noodle climb it, his cool weight settling around my shoulders in his usual spot. His head came to rest above my collarbone, tongue flicking once against my jaw.
“Be nice tonight, Nood.”
‘No.’
I groaned, just imagining the kind of chaos he could cause. But I refused to leave him behind. If there was one thing in my chaotic life that was a constant, it was Noodle.
We took the path through the grove, the fog hanging low between the trees, and nobody spoke much.
Theo, who could fill an hour with conversation, walked quietly at my side with his hands in his pockets.
The guys fanned out around me like some kind of shield.
Well, I supposed that’s exactly what they were going to become, weren’t they?
The entrance wasn’t in the library. I’d assumed it would be, because everything important at Imperium seemed to route through those restricted archives, but Lucas led us instead to a low stone building off the western courtyard that I’d walked past a hundred times and dismissed.
Inside, past shelves of actual, boring storage, folding chairs, crates of candles, a shelf of chipped teapots that had no business being adjacent to an ancient secret chamber, there was a door. Old wood, iron bands, no handle.
Lucas pressed his palm flat against it. For a moment nothing happened, and then the iron warmed to a dull orange, and the door swung inward onto a spiral stair descending into the dark.
“Of course it’s a creepy staircase,” I muttered. “It’s always a creepy staircase.”
“Would you have preferred an elevator?” Rowan asked.
“Absolutely. And a lobby with a vending machine.”
The stairs went down a long way. The air changed as we descended, growing cooler and heavier, and beneath the cold there was something else, a low vibration I felt in my teeth before I heard it. There was magic saturated in the ground all around the academy, but it was extra potent down here.
‘The earth sings,’ Noodle said. I patted his head, both for his comfort and my own.
The stairway opened into a chamber that stole whatever clever remark I’d been preparing right out of my mouth.
It was vast, round, carved from the bedrock itself, the ceiling lost somewhere above the reach of the torchlight.
Iron sconces lined the curved walls, their flames burning low and steady, and the floor was smooth dark stone worn glossy by centuries of feet.
In the center of the chamber, the floor was scorched. A great starburst of blackened stone maybe thirty feet across, its edges feathering out into streaks and rays, as if something unimaginably bright had burned there once.
The First Crossing. The place where the last Ophis had stood, ten thousand years ago, and sealed the door behind our entire species.
My magic surged so suddenly that Noodle’s coil tightened around my shoulders, and somewhere in the chamber, fabric rustled as thirty robed figures turned to look at me.
“Breathe, love,” Theo said quietly, close to my ear. “It passes. The first time we each stood in this room, it did the same thing to us. The raw magic of the home worlds still lingers here.”
I breathed. Or tried to. The surge of magic didn’t vanish, but it settled ever so slightly, banking down from a flood to a strong current, and the metallic taste at the back of my throat faded.
When my vision cleared properly, I made myself look at the people instead of the scorch mark on the floor.
They stood in a loose crescent on the far side of the scorch mark, all in the same heavy dark robes, and my first thought was that these guys had coaxed me down here into some kind of weird ass cult, and I was about to be the not-so-virgin sacrifice.
But then I realized there were faces I recognized, not personally of course, but from reputation and the fact that I’d spent the last couple of weeks online stalking each of the guys and their families.
Arthur Bennett, unmistakable with the same aristocratic bearing he’d handed down to Lucas, and beside him a tall old woman with a long silver braid over her shoulder and dark eyes that were already smiling at me.
Phoenix crossed the chamber and hugged her, this small adorable woman disappearing entirely against his enormous frame, and she patted his back twice like he was still a boy. “Gran,” he said with affection.
“You’ve gotten bigger,” she accused. “I told you to stop that.” She chuffed him on the arm playfully.
Phoenix crossed his arms as he stood back and smirked. “I saw you last month, Gran, I think your age is showing.”
She winked and turned to me then, and up close her face was a map of deep lines, but her eyes were as alert as a twenty-year-old.
“Tala,” she said, taking my hand in both of hers.
Her palms were dry and warm. “Phoenix’s grandmother if you haven’t guessed already.
I’ve been alive for eighty years, girl, and I confess I did not think I would see this day inside them. ”
“Maybe I should have worn my going-out boots then,” I said, before I could stop myself.
Tala laughed. “Oh, I like her,” she said, to no one in particular. “You didn’t tell me she was funny, boys.”
Arthur Bennett stepped forward next. Everything about him was composed and expensive. I could see Lucas in the set of his shoulders and the way he took a half second before speaking, as though every sentence was well-thought-out.
“Ms. Black,” he said in a very posh English accent. “Thank you for coming. I recognize that trusting us does not come easily to you, and that we have done little as an institution to deserve it.”
I gave him my most polite smile, mentally telling myself not to be a bitch.
“You’re right. I wish I’d been told about this Order when I first arrived.
I had to come to my own conclusions while reading archived journals.
But I guess I can understand. You don’t know me yet, or my intentions. For all you know I could be evil.”
Somewhere behind me, I heard Jamie exhale something that might have been a laugh.
Arthur took it without flinching. If anything, something in his face eased, like he’d been braced for worse.
“Then I’ll be direct with you. We are not going to ask you for anything tonight.
No oaths, no rituals, no signatures in blood.
Tonight we want to give you the truth first. And then an offer you are free to refuse. ”
They didn’t make me stand in the middle of the scorch mark like some sacrificial centerpiece, which I appreciated. Instead, chairs were brought in by a few of the cloaked individuals. Ordinary wooden chairs. The elders settled themselves in a wide circle.
“You know pieces of the puzzle,” Tala said. “My grandson and his shield have been feeding them to you slowly, on our instruction of course. But you’re exceptionally smart, and you’ve been finding others on your own too. So tonight we give you the facts, and you may ask anything you like. Agreed?”
“Agreed.” It’s all I wanted. Information, Truths. Anything to tell me that what they were going to ask of me would actually be achievable.
“Then let’s start with the enemy, because everything else follows from them.” She folded her hands in her lap. “What do they teach you about the bane, in your classes? At Dominion, at Imperium. What are they?”
It felt like being called on by a professor, which, considering my parents, should have been comforting.
“Dark matter entities. They come through portals, feed on life force and magic. They’re classified by size and threat level, and before the First Crossing, they nearly wiped out the Aelari on the home worlds, and they’ve been coming to Earth ever since. ”
“All true,” Tala said. She leaned forward.
“Here is what the Assembly does not teach, because it stopped being convenient for them once they settled on Earth. The bane travel between worlds the same way you travel through portals. But their portals are not like yours. A bane portal is a violent tear in the fabric of space. They chew through that fabric, and like anything with teeth, they can only bite so far. A few light-years at a stretch, no more, and the energy it takes costs them. They must stop. Feed. Rebuild their strength on whatever living world they’ve landed on, sometimes for decades, sometimes for a century, before they can bite again. ”
Her dark eyes held mine. “That is why the home worlds took generations to fall instead of days. The bane came through the outer worlds first and ate their way inward, world by world, jump by jump, and our people could not stop it. Do you understand what I am telling you?”
“They’re slow,” I said. My mouth had gone dry. “They’re devastating, but they’re slow. It takes them lifetimes to cross what I could cross in a step.”