chapter Thirty
The light and the passage disappeared, and when Bliss opened her eyes, she saw that she was in a small stone room with bars on the windows. "Where are we? A prison?" she asked.
"No ... a monastery, I think," Lawson said, frowning. "But we're not in the right place or the right time. Look."
Bliss looked out the window to a grand canal dotted with gondolas and speedboats, people rushing about on the cobblestone streets with umbrellas.
"Where are the monks?" Ahramin asked, taking a seat on a stone step.
"They're gone, I think only the tourists are left," Malcolm said, reading a plaque by a velvet stanchion at the end of the room. "It must be Tuesday, when the museums are closed, otherwise we'd be surrounded by them."
"We're close," Bliss said, comforting Lawson. "Venice isn't too far from Rome."
"When I make portals ... I just imagine a space in my mind ... I thought it would be same here," he said, biting his fingernail.
"These portals you create, they must be part of the passages somehow," Bliss said.
"Maybe, I don't know. All I know is I can picture myself somewhere else, and then a path appears in front of me. I thought using the chronolog would be that easy."
Bliss nodded. She had an idea. When the Visitor, Lucifer, had taken over her mind and she'd been able to see his memories, she'd had no control; she couldn't call up a memory at will. But the images she'd seen of Allegra's memories felt different, and she wondered if maybe it was possible for her to summon them at will, if she focused hard enough. She'd have to be careful how she explained herself, though; she still wasn't sure what would happen if Lawson ever discovered her true parentage, and now wasn't the time to find out. She stared at the chronolog. "I think my mother had one of these once, and sometimes I can access her memories," she said.
"How?" Lawson asked.
She shook her head. "I don't know, all I know is I can feel her - guiding me - and I think that maybe if I concentrate, I can remember a little more, see how she used it." She took a seat on the stone step next to Ahramin, who gave her some space. Bliss closed her eyes and focused. Tell me, she thought. Please, if you know anything, please tell me. Show me.
At first all she could see was darkness. But then the darkness blurred, and a light began to shimmer, and she saw Allegra pick up the chronolog again and open it. The disc had stopped spinning and looked more like a regular watch, but with three different hands, and the numbers at the edge of the circle were in multiples of thousands, hundreds, and tens. Layered over the whole disc and its hands was a map, and Allegra maneuvered the hands on the chronolog to certain positions.
Bliss opened her eyes. "I think I know how to do this." She took the chronolog and pressed the button, then waited for the disc to stop spinning. "You see these hands?" She pointed them out. "One set refers to time, measured first in thousands and then hundreds of years, then decades. You have to set it like a clock - see this knob? You wind it so the hands move," she said, adjusting it. "Now these other hands, with the images of the continents behind them? They represent longitude and latitude. The trick is to line up the time and place you want at the same time, then press another button on the side."
"So we just have to set it to the right time and co-ordinates, then press the button and we're there," Malcolm said excitedly. "We can do this!"
"Not so fast," Lawson said. "Anyone know the date? Or the coordinates?"
Malcolm's face fell.
"We can find those things," Rafe said. "If this is a monastery, there's got to be a library here, with a set of encyclopedias."
"I'll help," Bliss said, and followed Rafe down the stairs. They walked around the empty monastery until they reached a room at the end of the hallway that was blocked off from museum tours. "I think this is it," Rafe said, opening the door marked BIBLIOTHECA.
The room was covered with dust and lined with bookshelves. A little typewriter sat on an antique desk. Rafe whistled, and nodded to a shelf that contained a full set of the Encyclopædia Britannica. What she wouldn't give for the Internet right now, she thought; they'd have their questions answered in seconds.
"I'll look up the year, you take the location. Okay?" she asked Rafe.
"Sounds good to me."
Rafe's job was easier, she knew - all he had to do was look up Italy and he'd find everything he needed, and he did. "The coordinates for Rome are latitude 41 degrees 54 minutes north and longitude 12 degrees 30 minutes east." He smiled at Bliss. "Malcolm will be able to figure out how to set it if we can't."
Her task was trickier - she had to figure out the year of the feast in which Romulus had held the first Neptunalia, when the Sabine women were captured. Should she look up Rome? Romulus? Neptunalia? Sabine women? She finally found what she was looking for in an entry entitled "The Rape of the Sabine Women." She realized that later scholars changed their theories about what had really happened on that day - and that "rape" had been just another word for "kidnapping," which was why the painting had been called The Abduction of the Sabine Women when she'd seen it in the museum.
"Have you found anything?" Rafe asked.
"Almost there," she said. The information was pretty confusing, and she wasn't sure how trustworthy the date the encyclopedia listed was. "It says eighth century BC, but the dates are a little vague. As best as I can tell, it was 752 BC. I'd hate to be off, though - who knows where we'd end up?"
"If that's the best information we can find, it's better than nothing," Rafe said.
They headed back to find the group in heated discussion. "We're trying to figure out what Romulus has to gain by killing all of those women," Lawson said.
"Does anyone have a theory?" asked Bliss.
"Not exactly. But I'm pretty sure it has to do with all the things that have been changing lately. It's not just the Gates of Hell that are falling - that's part of it, but it's more than that," Lawson said.
"Like what?"
"Mac, you want to take this one?" Edon said.
"The oculi being lit, the dark roads being discovered. Like Marrok said, they seem to be signs that the power of the wolves is returning, and I think Lucifer wants to go back and stop it. If the wolves get their power back, it will be harder, if not impossible, to keep turning us into hellhounds," Malcolm said.
"The ancient wolves were immortal, right?" asked Bliss. "Romulus was a wolf, yes? Before he was a hound. One of the ancients."
"Yes." Lawson nodded.
"But all the wolves - like you guys - can breed. You can have pups."
"Litters, even," Ahramin added drily. "It's why we're all close in age."
Bliss looked at them, her face flushed with excitement. "I know who the Sabines are."
Lawson looked at her expectantly.
"Only mortals were given the gift of procreation. Vampires cannot procreate, they only reincarnate in new bodies for every cycle. But you can breed, and while you have extraordinary strength and power, you are mortal, which means the ancient wolves - the Praetorian Guard - the Romans - bred with human women. The Sabines are your human mothers."
"And Lucifer ..." Lawson said, his face growing darker.
"Wants to kill you all. He wants to stop wolves from being born. Especially one of you," she said, looking directly at Lawson.
"What?"
"Isn't it clear? He has to stop you from being born. Erase you from the timeline, from history. Lucifer will sacrifice his whole army for it, all his hellhounds, rather than risk the rebellion and the chance that you might live to fight for the other side."
"What are you talking about?"
She was breathless with her own realization.
"You are Fenrir. The great wolf whom legend has foretold will free the wolves from slavery and return them to the glory of the true Praetorian Guard."
There was silence as the group digested this new information. Bliss saw Lawson's brothers look at him in a new light, and even Ahramin was gazing at Lawson with a respectful air.
Lawson frowned and crossed his arms, looking uncomfortable with all the attention. "You don't know that for sure."
"But think about it," she said. "You can enter hallowed ground, and you can make portals through the worlds, something the other wolves can't. And you said so yourself, after your escape there were many others who followed your path to freedom. 'We freed ourselves.' You certainly did. Marrok knew who you were. It was why he encouraged you to escape, why he risked stealing the chronolog. Because it was time. Because you are Fenrir."
"Well then," Malcolm said. "What are we waiting for? Let's go to Rome."