For the next few hours, the five of us sprawled around the yacht, on lounge chairs, on the floor, in the sparkling midday sunlight out on the deck, all deep in thought. Elodie was muttering to herself about the scientific implications of what a blood union could mean. Jack had written all the clues down and was trying slightly different translations. I had a thesaurus, a translation dictionary, and regular old Google search up on my phone. The bracelet was next to me, and every once in a while, I’d try a new password. By lunchtime, though, I could barely put a sentence together, much less think about synonyms and riddles and how I wished I knew French idioms. I was about to throw the bracelet across the room.
“Where will we go?” Jack said quietly from the deck chair next to me. “Paris?”
I buried my face in my hands. “I guess.” The bracelet being in France made as much sense as anything.
Jack nodded. “I’ll tell everybody.”
I glared at the bracelet through my spread fingers. We had to be missing something.
Look where he looks. Those who gave all hold the key. Then there was the bracelet we already had: Only to the true. True. Accurate. Authentic. Legitimate. Genuine. The words were still scrolling through my mind, like my subconscious was trying to tell me something I was missing. True. Factual. Trustworthy. Morally right. Like Jack’s compass, true north.
But it wasn’t like Napoleon had anything to do with the Saxons’ compass. He was a Dauphin relative. I’d tried the word north earlier, anyway, even though it wasn’t in French, just in case. I rubbed my eyes hard. It did seem like Napoleon liked the physical in his riddles at least as much as he liked wordplay. We’d had to actually go to the gargoyle at the top of Notre-Dame to discover where he was looking. And that was where we found the diary Mr. Emerson had hidden inside the sarcophagus at the Louvre.
Suddenly, the fog cleared.
Look where he looks. That was what the clue had said. And on the first bracelet: Where he looks, it will be found. When it is found, my twin and I will reveal all.
I sat up straight. Oh my God. That was it. This was what had been at the tip of my tongue for days. We’d been ignoring the “where he looks” clue that kept popping up because we’d already found the diary by using it, but Mr. Emerson had hidden the diary.
Not Napoleon.
We were such idiots.
Mr. Emerson had figured out Napoleon’s clues and knew where the gargoyle was looking, so he hid something in that line of sight—at the Louvre.
But the “where he looks, it will be found” clue Napoleon left on the bracelet couldn’t refer to the diary we found at the Louvre. It had to refer to something that was there in Napoleon’s time. At the Louvre or anywhere else the gargoyle might be pointing. Look where he looks. Where he looks, it will be found. Those who gave all hold the key.
The password was somewhere in the gargoyle’s sight line.
I was so keyed up, I had to type the louvre paris into my phone four times before I spelled it right. Finally, I brought up pictures. It was unlikely we were looking for something inside the museum. The collection would have changed too much since Napoleon’s time. Maybe there was a really obvious inscription on the building that unlocked the bracelets.
But I got frustrated quickly. Most of the photos weren’t good enough to tell if there was anything there at all. I called everyone into the kitchen.
“This isn’t a bad idea,” Jack said, his eyes lighting up. “Or maybe it’s not at the Louvre. That was the right direction for the gargoyle, but there are an infinite number of other buildings in the same direction.”
“‘Those who gave all,’” I thought out loud. “It sounds like someone who’s dead. Like a martyr. Or a saint? Could it be a church?”
“It could be any number of things,” Stellan said.
He pulled up a map of Paris on his phone, but it was too hard to continue the gargoyle’s sight line on the small screen.
“We need a map,” I said.
Elodie shook her head. “What we need is to go to Paris.”
CHAPTER 18
A few hours later, we were on the ground, back in the city that felt more like home than anywhere had in a long time.
Since we couldn’t let the Saxons know we were with Stellan and Elodie, Colette left me and Jack in Paris before continuing to Cannes, while Stellan and Elodie had taken a separate plane. During the flight, Jack and I studied one of the paper maps of Paris we’d picked up in an Athens bookstore. We’d isolated the area that could be in the gargoyle’s line of sight, and now we were making a list of landmarks that fell within it. Churches, small museums. Anything that may have been important to Napoleon.
I got out my phone in the cab on the way from the airport. Six missed calls from my father. I listened to the first voice mail just as Jack’s phone rang.
“Elodie?” he said, then sat forward in his seat. “What? Is he—thank God.”
In my ear, my father’s voice said, “Avery, there’s been another attack, in Paris. They tried to get to Luc Dauphin. Call me as soon as you can.”
I gasped out loud. Jack put down his phone.