? ? ?
“You okay, kid?” Chae Rin asked from the backseat of our van. I was back in the land of the living, my body jolting to life in the passenger seat. But I could only answer her by rubbing the sweat off my face with both hands.
The old, rusty van Jin had given us was a vintage sixties Volkswagen. It was a classic, but barely maintained. There was rust around the edges. The paint job—white for the top half, red for the bottom—was dull and peeling, and the flannel curtains covering the windows smelled like cat. I guess they couldn’t have given us their best, but they could have spared us one that didn’t give me the jitters with each sudden shake. At least the gas tank was full.
It was going to be a long trip, an almost twenty-hour drive—and we’d just started it. Naomi had wanted us to get to the museum fast before the Sect, but “fast” was a luxury when you were driving across countries in a crappy car. We’d already given ourselves the inoculations so the Sect couldn’t track us. We’d also dropped James off at the first town out of the mountains. It’d actually taken him a while to come to, but after he had, despite still being a bit shaky, he’d scrounged up some money we’d need on the road and promised to let us know if he heard any rumblings from the Sect—or from Naomi. If she was even still alive. For Rhys’s sake, I hoped she was.
“I think inoculating myself made me weaker in there.” I held a hand against my head. “I guess it’s good that I was still able to get there in the first place, but I don’t know if it helped. I know we’re supposed to get into a place in the museum called the Little Room, but I didn’t get a sense of what we’re supposed to do once we get there.”
“It’s okay.” Lake had a whole bench to herself, lying down with her knapsack on the floor of the car beside her. “James told us Naomi already has a guy there waiting for us. He worked for Baldric. He’ll help us get in after hours.”
My phone buzzed with a text: Where are you?
I sucked in a breath. It was from Rhys.
“What is that?” Through my mirror, I could see Chae Rin gripping Lake’s seat to get a look. “Is that your phone?”
Another text: Are you hurt? Are you okay? Mom is in bad shape.
Naomi. I bit my lip as another one came in succession: Tell me where you are and I’ll come help you.
“Turn it off!” Chae Rin threw one of the dirty pillows that came with the van at my head. “We inoculated ourselves to make sure we didn’t get tracked, stupid.”
True. James had even given us a burner phone to use.
“She’s right, Maia,” Belle said. “They can track through Wi-Fi and GPS.”
Belle. She looked rigid in the driver’s seat, her knuckles white as she gripped the steering wheel.
My eyes lingered on her wrist until another pillow hurled by Chae Rin had me turning my cell phone off.
“Did he mention something specifically?” Lake asked, her sneakers pushing the old window curtains back and forth. “Baldric, I mean?”
“A lot of what he said didn’t make much sense.” I laid my head back against my seat. “He talked about shadows on the wall. . . .”
“Like in that desert hideout?”
I blinked. Yes. And that church in London. Shadows that looked like phantoms. But Pastor Charles had been adamant that they weren’t really shadows at all.
There’s more to Emilia Farlow’s old teachings than you would expect, Baldric had said. The secrets of the shadows . . . and the secrets of the beings who dwell among the shadows.
“He also said something about the sins of those little girls,” I repeated, sitting up quickly. “Back in the nineteenth century.”
“Wait!” Lake dove into her knapsack and pulled out the cigar box—the one we’d kept in our dorm back at the London facility.
Chae Rin’s eyebrow arched as she peered down at the box from behind Lake’s shoulder. “You had that in there?”
“Yep, brought it with me. I showed the other two in Toronto.” She cracked the lid open. “It’s just something you said, Maia. I’ve been trying to figure out what’s up with this doll.” Lake didn’t want to touch it, so Chae Rin did. Dried mud still painted its face brown. Chae Rin’s fingers pinned down its maid dress, and when she showed it to me I could see, once again, the torn-out eyes.
Chae Rin shook her head. “Freaky as hell,” she said, tugging gently at its disheveled hair made of black yarn.
“Exactly.” Lake shivered. “Gives you creepy little-girl vibes, doesn’t it? Alice and Nick. Weren’t they around back then?”
“Wait.” I stuck out my hand. “Show me the letter.”
Lake gave it to me, and I scanned it. I’d read it enough times this past month, but there was something nagging at me. I was missing something obvious. . . .
“There it is!” I tapped the paper. “Emilia!”
Chae Rin blinked. “Who?”
“?‘Two years, my dear friend, my sister,’?” I read, “?‘since you passed away, and I find my thoughts are still attached to you, to Patricia, to Emilia, and yes, even to Abigail. Perhaps it is guilt.’?”
“Emilia?” Lake repeated.
“In Natalya’s memories, Baldric mentioned Emilia Farlow.”
Belle quickly glanced down at the letter in my hands before directing her attention back to the road. “Emilia Farlow. The original creator of the Deoscali cult.”
“The cult that worships phantoms. But her teachings were different.” I remembered the serenity in Pastor Charles’s eyes as he’d explained it. “That the phantoms aren’t really phantoms at all—or that they’re not bad? Or maybe they’re bad under certain circumstances? I don’t know.” I pressed a hand against my forehead. “He said they control life and death. And fate.”
“Well, it can’t be a coincidence,” Chae Rin said.
“I agree.” Belle’s eyes were stern as she gazed into the horizon. “The secret volume has to tell us more. We should hurry.”
She pressed on the gas. Belle didn’t say much as he drove down the highway, the antiphantom nets, much like those in Britain, lining the roads as we traveled. It was only in the seventh hour, when the other two had fallen asleep, when my own eyelids were starting to feel heavy, that I felt comfortable saying anything to her.
“Belle . . . when I was scrying, I saw another of Natalya’s memories. Not just the one with Baldric.”
Belle seemed to understand what I was insinuating, probably from the guilt written all over my face—the guilt of prying into someone else’s darkest moments.
“You weren’t concentrating hard enough, then. Remember that scrying is dangerous, Maia. You should be careful.”