“No, it’s not. Not yet,” Nibsy said.
The shot went off, shattering the night before Dolph even realized the boy was holding a gun, before he could turn and fight.
“But you are.”
As Dolph slumped onto Leena’s grave, everything fell into place.
In that instant, Dolph knew what he should have figured out long before but had been too willingly blind to see. Of course it had been Nibs, the very person who had guided his every decision after he lost Leena. The one who had known what the Brink took from him, who had suggested that he use Paul Kelly to pressure Harte.
Even before all of that, it was Nibs who had assured him that Leena would be safe. How deep had the boy’s game gone? How blind had Dolph been in his willingness to trust?
He’d wanted an ace in his pocket and had chosen a serpent instead.
But the knowledge had come too late. He felt his heart beat once, twice more, and then the cold night faded as the world around him went dark.
A SECRET TOLD
Khafre Hall
The click of the heavy safe door swinging open echoed through the room. Esta could only watch as the men began to wrestle Harte into the massive safe. They’d rehearsed for this moment, and every single time, the rehearsal involved her getting into the Glass Casket. Her making her way into the Mysterium. Her finding the Book and the stone, and then her taking them, sifting through the layers of time and giving them to Professor Lachlan, where they belonged.
She’d been so stupid not to be prepared for him doing something like this, but she wouldn’t go down without a fight.
“Wait!” she shouted, drawing the attention of the men to her. “A kiss for luck?”
The men exchanged glances before shrugging and stepping aside.
“She could have a key,” Evelyn said. “You should check her to be sure.”
But if Evelyn had thought to expose her, it didn’t work. It took only a moment for Esta to open her mouth and demonstrate that she hadn’t hidden a key or pick there, and then they let her by.
Harte’s expression was stony as she approached him.
“Good luck, darling,” she said, loud enough for anyone onstage to hear as she slid her arms around his neck and tilted her face toward him. As her lips came closer to his, she saw the question—the challenge—in his eye. And she pulled time still.
He gasped as the world went slow around him, his eyes wide with confusion, and then, with wonder. “So this is what you do,” he murmured. “This is your affinity?”
“Shut up and focus,” she snapped. “We don’t have much time.”
“It looks like we have all the time in the world,” he said wryly as he nodded to the nearly frozen room around them.
“It’s only slowed, not stopped completely. I won’t be able to hold it indefinitely.” She shook him a little. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I could ask the same of you,” he said coldly. “But I already know.”
Her stomach sank at the memory of ?his touch in the carriage. “I’m not the one switching the act up.” But the words sounded weak, even to her.
“No?” he asked. “You weren’t planning to take everything and leave us all holding the bag?
“You don’t understand—”
“You told me the old man—your father—was dead, but that’s not true, is it? ?You were going to take him the Book,” he said, confirming her worst fears. “I’d started to trust you. Everyone trusted you.”
“Maybe they shouldn’t have.” Her voice came out so much flatter, so much less confident than she’d intended.
Suddenly, she was painfully aware of the way the light slanted, the way the motes of dust hung suspended and unmoving around them in the beams of the footlights, like stars come to earth. She wanted to explain everything, tell him exactly why she needed the Book, but he was right. She’d take the Book back to Professor Lachlan like she was supposed to, but she couldn’t lie to herself about what it meant for the people here.
“Nothing’s more important than the job I have to do,” she whispered, willing him to understand.
“I sure hope that’s true.” Harte’s expression shuttered. “Because they’ll go after Dolph, you know. They’ll go after all those friends of yours.”
“They’ll go after them anyway. I have to take the Book. To protect it. To protect them. If I don’t do this, they’re dead—Dolph, Nibsy. ?Who knows who else.”
His eyes went cold. “Is that all Nibsy gets out of your duplicity?”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with him.”
Harte laughed, a derisive huff of air that sounded as cracked and broken as the trust between them. “This has everything to do with him.”
He wasn’t making any sense, but she had to make him understand. She had to convince him. “If you take the Book now, every Mageus in this city will be lost.”
“They’re lost if I don’t take the Book,” he said, and he told her about the machine that Jack had built.
“Why didn’t you tell me that morning?”
“Probably for the same reason you didn’t you tell me the truth about the old man you called your father. You’ve never trusted me.”
“And for good reason. Look at what you are doing! You’re leaving me at the Order’s mercy while you make off with the Book.”
“You don’t get it, do you? Nothing about this is meant to hurt you,” he said, regret thick in his voice. “This was all just supposed to be misdirection, to take the suspicion away from you. I was going to come back for you. We were going to get out of the city together. Destroy the Book together. . . . Before I saw what I saw. Before I understood what you’re planning.”
Her chest tightened. “That’s easy for you to say now.”
“No, it’s not. It’s the hardest thing in the world to admit to what you gave up.” He leaned his head toward her until their foreheads touched. “Unless you’ve changed your mind? Come with me. Help me destroy the Book. It’s the only way to ensure the Mageus are safe from Jack and all those like him.”
“I can’t,” she said, hating herself a little for how much she wanted to say yes. “Even if I wanted to, it would never work.”
He pulled away from her, his expression stony from her rejection.
She ignored the hurt in his eyes, the anger in his expression. “This isn’t about me,” she whispered to him. “This is so much bigger than the two of us. ?Your life won’t mean anything if you go through with this. If you take the Book, maybe you will keep Jack away from it, but you’ll also condemn all of our kind to another century of the Order’s control. ?You will condemn magic—and all Mageus with it—to a weakened half-life of existence. And it will never recover,” she told him. “We will never recover. There is no walking away from this.”
“You can’t know that.”