“It was easy enough to get her out of the way—Dolph believed me when I told him Leena would be fine going into Morgan’s house. He was supposed to die that night as well, the stubborn bastard. But in the end it was easy enough to get rid of him, too.”
“You killed them both,” she whispered, still trying to process what he’d revealed. She was suddenly glad there was a chair holding her up, because she wouldn’t have trusted her legs to do the job. “You lied to me about everything.”
“I also saved you. Life is full of contradictions, isn’t it?” All the amusement melted from his expression, and he leaned even closer. “By the end of the year, things had only gotten worse. Their Conclave was coming up, and the Order was growing increasingly desperate to find their artifacts. I knew if the raids got ahold of you, the Order would keep you. I couldn’t risk losing you, so I did the only thing I could. I used Ishtar’s Key to hide you.”
He held up the cuff and examined the stone. This stone didn’t have the crack bisecting its smooth surface. Even from that distance, Esta could feel its call.
“I’d experimented with it myself, and I knew it could be used to focus or amplify magical power, even if I wasn’t completely sure what it would do for you. You were too small to have any control over your power, but I knew that if I got you scared enough, you’d use your affinity. So I locked you in a closet, and when you stopped crying, I opened the door to find you gone. Exactly as I’d hoped. Far out of the reach of the Order.
“They took me in, of course, and the interrogation wasn’t an easy one. I didn’t exactly walk away from it,” he said, gesturing to his leg. “When I got back, the old woman I’d left watching the room said you’d never returned. I’d expected you to be back in minutes, maybe hours after the Order’s men left.” He frowned. “Ishtar’s Key was more powerful than I’d realized, and you made me wait quite a while longer before you finally showed up. More than ninety years. But I was right in the end—it all worked out. I waited, and while I waited, I planned, and sure enough, you eventually appeared. As I knew you would.”
“You stole me. You stole my entire life.”
“I made you. I gave you a life you would never have had back then. And now you’re going to repay the favor.” He slipped the cuff onto her arm.
She could sense its heat, the call of its magic, but her blood still wasn’t quite clear of whatever drug he’d given her, so she couldn’t draw on it.
“Do you know what time is, Esta?” Professor Lachlan smiled when she didn’t answer. “It’s the substance that connects everything, the indefinable quality that transcends everything. It is the quintessence of existence—Aether. There was a reason I wanted you, a reason I saved you.”
“Aether?” Esta asked, remembering Harte’s words on the bridge.
He took the dagger, the one she’d stolen from Schwab’s mansion that fateful night when everything had started to go wrong, and examined its tip. “It’s a bit primitive, I know, but these things do tend to work better with a little blood.”
Esta held herself steady, refusing to so much as flinch when the Professor approached her with the knife. Slowly, he traced it across her chest, just beneath her collarbone. She didn’t even feel the bite of the blade. Her entire world had imploded—she’d betrayed her friends in the past and now she’d been betrayed by the only family she’d ever known. Everything she thought she knew about who she was or why she’d been saved was a lie. With everyone turned against her, she had no way out.
What was a little blood, a little pain in the face of all that?
When he was done, when her wound had started to feel hot, he tucked the knife into the bodice of her dress, so its blade was pointing down toward her belly and the Pharaoh’s Heart lay flush against her skin.
“Aether connects all of the elements,” he explained, “and so I will use your affinity to connect the stones. With them united, I’ll be able to control the power of the Book.”
“And what about me?” she said, hating the way her voice shook. “What happens to me?”
“I expect the same thing that happened to all the Mageus whose power was taken to create the original stones.” He gave her an unreadable look. “You’re just the vessel.”
She tried to struggle against the ropes again, but with the dagger against her skin, she couldn’t move without slicing herself to ribbons.
“Now, now. It’ll only be a few more minutes.” Professor Lachlan smiled softly then, and it wasn’t the cold smile of Nibsy Lorcan, but instead was the smile Esta had grown up with, the smile she had craved so desperately as a child.
That betrayal sliced deeper than any wound the dagger could make.
But she lifted her chin. She would not let him know how afraid she was. The only thing she would allow him was her hate.
Professor Lachlan returned to the table and retrieved the Book. He ignored her as he flipped to a page he’d carefully marked, and then he began to read aloud.
At first it sounded like Latin, but as he droned on, the tenor of his voice changed, as though something had come over him, and she could no longer understand the individual words. As he chanted, the syllables grew more and more strange, until they no longer sounded like words, until his voice no longer sounded human, and as he chanted, the stones in the pieces of metal pressed against her skin began to grow warm. On and on he went, until time seemed to lose all meaning, until the heat from the stones felt as though it would burn straight through to her bones, until a strange wind had begun to swirl around the library, rustling the papers until it grew strong enough to send them into the air. Until the lights began to flicker. Until all at once, a terrible roaring filled her ears.
And then everything went dark.
The air in the room went still.
But Esta wasn’t gone.
CONTINGENCIES
A flame flickered nearby, illuminating the deep wrinkles of Professor Lachlan’s face as he approached her. “You’re still alive,” he said softly, like he was talking to himself more than her. “It didn’t work.”
“I can’t say I’m all that sorry.”
Professor Lachlan leaned close to her. “You will be.” He used the intercom to tell Logan to check the breakers in the basement, and he began removing the artifacts from her one by one, beginning with her cuff. A moment later the lights flickered on again.
“Did you say one of the words wrong?” she asked, purposely poking at him.
“No. I said everything perfectly,” he told her as he took the final artifact back. “I was afraid this might happen. I was afraid it had been too long.”
“So your grand plan isn’t going to work after all?” She didn’t allow herself to hope. Not so long as she was still tied to the chair.
“Of course it will. There might not be enough magic left in the world for the ritual to work now, but there was before. So you’ll take the Book back to the boy I once was, back to a world where magic still had power and I was still young enough to use it.”
“Why would I ever do that?”