The Book of Blood and Shadow (20 page)

He was the one who found it.

Just a yellow sticky note, stuck in between a first edition of
The Leviathan
and an old issue of
Renaissance Quarterly
. On the front, the Hoff—or someone—had written
Ivan Glockner, Central Library, Prague, reference dept
. But it was the back of the note that
first caught my eye: the word
Hledači
, underlined, with a question mark, and above it, inked with enough pressure to break through the page: the eye, the lightning bolt.

Sometimes, maybe, it was better to be crazy than it was to be right.

“Seekers,” Eli said.

“What?”

“
Hledači
. It’s Czech. For
seekers
.”

So that’s why the word looked familiar.

The letters from Max’s room were in my bag, along with Elizabeth’s. I’d brought them just in case. In case of what, I didn’t know. Maybe I’d hoped I would find something that linked them all together. Something that made sense of them.

Maybe I’d hoped I was wrong.

I took out Max’s letter and handed it to Eli.

“What is this?” he asked.

“None of your business. There, at the bottom, that’s Czech, right? Can you read it?”

“None of my business, but you want me to …?”

“Yes.”

“This looks really old,” he said.

“Probably is.”

“Old like it should be in a library or a museum or somewhere with gloves and alarms and people shushing you.”

“Can you or can’t you?”

He squinted at the faded text, then read aloud. “ ‘I swear this solemn vow, that I will seek the
Lumen Dei
for the glory of my people, the glory of my land, and the glory of God. I will keep a pure heart and an iron will. If I fail, my sons will continue the search, and their sons, and on and on until the
Lumen Dei
has returned home. Today I am reborn a seeker.’ ”

“Hledači,”
I said, curling my tongue around the strange sounds.
Lay da chee
, the Hoff’s nonsense words, what I’d taken to be infantile babbling. The Hoff’s warning.

“ ‘Přísahám, že budu věrný Hledačům, a zasvěcuji svůj život hledání, dokud neskončí,’ ”
he continued. “ ‘I swear my allegiance to the seekers, and pledge my life to the search, until our search has ended.’ ” Eli looked up at me. The letter hid most of his face. “Where did you get this?”

“That’s not important.”

It couldn’t be.

23

You know I submit this report under great duress
, began the final letter in Chris’s mystery stash. I’d postponed translating it, knowing that this was the last of him, even though there was nothing of him in it.

Someday you will pay for the things you have done
.

The journey was uneventful. The astronomer was hesitant. He pretends to care only for advancement at court. But she charmed the truth out of him. He lives to search for answers, and believes this is where he will find them. She has sewn his calculations into the lining of her cloak. I leave this for you at the Golden Bough, and it will be my last until returning to Prague. For the rest of the journey, we will sleep under the stars. If all goes smoothly, we should arrive at the city wall on the Lord’s Day
.

You have promised not to harm her. I take you at your word. If you break that oath, no threat will stop me from acting
.

12 March 1599
.

I wondered if Elizabeth had known she was being spied on, and if she could have forgiven it if she’d known the spy was also protecting her. A cowardly weasel of a guardian angel was, I supposed, better than none at all.

24

The Whitman Center seemed dingier this time around, simultaneously less bucolic and less sinister. Adriane’s door was closed. I knocked, without thinking, then remembered, and felt like a gut-punched fool—until the knob turned in my grip, and Adriane opened the door.

“Surprise!” She twirled for me, radiant in a strappy yellow dress. Inside the Whitman Center, it was always summer. “You’re surprised, right?”

“I’m surprised.”

And then there was all the hugging, crying, snot dripping, and tear wiping you’d expect. She didn’t want to hear anything about what she’d missed in the last few weeks, nor did she have anything to say about her stay and gradual recovery at the Whitman Center, except that “you can turn any place into a spa if you try hard enough, although I’ll admit the food is less than five-star.” She’d had no visitors, as far as she knew, aside from her parents, and as soon as she’d snapped out of it enough to be aware of anything, she’d asked them to make sure I stayed away, along with everyone else, until she was completely well. She couldn’t stand the idea of anyone seeing her like that; so, in true Adriane form, she explained that from here on in, we would pretend no one had. She didn’t ask how I was doing, and she didn’t mention any strange visitors pretending to be her dead boyfriend. The incoherent babbling, the wails of “Oh my god, I was so worried” and “Did you see me on the six o’clock news,” the derision and
subsequent dismissal of all well-meaning messages from well-meaning nonfriends, all of that was easy. When she slid to the floor in an effortless split and pressed her face to her knee with that soft, familiar groan of limb-stretching ecstasy, I almost started crying all over again.

She was back.

“Are you going to ask me?” she said, face against her leg, a curtain of hair shielding her expression.

I didn’t want to. Not after what had happened the last time.

“Well?” She looked up.

I shook my head. This all seemed too good to be true. A fantasy, a respite, and so necessarily temporary. I didn’t want to do something that might make us both wake up.

“Ask.”

She really was back. When Adriane gave an order, it was hard to defy. Especially when it was an order I was so desperate to follow.

“Do you remember anything?” I asked.

She didn’t flinch, much less scream. When she raised her head, there was a faint, plastic smile fixed on her face.

“Nothing. One hundred percent blank.” The smile hardened. “I guess that makes me the lucky one.”

I didn’t argue with her, though probably I should have, since she was the one who still had a fading scar on her cheek, the one who would sleep here, with the fluorescent lights, hospital sheets, locked doors, and distant screams, while I went home and curled up in my own bed, the one who’d planned to spend the rest of her life with Chris and, even if the images were buried in some inaccessible corner of her brain, had sat in a pool of his blood and watched him slip away. It was the closest we ever came to acknowledging what I’d gone through while she was sleeping; that I’d gone through anything. For Adriane, that was a lot.

“My turn,” she said. “Heard from Max?”

“He sent me a message.” It felt strange to say it. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to have someone around who could be trusted. “I think he wants my help, but—”

“Thank god. I knew he wasn’t—you know.”

“They think he did it,” I said, when what I wanted to say was,
Do you think he did it?

“Obviously. What more would you expect from Chapman’s crack law-enforcement team? Competence?”

“So, you don’t believe it? You think he’s innocent?”

“You even have to ask?”

“I know how you feel about him, and—”

“Nora, come on. He’s a mouse. Not a
killer
.” Adriane laughed, then broke off abruptly. “Wait,
you
don’t think he did it. Do you?”

I had told myself I was completely convinced of his innocence. But if that was true, why was I suddenly so relieved? Adriane had been there. Even if she couldn’t remember, some part of her would know. If Max had done something.

Of course he hadn’t done something.

She squeezed my hand. “He wouldn’t have left unless he had to.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling myself. But …”

“He’s alive,” Adriane said. “You’re not allowed to feel sorry for yourself. Eventually
he’ll
come back.”

The unstated corollary hung between us. There was a hard silence.

“How are you doing?” I asked finally. “Really.”

“I told you, my sanity’s been fully certified by the highest authorities in nutland. They’re kicking me out of here in a couple days.”

“No, I mean … with what happened. Chris.”

“We don’t have to talk about that.”

“But if you want to … I mean, you know I’m …” Maybe I
should have felt sorry for them then, all the parents and teachers and friends who’d ever stuttered through some awkward attempt to fix what couldn’t be fixed while I stonewalled, mute and blank, until they ran out of words and walked away, statue-still if they made the mistake of hugging, stroking, squeezing, or otherwise invading my sacrosanct personal space. But instead I just hated myself for being one of them, when I should have known better.

“What do
you
want to talk about, Nora?” There was an edge to her voice. “You want to tell me all about discovering ‘the body,’ and getting the blood off your hands and what Chris looked like full of holes, whether his eyes were open, whether you screamed, whether I screamed?” Her voice didn’t shake; her body was perfectly still. Everything about her was steady, hard—but it was a brittle kind of hard. Like she knew if she tried to bend, even a little, she would break. “Or maybe you want me to talk. You want to hear what it was like to wake up in this place and have some random nurse in orange polyester tell me, ‘Good morning, it’s Thursday, the sun is shining, your parents brought flowers, my name is Sandra, oh, and by the way, you’ve been a zombie for three weeks and your boyfriend is dead.’ ” She raised her hand to tuck her hair behind her ear, and that was the only tell: It was trembling. “Talking won’t fix this. So for future reference, the answer to how I’m doing is ‘Fine.’ If you can’t deal with that …”

“You’re fine,” I said, and it wasn’t until I did that I realized how much
I’d
wanted to talk—how tired I was of pretending. But I wasn’t the one who mattered right now. “I got it.”

Adriane had never been much of a crier. But then, until now, she’d never had much to cry about. Perfect boyfriend, perfect life-sized Barbie-style dream house equipped with perfectly competent parental units, perfect GPA paired with a perfectly cultivated pretense of academic slacking, perfect posture, perfect hair, perfect
nails, perfect love, perfect life. But it occurred to me now that it was easy to hide tears when you had the perfect smile. Maybe she cried more than I knew.

“So,” she said.

“So,” I said.

“Gossip update. Never a bad place to start.”

I did as she asked. I told her about Holly Chandler’s mid-volleyball wardrobe malfunction and Pranti Shah’s hookup with Ben Katz, even though he was ostensibly still sleeping with his semi-girlfriend of four years and also, it was said, the new English teacher. We faked our smiles until, gradually, they shaded into real ones. It was easier than it should have been to let ourselves forget.

“Sing it for me,” she said after I told her about our history teacher’s drunken turn at a local karaoke night, when he had, according to the rumors (and lyrics) flying around school the next day, belted out an improvised love song to his ex-wife.

“Not going to happen.”

“I’m in a mental institution,” she pointed out. “I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to indulge my every whim.”

We were both so good at pretending nothing mattered. I wondered if it was possible to be too good. “I promise, if you start believing you’re Elvis, I’ll buy you a sequined jumpsuit,” I told her.

“Please. If I were going to have delusions of grandeur, I’d pick someone with much better fashion sense. Speaking of which, I’ve taken advantage of my recent leisure time to start putting together an itinerary. And don’t you dare complain about the store-to-museum ratio: Trust me, culture goes much better with a side of couture.”

“What am I missing? Itinerary for what?”

She rolled her eyes. “Hello?
Bonjour?
Paris? Two weeks from today?”

“Adriane …” I glanced at the bars on the windows, the door that didn’t lock from the inside.

“I told you, I’m fine, and as of Saturday, I’m home. Plenty of time to shop and pack for
les vacances magnifiques
.”

“Are you insane?” I said, without thinking.

“Not anymore.” She didn’t smile.

“I can’t go on that trip,” I said. “Neither can you. Not after what happened. The whole point was to go together, and now …”

“ ‘And now …’? ‘What happened’? Since when did you become one of
those
people?” she said, suddenly angry. And behind the anger was something else, something that I knew she would never let me see. Something that could break her. We’d never had so much in common. “Chris is
dead
. Someone
killed him
. That’s
what happened
. You think sitting around here crying is going to change that?”

“You think going to another country will? You think you’d have
fun
?”

“It’s not about fun,” she said. “Not anymore.”

“Then what?”

“Look, you’re right. This isn’t the way we planned it. Obviously. But if I’ve got a chance to get the hell out of here, even for a week, I’m taking it. Or rather,
ma mère
and
mon père
are taking it for me.”

“What?”

“They claim that distance and European air will cure all my ills. Coincidentally, the week they’ve booked for themselves at some spa in Aruba will do the same for them. No way are they canceling their trip to look after their poor, wounded daughter.” She laughed, harshly. “That parent-of-the-year award must have gotten lost in the mail.”

“Adriane, I’m sure if you ask them to stay …”

“They’re going,” she said. “Hence, I’m going. Hence, you’re going.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“It is if you want it to be.”