The Book of Blood and Shadow (26 page)

Tourists still choked the main avenues, families given way to drunken stag parties, hooting frat brothers in matching sweatshirts marking them as the Prague Drinking Team, the lucky ones pedaling along on six-seated bikes whose license plates read party on wheels. But the side streets were deserted. Graffiti glowed under the orangey lights: crude, angry slashes the color of blood and rust sprayed across gritty stone walls; words stuffed with too many consonants; arrows and faces and one faint marking that could have been either a cross or a swastika; cryptic symbols of all kinds except the one I was half determined and half afraid to find. Our footsteps echoed against the stone.

“What if he’s not there?” I asked as we descended the walkway that led from the Karlův most to the island of Kampa. Below us flowed a still, narrow waterway: Certovka, the Devil’s Stream.

“He’ll be there,” Adriane said.

“And then what?”

She didn’t answer.

A slender, solitary figure leaned against the railing, his back to the water, his face in shadow. I didn’t let myself believe it until he tilted his head toward us and his glasses glinted in the moonlight.

Max.

He stepped into the pool of light beneath a nearby streetlamp and smiled. He looked thinner than I remembered, and paler, but it could have been the light, which gave his skin a jaundiced glow.

Max.

He held up a hand in greeting but otherwise didn’t move, waiting for us to come to him. That was how it always played out in my dreams—except when I got close enough to touch him, he
would always jerk out of reach. He would run and I would chase him, but never catch up.

Max.

Here.

Alive.

He was supposed to make everything okay. He was supposed to fix everything that was broken, fix me. He was supposed to hold me when I threw myself into his arms, squeeze me until I felt safe. He was supposed to tell us why Chris was dead and why he had disappeared and why everything had fallen apart, and then he was supposed to know how to put it all back together.

I stopped short of him, a few feet of distance between us. Something was wrong—wrong with me. Because seeing him was supposed to make me feel again, to fill up the empty hole. I did feel: Angry. Relieved. Sad. Grateful. Confused. Scared.

But I didn’t feel okay.

I didn’t feel safe.

“Max!” It was Adriane who cried out his name, Adriane who ran to him, tears streaming down her face, arms stretched wide. She clung to him, and he let her, and no matter how they felt about each other, there was nothing strange about it. They had both loved Chris; they had both endured, together, whatever had happened that night; they had both survived. Adriane was the normal one, her face buried in the shoulder she had once deemed too narrow and bony, her body shuddering uncontrollably in what she’d once termed Max’s “spindly octopus arms.” Max watched me, over her shoulder, but he held on and waited for her breathing to slow and her sobs to ebb. When they did, and she finally let go, her face was tearstained but serene.

Something was definitely wrong with me.

He closed the distance between us.

“Where have you been all this time?” I said, not
I love you, I missed you, thank god you’re safe
. “Why are we here? What happened that night? Where the hell did you go?” Not
How could you leave me alone?

He kissed me.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Behind me, there was an aborted scream. Then a muffled grunt. I whirled around. Adriane struggled in the grip of a hooded man, his arm pinned across her chest, his hand slapped over her mouth. Then there were more of them; they were everywhere, pouring out of the shadows. Someone punched Max. Someone lunged at me. I flung my fists blindly, waiting for some self-defense mechanism to kick in, trying to remember the hierarchy of pressure points we’d been taught in gym class, aim first for the eyes, the neck, or was it the kidneys? I screamed for Max as two of them wrestled him to the ground. My fist connected with a stomach and my elbow knocked something hard, like a chin or a skull, but that was wrong, I remembered, I was supposed to go for the soft spots, the membranes—and probably I wasn’t supposed to be thinking through instructions as rough hands yanked my arms behind my back and bound my wrists. I shouted uselessly, who are you and what are you doing and let go of me and, more than once, help, but no one answered and no one came.

My arms were locked behind my back, and there was nothing to break the fall when the hands forced me to the ground and knocked me onto my back. The man’s face was shrouded by his hood, and I could make out nothing but the tip of a nose and the whites of his teeth. He leaned over me, large and terrifying—and stupid, because as he did, I brought up my knee and caught him on the chin, hard, then, in the same motion, gave his balls the kick that had made me a third-grade kickball champ, and with a soft moan, he stumbled backward.

All you did was make him angry, I thought.

But he was already angry. Guess what: So was I.

I scrabbled my feet against the ground and struggled into a sitting position, because now all I had to do was get up before he did, kick him while he was down … and find some way to save Adriane and Max, all with my hands tied behind my back.

“
Policie!
” someone shouted behind us. “
Police! Polizia! Policie! Stůjte, nebo budeme střílet!
”

Spooked by the interruption, the hooded men left us in the dirt, and scattered.

“They attacked us!” I cried, climbing off the ground. “We didn’t do anything.”

Adriane was slouched against the wall, dazed and breathing heavily. “Did that seriously just happen?” she asked the night. “Tell me that didn’t just happen.”

Max, his arms and legs bound, lay curled in a fetal position against the stone base of the bridge. “I’m okay,” he called softly.

I felt the laughter burbling up in me again. Sure, we were all okay.

Czech cops didn’t look much like cops. There were two of them, one in jeans and a blue hoodie, one in a gray trench coat, both in their early twenties.

“Thank you,” I said, twisting around so they could undo whatever was pinning my wrists together.

The one in the trench coat called out something in Czech—then, without releasing any of us, both cops turned their backs and walked off into the night.

“Wait!” Adriane shouted. “Where are you going? You’re cops! You have to help us!”

“I didn’t pay them enough for that.” Eli stepped out of an alley. “And trust me, you should be glad they’re not real cops. That’s trouble you don’t need.”

My jaw actually dropped. “What the hell?”

He shook his head and flipped open a pocketknife, beckoning me toward him with the blade. “Questions later. First—”

I didn’t move. He snatched my wrists and before I could pull away, the knife slashed down. I was free.

15

To his credit, Eli cut through everyone’s bonds and gave us a chance to ascertain there were no broken bones or gashed wounds before he began to gloat. The first thing—he said, and we all agreed—was to get off the street before the hooded men wised up and came back. “I know a place,” Max said, and though he balked at the idea of letting Eli trail along, he could hardly argue with the probability that Eli had saved our lives. That had to be worth something. And whatever lies he may have told or secrets he was keeping, he was still Chris’s cousin. That was worth more. Max led us through the narrow streets of Malá Strana until we reached a stone hostel, U Zlatého lva, that looked not all that different from the one we’d left behind that afternoon, except that a stone lion paced the top of the doorframe, instead of a boar. Max held my hand the whole way. It helped.

A little.

Max’s room was even smaller than ours had been. A narrow window abutted a wall of stone, and a rusted, leaking sink jutted out beside the bed. We’d passed the communal bathroom on our way down the grimy hallway, a single flickering fluorescent bulb strobing our movements into jerky, stop-motion animation. The door locked behind us, but the ancient hinges looked like something an angry toddler could knock out with one good kick.

“We should be safe here,” Max said. “For a while, at least.”

“Safe from who?” Adriane asked. “Who the hell were those guys? What is going
on
?”

“Yes, Max, we’re all ears,” Eli drawled. He was leaning against the door, as if positioning himself for a quick getaway. “Tell us all about what’s going on and why absolutely none of it can be blamed on you.”

Max pushed his glasses up on his nose. “I’ll tell you everything,” he told me quietly. “You. Not him.” He put an arm around me. It felt strange, after all this time, to be cradled again—to be his.

“Is ‘everything’ going to include the part where you kill your best friend?” Eli asked.

I squeezed Max’s hand. “The police think—”

“I know what they think.”

“Is that why …” I wasn’t sure I wanted this answer. “Is that why you ran?”

He touched my face with the back of his hand, tracing his knuckles along the line of my jaw. “You know I wouldn’t have done that.”

“Enough.” Adriane’s voice was harsh, with a ragged edge. She’d pressed herself into the corner with her hands crossed over her chest. It seemed wrong, Adriane on her own, Max and me together. I was supposed to be the odd man out, the cheese standing alone, she must have been thinking. But Chris was dead, and Max was warm and breathing and holding on to me. A display that suddenly felt obscene. “Just tell us what happened that night.”

“She doesn’t remember,” I told him.

Max’s eyes narrowed. “None of it?”

She shook her head. “So—please.”

He took his arm off my shoulder, and let his hands fall together in his lap. “I didn’t kill Chris,” he said.

I leaned against him. “We know that.” He edged away.

“Speak for yourself,” Eli said.

“This is going to sound crazy,” Max said. “I thought it was crazy, too. But it all has to do with the Book. And this device called the
Lumen Dei—
”

“And the
Hledači
, right,” Eli said. “Now tell us something we don’t know, like what they’d want with a clueless American college student.”

“You know about them?” Max said, his eyes wide.

“You tell us,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”

“I didn’t want to get you involved in this,” he said.

I just looked at him, the
too late
implied.

He sighed. “Those men, the
Hledači
. It turns out they’ve been watching us all along. They watch anyone who’s seriously researching the Voynich manuscript. They think it’s the key.”

“To what?” I asked.

“To putting the device back together. It disappeared four hundred years ago, and for whatever reason, they think the pieces are still out there somewhere, and the Book can help them find it, or help them make a new one.”

“Explain this to me like I’m—oh, I don’t know, sane,” Adriane said. “These people honestly believe there’s a four-hundred-year-old machine that will hook them up to God?”

“The device itself actually makes sense,” Max said, slipping easily, even under these circumstances, into professor mode. “There was an explosion of scientific and technological advances in the Renaissance—people like da Vinci were practically designing airplanes. And everyone’s reason for doing anything was to get closer to God. Alchemy, astronomy, biology—the whole point was to read the Book of Nature like it was a second Bible. Science was just another form of religion—a different way of knowing the world. That was supposed to be a metaphor, but it kind of
makes sense that eventually someone would have thought to do it for real. Find God. With a machine.”

“I suppose the polite gentlemen in the hooded robes sat you down and gave you a fascinating lecture on all this?” Eli said.

He didn’t know Max like I did, and so he couldn’t read the tea leaves in Max’s face, the pale spots behind his ears and the way his lips moved soundlessly as if his body were rehearsing a rebuttal even before his mind came up with one. Max had a temper, but he didn’t yell. Adriane had, early on, classified him as a goat: ornery, but mostly harmless. He didn’t look harmless.

“They didn’t have to tell me,” he said flatly. “I’m a history major. I read.”

“You believe this machine really exists?” I asked him.

“It doesn’t matter—they believe it.” He shuddered. “And whether it exists or not, they’re crazy. They attacked the Hoff. They killed Chris. And they …”

“What?” Eli said. “They stole your lunch money? They gave you a wedgie? What makes you so special that they just left you alone?”

“They didn’t,” Max said, so softly that only I could hear him. He dropped his head. “They were waiting for me when I got to Chris’s house. Three of them. Chris was already—” He swallowed hard. “Adriane, you were there, too, but … blank. You didn’t answer me. It was like you didn’t even see me. They were arguing with each other, about Chris. They weren’t supposed to kill him, at least not before they got what they wanted—someone messed up. And when they saw me … I ran.”

“You left her there,” I said. “Alone and helpless. With a house full of psycho killers.”

“I didn’t think,” he said. “I just ran. But they caught up with me.”

“Maybe that’s why they left me alive,” Adriane said slowly. She was pale, but calm. “They might have stuck around and killed me if you hadn’t run. Maybe that saved us both.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Eli said.

“They knocked me out,” Max said. “When I woke up, I was in Prague—not that I knew it. They kept me in a basement.” He glared at Eli. “I wasn’t special. They needed one of us alive so they could get what they needed.”

I put my hand on his back, but he stiffened, and I took it away. “What did they need?” I asked, gently as I could.

“Some kind of map,” he said. “The key to where the pieces of the
Lumen Dei
are hidden. They were convinced Chris was hiding it somewhere. I have no idea why. I tried to tell them I didn’t know anything, I kept telling them and telling them, but they wouldn’t believe me. And then it occurred to me that if they did believe me … they wouldn’t need me at all anymore.”