The Book of Blood and Shadow (28 page)

He rolled away. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over.” He sat up, then climbed out of bed. “I need to get out of here. Take a walk or something.”

“I’ll come with you.”

He shook his head.

“It’s four a.m.,” I said.

“Which is why you should go back to sleep.”

“And you should, too. What if—?” We’d just been attacked by a troupe of masked avengers, and apparently a crazed and murderous secret society was trying to hunt us down—did I really need to spell out the reasons that wandering around, alone, in the middle of the night wasn’t the best of ideas?

He pressed his hand to my forehead, like he was checking for fever. “I won’t even go outside, okay? I’ll go pace the lobby or something. I’m no safer up here than I would be down there—if they know where to find us, it’s over no matter what.”

“That makes me feel so much better.”

He kissed me, lightly, then pulled on a sweatshirt. “I just need to wear myself out a little. Get out of my own head. Then I’ll come back to bed.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

So I let him go. But I couldn’t sleep without him. Especially not with all the added fuel for my nightmares, images of Max in a basement, hooded figures gathering around him, wielding knives, fists, whatever it was people who knew exactly what they were doing did when they wanted to hurt you without leaving a mark.

No permanent damage.

We’d had a fight, right before we fell asleep. Lying there in his arms, I’d told him everything that had happened to me, starting from that frozen moment in Chris’s house, kneeling by Chris’s body. But when it came his turn to pick up the story—to go back to that night and everything that came after, he had nothing.

“It’s not important,” he’d said. “We’re together now, that’s all that matters.”

We both knew it wasn’t. But maybe the question was too big, the answer too hard. So I started smaller. I asked him about the letter I’d found in his room, the one that named the enemy.
Hledači
.

I felt him shrug. That wasn’t important, either, he said. Just something he’d found, something interesting he was planning to show to the Hoff. Not a big deal; not relevant.

“That’s because you don’t read Czech,” I told him. “Eli translated it for me—”

“You showed it to him?”

“What’s the difference? You said it was nothing.”

“But you didn’t know that,” Max said angrily. “It could have been important—private. And he’s a stranger. He’s nobody.”

“I know that, but I was desperate. And
he
was there.” There’d been no need to add the obvious corollary.

He took a deep breath and held it, like he was trying to keep in all the things he couldn’t or wouldn’t say. Then he ran his finger lightly across my back, swirling curves and lines that spelled out a message I would never get.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m just worried about you. And
you’re not desperate anymore, right? I’m here now. You don’t need to trust a stranger. You can’t risk being naive.”

“I’m not being naive.”

“Then why is he here?” Max asked. “We could ditch him right now.”

“We can’t do that,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Well … for one thing, we need his credit cards.” Eli had paid for the rooms, without hesitation. No ancient societies were tracking his credit-card payments, and no Interpol agents were watching for his ATM withdrawals; no one was hunting him.

“So we take them with us.”

“Max! We’re not stealing his money and leaving him alone in the middle of Prague.” It was funny how he and Adriane had had the same impulse. It might have been the first thing they’d ever had in common. No—the second, I reminded myself. The first was that night in Chris’s house. They would always share those scars.

“For all you know, he’s planning to do the same to us. Or worse.”

Maybe it didn’t qualify as a fight, not exactly. But it wasn’t the way I wanted to spend my first night with Max. It wasn’t right. Nothing was.

“I’m sorry,” I said, with nothing to apologize for. “He was there when we needed him. I know he’s not telling us everything. But I trust him.”

“That doesn’t seem contradictory to you?”

“I trust him,” I said, more firmly, not even sure if it was true. “I want him to stay.”

That’s when Max finally did let go, and sat up, with his back to me. “Fine. You trust him,” he said, voice tight. “What about me?”

“Of course I trust you.”

“Tell me there’s no part of you that believes what they said about me.”

“Of course I don’t.”

He turned and brought his face close enough to mine that I could see his eyes, even in the dark. And he could see mine. “There’s no part of you that thinks maybe I’m the one who—”

I pressed a hand to his mouth before he could say the words. “I trust you,” I said, my other hand on his, so he could feel that it was steady. “I never had any doubts. Not for a minute.
I trust you
.”

He lay down again. He held me again. He kissed me, and closed his eyes, and went to sleep.

Maybe it hadn’t always been true. But lying in bed, Max molded around me, our chests rising and falling in sync, his breath misting warm on my bare neck, there was no other truth.
I trusted him
. Those nights alone in the ominous quiet of my house, those nights I’d lain in bed holding a knife, waiting for someone to emerge from the shadows, those nights no longer counted. Those doubts were no longer real. Like all monsters, they disappeared in the morning light. They had disappeared as soon as Max was beside me.

But now he was gone again. Pacing the lobby, nursing secret wounds, hiding from his nightmares or his grief or from me. I sat up and turned on the light. I turned on all the lights.

The Elizabeth letter was folded up inside an empty Band-Aid box, which itself was tucked into a balled-up sock and stuffed into the sleeve of my Red Sox sweatshirt. After what had happened to our last room, I wasn’t taking any chances. We’d agreed to decipher Elizabeth’s code, if we could, first thing in the morning, but I was awake now, with no intention of closing my eyes until Max returned, safe and intact.

Three by three is where you’ll find me
.

So I smoothed out the letter, found a pen and a fresh page in my notebook, and started to count.

19

S
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S.

It didn’t take long for Elizabeth’s real message to emerge.

SVB MVRIS VBI PATER DEVM QVAEREBAT VBI CERVI MORTEM FUGIVNT MVNDI AD CVLMEN MEDIAM AD TERRAM AD SPECTATE
.

Beneath the walls where our Father searched for God where deer run from death look to the top of the world toward the center of the earth
.

Whatever that meant.

20

“You’re the dead-girl-letter expert,” Adriane said the next morning as we gathered around the lobby’s ancient PC, keeping our voices low in case the clerk got bored enough to eavesdrop. Adriane was acting normal again, whatever normal meant under these circumstances. It wasn’t healthy to pretend this well, so I probably shouldn’t have been so relieved. “Illuminate us.”

I had nothing.

“The search for God,” Max said. “That’s got to be the
Lumen Dei
. Wherever Kelley built it.”

I shook my head. “He didn’t build it. She did. And she didn’t even start until he was dead.” I had filled them in on everything I’d learned from Elizabeth’s letters and the anonymous ones from Chris’s room. But Adriane was right, I was the expert. And, though I would have felt ridiculous admitting it out loud, I couldn’t help feeling like Elizabeth was speaking to me.

“Where was he before that?” Eli asked.

“Prison,” I said. “Somewhere in the country, I think.”

“That fits with the deer,” Max said.

“Doesn’t quite fit with my shoes,” Adriane put in, with a rueful look at her new suede mules. Then, at the expression on all our faces, “Obviously that’s not relevant under the current doomsday situation; I’m just offering an observation. Rule number one of brainstorming, remember? You can’t say the wrong thing.”

“And yet somehow you always manage to find a way,” Max said, but I could tell he was holding back a smile.

It was good to see.

“Who was her father?” Eli asked suddenly, his eyes still fixed on my translation of the letter. “What did he do? Before prison?”

“He was the court alchemist,” I said. “Tried to turn lead into gold, that kind of thing.”

Adriane sighed. “Of course. A magician. This just keeps getting better.”

“Alchemists weren’t magicians,” Max said. “They were the first chemists, the first pharmacists—even the ones who were trying to make gold weren’t doing it to get rich. They thought that by purifying metal, they could purify the soul. They were searching for the connections between the earth and the heavens, the world of man and the world of—”

“God,” Eli and I said together, and he was already typing
Prague / history / alchemy / locations
into the search field.

The first, second, and third entries were all for the Mihulka, a fifteenth-century tower that was part of the Hradčany fortifications and had been used as an alchemical laboratory by many of Rudolf II’s court alchemists. “Including Edward Kelley,” Eli read aloud. Elizabeth’s father.

But my eye had already skipped down to the next paragraph, describing the bucolic beauty of the tower, which formed a part of the old castle fortifications and was bounded on one side by the Royal Gardens—and something called the Deer Moat. Which had, during the reign of Rudolf II, been fenced in and used as a hunting ground for deer.

Where our Father searched for God
.

Where deer run from death
.

We had it.

21

It felt risky to leave the relative safety of the Golden Lion, with its drawn blinds and locked doors—but riskier still to do nothing, and wait for them to find us. So we set out midmorning and—after Eli
wove us through an elaborate pattern of concentric circles, sudden turns, and crowd crossings designed, he said, to ensure we wouldn’t be followed—joined the flow of tourists streaming toward Hradčany.

“Evasive maneuvers you picked up from a bad spy movie aren’t going to help us,” Max had said, an un-Max-like sneer twisting his face. “These are pros. There’s no middle ground. Either they’re nowhere near us, and we’re safe—or they spot us, and we’re done.”

But then he must have seen my expression, or felt my hand tense in his, because he cleared his throat and added, “But maybe this will help.”

Whether it did or not, we made it to the castle safely, and in the unseasonably bright sunshine, surrounded by bickering couples and rambunctious field trippers, it seemed unimaginable that there had been any other option, that the sea of sightseers could be hiding men and their knives. I knew it would be dangerous to stop believing in them just because the sun was out. But in my experience, bad things happened in the dark.

Even in early spring, the Deer Moat was so dense with overgrowth that the stone towers of the castle fortifications disappeared almost entirely behind a wall of sallow green. As we plunged deeper into the grounds, the crowds of tourists dropped away—they had come to Prague for history and photo opportunities, not this bald pocket of dirt. By the time we reached the weedy base of the bridge adjacent to the tower, the Prašný most, we were nearly alone, and it was easy to slip off the path and into the trees that dotted the steep slope leading up to the Mihulka.

Max held the compass, which we’d picked up for fifty crowns at a souvenir stand just within the castle gates. It was gilded with fake gold and had a saint on the back.

The top of the world
, we’d decided, could only mean true north.