The Book of Blood and Shadow (43 page)

“Why would I do that?” I asked.

Max was a terrible liar, I reminded myself. He blushed; he fidgeted. He told truths no one wanted to hear.

He told me he loved me.

People lied for a reason. They lied to fill a need—for gain, for escape. But I’d had nothing he needed.

He said he needed me.

“I can protect you,” Eli said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Another lie, and this one I could read on his face. “I don’t want your protection,” I said. “I want your help.”

“Semantics.”

“Help to go after them. The
Hledači
. To destroy them.”

I saw his answer before he voiced it, in the taut muscles of his neck, the narrowing of his eyes, beneath his lies, a truth: “That’s all I want.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“What can you tell me?” I said.

“What do you want to know?”

I wanted to un-know, un-see. To hand the folder back without opening it. To leave the postcard on my brother’s grave, to stay in Chapman wondering whether I would ever see Max again, believing he would save me. I wanted not to question him when he could no longer answer. I wanted not to doubt. I did not want to know.

I wanted to believe.

“What did the priest say to you, on that first day? The one you fought with in the Church of St. Boethius.”

I could tell I had surprised him.

“I can’t tell you that, either,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Okay—then tell me what the
Hledači
meant on the bridge, about my destiny.” The word that they had called me, the word that had appeared in Max’s email. What was supposedly Max’s email. “What’s
vyvolená
?”

“Chosen,”
he said. “The
chosen one
. You.”

The single bark of laughter came unbidden. He didn’t crack a smile.

“The
Hledači
believe that
ta, která ho najde, bude jako ta, která ho ukryla
.” he said. “ ‘She who discovered it will be as she who disguised it.’ ”

“No one’s discovered it yet,” I said. “Isn’t that their main problem?”

“You found the map,” he said. “They’ve been searching for it for centuries. They believe God guided your hand, that you must be Elizabeth Weston’s spiritual heir.
Lumen Dei má v krvi, její krev je v Lumen Dei
. ‘The
Lumen Dei
is in her blood, as her blood is in the
Lumen Dei.’
Her blood. Your blood.”

“Trust me, I am not related to Elizabeth Weston.”

“You’re thinking literally,” he said. “They’re thinking spiritually.”

“So they don’t literally want my blood.”

“Well …”

“Great.”

“It’s why Max got close to you,” he said. “And why he convinced you to come to Prague—why he pretended to help you track down the pieces. Because they needed the
vyvolená
to be the one to find the
Lumen Dei
.”

The Hoff had known, I realized.
You’re the one
, he had said.
They’ll lie. But don’t go!
Could he have meant that
Max
would lie, would kill, would do anything to get me to Prague to fulfill my supposed destiny?

Max, I remembered, was the one who found him.

“That doesn’t explain why you pretended to help,” I said. “Or how you know any of this.”

“I knew some from the beginning. I know more now. And I told you. I’m here to protect you—”

“Because I’m
vyvolená
. Right. So you’re crazy, too.”

“Because if they think you’re the
vyvolená
, you’re in danger. They’ll want to use you, just like Max did.”

“Max loved me.”

“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t using you.”

“And you? What have you been doing all this time? Pretending to care about Chris? About—any of it?”

“Using you,” he said.

I felt no satisfaction from the admission. I suspected it would be a long time before I felt anything again. “And are you sorry?”

“I … regret the need.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“I know.”

“Are you one of them?” I asked.

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

“No.”

“You want me to believe that everything about Max was a lie. Everything he said, everything he did. Everything between us. All lies. That he was a murderer. And all those months with him, I just never noticed.”

“He was good,” Eli said.

“So how good are you?”

“If their agenda was my agenda, we wouldn’t be here right now,” he said. “I would just give them what they want the most.”

“Me.”

“You.”

“With your crazy ninja skills.”

“They come in handy.”

“When you want them to,” I said. If Max was
Hledači
, and Eli had known, he’d likely wasted little effort trying to save Max from his own, the men who’d pushed him to the edge of the bridge, and over it. If Max was
Hledači
, if everything unthinkable was true, then maybe I should have felt grateful.

I still felt cold. “Get out now. Please.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Oh, so sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. I’m sure you understand.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“Right now you need to do it from somewhere else.”

“Nora—”

I threw the folder. Incriminating evidence fluttered and flapped, drifting gently to the ground. “
Go
.”

Once I was alone, I collected the pages from where they had fallen and stuffed them into my backpack. Then I returned to the bed, picked at loose threads in the stained floral spread, imagined
the weight of him on the mattress, on me, the creak of the bed-springs beneath us, the flutter of moths and the scuttle of rodents in shadowed corners, the things he whispered to me in the dark.

The best lies, the most believable lies, are mostly truth. I read that once, somewhere.

In a world without absolutes, the truth is whatever you choose to believe. I read that, too. But I never understood how you choose. Or choose not to.

Adriane came back from the shower damp and radiant. “Your turn,” she said. Then, “You okay?”

I stood up. “Eli’s not who he said he was.”

“Then who is he?”

I could admit I didn’t know, and didn’t know if it mattered.

Or I could lie.

7

“Seriously, what kind of PI doesn’t carry a gun?” Adriane complained. She pulled on her hood, casting her face in shadow.

“If everything goes smoothly, we won’t need a gun,” Eli said. It was strange to see the black robes billowing around them, stranger still to feel the scratchy wool of my own robe brush against my ankles, to peer out from beneath the hood that cut off all periphery vision. So this was how the world looked to the
Hledači:
narrow and rimmed with darkness.

“Well, in that case, I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Adriane said. “Things have been going so smoothly for us up till now.”

Eli stopped. The Letohrádek Hvězda, the Star Summer House, was in our sights, a glowing, six-pointed oasis in the dark field. It was a moonless night, and our path was lit only by the light of his phone screen. “If you don’t want to do this, you can wait here. But decide now.”

Adriane raised her hands, palms up, balancing the options. “Hmm. Sneak into the hornet’s nest, or wait here, alone and defenseless, for hornets to come to me.”

I let their bickering wash over me. They were both afraid, and this was how they hid it. But not me. I’d buried my fear along with my grief. It was too big—too dangerous. Feeling anything would mean feeling too much.

“Let’s go,” she said, then, as we padded through the grass toward the
Hledači
hive, added, “but just in case circumstances prevent me from saying it later, let me add a preemptive ‘I told you so.’ ”

I’d given her a choice. Not the real one, of course. But a choice nonetheless. Eli, the private investigator, wanted to handle this himself, I’d told her. Go to the authorities about Max’s death, the
Hledači
, all of it. The all of it that she knew, at least. I couldn’t tell her about the folder. Too humiliating, if she believed the evidence, if she looked up from the emails and photos with eyes full of pity for the pathetic loser who’d been so easily deceived. And if she didn’t believe it, if she believed in Max … what would that say about me, and whatever weakness made me so eager to doubt?

Eli would take care of things, I offered, and we would go home.

“They can come after us there just as easily as they can here,” she’d said. “Look at Chris. That’s not going to be me.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“We go after them,” she said. “We take it all back.”

The clues, the stolen pieces of the
Lumen Dei
.

Our lives.

I didn’t ask which.

The Letohrádek Hvězda, a daytime tourist attraction, was locked down at night, but Eli, the fake PI without a real weapon, had a knife and a paper clip, and within minutes, we were inside.
I couldn’t imagine what it would have looked like in the benevolent daylight, but at night, with its unsettling angles and bas-relief stone gods watching us from every surface, it was too easy to understand why a sect of religious fanatics had chosen the Star Summer House as their home base. Rudolf’s grandfather had built it as a hunting lodge-cum-sacred site, perfect for whatever weird mystical rituals he—and apparently five subsequent centuries of gullibles and nutcases—chose to attempt. The building foundation was set in the shape of the Star of Solomon, the better to connect with the powerful forces of the macrocosm, and everything—the number of levels, the floor colors, the painted walls and stucco-carved ceilings depicting heroic Greek gods—was dedicated to aligning with the four elements and thus turning the building into some kind of magical lightning rod for divinely approved conjurers. The
Hledači
—as apparently everyone who was anyone in the secret-society crowd knew—had bought it hook, line, and sinker. According to Eli, that is. Another thing I didn’t tell Adriane: the not-insignificant possibility that Eli was still lying, and we were walking into an ambush.

I believed that Eli hated them—that, for motives of his own that had nothing to do with helping us, he was nonetheless helping us.

But it had become clear that my beliefs were no longer to be trusted.

The robes had been easy to acquire. The plan was simple: We would descend into the bowels of the Star Summer House, the secret chambers supposedly dug out beneath its basement, and, costumed as rank-and-file
Hledači
, we would float past the guard posted by the hidden doorway, infiltrate the nest of murderously busy bees, then seek out incriminating evidence we could photograph, record, or steal.

The backup plan was simpler: We would run.

8

We didn’t have to run. The robes proved the only password we needed, and we were waved into a warren of cavelike chambers and corridors lit only by dim gas lanterns and flickering candles.
Hledači
scuttled past us with urgency, and we kept our heads down, our bodies turned inward, as if engaged in intense conversation not to be disturbed, and hugged the shadows as we followed behind.

We had delivered ourselves into the hands of our would-be murderers, and still, I was not afraid.

Adriane held the phone, its camera activated, her finger on the shutter. And we joined the flow of
Hledači
into a dark chamber, round as the building above us was sharp. Atop a golden altar stood a man whose robe was white and whose eyes, from where we hovered at the back of the crowd, seemed bottomless and black. The stone behind him was inscribed with a familiar symbol: an eye speared by a lightning bolt, painted in dark red, twenty feet high.

I hadn’t expected a crowd.

I’d pictured the
Hledači
as a ragtag collection of eccentrics, the crumbling remains of what had once been a fanatical army, now dwindled to ten or fifteen at the most. Eli had apprised me of my mistake, but seeing it was different. Now I believed: The
Hledači
was still an army, hundreds strong. A cult, a people, all draped in the same heavy black, their voices raised in a unifying chant, their words echoing off the curved stone, swelling to fill the chamber, until they fell into abrupt silence at the sight of their leader’s raised fist. He shouted in Czech, and the crowd thundered.

Adriane hid the phone beneath her robe, its recording function taking in the leader’s voice as it rose and fell with mesmerizing
rhythm and Eli whispered the only translation we needed: “He says he’s called them together because the
Lumen Dei
is closer than it has ever been before, and they need only one more piece to meet their destiny. That nothing will stop them.”

And then the man stopped, and his masses filled in the quiet left in his wake with a new chant, which needed no translation, for mixed into the alien words was one I recognized, one that was repeated, an angry drumbeat driving them to a fever pitch.

Vyvolená!

Vyvolená!

VYVOLENÁ!

The fear had come back. And every time they said that word, it grew.

“Maybe we should get out of here,” Adriane whispered.

This time there was no bickering.

With the
Hledači
absorbed by their bloodlust rally, the other chambers were largely empty, giving us free rein to wander, searching for anything we might use as leverage with the cops or the
Hledači
themselves. We found it behind a wooden door carved with a woman mounting a centaur. The room, its walls lined with fraying, leather-bound books, may have begun life as a library but now clearly functioned less as a storehouse for ancient wisdom than it did a repository of information on the search for the
Lumen Dei
, beginning in the sixteenth century, ending with us.

This was what we hadn’t dared hope for; it could save our lives.

Adriane snapped photo after photo while Eli and I leafed through stacks and files of personnel dossiers, crumbling newspapers, journal articles about the Voynich manuscript, paintings and photographs of those who studied it, potential
vyvolená
s from nineteenth-century London, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, all of them discarded without care or organization, like trash, in favor
of the documents and photos that papered the back wall. It was the wall of crazy found in every Hollywood serial killer’s lair: Surveillance photos of Chris and Adriane and me. Our birth certificates, our report cards. Photocopies of the Voynich symbols. Arrowed diagrams connecting us to each other and to the Hoff and his book. Crowd shots with blood-red circles marking my face. Intimate pictures capturing the faces we saved for when we were alone.