The Bronze Key (Magisterium #3)(36)

There were a few white shoes with low heels and a single cream-colored slipper. Behind them was a wooden box. It might have been the only thing in the whole room that wasn’t some variation on the color white. As Call scooted closer to it, he wondered if the box was hers at all. Maybe it was a leftover of the last person who’d used the room.

He pushed it out the other side and went around the bed to inspect it. Worn wood and rusty hinges — not at all her style.

“What did you find?” Aaron asked, coming over to Call. Tamara sat down next to them.

Call lifted the lid …

… and the face of Constantine Madden stared back at him.

Call felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

It was Constantine in the photograph, no doubt about it. He knew Constantine’s face as well as he knew his own, for all sorts of reasons.

Not all of him was visible. Half his face was young and still handsome. The other half was covered by a silver mask. It wasn’t the same mask that Master Joseph had once worn, to fool everyone into believing he was the Enemy. This one was smaller — it concealed the terrible burns Constantine had gotten escaping the Magisterium, but that was all.

Constantine was standing among a group of other mages, all wearing the same dull green uniforms. Call recognized only one of them: Master Joseph. Master Joseph was younger in the photo, too, his hair brown instead of gray.

Constantine’s clear gray eyes stared right at Call. It was as if he were smiling at him, down the years. Smiling at himself.

“That’s the Enemy of Death,” said Aaron in a hushed voice, leaning over Call’s shoulder.

“And Master Joseph, and a bunch of Constantine’s other followers,” said Tamara, her voice tight. “I recognize some of them. I’m starting to think …”

“That Anastasia Tarquin was one of them?” said Call. “There’s definitely something weird going on. The Enemy’s wristband opened her door, she has pictures of him …”

“She might not be keeping it because it’s him in the photo,” said Tamara. “It could be because of any of the other people.”

Call stood up on legs that felt wobbly. He faced the safe, his hands in fists at his sides.

“Constantine,” he said.

Nothing happened. Tamara and Aaron stayed where they were, half crouching over Anastasia’s opened box, looking up at him. They both had matching expressions on their faces — the expression Call thought of as their Dealing with the Fact That Call Is Evil expression. Most of the time they could ignore or forget that Call’s soul was Constantine Madden’s.

But not always.

Call thought of the followers of the Enemy of Death. What had drawn them to Constantine? The promise of eternal life, of a world with no death. The promise that loss would be reversed and grief erased. A promise that the Enemy had made to himself when his brother died, then extended to his followers. Call had never experienced real loss, and couldn’t imagine what it would be like — he didn’t even remember his mother — but he could imagine the kind of followers that Constantine had undoubtedly attracted. People who were grieving, or frightened of death. People to whom Constantine’s determination to get his brother back would have been a symbol.

Anastasia had lost several husbands, after all. Maybe she wanted one of them back.

Call raised his hand, looked at the Enemy’s wristband, and then, again, at the safe.

“Jericho,” he said.

There was a click, and the safe opened.

Call, Tamara, and Aaron went still at the sound. The safe was unlocked. They were going to be able to sneak down to see the elementals. The plan had worked. But Call was still nervous enough to make his hands shake.

Anastasia had seemed like a nice, non-murderous person, but despite that, it seemed that she was either trying to kill him or she was on his side for terrible reasons. He didn’t like either option.

“So … you better cast fire into the lock,” Tamara said. “Before that poisonous snake elemental crawls out.”

“Oh, yeah.” Call fumbled to get his thoughts straight. Snapping his fingers, he kindled a small flame between them. Then, approaching the opening, he let it grow into a long, thin bar of flame — like an arrow without a quiver or bow. He tossed it through the open hole of the safe. It whuffed, briefly seeming to grow and burst in the enclosed space. Call couldn’t tell if there was an elemental in there, coiling around. Had he sent enough fire to destroy it? Did it disperse or just slither into some corner?

Call reached out his arm toward the hole in the safe.

Don’t flinch, he told himself. Don’t move fast. If you see a snake, it’s an illusion.

His fingers edged forward as he heard an intake of breath behind him.

“Call,” Aaron warned, “don’t go too fast.”

The snake’s head slithered out of the hole just as Call’s hand skimmed the edge. It was the bright green of poison, with black eyes like two droplets of spilled ink. A tiny orange tongue flicked out, testing the air.

The hair on his arms rose. His skin crawled at the feeling of a snake sliding over him, cool and dry. Was that an illusion? It didn’t feel like an illusion. Every muscle in his body clenched as, against all his instincts, he reached deeper into the safe. He felt around for a moment, encountering more coils of something that felt like smooth rope.