The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves #1)(67)

“So…” Enrique looked around the room. “Technically … we could take anything right now?”

“Focus,” warned Séverin.

Around them, the library stretched for nearly a kilometer underground. As the world’s largest purveyor of ancient Egyptian artifacts, House Kore’s shelves overflowed with Forged treasures plundered from pharaohs’ tombs and scrolls encased in glass and sand that had been lifted from the foundations of crumbling temples. But though the owners and artisans of the objects had long since passed, the power within them still crackled. Glass beetles with lightning storms flashing across their carapace scuttled into the shelves. Once or twice, a telescope’s eye turned toward him, and Séverin saw not the dirt floor and treasures mirrored behind him, but a skull hovering over his head, a ripped rose on either side of him. Shaken, he kept walking.

As they neared the eighth aisle, a cold wind gusted into the hall. Zofia reached for her necklace. Laila stood back, fingers skimming down the wooden beams of the shelves. She turned to Séverin, her chin dipping ever so slightly in a silent signal: Safe to enter.

Séverin entered first. Then stopped. He heard the others rounding the corner, the shuffle of their feet abruptly stopping. Enrique stood at his shoulder and groaned.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

The entire eighth aisle … were Horus Eyes. All of them were bronze and the size of one’s hand. All of them had a perfect glass pupil and were completely identical. Only the objects stuffed between their spaces on the shelves distinguished them. Odds and ends not worthy enough to be catalogued. Silver ankhs dangled from slender hooks, and broken canopic jars were shoved alongside bits of pottery strewn about the shelves.

Zofia stepped forward. “Not all of the Horus Eyes are Forged.”

“How do you know?” asked Enrique.

Zofia touched her palm, not looking at anyone directly. “They’re just not.”

“She’s right,” said Laila, taking her hand off the Horus Eye closest to her.

Hypnos eyed her shrewdly, and Laila gestured at the shelves. “It’s nearly impossible that so many would actually be here. In existence.”

“Fair,” said Enrique. “In which case, we’re looking for a special Horus Eye amongst the decoys. Presumably, looking through the correct Horus Eye will reveal a Babel Fragment, so it won’t show the floor beneath you. It will show something else.”

Hypnos groaned. “But there’s got to be hundreds of Eyes!”

“All the more reason to get started.” Séverin moved to the first shelf. “Shall we?”

There were fifty sections, ten for each of them. Séverin began reaching for the Horus Eyes. Every time he could see his shoes through the glass, he put an Eye back and reached for another. One after another after another, and each time he saw the ground reflected at him. Three sections. All of them decoys.

Séverin slid yet another decoy into its section when a slip of silver cloth fell. When he reached for it, his fingers skimmed across the surface, as if it were a pane of ice. He’d never seen anything like it. And frankly it was just so lustrous, like a mirror poured onto the ground. He pinched the edges of it, lifting it off the floor and stowing it away.

Across from him, Laila paused in running her hands along the Horus Eyes. Her gaze swept from his face to his jacket pocket and lingered there. He couldn’t seem to hide anything from her.

Séverin cleared his throat. “Enrique? Zofia? Anything?”

Enrique shook his head. Zofia didn’t answer. Séverin turned, about to move back to the shelf when he saw Laila struggling to pull a Horus Eye from its shelf. There was a large, black tome wedged next to it. The base of its spine seemed stuck to the wooden board.

“I can’t get to it!” said Laila. “The Horus Eye is stuck behind this book.”

Séverin couldn’t have explained why the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly raised. He didn’t like how that book was stuck to the shelf. It felt too intentional. Besides, there was something unnerving about the ink-stained pages and how the charred leather-bound cover looked far too smooth to be made of animal skin. Even the library felt entirely too still and silent in that moment. Before he could warn her, Laila pried the book off the shelf. The moment she wrenched it from its spot, it split down the middle. Indigo plumes spilling out from the opened pages.

“Get back!” yelled Séverin.

Laila dropped the book and darkness erupted from the pages. Amidst the dark, a snatch of white slipped from the page to the floor. It was a slender white feather.

Before, he thought the cavernous library had been still and silent. He was wrong. This was silence. All the sounds he had taken for granted—rustling fabric, whirring insect wings, running water—disappeared. Shadows seeped in from all sides of the library, rushing to give the book’s smoke new shape. A snout formed. Teeth glinted. Paws covered in blood-slick fur outstretched. Séverin could see Laila, her mouth shaped into a scream. He darted between the thing’s legs toward her just as a low snarl reverberated through the library. Slowly, the five of them looked up.

The shadow creature towered above them, the top of its head stretching far above the high shelves. The front of its body belonged to a lion, the hindquarters belonged to a hippo, and its head swung back and forth, crocodile jaws snapping. The creature slammed its paw against the floor.