The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves #1)(81)

“But midnight is hours away!”

Séverin’s gaze shuddered. He rubbed the scar on his palm, then reached for his tin of cloves. He chewed one thoughtfully, ignoring the tension building up with everyone else.

“At least by then, the girls will be back.”

Séverin left not long after that to attend to L’Eden business, which left Enrique and Hypnos alone in the stargazing room. Enrique wasn’t sure what he should do. In the end, both of them returned to what they had been doing before—poring over the shredded documents of the Fallen House. Searching for clues in the detritus. The shadow of evening stretched over them. Food had been called up and eaten without either of them lifting a head from their research. Always, the bone clock stared back. Waiting. Smug. When Enrique looked at the room, he saw the strange pall over it. The cushions upturned. Tristan’s pillow shoved under a chair so no one could sit in it.

“Why are you helping us?” Enrique realized the words were out of his mouth before he could even think them.

Hypnos looked up, his face unguarded. “Is it so strange to think I might have reasons of my own for wanting the Babel Ring found?” he asked.

“That’s not an answer. You could be doing this work from home. I’ve heard the House Nyx library is the envy of scholars. You don’t have to be here.”

Hypnos was quiet for a moment, and then he folded his hands on his lap. “If I had someone on my side … someone of equal standing to me, then maybe life in the Order would be … easier.”

Enrique processed this. “You want Séverin to become a patriarch?”

Hypnos nodded. “When we were little, I thought we’d grow up and be kings or something. A whole kingdom to divide between us.” He glared at Enrique. “Do not tell him I said that.”

Enrique mimed a zip over his mouth, and Hypnos relaxed once more. He looked so young, so unlined, and yet his ice-colored eyes looked ancient.

“The truth is I need someone on my side,” said Hypnos. He wrapped his arms around his knees. “Someone who might understand what it means to live in two worlds as I do. I have tried and I have failed. I cannot be both the descendant of Haitian slaves and the son of a French aristocrat, even if that is what I hold in my heart. I had to choose, and perhaps the Order forced my hand in this. But what no one tells you is that even when you decide which world you will live in, the world may not always see you as you would wish. Sometimes it demands that you be so outrageous as to transcend your very skin. You can change your name. Your eye color. Make yourself a myth and live within it, so that you belong to no one but yourself.”

Enrique’s mouth felt dry. He knew exactly how that felt. The feeling like his own skin betrayed him. That his own dreams didn’t match his face and would therefore never come to pass. “I understand.”

Hypnos snorted. He dropped his head back against the couch, and the light caught on the long line of his throat. Hypnos looked like a seraph who spent his whole life in ripe sunshine. He had always been beautiful, but now the light gilded his beauty into something unearthly. Enrique used to feel a twinge of shame when it came to his feelings … He used to pray that when it came to attraction, his body would just choose between men and women, and not both. It was his second-oldest brother, bound for priesthood, who told him that God made no mistakes in crafting their hearts. Enrique still hadn’t quite parsed out his own relationship to faith, but what his brother said had made him stop hating himself. It made him stop turning from what lay inside him and embrace it. But it wasn’t until he arrived in Spain for university that he started doing more than just looking at beautiful boys. He was reminded of it now, staring at Hypnos … and he was far too distracted to realize the other boy had noticed.

Hypnos swiped his thumb across his lips. “Do I have something on my mouth?”

“No, not at all,” said Enrique, turning quickly.

Hypnos muttered something that almost sounded like: That’s a pity.



* * *



TIME MARCHED STEADILY toward midnight.

By then, Laila and Zofia had returned. They shared their findings with one another—the bone clock and the hidden Tezcat—and settled down to wait in the stargazing room. The chairs had lost some of their ghostly attributes, and everyone took a seat, leaving only Tristan’s cushion untouched.

In those final stretches to midnight, Enrique thought he could feel everything … From the heat vibrating off Hypnos’s hand, which was just an inch too close, and the glow of Zofia’s candlelight hair as she bent her head to inspect her newest invention, to the sugar crystals from the cookie Laila had snuck him and the cold of Séverin’s fury as he stared at the clock. Enrique, who had always dreamed about what magic might feel like, thought he had found it then: myths and palimpsests, starlight sugaring the air, and the way hope feels painful when shared equally among friends.

At the stroke of midnight, they slid the clock into position: six minutes past two.

Light burst across the room.

Laila jerked backward, but Zofia leaned toward the light. Curiosity flickered across her face.

“It works like a mnemo bug,” she observed.

The vision contained in the clock splayed across the room, blotting out the glimpse of the stars overhead.

A hall full of bones. Grinning skulls crowded together. Compacted earth where a great spiraled pattern like the logarithm floor of House Kore spread out across an abandoned auditorium. And Enrique thought he might even be able to sniff out the smell of that place regardless that he could only see the image of it. Great crosses made of femurs, and an eerie lake where stalactites dripped their mineral tears. Here, finally, was the secret hiding place of the Fallen House. The place connected to the Forged exhibition. The place where, somewhere, Tristan lay trapped in the dark.