Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(116)


Belle was staring up at the portrait hanging above the fireplace at the west end of the room. Bartholom?us Blackwell II: 1849–1910. Blackwell’s ancestor. He had the same wild, long, dark curls and the same ridiculous, elaborate sense of fashion. The moment I saw him, something stirred inside me. Natalya.

I pressed a hand against my forehead. There was something there. Something I was missing.

“You okay?” Chae Rin walked up to me and shook my shoulder.

I’d seen the memory through Natalya’s eyes. It wasn’t the right way of scrying. It left you vulnerable to someone else’s emotions and feelings . . . but at the same time, the chaotic nature of intertwining your mind too tightly with someone else’s made the process unwieldly, untrustworthy. I may have felt emotions that were wrong, or not felt emotions I should have. The thoughts I’d heard could have been heard incorrectly. I had to think back to it. Back to that dream.

I closed my eyes. It was months ago, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember it completely, but shadows of old feelings crept back inside me. Natalya’s fear and urgency as she walked through the room to leave her message for Belle. She’d walked over to the shelves on the first floor to get to the Castor Volumes, the first ever printed, preserved in this secret space. But there were only twelve of them, each bound in velvet. What was I missing? And why did my eyes keep slipping back to the portrait?

Natalya had stared at the portrait too for a moment before moving on.

It doesn’t matter.

That’s what she’d thought to herself. Natalya was being chased. She’d only had a moment’s worth of time, but the portrait had still managed to capture her attention.

It doesn’t matter. . . . It doesn’t matter now. . . . It doesn’t matter anymore.

But it did matter. Something in me screamed it.

“Help me take this down,” I told Belle.

Belle had to raise me above her head so I could reach the portrait and bring it back down. The black letters written in cursive on the wall behind it were so tiny I had to squint to read them. But I recognized the Latin immediately.

“Et in tenebris invenies,” I finished slowly. “And among the shadows, you will find them.”

“What does that mean?” asked Lake as I hopped down from Belle’s shoulders.

“Among the shadows.” I remembered the paintings of phantoms all along Pastor Charles’s church: shadows dancing across the walls, bathing only in the light of the stained glass windows. “The shadows are phantoms.”

I pivoted on my feet, my focus on the petrified phantom at the center of the room. “I think this is it.”

I joined Lake by the phantom. She eyed me as I hopped over the chains and began sweeping my hands across the hard crystal. “What exactly are you looking for?” she asked.

I didn’t know. All I knew was that the thirteenth volume wasn’t here. No way would Baldric just place it, handily available, among the other books. There was something I was missing.

“Wait.” I stepped onto the platform itself and lifted myself up on my tiptoes. “What’s that? There something in its mouth?”

Carefully, I climbed up its bent knees, jutting out just far enough to make a pretty good foothold. As I came almost eye to eye with the phantom, I remembered, looking into their hollow, black depths behind the sheen of crystal, that this thing was not a “fossil” at all. It was alive. Its flesh and exoskeleton may have transformed into a different substance, but like Pete and Mellie had demonstrated in the London facility, with the right material it could be called back to life. It was an unsettling thought. More unsettling when I stuck my hand up its exposed throat, my arm avoiding its long teeth, sharper now inside the crystal coating.

My hunch was right. Deep inside its mouth, jammed neatly into the roof of its mouth, was a key. I grimaced, trying to yank it out without impaling my arm on its jaw.

“Yes,” I whispered when it finally came loose, but the deep rumbling behind the bookcase caught me by surprise. Startled, I turned too quickly, slipping off the phantom’s knee and falling off the platform.

“What’s going on?” Lake said, helping me up from the other side of the chains. “Is the bookcase moving?”

Chae Rin scoffed. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief as an invisible force dragged the shelf out at an angle, revealing a black space behind it.

There was nowhere else to go but into the passageway. It had opened only a sliver, so we had to slide ourselves through one by one. The girls followed me down a set of creaking stairs, deeper and deeper, and then into a dimly lit corridor of red brick until we came to a locked iron door. The key fit perfectly. The lock clicked, and after swinging the door open, we entered a vast space that could have been another exhibition area anywhere else in the museum.

It was a little dusty in here, but otherwise, the area was well kept. Perhaps Baldric visited from time to time during his tenure as the secret volume keeper. The elaborate white border stretching across the four corners of the ceiling had beautiful patterns in the plaster: rose vines twisting and sprouting blooms across the wide strips. On each side of this secret area were three tall suits of armor carrying real spears, standing guard in their rows. I walked across the marble floor, marveling at the two crystallized phantoms on display at the front of the room with only a velvet rope separating them from the rest of the hall. Dragons, like the one upstairs, though these were even bigger, their outstretched wings almost touching the ceiling. And in the middle of the wall between them hung a beautiful painting—a portrait, rather—of a plump, rosy-cheeked girl in a lavender Victorian dress, her charcoal hair swept up at the top of her head. At the bottom of the frame read a dedication:

Sarah Raughley's Books