Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(118)

“Belle, it’s the same as the chamber at that church,” I told her.

Pastor Charles’s cellar. A place of pure calm.

This room was a cellar too, the walls, the floors, the ceilings, all stone. But when I closed my eyes and listened to the quiet, when I let the thoughts slip out of me, I could almost feel something slithering by my arms, my legs—a whisper of a touch. It’d happened in the church, but I couldn’t ignore it this time. No, it wouldn’t let me ignore it. Whatever they were, the air was dense with them, and I was connected to them. Or maybe we were connected to the same force, the same energy flowing through us, sparking the magic in me that began swelling up from the depths of my soul. I lifted my hand, considering the fingers that curled inward, twitching whenever one of them glided by. It didn’t take any effort: a little flame burst from my fingertips.

“Woah, okay.” Lake shivered. “Something just grazed my cheek. This room isn’t haunted, is it?”

“Haunted” was one word for it. The cellar was cylithium-rich, but it was more potent than what I’d felt in Pastor Charles’s cellar. Still, it couldn’t have just been the cylithium I felt.

Spirits? Pastor Charles’s ramblings suddenly didn’t seem so unreasonable.

“There’s something there.” Chae Rin walked up to one of the tiles at the very center of the room. A longer slab, it stood out from the rest, with its larger concrete frame, its clearly defined edges, and the handle protruding from the surface. “Looks like a trapdoor.”

But the etchings made it look more like a grave—not only words but also a symbol was carved deep into the gray concrete. I could only make out the drawing’s pointed talons, but I could tell it was a drawing of a beast. Of a phantom.

“What does it say?” I asked, but as we drew closer to it, we could read for ourselves the words written above the symbol.

Belle bent down by the door, brushing off the dust that had settled on the surface. “?‘Summon calm,’?” she read.

Calm. Castor had mentioned it too, in his first volume, that there were places like this. The door looked heavy, but the four of us were brimming with power here in this mysterious room. Gripping the handle, Belle lifted the door up with ease.

The secret volume. Placed only two feet beneath the door in a darkened pit, it sat atop another solid surface. There was nothing ceremonial about its burial, nothing to signal its importance. It looked the same as any of the other Castor Volumes—same binding, same silver engravings. I bent down and picked it up, running my hand along the Roman numeral on the cover. XIII.

And something else.

“?‘And among the shadows, you will find them,’?” I read. It was in English, written in small plain letters toward the bottom of the cover, just below another strange symbol—the flame I saw in Saul’s bunker, the symbol Natalya drew.

“For only in calm,” Belle said, “can you hear them speak.”

She was reading too, but not the volume. This time, the words were etched upon the floor on the very space the book had rested. And below the single line lay a symbol of three swirls, three energies, joining together to make the whole.

Only in calm. I felt another sudden chill whisper along my skin. Like eels in a tank, they fluttered past us, saying nothing, saying everything. Were they really spirits? The sensation was overwhelming, making every cell flare to life inside of me. Belle, Lake, Chae Rin, and I were moving toward one another. No words passed between us. Nothing told us to stand in a circle, and I didn’t know why I stretched the volume in my hand out into the center. One by one, the other girls placed both hands on the book as if fate compelled them. Whispers only our souls could hear, secret truths binding us together. My hand was last.

It happened so suddenly, I barely had a chance to breathe before my soul ripped out of my body, away from the girls, away from the room, through many doors, through infinite space. Scenes flashing one after another, faces blurred as they whipped past my face like the wind.

I’d felt this before. Yes, La Charte hotel, that night Saul attacked New York. The night he kissed me. The touch of his lips had forced me away from myself, and now here I was again, flying, but to where? I was in my own consciousness. I knew that much. But I glimpsed the shallow stream only once as I rocketed past too many red doors too quickly, each of them blowing open for me so fast, I hadn’t a chance to see the girls guarding them. I was skipping the line. Going back, back, back. Back through memories, back through fire, through tragedy, through death. Back to the beginning. I closed my eyes.

And I . . .

I . . .

And when I opened them, I was standing on a grassy field with the world burning down around me. The heat was unbearable. It was from the flaming mansion behind me, its smoke and embers reaching into the sunset sky—a sky raining chaos upon us.

I could see them off in the distance, monsters of nightmare barreling down to Earth in a cloak of black fire burning from their bodies. Beasts like dragons and serpents from the old tales Alice’s father had collected all those years he traveled around the world searching for its secrets. But these were not creatures of myth; they were terror made flesh—black, rotting flesh, their white eyes glowing ominously, emptily, at their prey below.

We were safe here. Alice had made sure of it. But we were the only ones to be met with such a fate. Beyond the trees bordering her family’s estate, I could hear the screaming of the townspeople off in the distance, hear buildings coming down. The death and destruction. I’d narrowly escaped it myself. The tears in my dress and cuts on my body were proof of such.