The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves, #1)(93)

Hypnos’s eyes widened, a smile touching his lips. “The Sphinxes.”

Enrique nodded. The Sphinx would be able to track anything House-marked, even if it led them down to the catacombs. Plus, their eyes could record images … and the Order would have no choice but to believe the Fallen House had once more risen. Hypnos tore off the brooches. A blue light, once marked onto the back of them, flared red. He rolled them one by one onto the ground.

Enrique glanced at the auditorium below. The ground rippled, dirt cascading in waves.

“It’s nearly here,” said Roux-Joubert. He grabbed Séverin by the lapels. “Tell me how to open the Tezcat. What did you do?”

Distantly, Enrique heard Séverin’s wheezing response, “You know, for someone who wishes to play god, you’re not very omniscient.”

Enrique looked away, but he still heard it: a resounding crack as Roux-Joubert brought his fist to Séverin’s head.

“Hurry, hurry—” murmured Enrique, rocking on his heels. He wished he had his rosary. He needed something to do with his hands. He couldn’t just watch.

A ripping sound blared beside his ear, the hiss of a struck match. Below, Roux-Joubert paused. Enrique looked to his side. Zofia had struck a match and was now holding it against the ground.

“Zofia, what in the—”

“He told me he’d leave an emergency path,” said Zofia, pointing at the pale powder on the ground. “This substance is highly flammable.”

Enrique felt the grin spreading on his face even before he realized he was smiling. Fire in this place would buy them time. But it was dangerous … they had to work quickly.

“Then by all means, phoenix. Light it up.”

Zofia lowered the match to the powder.

On the stage, blue veins of light emerged on the floor. The shape of them: nautilus-like and vast, stretched across the very walls. Enrique couldn’t see what the others were doing, but he could feel the power of the Babel Fragment. It felt like something that could level kings and twist immortality. He opened his mouth, wanting to receive it like a sacrament.

Hypnos lunged forward, snatching Zofia and Enrique by the backs, of their collars.

“Move!” he shouted.

He pulled them back, just as a strong burst of wind swept through the corridors. Enrique shivered as something nameless coiled through him. He felt it at the corner of his soul. A knowing there, like a creator’s thumbprint. It was too late to stop Roux-Joubert from stirring the Fragment from its rest.

Because it was wide awake.





28





LAILA


One minute after midnight

Laila fell to the floor as the force of the Babel Fragment hit her. Her vision fuzzed. Blue streaks wrinkled the dirt stage, like ice cracking across a lake. Light lashed through the floor, a dark expanse opening in the middle of the stage, terrible and lightless, a chasm where stars went to be unmade.

Laila touched the floor, spreading her fingers in the hard dirt, feeling it bite into her nail beds. She had never been able to read anything Forged. Always, it was as abrupt and stark as a light turned off in a room. But this time … this time she could do more than just read the Forged power licking through the room.

She could understand it.

The vastness of it seized her from her own body. She was everywhere, everything, in that moment. She was at the top of a mountain, snow caught in her hair. She was on the floor of a palace, the sweet-smelling resin stinging her nose. She was clutched in the hand of a priest, placed in the mouth of a god, forged—in the old sense of the word, existence hammered into being—in a furnace of time. Points of connection mushroomed across the plane of her mind. Her consciousness scattered. She was infinite—

Laila gasped.

She pulled back her hand from the dirt. Points of blue blinked and dimmed on her skin. What did it mean that it called to her this way … if this was a place where stars could be unmade … what about her? Would she unravel here?

Who was she? What was she? Her mother called her beloved. Her father labeled her blasphemous. Paris named her L’énigme.

“Laila?” breathed Tristan.

Laila.

She was Laila. The girl who made herself. This moment—shining and distant—crashed around her. Her senses rushed back to her and with them, fear. She knew it was not desperate imagination that let her see the flash of matchlight far above in the terraces. Zofia. Enrique. They were here. Séverin was still swaying, kneeling. Blood dripping down his mouth from the cut along his cheek. She could feel Tristan’s hands on her shoulders, cold and quivering. She touched his wrist lightly, letting her hair fall over her face so as to conceal the gesture from Roux-Joubert.

The earth was not all that she had read.

When she’d kneeled on the ground beside an unconscious Séverin, Tristan had held a blade to her. And then he forced the hilt into her hand. Please. Make it stop. The wooden hilt had dug into her palms, splinters cutting into her skin, images lancing through her mind. In her visions, she saw Tristan forced under waves of nightmares that warped his doubts and made them seem real. They’d tortured him. And then they’d tortured him with the knowledge of what he had let happen. Laila had handed him back the knife, closing her fingers around his in the stolen seconds before Roux-Joubert had arrived with his associate.