The King's Seal

by Amy Kuivalainen

  Kreios folded his long legs. “I’ve been trying to contact you for weeks, and finally, you’ve responded—at the most inconvenient time.”

  “You killed Tim, you asshole. He had no memory. He couldn’t have been any threat to you—”

  “Let me stop you there.” Kreios’s black eyes filled with anger. “Abaddon killed Tim, not me. I saved Carolyn’s life by getting her out of that room. Don’t think for a moment I wasn’t punished for that. Tim was dead from the moment he agreed to go on the Cave 12 dig organized by Abaddon, and you know it.”

  Penelope swallowed the words of abuse she wanted to hurl at him. “Thank you…for Carolyn,” she managed, her mouth filled with ashes.

  Kreios made a dismissive sound. “Don’t bother. I’m not going to fool myself into thinking we are polite people that thank each other and will one day be friends. Did you get my postcard?”

  “I did. Is that where he is?”

  “It’s where they are all going to be. Why haven’t you done something about it yet?”

  “We need to find something that can stop…our enemy forever.” Penelope didn’t know if saying Thevetat’s name would summon him to them.

  “Have you found Nereus’s books?”

  “Not yet, but I’m working on it.”

  “Work faster. Abaddon risked going to your palazzo to find them. They are the most important books in your precious Archives.”

  “He won’t be able to fuse demon and body together without them. We have time—”

  “We don’t.” Kreios took a sip of the amber liquid in his glass. “After Abaddon failed to retrieve Nereus’s notes on the rituals, Thevetat pulled Abaddon’s memories apart to find the night they tried to bring Poseidon back from the dead. Thevetat knows the ritual to perform it, but he doesn’t know how Nereus sabotaged it. If she ever wrote that information down, you must find it. You delayed them by destroying the web in the Bahamas, but it only slowed them down a little and pissed them off a lot. They are just waiting for the high tide to be at its peak. You have a month at the most before Thevetat is in his body and trying to release a demon horde to help him take over the world.”

  “What? I thought you said he only wanted a body!” He’d mentioned nothing about Thevetat trying to release more demons.

  “He needs a body, and so will all the rest when he summons them. Humans burn out too quickly and won’t be able to contain the power they’ll be able to wield,” Kreios said and then added, “The last time we met, I didn’t know he’d planned to summon more of his kind. Abaddon finally told me because he needs someone else to help him during the ritual.”

  Penelope’s stomach filled with ice. “Tim knew. I thought it was the curse messing with him, but he said something about demons being released from the sky.” He’d sounded so scared on the message he left on Carolyn’s phone. He’d seen it, and they all had ignored him, discounting it for madness. Of course they wanted more than a body for Thevetat. That was only the beginning of what they were planning.

  “It changes nothing. If you stop Thevetat before he can fuse into his body, we’ll never have to worry about whatever else he plans on summoning. The high tide is coming in faster than I thought. You need to move faster, Penelope.”

  “I’ve got a way to track the tide. I’ll make sure we have what we need by then,” Penelope said with a dose of courage and conviction she didn’t feel.

  Kreios narrowed his black eyes. “There’s something different about you. You’ve got a touch of…something new.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  Kreios cocked his head, his gaze going to her third eye. “Oh, Doctor Bryne. You really are full of surprises. I bet Alexis is at his wits’ end worrying about what you’ll do next.” He chuckled.

  “Are we done?”

  “We are. Get your magicians moving. Find the books, and get to Milos before we’re all fucked.” Kreios took her hand and kissed it. “Until next time.”

  PENELOPE JOLTED awake, gripping either side of the couch and gasping for air. She vowed then and there to never take Alexis’s ring off, no matter how much the heat swelled her fingers. She clung to what Kreios had said so she’d be able to tell Alexis word for word. Penelope snatched the astrolabe off the desk and opened it to the back. The dials were glowing an ominous blue.

  “Not peak high tide,” she said. She twisted it and spotted a flash of red. “Hello, what are you?” She lifted it closer to her face so she could get a better look.

  There was a new twisting glyph, and it was glowing. Without thinking, she poked it. Air rushed about her like a cyclone, and she screamed as her hand was sucked into the astrolabe. Alexis came rushing around the stacks, reaching for her as the world darkened and closed in around her.

  Penelope landed heavily on a mound of pillows. Dazed, she lay still, trying to get her bearings and ensure nothing was broken.

  “Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic,” she whispered like a mantra as her eyes refocused. Alexis’s fear and alarm were radiating through the moíra desmós and making her chest hurt. She tried to focus on sending back that she was okay, then sat up and looked about.

  The roof above her glowed faintly blue, and strange shadows marked a pattern along it. She stilled. It was the same blue as the astrolabe. She was in the astrolabe. Her heart raced. She climbed out of the pillows—pillows that had been stacked on top of a wide reading lounge, almost as if designed to break a fall. Her fall.

  “God damn you, Nereus!” Penelope kicked a cushion because anger was always better than fear.

  The wide circular space she found herself in was piled floor-to-ceiling with books. Chains held them in place on the bookshelves, and they hummed with magic. She freed one and opened the cover. It was handwritten in Atlantean, the words shivering and moving under her touch.

  “Oh shit,” she whispered, suddenly realizing she’d had Nereus’s secret library all along. “That’s why the Archives kept giving you the astrolabe. God, Penelope, you’re so dense.”

  Although how Nereus thought she’d be able to figure out the astrolabe’s secret storeroom was anyone’s guess.

  More and more things fell into place the longer Penelope thought about it. Nereus had been on a mission with Alexis and the others when Atlantis sank, and yet she had her books with her. Carrying a library onto a battlefield was impractical…unless she had a device in which she could carry a whole library with her wherever she went. The astrolabe had remained in Nereus’s possession at all times and was protected because of it.

  A surprised laugh escaped Penelope’s lips. Abaddon had killed Nereus in a fit of anger and hadn’t even bothered to check her pockets. Even the Archives was a glorious decoy.

  Penelope didn’t know how long the magic would last, so she started scanning the book titles. Most of them were journals and research notes of projects, lists of war supplies, and detailed descriptions of experiments being performed at the citadel. She was going to need Alexis’s help if she was going to get through it all. Penelope tucked a book that mentioned Poseidon in the first few pages under her arm.

  Okay, Nereus, how do I get out of here? Not knowing if the astrolabe was as sentient as the Archives, Penelope added out loud, “I’d like to leave now, please.”

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then, without warning, her body was stretching in a way that definitely wasn’t normal. She screamed as she was pulled through the ceiling and back into the Archives. Phaidros caught her before her legs gave way.

  “Easy, I have you,” he said, then helped her into her office chair.

  “Oh God, that was the worst.” Penelope put her head between her knees to fight off the rush of nausea.

  “Here, drink this.” Phaidros passed her a glass of water. “You’ve been in that thing for five hours. You’re going to be dehydrated.”

  “Five hours? It felt like only an hour to me.” She rubbed at her chest. She couldn’t feel Alexis. “Where is Alexis? What’s happened?”

  “H
e’s okay, Pen—”

  “Don’t lie to me! I can’t feel him anymore!”

  “He’s fine! Drink the fucking water, and I’ll take you to him. Just breathe.”

  Penelope’s heart was pounding, but she did as she was told and drained the glass.

  “I swear, you two are as insane as each other. If something happens to either of you, the other just automatically assumes the worst.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s like my lifeline is completely gone.” Penelope’s heart stuttered.

  “It’s probably a good thing. That tie of yours has just driven Alexis half-mad because he was unable to get to you. I’ve been guarding this damn astrolabe for hours. I knew you’d turn up eventually, and I told him as much, but when it was clear he couldn’t settle down, I put him in prison.”

  Penelope gripped her empty glass to keep from dropping it. “You did what? What prison?”

  “You really need to get your head out of your books, Pen. The Archives is a lot of things. It’s not only a library.”

  “Show me.”

  Leaning on Phaidros’s arm, Penelope shuffled through the stacks until they came to a bare stretch of the cavern wall. Phaidros placed his hand on it, and a golden sigil appeared before a door slid open.

  “I wouldn’t have been able to find that!” Penelope protested.

  “Apparently Alexis didn’t bother to show you either.”

  “Maybe because he knows I’ll never need it.”

  “You might not, but every one of us has had our time in here—Alexis most of all.” Phaidros pointed to a door with a small window slot in it.

  Penelope stood on her tiptoes to look through it and gasped. There was Alexis, cross-legged on the floor amid a storm of blue lightning. The black stone walls around him sucked the crackling energy in, and yet more and more flowed out of him.

  “What is it doing to him?”

  “Absorbing and neutralizing his magic. When you got sucked into the astrolabe, Alexis was worried he would lose his temper and accidentally break you in an attempt to free you from it. I convinced him to go for a time-out. After an hour in a cell, I’m exhausted. He’s been in there for three.” Phaidros looked in through the slot. “Remember this moment, Penelope. This is what he really contains under his skin, and we haven’t even reached peak high tide yet.”

  “He is…incredible.” Penelope gazed in at him in sheer awe. “Kreios made contact again. Thevetat knows the ritual and is going to perform it as soon as the tide peaks. I need Alexis to store some of that power, because if Thevetat gets into his body, he’s going to summon more of his kind.”

  “Poseidon save us…” Phaidros sighed. “Tell Alexis the news while he’s still in there. We don’t need him blowing up the palazzo.”

  ALEXIS WAS lost in a storm of magic and memory. It was his own helplessness that had driven him into a cell, not Phaidros’s coaxing and thinly veiled threats. Alexis released his frustration out and into the walls around him, a part of him wondering just how much they could take before they cracked.

  Penelope’s fearful face kept playing over and over in his mind. She was sucked into the astrolabe like a frightened djinn. If he couldn’t protect her from a dead magician’s trinket, how was he going to save her from Thevetat’s wrath? If it weren’t for the moíra desmós telling him that she was still alive, he would’ve lost his mind completely.

  Penelope is clever. She found her way into the astrolabe, and she will find her way out again. His voice of reason was having a hell of a time fighting off the other voice, which told him he should’ve taken the time to study the damn device before letting Penelope carry it around like an accessory.

  It was yet another worry atop his ever-increasing pile. Alexis wished that the destruction of the cache of magic in the Bahamas would leave Thevetat and Abaddon licking their wounds for months, but he knew it was foolish to hope. Constantine was right; Thevetat would retaliate, and they had to be ready for it. Ancient rage and hurt filled him, and he forced more magic from the deep well inside of him.

  In the early days, when Alexis had been unable to process the irrevocable loss of Atlantis, he’d devoted himself to time magic. He’d created theories on how to project his consciousness back to his past self in order to warn of Thevetat before Abaddon could summon him, or even to send his physical self back in time permanently. Any idea he presented to Nereus had been shut down and absolutely forbidden. Playing with time was too dangerous, and they had all suffered enough. It had taken a hundred years for Alexis to let the ideas go, mainly because their lack of aging was becoming a concern. As magicians, they’d expected to live longer than other humans, but not by centuries. Nereus had convinced him to give up on the time projects and work on finding the answer to their immortality.

  Based on Penelope’s dream trip to see Poseidon, perhaps Nereus already knew time magic, thanks to her old master. Poseidon had seen Thevetat’s rise and Atlantis’s destruction. Had Nereus known their first war against them would fail all along? She’d let Alexis go half-mad trying to find a way to go back and stop it. How much had Poseidon told her of the calamity to come? According to her letter to Penelope, Nereus had a vision of her five years ago and knew she’d be the one to take over the Archives and be an asset in the fight to come.

  I’m sending you a protector, Poseidon had told Penelope. If he’d meant Alexis, then Alexis had failed twofold.

  Alexis… A voice called through the storm of magic around him. He opened his eyes just as Penelope walked through the wall of his magic and knelt down in front of him.

  “Are you in there, Alexis?” She rested her palm against his cheek.

  Half-dazed, he reached for her, pulling her into his lap and holding her tight until he was convinced that she was really there.

  “I’m okay. I’m not hurt,” Penelope assured him. “Let the magic go so I can talk to you.”

  “I couldn’t reach you,” Alexis croaked.

  “I was here all along, only smaller.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t stop it happening to you. I couldn’t protect you.”

  “I don’t need you to protect me, Alexis. I need you to love me.” Penelope kissed him, and the warmth of her lips pushed back at the cold darkness inside of him. The magic flowing about them stilled, and the walls pulled the rest away until they were only Alexis and Penelope once more.

  “What happened to you?” asked Alexis.

  Penelope let out a low whistle. “Where do I start? I think we should’ve stayed in bed this morning.”

  Alexis held her incrementally tighter as she told him first about Kreios drawing her to Florence and then what she’d found inside the astrolabe. Alexis groaned once she was finished. “Oh, my Penelope, why are you so impossible to keep safe?”

  “It was scary, but it’s all good news. We can figure out what’s in the books that are locked in the astrolabe for a start.”

  “I’m tempted to throw the damn thing into the canal for all the trouble it’s caused today.”

  Penelope pressed a kiss to the frown line between his brows. “Stop it. You’ll do no such thing.”

  “You were gone for five hours, Penelope.”

  “Next time, come with me if you’re too impatient to wait for me.”

  “It’s not about impatience. It’s fear. You’re so new to magic, and I worry that you’re going to be hurt by your own curiosity. You didn’t stop and question why a new glyph would appear on the astrolabe. Instead, you poked it without a second thought.”

  “What was I meant to do?”

  “You should’ve shown me first. I could’ve told you it was a sigil used for openings and that touching it would activate it.” Alexis bit down his frustration. “And you should be wearing the ring I made you so your body stays together.”

  Penelope took his face in her hands, forcing him to look her in the eye. “Stop trying to control everything. You are the one that has always said magic is an unknowable force. You were scared today; that�
�s why you’re pissed. But guess what? Because I pressed the sigil, I managed to find the books we’ve been looking for for months. Because I forgot to put the ring on, I saw Kreios, and now we know what our enemy is planning. Deal with things not going your way, Alexis.”

  “I can’t lose you.”

  “You will if you don’t let me make my own mistakes, because sometimes, those mistakes give us the answers we need. I’m a newcomer, but I’m linked to all of this just as much as you.” Penelope pushed her hands through his hair, and he rested his head against her chest. “I love you, Alexis. I’m sorry I scared you.”

  “I’m sorry that I can’t keep you safe.”

  Penelope laughed. “Oh, magician, I knew I was never going to be safe again as soon as I walked through the palazzo door. Still, I’d choose to do so again and again.”

  “I love you, Penelope. I can accept you doing crazy things like getting sucked into astrolabes if you promise you’ll always find a way back to me.” Alexis tilted his head up, and she brushed her nose against his.

  “Of course I’ll come back. You’re my home.”

  FROM THE OTHER side of the cell door, Phaidros watched Penelope calm Alexis faster than he ever thought possible. After waiting a few minutes to make sure she wasn’t in any danger, Phaidros walked away, the intimacy of the moment too painful to watch.

  Zo almost crashed into him coming out of the elevator. “Have you seen Aelia?”

  “No, I was in the Archives. Why? What’s happened?”

  Aelia had kept to herself since they’d arrived back in Venice. The emotional upheaval between them in Badija had been powerful, and they both needed time to process it.

  “I don’t know if anything is wrong yet, but she isn’t in the palazzo. I thought she might be with you. She must have gone out shopping or something.” Zo didn’t have to say that he was worried. His harried energy was enough to put Phaidros on edge.

  “She should’ve told someone that she was leaving. We don’t know if any of Thevetat’s minions are about, and Penelope just had a conversation with Kreios. He’s in Florence. That’s close enough to worry about.”