The Conspiracy of Us

by Maggie Hall

  “I’m sorry,” Jack mouthed as I got closer. I shook my head.

  “Let him go,” I murmured to Monsieur Dauphin. “That’s the only way I’ll do this.”

  Monsieur Dauphin glanced around at the dozens of guests—the president of France a few rows away, glowering at Jack. Padraig Harrington, the golfer, wearing an amused grin, like this was the most fun thing that could have happened today. “You have my word,” he said.

  He pulled Jack to his feet and propelled me toward Luc, who stood at the altar, looking nearly as lost as I felt. But to him, the mandate was fate. Destinée. Especially since they’d lost his baby sister. I knew that, as much as he might want to, he wouldn’t stop it.

  Luc steadied me with a hand on my elbow, and I spun to watch Jack stumble away down the aisle, his ankles still restrained. Not twenty feet away, a pair of guards jumped up and caught him, and a man in a white turban gestured with a flick of his wrist for them to hold him to the side.

  “Wait—” I cried.

  Monsieur Dauphin leaned in close beside me. “I said we wouldn’t catch him. I didn’t promise no one would.”

  I choked back a whimper. I’d thought maybe he wouldn’t kill me if I exposed what he was doing in front of all these people, but suddenly, I wasn’t so sure. But even if it was ridiculous—me against the whole Circle—I was going to have to try, and not just for myself now. We were in a semi-open space. It was possible one of these doors led to the outside. If I caused enough of an uproar, I could try to free Jack and run.

  Monsieur Dauphin stood in front of us. “I do apologize for the dramatics,” he said. “We’ll now move on to the purpose of the day. The marriage of my son, Lucien.”

  I shuddered, and felt Luc tense beside me. Down a side aisle, Jack stood suspended between two guards.

  I blinked through the veil, itching to yank it off. I couldn’t do it yet. If I was going to have any chance, I had to choose the right moment.

  A priest stepped forward and took my hands and Luc’s. He bound them with rope, then produced a knife. “Rule by blood,” he said, and I remembered the saying from the books I’d seen that first day. He made a shallow slice across each of our palms. I hissed at the sharp sting but tried to stay still, not fight, lull the guards into backing off farther.

  The priest pressed our two palms together and tied the rope tighter. Then he held up a candle. “Light in the dark,” he said, and passed the flame under our hands, searing the knot shut. Luc laced his fingers through mine and squeezed, and I squeezed back. This wasn’t his fault.

  The priest leaned over our hands and began an incantation in a language I didn’t know. As he did, another priest approached and, to my surprise, pulled my veil off my back so my shoulders were exposed. And then, there was a snipping sound, and I felt the priest touch my head. He held up one wide, dark ringlet.

  My free hand flew to my head. They’d cut part of my hair?

  “In the gamos ceremony, the blood ritual and the offering of a lock of hair symbolize purity and commitment to the marriage,” the priest continued, switching to English when he’d finished his prayer. “And now, the marriage vows.”

  The timing still wasn’t right, but this was the last chance I’d have.

  With my free hand, I ripped the veil off my head and tossed it in a pile on the floor. “Do you realize what the Dauphins are trying to do?” I yelled. “Look at my eyes!”

  A murmur rippled through the crowd; a few people in the back rows stood to get a better look. Monsieur Dauphin rose from his chair.

  “I have purple eyes,” I said. I yanked as hard as I could, and my hand came free from Luc’s with a spatter of blood across my white dress and the bite of rope burn on my wrist. Luc’s mouth fell open, but he didn’t stop me. “I’m Alistair Saxon’s daughter, and the Dauphins were going to marry me into their family without telling you.”

  The room burst into an uproar. Monsieur Dauphin lunged for me, but I leapt off the altar and ducked behind the huge gold cross. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw guards surge between Monsieur Dauphin and the crowd.

  In the chaos, I managed to slip into an alcove, where I worked the knife out of my dress. I’d gotten as lucky as I could have hoped—the whole crowd seemed to be turning on Monsieur Dauphin. Only a few people, and fewer guards, were headed my way. I waited a few more seconds, then ducked out the side of the altar area and ran toward Jack. I steeled myself to fight off the guards, but as I approached from behind, they shoved him against a wall and joined in the fray.

  Jack’s eyes widened when he saw me. “No, Avery,” he said. “You might be able to get away. Just leave me!”

  “Are you insane?” I dropped to my knees and started cutting through the rope around his ankles, the knife slippery from the blood on my hand. “I’m not leaving you.” I sawed harder, but I wasn’t going fast enough.

  Someone else fell to the ground beside me, and I whirled, knife in hand.

  Luc had his own dagger ready. Instead of reaching toward me, he sliced through the ropes. “Hurry,” he said.

  I gave his arm a quick squeeze, and Jack hauled me to my feet.

  We turned around, but stopped when we almost ran into a dark-skinned little girl. She must have been about eight, and stared up at me with huge, awestruck eyes. Her mom dashed up and grabbed her shoulder—and then she noticed me, too, and stopped short. She dropped to her knees.

  “My lady,” she said in a heavy accent, and raised her hands to her forehead, palms out. “Blood save you.”

  I glanced at Jack. He looked as surprised as I felt. I took a step back from the woman, but then a man dropped to his knees next to her, and made the same sign with his hands. “May I offer my son,” he said reverently. “To raise up the Circle. To save us all.”

  “What the—” I breathed as another man in a nearby pew noticed us and hurried over.

  He didn’t fall into the same position. “Guards!” he yelled. “Seize her!”

  I backed up another step. Blood dripped from my palm onto the marble floor.

  I had forgotten Luc was there until he stepped in front of me. “Friends. Brothers,” he said with a quick glance at me and a nod of his head toward the back of the church. “We know this is a miraculous time.” He circled the people smoothly until they were all facing away from me. Behind his back, he made a subtle hand gesture. Go.

  I pulled on Jack’s hand, and we backed away, toward a wide column. “Look!” Luc said. I saw him gesture toward the altar. “There she goes.”

  I yanked Jack fully behind the pillar. With a flurry of exclamations, the people noticed I was no longer behind them, and jumped up to follow Luc.

  “What was that?” I whispered. Jack just shook his head. We rushed toward where I remembered seeing a side exit yesterday.

  Halfway there, Stellan stepped into our path.

  I almost screamed in frustration. Jack tried to dodge him, but Stellan caught my arm and pulled me behind another pillar that hid us completely from the rest of the church.

  “You promise me you were telling the truth?” Stellan murmured. I yanked Jack to a stop.

  “What—”

  “And you’ll stand behind me as the thirteenth, if we’re right. Whatever we end up having to do.”

  I gaped at him. Beside me, Jack did the same.

  “She cries herself to sleep every night I’m not there.” Stellan squeezed my arm. “Every single night.”

  I thought of the pretty little blond girl. Anya.

  “And you can’t say a thing about me to the Order. Make something up,” Stellan said. “Promise me.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes!”

  A shout came from the other side of the pillar. Guards. They hadn’t seen us yet, but they would soon.

  Stellan cursed under his breath. “I’ll stall them. Second door on your left. It leads up, but all the exits
on this level are locked. I’ll find you later.”

  “How—”

  “Hurt me. Hurry. Make it look convincing or they’ll know I let you go.”

  Jack didn’t need to be told twice. He hit Stellan with a quick right hook.

  Stellan staggered back one step. “More convincing than one little punch.”

  Before Jack could do any more, I held up the knife.

  Stellan’s eyes widened, more with appreciation than fear.

  I gritted my teeth and poked the tip of the knife into Stellan’s arm.

  He cursed under his breath in French. “More,” he murmured.

  More? I hesitated too long. Stellan took my hand and plunged the knife into his shoulder.

  I cried out louder than he did, but he let go of me, and Jack and I sprinted to the second door on the left, slamming it behind us and plunging ourselves into blackness.

  “Give me your shoe,” Jack said. I tore both of my heels off, shoving one blindly in his direction. In the bit of light from under the door, I saw him work it underneath like a makeshift doorstop, then gesture toward the stairs.

  My eyes needed more time to adjust to the dark, but time was something we didn’t have. I dashed blindly after him up the narrow, steep spiral, holding my wedding dress as high as I could. A couple of flights up I tripped anyway, and felt the wound on my thigh from the fire escape rip open. I didn’t even have time to cry out before Jack was helping me up, urging me forward.

  We hadn’t gone more than three flights when we heard the door open with a screech and a bang. The silence exploded with echoing voices, pounding footsteps. I gasped for breath, concentrating on the lighter spot in the dark that was Jack’s gray shirt ahead of me.

  We finally emerged into an open space a tiny bit brighter than the stairwell, and I put my hands on my knees, panting. It smelled like wood and damp. Flower-shaped windows let in what little moonlight made its way between the clouds, and illuminated what had to be rafters.

  “We’re in the bell tower,” Jack said. Sure enough, there was the vague silhouette of a massive bell.

  The guards’ footsteps, and their shouts, came closer.

  “If we’re in the bell tower, that’s the front of the cathedral,” Jack said, ducking us under the crisscrossing wooden beams and dragging me toward the wall of windows. “I think there’s a door.”

  We both felt frantically along the wall.

  “Here!” Jack’s exclamation was punctuated by a child-sized door thrown open to the night.

  We jumped out of it into the rain and closed it as quietly as we could. I looked around in surprise. We were on the gargoyle balcony from yesterday.

  “Where now?” I panted, dashing rain out of my eyes. We wouldn’t have much time before they figured out where we’d gone.

  He ran to the side and peered through the metal fencing. I gulped.

  “There’s construction scaffolding all down this side,” he said. “They’d never expect us to escape from up here.” He looked back at me. “I’ll hold on to you. I’ll help you. I know you’re afraid of falling, but—”

  I took the hand he offered. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not scared anymore.” I realized it was true. Because I’d actually come to terms with the fear or because I’d found scarier things than heights, I wasn’t sure, but I was no longer afraid of falling.

  I hiked the dress up around my knees, and Jack helped me over the relative safety of the railing and onto the swaying, slippery scaffolding. I clung to him for a second, then grabbed the railing and moved.

  A slim ladder led down between each level. Luckily, my dress was easier to deal with going down than up, and we flew past the cathedral’s stone facade, down down down. With our footsteps and the rain pinging off the scaffolding, I couldn’t hear whether the guards had made it to the balcony. The cut on my thigh, and the new one along my torso, screamed. I could hardly breathe. Finally, when I was sure I couldn’t go any farther, my feet hit solid ground. We’d ended up in a courtyard of what must have been some kind of caretaker’s house next to the church. I gasped for air, and we ran for the cover of a small bunch of trees.

  I collapsed against the fence. “Did they see us?” I panted.

  Even though we’d been on the side of the bell tower and not the front, a girl in a wedding dress scrambling down the side of NotreDame wouldn’t exactly blend in. Luckily, it looked like the rain had kept most tourists away tonight, and most of the Circle inside the cathedral.

  I tried to stand and tripped over my dress again. I batted at it in frustration, and then I remembered the knife in my hand.

  I plunged it through the lace and the satin and the layer of crinoline underneath at thigh height, and ripped a hole in it. When Jack saw what I was doing, he helped me rip it the rest of the way around until most of the skirt was around my ankles and my legs were free again. I stepped out of the discarded fabric and Jack stuffed it into a nearby trash can.

  “I have a phone,” I said, pulling it out of my dress. “We have to call the Order.”

  “We have to get away from here first.”

  We did. The second they realized we’d gotten out of the church, it’d be a massive manhunt. But we couldn’t just take off running.

  Right as I thought it, one brave tour group hurried toward us under dozens of red umbrellas. On the street across the Seine, I could see their matching red double-decker bus waiting under a streetlamp.

  “Time for a tour,” Jack said. He took my hand, and when they passed our hiding place, we inched our way into the middle of their group. We left them at their bus on the other side of the river, then ducked down a side street and under the awning of a tiny frites shop.

  A car drove by, splashing through a puddle on the cobblestone street. I pulled out the phone, and paused.

  Jack read my mind. “Are we going to tell them about Stellan?”

  “We promised him we wouldn’t. And we’re not even sure it’s true.” I stopped when the shop owner peered outside, but Jack waved him off. “Whether it’s true or not, they’d kill him,” I went on.

  Jack ran his hands through his hair. The sloppy hoodie looked so out of place on him. “They’ll kill Fitz if we don’t.”

  The thought of handing someone over to the Order was bad enough when I didn’t know them. I thought of Stellan taking the bobby pins out of my hair on the plane. Of him talking to his sister on the phone—his sister who had no one else in the world. “Maybe if we tell them we have clues but we’re still working on it, they’ll give us more time,” I said. “Enough time for Saxon to go after them. We could even say we have leads on the tomb if we have to.”

  Jack frowned and looked back at the cathedral. The rain came down harder, beating on the plastic awning overhead. “Okay. Let’s try it. You’re right—if they’ve kept Fitz alive this long, he must be their only bargaining chip.”

  I dialed the number and put it on speaker.

  Scarface picked up on the first ring. “You’re late.”

  I clutched Jack’s sweatshirt in my fist.

  “We had a bit of a delay,” Jack said over the rush of a car driving by.

  “Well?” Scarface said. “Do you have it?”

  “We need to know he’s okay first.”

  I groped for Jack’s hand, and he grabbed mine and squeezed. A rush of wind sprayed us with cold raindrops.

  Scarface gave a derisive sniff. “All right,” he said. And then, Mr. Emerson’s voice came on the phone, and my eyes swam with relieved tears.

  “Avery. Jack. Sweet kids. I love you both so much. Don’t—”

  The phone was snatched away, and Mr. Emerson’s voice faded into the background. I hugged Jack’s arm and felt a grin taking over my face. He was alive. He was still alive. We weren’t too late.

  “Happy?” Scarface said. “Your grandfather or whatever is alive and
well. For now. We almost didn’t give you that reprieve when your friend called and said you needed more time, but lucky for you, I was feeling generous.”

  Stellan. He had actually called them, and then he helped us escape. We really couldn’t turn him in now.

  “All right.” Jack took the phone out of my hand. His voice was thick with emotion. “We do have some information, but we don’t know who the One is yet.”

  “That wasn’t our deal,” Scarface interrupted.

  “Wait,” Jack said. “Listen. We don’t know who it is, but we have clues. We just need more time. And this way you know we’re not lying and making up a name.”

  “The deal was the name of the One for your grandpa’s life.”

  “We know. We just need another few days.” Jack looked at me, eyes wide. This wasn’t going well. “The tomb,” I mouthed. Jack nodded. “And we know more, too. We have information about the—”

  Mr. Emerson’s voice piped up again from the background. “No! Don’t tell him anyth—”

  An explosion cut off his words.

  I grabbed at Jack with both hands. His face turned ghost-pale, and the hand holding the phone went slack. No. That wasn’t what I thought it was. It couldn’t be—

  “Hope you’re happy,” Scarface said. “Your slipup just got the old man killed.”

  “No,” I said. It was like I was talking underwater. Too slow. Too far away. “No. No!”

  “If you’d like to try telling the truth again, we have someone else I hear you might be interested in.”

  A choked sob escaped my throat. “No!” I cried, not able to believe that had really happened. We’d gotten him killed. They had killed Mr. Emerson. They’d—

  “Avery?” said a new voice.

  I jerked away from Jack and stared at the phone, caught in the middle of a sob. “Mom?”