Shadowbound

by Dianne Sylvan

  Stella guzzled about half the can, then looked embarrassed and held it in her hands for a while, fiddling with the tab with her thumb. “It wasn’t exactly an episode . . . I guess it was sort of a dream? I don’t remember any of it. I woke up on the floor in this totally random room around the corner. I thought I might be near the library, but this place is such a rabbit warren, who knows? But one of your guys walked by and saw me, and I guess I looked lost and whacked-out enough that he came to help.”

  “Which room was it?” Miranda asked. “What was in it?”

  “It was just an office. I don’t think it’s even one you guys use. There was this huge leather chair, and the walls were lined with those bookcases, you know, the ones with the glass doors that open up and down?”

  “Barrister bookcases,” David supplied.

  “Yes. Those. There was also a desk with nothing on it but a couple of knickknacks.”

  Miranda turned to her husband. “The empty study down from the music room?”

  “Sounds like it. Most of my college textbooks are in there, but that’s about it.”

  “The thing is . . .” Stella took another swig of her soda before continuing. “That was the third time this has happened . . . this week.”

  The Pair both stared at her.

  “The first was the day after you were all out of town. I thought, okay, I’m sleepwalking. Weird, but not scary. Then two days later it happened again. It started to freak me out but I thought, maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe I went sleepwalking again and that was the only place my brain could come up with since it had just been there. But then tonight . . . three times isn’t a coincidence. Three times is a very special episode of ‘what the fuck?’”

  “And you saw nothing that seemed out of place or odd in the room?” David asked.

  She shook her head. “The room was freakishly tidy. If there had been even a book out of alignment, it would have stuck out like a sore thumb. It was just a room. I didn’t get any impressions from it like I might if something bad had happened there—there was nothing.”

  “I think we need to check out this room,” Miranda said.

  They all stood, but David said, “Let me meet you there—I want to stop and grab something that might help.”

  Miranda was still worried, watching Stella, that the girl might fall over; she might not remember what had happened, but the whole thing had definitely left her unsteady. She led Miranda down the hall and around the corner fairly confidently, and they wound up at the room the Pair had expected. Since it was in their wing, it was locked, and Miranda held her com up to it—

  “Wait,” Miranda said, frowning. “This room is locked.”

  “So?”

  “So your com isn’t authorized to get in here. How did you open the door?”

  Stella shook her head. She had no answer to give.

  It was just as the Witch had described: empty, silent. Miranda flipped the lights on for the human’s benefit, but there was really nothing to see. “Where did you wake up?”

  “Over here . . .” Stella walked over to stand away from all the furniture, slightly off center. “Same exact spot every time. I remember seeing this little splotch in the tile.”

  “Which way were you facing when you woke?”

  A frown. “Well, now that you mention it . . . every time I was facing this way.” She turned away from Miranda toward one of the bookcases. “And . . . okay, that’s weird.”

  “What is?”

  “The sequence of events was always the same. I woke up struggling, saw the bookcase, then started looking around trying to orient myself. But when I looked over here . . . every time, I noticed this book.” Stella bent to one of the lower shelves and lifted its door, her finger falling on the spine of a thick, aged hardcover. “Maybe it was just because the cover’s this funky shade of orange. I don’t see what theoretical calculus would have to do with anything.”

  Miranda joined her and pulled the book from the shelf. It was absurdly heavy. She opened it and flipped through, but all she saw were pages and pages of marginalia in a neat, slightly slanted hand she knew quite well. Nothing fell out of the book, there were no hidden messages—unless they were written in math, which David would have to judge. “Was there anything behind it on the shelf?”

  Stella had knelt and was shifting the other books around. “Whoa.”

  “What do you see?”

  “A mirror,” Stella replied. “A tiny little mirror about two inches square, stuck to the back wall of the bookcase. What do you suppose it’s for?”

  Before Miranda could answer that she had no idea, David appeared; he had a small handheld device about the size of his phone that she recognized as a scanner of some sort.

  She raised an eyebrow at him, and he said, “Ever since Ovaska, I’ve been working on a way to scan for psychic or magical energy to detect amulets and such and hopefully one day tell me what kind they are. Our regular technology—the kind we use in the sensor network, the kind in the tracker I stuck in the soldier—can’t pick it up. I’ve tried dozens of methods and had no luck whatsoever. I couldn’t find the logic.”

  “Magic isn’t logical,” Miranda said.

  Stella laughed. “Of course it is. It’s very logical. It’s all cause and effect. If something seems to appear and disappear, that just means it went somewhere you haven’t found yet. But there’s an underlying order.”

  “Exactly,” David said. “After you started telling us about the whole Web thing, and I started observing our abilities and incidents from that perspective, it started to make more sense.” He held up the scanner. “This is the first version that has given me anything useful. I figure if there’s something you’re being led to see, this will either help us find it, or at least tell us if it’s supernatural before we pick it up and play with it and get turned into frogs.”

  “Show him the mirror,” Miranda told Stella.

  The Prime bent and followed the Witch’s gesture. “Well, now.”

  “Is there anything magical about the mirror?” Miranda wanted to know.

  David held the scanner up to it and shook his head. “Assuming my readings are correct, no. It’s just a mirror.”

  “Why would anyone slap a mirror in a bookcase?”

  He examined it for a minute. “Odd . . . it’s glued to the back wall of the bookcase, but it’s not glued flat. There’s something very thin underneath the bottom edge that’s tilting the bottom out at a slight angle . . .” Something dawned on his face, and he straightened, looking around the room.

  His expression became what she called his “in the Matrix” look; she could see him running through something as his eyes traveled over the walls. A moment later, though, he dug in his coat and pulled out a small flashlight.

  She had long ago learned not to be surprised at anything he had in his pockets.

  He glanced over at the light switch, and it flipped. The room spun back into darkness, and Miranda’s eyes adjusted instantly, but she had to reach out and grab the Witch’s arm to keep her from tripping as they got out of David’s way.

  David asked Stella where she’d woken up, and she showed him; he knelt there, turned on the flashlight, and aimed it directly at the mirror.

  Miranda and Stella both gasped. The flashlight’s beam hit the mirror, bounced off at an angle, shot across the room, and apparently hit another mirror, then another—the light zigzagged off almost every corner before hitting a bare spot on the wall, down by the floor.

  “What the hell is that?” the Queen asked. “How did you not know this was here?”

  “I never use this room,” he reminded her. “I think the last time I was in here was to alphabetize the books a few months after I moved in. Why would I be looking for something this bizarre?”

  “But what’s behind that wall?” Stella asked.

  “Let’s find out.” The Prime took a long look at the beam again, memorizing the exact spot where it ended, then reached over to the light switch with his mind
and turned it back on. “Stay back a minute,” he said, stowing the flashlight and approaching the spot. “I think the Signets are giving off interference that’s mucking with the signal. When it was just mine I didn’t really notice.”

  Miranda heard the little gadget beep several times, and David shook his head. “It’s not registering anything. Whatever’s in there is either perfectly mundane or shielded somehow.”

  The walls were paneled, and a wood chair rail surrounded the room; it would be pretty easy to take a panel out, stick something behind it, and replace it without it being obvious anything had changed. David felt around the panel for a moment, probably looking for a catch.

  “I hope we don’t have to saw it open,” Miranda said. “I’d feel like a blasphemer damaging this woodwork.” She went closer and added her hands to the search, pressing along the chair rail to see if it moved.

  She was about to give up when she felt something under her fingers give just a tiny bit. “There!”

  There was a soft click, and a section of the rail moved out a few millimeters, allowing the panel it held to tilt just enough to be removed.

  She and David took hold of the panel and lifted it gingerly from its slot. Behind it were wall studs, and behind that bricks; she had no idea how the Haven had been designed or even when it was built, but there were cobwebs aplenty.

  And right in between two studs, covered in dust, a box.

  David’s eyes gleamed with excitement. He lifted the box very slowly out of its hiding place and set it on the floor.

  It was about the size of the calculus textbook that had led them here in the first place; carved out of ebony wood, it reminded her of the box the Stone of Awakening had come in—and the one her Signet had originally been kept in. There was some kind of writing carved around the edges, possibly Greek—Novotny’s symbol-and-language database would make short work of it. A weird metal lock was built into the side, and though it was clearly very old, both box and lock looked rock-solid.

  That wasn’t the remarkable thing, though. The remarkable thing was carved right in the center of the box’s lid:

  The Seal of Elysium.

  Nine

  In her dream she walked around the streets of Prague, dressed stylishly for autumn, Vràna trotting along at her side, the dog’s tongue lolling out in a smile and her tags jingling in the quiet night. The sky overhead held no moon, only thousands of stars that, if she stared up at them long enough, seemed to form a spider’s web of faint threads of light.

  It might have occurred to her that what she was dreaming had never once happened and probably never would—she had yet to set foot on the streets of her capital alone—but in the dream, at least, she walked like a woman with a purpose, hips swaying slightly, the wind catching the dark ribbons of her hair and trailing them out from beneath the hat she wore against the chill.

  She stepped out into a picturesque old-town square that she wasn’t sure really existed. The buildings around her opened up to offer a flirtatious peek between them, revealing a stone fountain and park benches, old-fashioned streetlights. The few people passing by were little more than shadowy shapes.

  “Good evening.”

  Cora wasn’t startled; every time she had the dream, she was unafraid of anything. She turned toward the woman’s voice, smiling. “Good evening.”

  There, sitting on a low wall that surrounded the fountain, was a young woman in a long black dress covered in a black velvet coat that trailed to the ground. She had a pale, oval-shaped face framed by a tumble of dark red hair much like the Queen of the South’s, but rather than green eyes, hers were . . . well . . . for just a second they were green, though that might have been Cora trying to make something familiar of her; then, they settled on a disturbing, depthless black that also should have frightened Cora but for some reason did not.

  Vràna padded over to the woman and sat down next to her, laying her gigantic shaggy head in the stranger’s lap. Cora had never seen the Nighthound do that—she was loyal only to her mistress and affectionately tolerant of Jacob. The woman rested a hand on the dog’s head.

  “You are the Queen of this territory, are you not?” the woman asked. There was something so familiar about her voice . . .

  “I am,” Cora said.

  The woman looked her up and down, smiling as if she’d just discovered her favorite daughter hiding in the garden. “Do you like being Queen, Cora?”

  She frowned. “I had never thought about it.” She sat down on the wall next to the stranger, considering. “I suppose I do—I feel like I have not really started yet, though . . . as if I had been convalescing from a debilitating illness and have only just risen from bed.”

  “An apt metaphor,” the woman said with a nod. “But the time is soon approaching when you will have to leave the safety of your chambers and step out into the world. You barely know a tenth of what you are capable of, Cora. I hope that what you learn about yourself will be worth the lesson.”

  Cora stared at her, uneasiness finally reaching her through the odd reality of dreams. “I do not like the sound of that.”

  “The Web is in motion,” she replied. “My son was kind enough to unlock the door, but it will take all of you to open. In the meantime we whisper through the door, trying to tell our secrets. If you would hear more, you must ask the Voice.”

  The Queen heard something rustling off to her left, and seemingly out of nowhere, a large raven soared across the square to land on the fountain, its broad black wings almost filling the sky. It hopped down beside the woman. A moment later, a second one arrived . . . and then a third. One was close enough that the woman could reach out and scratch its head; the bird made little noises of delight that were eerily human.

  Cora heard more feathers and looked around the square, counting more ravens perched on lampposts, bobbing in the newfallen snow. Five, six, seven . . . there should be eight. She knew there should be eight.

  Cora fought against the question for several minutes. She didn’t want to know the answer, but she had to know the answer. “Who are you?”

  “To you? A friend. To others? A Prime in my own right, perhaps; or a mother; or, in some cases, a hand waiting to be taken, a hope believed long lost. I am what each of you needs me to be.”

  Cora’s heart was pounding. She could feel the dream beginning to unravel around her, details that had been so clear becoming misty and unformed. The woman before her remained fully present, but her dress and coat began to blur around the edges, becoming one with the shadows that had formed around the fountain, even in the dark of night. “What . . . what must I do?” Cora asked, her voice nearly swallowed by the wind.

  The woman leaned forward and took her hand, sending a shock wave of energy through Cora’s body. Their eyes met and held, and Cora could see the night sky overhead turning in the woman’s eyes . . . containing the stars, containing the universe.

  “Do not be afraid,” she told Cora. “Love is stronger than fear, child. Hold on to it. In the darkness when you feel alone and small, remember you are a Queen . . . you were chosen for this, you of all your kind. You guard the heat of a will on fire . . . just let it burn.”

  Cora woke shaking, her skin fever-hot and her mind spinning, to the sound of wings.

  • • •

  “What do you mean, you can’t open it?”

  Dr. Novotny cleaned his glasses on the lapel of his lab coat, looking both sheepish and perplexed. “I mean we can’t open it.”

  David frowned at the black box, which rested inside a Plexiglas enclosure and was currently finishing a busy day of tests, scans, and attempts to access its inner contents. “It’s made of wood,” David pointed out unnecessarily.

  “I’m just as flummoxed as you are, Sire. We’ve tried everything—the box is held together with expertly made joinery, no adhesive whatsoever, so we can’t dissolve the glue and dismantle it. We took thorough scans of the entire surface, and as you gave permission to break it if necessary, we even took a hammer t
o it. Hammer, pry bar, torch, laser . . . we’ve tried. It even seems to be fireproof. Not only is it not breaking, none of our equipment has left so much as a gouge on the surface.”

  “What the hell kind of wood is that?”

  “I don’t think it has that much to do with the wood itself,” the doctor said, gesturing for David to follow him to the console, where he pulled up several screens of diagrams, scan results, and observational data. “The energy the thing is giving off is very strange.”

  “I didn’t think it was giving off energy. I didn’t get anything on my scanner.”

  “Your scanner needs work, then. It’s definitely got an energy signature, but it’s not a particularly active one. The closest descriptor is that it’s humming very quietly.”

  “What about the lock? What kind of key does it take?”

  “As far as we can tell, it’s not a key at all; the hole is the approximate size and shape of the stone in a large ring. Your sire was a member of the Order of Elysium—do you recall if she wore a ring?”

  “I don’t remember.” As Novotny fussed with the display for a moment, David quickly took out his phone and sent a text: Elysium: do they wear rings?

  “As for the outer carvings, we had a bit more luck.” Novotny brought up the scans of those, overlaid with translations of the language carved into the wood. “As suspected, it’s ancient Greek, though it’s a bit of an odd dialect. Still, it was easy enough to get through, and if the book itself is in the same language—”

  “Book?”

  Novotny smiled. “If you’ll take a look at this scan, you can see that there’s a slightly smaller rectangular object inside the box.”

  David crossed his arms thoughtfully. “It might just be another box. With another box inside it. The world’s oldest and lamest practical joke.”

  “Well, maybe, except for one thing.” Novotny pointed at one of the lines of translated text from the top of the box around the Seal of Elysium. “Herein lies the Codex of Persephone,” Novotny read. “It’s a book.”