Siege of Shadows

by Sarah Raughley

  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.

  None of this had moved dear Alice. She was focused on me alone as she stood at a distance, her chest heaving, the half stone clenched in her pale hand.

  I couldn’t breathe from the smoke. The soot darkened the white of my servant’s clothes, graying Alice’s sapphire dress. The flames would destroy the whole city soon. Even I hadn’t the power to banish them all. The fire of death would engulf everything.

  “Is this the world you wanted?” I asked her. “Is this what you dreamed about when you began your game? Look around us!” The white bonnet was already slipping from the crown of my head, so with a bloodied hand, I grabbed the straps and pulled it off, letting it fall to the grass. “The world is ending. The world is ending!”

  “The world is beginning.” Alice’s countenance had always been praised by those around us despite concerns over the sickly hue of her skin. Her blond hair, freed from its bindings, whipped around her pointed features. Her blue eyes, usually dark with secrets, were now bright and wild as she stretched out her arms as if to encompass the whole of the world. “Don’t presume to judge me when you are just as guilty as the rest of us.”

  “The rest . . .” I shuddered as I remembered that young mistress’s eyes, hollow with despair. “Because of what we did, Miss Patricia is dead. I do not even know where Miss Abigail and Miss Emilia are.”

  Alice’s smile disappeared.

  “Do you truly feel nothing?” My dressed flapped in the heavy wind. “How many more lives have to be sacrificed, Miss Alice?”

  But these words only seemed to enrage her. “Do not presume to know what I feel and don’t feel, you mud wench. That you dare speak to me as an equal is the biggest shock of all.”

  She was gone. The Alice I knew had disappeared into the ether of memory, her soul twisted and mangled into the sad, empty vessel I saw before me.

  Maybe I never knew her at all. Maybe I was a fool for once thinking I did. The throbbing pain in my chest was enough to tell me so.

  “Miss Alice,” I started, my tongue heavy. “If you had seen what I have seen . . . would you feel remorse? Or are you beyond even that?”

  “I told you to watch your words.” Her hands were shaking in anger; she must have cut her palm against the sharp edge of the stone she held, because blood began to drip from it. “Never forget that it was my father who took you from the mud. From the jungles. My father who saved you from a life among the savages and allowed you to live here in the civilized world.”

  “Your father told me where they are.” I spoke quickly as if every word could be my last. “ ‘For only in calm can you hear them speak.’ Miss Alice, we can go to those lands. We can ask them for one last wish! I can take you! Let us go together! If we do, we can finally end this!”

  “But my dear poupée. What if I don’t wish to end anything?”

  My fingers curled against my dress, crumpling the fabric. The slightly mad look in her eyes used to send terrors through me. I would hide behind corners to avoid their gaze. But I couldn’t hide anymore. I couldn’t cower. “Then I will have stop you.”

  “Stop me? You?” Alice lifted her chin, her lips stretching into an amused grin. “My Nicholas would never have looked at you if it were not for the training I gave you, the civilized words I taught you to speak. You should never have doubted me, Marian, when I told you that I would change everything. I changed your destiny. I dressed you. I raised you. I made you whole. My little doll.”

  The sound of her giggles chilled me from the inside.

  “And, poupée, I will not stop,” she said. “You will not stop me.”

  Slowly and silently through breaths of flame, the handle formed in my hand. “My dear Miss Alice,” I said as the steel blade stretched out from the handle, born and forged from fire. The sword of the legends I’d learned of. “I was already whole before you met me.”

  I brought up the sword, and in the reflection of its blade, I could see my own dark face, chestnut eyes narrowed in determination. In a blink, Alice disappeared and she was behind me, a knife raised above her head—

  “Maia!”

  It sounded like Lake’s voice.

  Yes, I was Maia. I was Maia.

  With a deep shudder, my soul started flying again. The sound of my name crashed through the surface of the memory, sucking my consciousness out of the apocalyptic scene, back into my own body in the museum. Breathing heavily, I dropped to the floor, though it wasn’t until my head had stopped spinning that I realized I wasn’t the only one down here. Lake was struggling to get onto her knees. Chae Rin was sitting, her legs flat against the stone, her body hunched over. Belle was the only one still standing, though she pressed a hand against her head as if to keep it from spinning.

  “What was that?” I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again just to make sure I was me. The special volume was on the floor. “Did you all see that? Did you see Alice?”

  “What?” Chae Rin looked genuinely confused. “No . . .”

  “You didn’t?” I drew my knees up, gripping them with trembling hands. “Was it just me?”

  “I saw her die,” whispered Lake, finally on her knees though she kept her hands against the floor to keep herself steady. “Patricia . . . She . . . she killed herself.” Her voice choked with emotion, and she covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her sob.

  “We saw different memories.” Belle looked at us. “Of different Effigies. The first.”

  We were silent.

  “Links in a chain. A dangerous game,” Chae Rin said suddenly. “That’s what Abigail said. She was crouched in a dark room somewhere rocking back and forth. She just kept repeating it.”

  “For me it was Emilia,” said Belle. “She was trying to save as many people as she could in York, but throughout it all she had a single focus—to find Castor. To tell him something. But what?” She shook her head. “It wasn’t clear.”

  “In mine, Marian and Alice were fighting,” I said, narrowing my eyes as I recalled the memory. “The phantoms had filled the sky. They were on an estate, but the mansion was burning. She said they had to end things.”

  I didn’t know how the pieces fit, but I knew they were involved. The five of them together. The ones whose supernatural burden so many girls had inherited after them.

  “How?” Chae Rin asked. “How did we just scry them like that?”

  The volume. Back at La Charte, it was Saul’s kiss that had forced me into Marian’s memories before. Both Nick and Alice were intimately connected to the girl. This volume . . . The secrets in this book were intimately connected to each of us.

  “Let’s take this back with us.” With sure steps, Belle walked over to the book and picked it up. “Hurry. Our powers are in full effect. The Sect is probably tracking us as we speak.”

  I helped Lake to her feet, but took one last look at the open trapdoor. The words written there. For only in calm can you hear them speak.

  Who are “they”? Where were those lan
ds Marian spoke of? That Castor spoke of? The more I learned, the less I knew.

  “Maia, come on!” Chae Rin said, jolting me out of my thoughts, and I turned to follow.

  The others disappeared quickly through the door before me.

  That’s why they were hit first.

  I ducked back behind the doorframe fast enough to miss the dart, but the others had struck their target. From around the frame, I saw Chae Rin stumbling forward, Lake falling to the ground, and Belle leaning against the statue for support. Belle’s hands shook as she pulled the large needle out from her neck. The one meant for me was still lodged into the doorframe.

  “Come out, Maia.”

  Vasily. My heart pounded against my chest as my head starting spinning. How did he get here? What was going on?

  Pulling out the dart from her neck, Chae Rin raised her hands, and though the earth trembled beneath us, it was nothing but a whisper that died off the second it’d started.

  “Maia, are you going to leave your friends here to rot? Do come out,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice.

  “Yeah, bitch!” Jessie. She was already laughing. “We’ve got something for ya.”

  I couldn’t hide here forever. Steeling myself, I stepped out from the doorframe, ready to launch an attack, but my hands froze the second I saw Jessie’s arm around Rhys’s neck and her gun to his head, her menacing grip squeezing his trachea to the extent that he could barely speak. Even captured, he remained stoic, but I couldn’t. My pulse was already racing, my eyes wide. I’d just begun to say his name when I felt the needle sink into my neck.

  28

  I STUMBLED FORWARD AND TRIPPED, hitting one suit of armor on my way down. As its spear clattered onto the ground next to me, I looked up. The other girls were huddled together in front of me, dizzily trying to regain their bearings. Vasily and Jessie stood just beyond the iron gates with Rhys as their hostage. Though they wore their regular street clothes, they looked menacing nonetheless, both with their fingers on their respective triggers.

  “You may feel a little dazed after the inoculation. This model’s a bit more powerful than the others.” Vasily slipped his dart gun back into his jacket, his hair tied up in a ponytail at the back of his head. “Just a protective measure.”

  Jessie’s sneakers squeaked against the marble floor as she shifted her position to peer at the four of us over Rhys’s left shoulder.

  “Now you’re all here!” Her manic laughter bounced off the high ceiling. “Great! Now you all get to see pretty Aidan’s brains fly out of his—”

  Vasily put his hand up to silence her. He was clearly the more measured of the two, and that was saying something. But even without a gun, he was the one who frightened me the most.

  “Maia,” he said as Jessie bit her lip moodily. He stretched his hand out to me next. “It’s time. Come with me. I know you don’t want Aidan to die.”

  After pushing myself onto my knees, I let myself fall back, my dizziness blurring my vision. When my back hit the suit of armor, I hoped it wouldn’t topple over. “How did you get here?”

  But I already knew. Naomi’s ring. Rhys had told me it’d been bugged. Jessie had been fiddling with it during Blackwell’s party days ago before throwing it back to her. They would have known we were meeting in Madrid. . . .

  “Your prints on the keypad.” Vasily still showed a little sign of the torture he’d endured earlier under the cruel hand of the Surgeon. There were scars all over his face, and his skin looked swallow and dry, like he’d aged several years. But that Cheshire grin hadn’t changed. He showed just a taste of it to me. “You should have used gloves. Rookie mistake.”

  “Besides,” Jessie added wildly, “Vasily followed Natalya around months ago. You think we wouldn’t find this place? You think we’re that stupid? Huh?”

  Behind me, Belle stirred, her hand twitching against the floor.

  “Calm down.” It was Rhys who spoke, saying words he’d probably said thousands of times before. He didn’t need to be able to see her face to feel her sudden frenzy. For a moment, it seemed as if Jessie had listened, her hand relaxing due to habit alone before she steeled herself and pressed her gun harder against Rhys’s skull.

  “He’s right, Jessie. There’s no need to worry. This time, Maia will come with us.”

  “Come with you where?” Chae Rin said. The other four were starting to come out of their dizzy spell, but I knew they couldn’t fight because I couldn’t fight. Whatever surge of power we’d felt in that mysterious room had once again disappeared under the influence of the inoculation dart Vasily and Jessie had hit us with. Our strength and our magic were gone for now.

  “To Saul. The preparations are almost done. But we need you, Maia. You’re the last piece of the puzzle. There’s something you know that nobody else does. Even if you don’t know you know it yet.”

  Marian’s frantic plea to Alice played back in my memories, her soft cries just an echo deep in my consciousness: “For only in calm can you hear them speak.” Miss Alice, we can go to those lands. We can ask them for one last wish! I can take you! Let us go together! If we do, we can finally end this!

  “And what exactly is he preparing for?” Shakily, I got to my feet. “Is it Project X19?”

  Vasily hid his shock much better than Jessie, who gritted her teeth and tightened her grip on Rhys’s neck in retaliation.

  “For you to ask that question means you know a little, but not enough,” Vasily answered.

  “I know the Sect is fractured. So is the Council. I know whichever part Baldric was terrified of is the part working with Saul—and working with you two.”

  The flash drive we’d given Uncle Nathan—the one we’d taken from Philip—pointed to the Sect. The nanotech Mellie had injected into my neck was a similar model to the one in Jessie’s own. Baldric was right in thinking there was a connection between Saul’s soldiers and the Sect.

  But why would Saul work with them? During our battle in France, Nick had told me that both he and Alice wanted the same thing: the rest of the stone so he could grant some wish. Marian knew where to find it. But that couldn’t have been all. What else did he have in store?

  “How did they recruit you, Vasily?” I stared him down. “You don’t have any powers, so you weren’t in the Silent Children Program. Neither was Rhys.”

  “The job was offered to me one day by a close associate,” Vasily said simply. “I didn’t think twice.”

  “Because you wanted to help Saul?”

  “This is much bigger than Saul. It’s not about the Sect, either. It’s about the whole world, Maia. It’s about changing the world.” Vasily slipped both of his hands into his pockets. “We’re making a world where poor girls like you don’t have to fight anymore. You can throw away your ‘duty’ and live your lives. Don’t you want that?”

  Vasily was sincere, as sincere as when he’d stared pale-faced at the image of his mother, broken by the same cruel system that had abused him.

  “The only way you can do that,” Rhys said, struggling against the pressure of Jessie’s arm, “is if you destroy the Sect.”

  “The Sect should be destroyed, Aidan,” Vasily said, his voice rising dangerously, his face alight with quiet anger. “After everything they did to you. To me. To . . .” He swallowed his next words, but I already knew what he wanted to say. His mother. “We’re nothing to them, agents and Effigies alike. We have to build something greater. This is the only way to do it.”

  Silently, he walked through the rows of suited armor, his gaze as sharp as the towering crystallized phantoms watching over us with their slitted eyes.

  My feet felt weighted as I stepped out to the middle of the hall, directly in front of him, my back facing Patricia’s portrait. I had no magic, not enough training to go up against a monster like Vasily. But I wasn’t going with him without a fight.

  Neither was Belle. I hadn’t seen her pick up the spear that had fallen next to me, but she had it firmly gripped in her h
and as she stepped out from behind the suits of armor.

  “Vasily.” She let the tip of the spear drag against the marble floor with a loud scratch as she walked. “Tell me again. That you followed Natalya.”

  Rhys’s eyes met mine, secrets whispering silently between us. Belle still had the special volume in her hand, but not for long. She threw it to the side and it skidded across the floor until it came to a stop against the suit of armor. Belle was readying herself for battle.

  Vasily laughed. “Who? Sorry, did somebody mention her?”

  “Tell me.” She pivoted on her feet, facing the trio.

  “Belle!” Lake got up, though she stayed where she was, her eyes nervously darting between both poles of the room. “Calm down!”

  “Did nobody tell you?” He gave Rhys a sidelong look, delighting in the way Rhys’s jaw set. “She’s nobody. You should know that by now. Important to no one. I can’t even remember what I did or didn’t do to her.”

  The spear shook in Belle’s hand. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see the digital wall clock ticking down from inside the opposite room. I could see the red numbers flashing just above the heads of the three stone statues. Ten seconds . . . nine seconds . . .

  “Guys . . .” I grabbed Belle’s arm, but she shrugged me off without even looking back. Her breaths labored, her hands trembling, she raised the spear, pointing its blade at him.

  “Did you kill Natalya?”

  Four seconds . . . three seconds . . .

  “Maybe.” Vasily smiled. “What a pity that you’re the only one who still seems to care.”