Blood Ties (16 page)

“How do you know?” Oliver asked.

“I can feel her emotions. It's her spirit, but more.… She's definitely alive, but she's left her body.”

“Maybe it's transference,” guessed Oliver. He'd heard of it. “It's like something between when Emalie goes into someone's head and when a vampire occupies an animal. You transfer your life force into something else, and usually you leave a summoning charm behind.”

Emalie's brow furrowed like she was searching the silence. “She always longed to leave, but she knew it was safe here, until…”

“What?” Oliver asked.

Emalie looked at Oliver. “Until she realized that someone was going to kill her.”

“That would be my dad,” said Oliver.

Emalie shook her head. “She didn't go far, because there's something she still wants to do—”

“Um,” interrupted Dean, “guys?” Dean had picked up a photo from the nightstand. The wooden frame was dented and chipped. Oliver and Emalie crowded around. The photo was faded, black and white with stains around the edges. Two women, one older, one younger, wearing plain white dresses, stood on the front step of a rickety wooden building. Sun gleamed brightly on their foreheads. The older woman had her arm around the younger in a motherly way. “So, that”—Dean pointed at the older woman and then glanced at the bed—“that's Selene. And we weren't in the museum for very long, but I think this other lady—”

“That's my mom,” said Emalie quietly, “for real.”

Dean turned over the frame. He slid three metal tabs aside, removed the back, slipped the photo out, and handed it to Emalie. There was script handwriting on the back:

Selene and Phoebe, guardians of the Muse

Township of Arcana, March 14, 1868

Emalie flipped the photo back around. She ran her finger over it and stared hard at her mother's face.

“So,” said Dean, “that's your mom, kinda, like, back in time.”

“Seems to be,” Emalie agreed.

“What's she doing there?”

“I have no idea,” Emalie answered.

“I've heard of Arcana,” said Oliver. “The Codex told me it was a town destroyed by Orani in … I think he said 1868.”

“Orani would never destroy a town.” Emalie frowned at the photo. “What are you doing, Mom?” She handed it back to Dean.

“Don't you want to keep it?” he asked.

“No, it's Selene's.” She squinted, like she was sensing the forces in the room. “She loves that photo.”

Dean returned the photo to its frame.

The slamming of a door echoed from the hall. Footsteps hurried in their direction. “Ember said it was room 209!” one of the vampires called.

“Now what?” Emalie asked.

Oliver looked back at the frail body on the bed.
Where are you, Selene?
he wondered. Something soft brushed against his leg with a tinkling of a bell. The tan cat. There was a blur of motion in the corner of his eye, and the black cat leaped onto the bed and curled up on Selene's legs, purring loudly. Oliver noticed now that the black cat didn't have a collar.…

Something else caught his gaze at the window, a tiny blinking light: a firefly. As he focused on the glass, he saw another, and another.…

He looked back at the black cat with its missing collar.

Footsteps neared the door.

“Guys,” said Oliver. “I know where Selene hid herself.”

“Where?” Dean asked.

“Come on,” said Oliver. He crossed the room and pushed open the tall, double windows. “Hang on,” he said. He threw an arm around Emalie's shoulders and leaped out into the night.

Chapter 12

The Temple of the Dead

AS OLIVER AND EMALIE LANDED
in the grassy yard, Oliver heard the smashing of a door from above—and at the same time, the sound of frantic voices from around the side of the Asylum.

“Whoa!” shouted Dean as he landed. “They almost got me—”

“Tsss,”
Oliver hissed. “Quiet.”

He crept along the side of the castle until he could see the front gate. A collection of vampires walked briskly toward the front door. The bone pins on the lapels of their black coats identified them as Half-Light Consortium. Oliver recognized a few of them: Leah with her short frizzy hair; Yasmin in her head scarf; and Tyrus leading the team, his turtleneck high despite the warm night. “Leah, check the back,” he ordered, and Leah started in Oliver's direction.

Oliver wondered for a moment if he should reveal himself to them.
Then I won't have a chance to talk to Selene on my own.
He found that, despite talking with his dad, Oliver wanted more than ever to talk to Selene. And he was pretty sure that was what
she
wanted, too.

He turned and raced back to Dean and Emalie. “Let's go.” They ran to the wall, Oliver grabbing Emalie again as they leaped over it and landed in the dry brush on the steep hillside.

“Where are we going?” asked Dean.

Oliver looked around.… There, up the mountainside, he saw one firefly, then another, and another.
Selene is best heard in the fires that burn cold.…
“This way.”

Oliver led the way, scrambling among loose chunks of rock and tufts of dry grass that cast blue shadows in the light of seventh moon. As they hurried upward, the fireflies slowly gathered before them, in a loose order that vaguely drew a line up the hill.

They reached the crest of the mountainside and found themselves standing on the rim of a huge volcanic caldera. Steep walls of rock dropped hundreds of feet down into a crater where a volcanic cinder cone just peeked out of the sparkling waters of Lake Naenia, the lake that was the spirit entry point to Hades' Well. The far side of the caldera ridge was much higher than where they stood, and its sharpest peak were brushed lightly with snow.

Wind whipped at them. Oliver glanced back down at the Asylum, but couldn't tell if they were being pursued.

“There,” said Emalie. Oliver followed her pointing hand. Just below the inside of the crater rim was a series of three flat plateaus, like steps down to the lake carved by a giant. They were littered with remnants of columns and walls. Oliver saw a small road winding away from them, through an entrance gate, and out through a cleft in the caldera wall. The plateaus blinked with meandering fireflies.

They would have to cross a steep incline of crumbled rock to get to it. Oliver led the way down, picking a path down the rock skree between large boulders.

“This is like skiing,” said Dean. He started hopping, feet together, down the slope, only to start a slide of rocks. “Yah!” He tumbled, head over heels, down twenty feet. “I'm fine,” he said, jumping up and limping badly.

They reached the first wide, rectangular plateau. Ancient stone stairs led down to the second level, and then to the third, which overlooked the lake from atop a hundred-foot cliff. Some columns still stood to hold the temple's long-fallen ceilings, and some lay fractured into segments on the ground. The floor was mostly dirt and grass, yet here and there, sections of a smooth floor of white-and-rose marble peeked through. There was a plaque on the crumbled wall nearest to Oliver.

“Tempiale di Necromancy,” Emalie read from the plaque.

“Necromancy?” Dean asked.

“It's when you speak to the dead to learn the future,” said Emalie.

Oliver nodded. “It makes sense. Right beside the lake, with the Well draining out below it. Spirits will be passing by here and could be contacted before they left.”

“You mean like Emalie did with that security guard?”

“That,” said Oliver, “and people probably listened to oracles here, too. Humans thought that oracles were being possessed by dead spirits.…” Oliver trailed off as green lights blinked past him.

The fireflies were congregating down on the third level, floating and falling like a fleet of tiny hot-air balloons. Oliver headed down the steps to the final level. Here, the center of each wall held a white statue of a woman, but the heads had long since crumbled away. They were likely statues of oracles in history. Two large, umbrella-shaped trees loomed over the space, one on each side.

In the center of the grassy floor was an exposed circle of shining marble. Oliver stepped onto its glassy surface, and saw that the marble showed a fragment of an ancient scene: what looked to be the wheels of a chariot or wagon, then three sets of feet, two in sandals facing away from the coach, and one set of bare feet, glowing golden, facing toward it. Below that, a Skrit symbol that Oliver didn't recognize had been carved:

“Look,” said Dean.

Oliver saw that the fireflies had all begun to float toward him.

“What's going to happen?” Dean asked. He and Emalie watched from outside the circle. Oliver shrugged. It was hard to even see Dean through the gathering fireflies. It was like Oliver was standing in a cloud of stars.

He reached into his pocket and removed the cat's collar that he had found on the statue of Phoebe in the museum. He held it out in his palm and said, “Selene.”

He didn't really know if this was what he was supposed to do, or even if he was right in his theory: that Selene had transferred her energy to the fireflies, the
fires that burned cold.
But fireflies had pointed him to the museum brochure, which had led him to the statue and the Asylum, and then to the cat in Selene's room that was missing a collar.…

If he was right, then this collar was a summoning charm. When a being used transference, she would leave a charm behind in order to be contacted. All this, of course, assumed that Selene wanted to be found by Oliver, and he wasn't sure if—

“Oliver!” Emalie shouted. Her voice sounded like it was coming over a gathering wind.

Oliver looked up to see the fireflies beginning to swirl in a vortex above his outstretched hand, making a tornado of light that stretched up from the cat's collar into the trees above. They spun and gathered more tightly, until it was hard to make out the individual lights anymore; there was only the pale, green-white swirl.

“Oliver,”
said a woman's voice, buzzing with electric static.

“Selene?” Oliver asked.

“Yes. I'm glad you found me. There is very little time left. My life is in grave danger.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your prophecy,”
Selene replied.
“Are you ready to know it?”

For a moment, Oliver almost wanted to say
no
.… “Yes.”

There was a sound on the wind like a deep inhalation.
“There will come a young demonless vampire who has garnered a power never before known among them, and who will at maturity be able to open the Nexia Gate.… The moment of choice will require a vessel so strong it can overcome the most powerful forces of the Architects. This triumph will free the
vampyr,
and establish a new order.”

Oliver ran it over in his head and felt a wave of disappointment. It was typically vague and prophecy-like, as far as telling him anything he didn't already know … “Is that it?”

“Isn't that enough?”
Selene asked, as if Oliver was a slow student.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Oliver,”
said Selene,
“think. Freeing the
vampyr,
establishing a new order.… Why can't you leave this world?”

“Well, we're bound to mortal bodies, to matter.…”

“So to free your spirit demons…”

“I guess we'd have to get rid of our bodies, which means destroying matter … oh.” A tremor rushed through him as he finally understood. “By opening the Nexia Gate,” Oliver said heavily, “I'm going to destroy this world.”

“Yes. Nothing living shall survive the opening of the Nexia Gate,”
Selene explained.
“All matter will be returned to its primordial origins, to begin again. That is what the prophecy means by ‘a new order.'”

Oliver glanced at Emalie and Dean. “They'll all be killed.”

“Yes.”

“But their spirits could survive.…”

“Perhaps, in some form, somewhere and some when in the infinite new worlds that form in the new order. But not as you know them. They and everyone they know and love, and every rock, and every insect, and even I will be destroyed, in the great reshuffling.”

Oliver felt as if a bottomless pit had opened in his stomach. “Why did you want me to know this?”

“Because most of me is human. I don't want my world destroyed. My family is still out there somewhere. And as much as I dream some days of the end of my own life, to be free of this cursed power of ‘sight,' to no longer be a prisoner of the vampires, what I dream of most is that the prophecy be undone.”

“Is it possible?” Oliver asked, feeling a sudden flash of hope. “How?”

“Half-Light thinks that by killing me they are also insuring that the prophecy will be fulfilled, because a prophecy can only be untold by the oracle who told it. But there is another way. It has to do with the part of the prophecy about the moment of choice…”