Descendant (22 page)

I don’t believe we’ll be allowed to go up there—there are signs indicating that it’s highly unlikely—but strange things happen when Kye’s around, so I follow him in the museum entrance and up some stairs. The guards stop us, informing us that the statue is closed to tourists for the day. We thank them, then wander to a display and pretend to be interested in the architecture. We wait. Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. At last, the guard closest to us is distracted. An elderly man doubles over coughing and needs assistance. While the guard’s back is turned, we slip past him and sneak up the stairs, holding our baggage to our chests to minimize sound.

As soon as we can no longer see the ground level behind us, we run. This is our only chance, and if we’re caught, things will become extremely complicated. As it is, I’m afraid they’ll figure out someone’s up here before we find the Key. We keep going until intense pain in my ribs forces me to pause for a breath. I sit to rest on one of the steps and Kye sits next to me, not nearly as winded. “Why aren’t you tired?” I ask, forcing musty air into my lungs.

“I run a lot.”

“You suck. I run a lot too. But not stairs.”

“I could piggyback you.”

“Shut it. I don’t need you to piggyback me.”

He stands and pulls me up. “We’re halfway there.”

After what feels like miles and miles straight up, we make it to the crown. Kye half-drags me up the last step into the small space. I lean against a window, panting, and stare out. The sun tints the clouds pink, highlighting the New Jersey skyline. “That’s something you don’t see every day.”

Kye grins, wiping beads of sweat off his forehead. “Look fast. We should get to work before we lose the light.”

We search the crown—the ground, the windowsills, the walls. It doesn’t take long, but it feels like hours because I’m so worried about security catching us.

When we’re sure it’s not here, Kye starts up a ladder affixed to the wall. “It must be in the torch.” We climb the narrow passage to the torch and emerge in a room only big enough for a few people. He slides his hands along the walls in the poorly lit room, and I mirror his actions on the opposite side, working toward him. “What if it’s not here?”

“It has to be,” he says. “My dad seemed positive the Key was re-hidden in the statue. Downstairs I read that the torch was closed in 1916. It makes complete sense that the keeper would hide it in the one place no Elen can look.”

“Why can’t they look here?”

“Why would they? She’s only been around since 1886—about three hundred years too late to have been an original vault for one of the Arawn Keys. But more importantly, this beautiful lady is copper, and copper is poisonous to Dark Elen.”

This surprises me. “If it’s poisonous to them, how is it not poisonous to us? What about cooking pots and pennies and all the other things made of copper?” I remember the ugly copper clock Gram hauled from house to house with every move. Every time, she insisted on hanging the hideous thing next to the front door.

“It has something to do with the metal content in their systems. Every time they steal someone else’s power, their blood metals rise. They can handle being around some metals, but not copper. It does something to their brains. Scrambles them, shuts them down. Like turning off a power switch.”

The idea makes me shudder. “How exactly do they to steal powers?”

“Something to do with the Arawnian Dagger and cutting out people’s hearts—”

“Ew. Okay, that’s enough.” The room is too dim. I pat the top of Kye’s backpack. “You wouldn’t happen to have a flashlight in here, would you?”

“Wouldn’t that be nice.” He’s still running his hands over the walls. “I had one, but lost it in Yellowstone.”

“Yeah. If searching for stuff in dark places is going to be a regular thing, it might be good to pick up another.” I lean against the wall, close my eyes, and beg my mind to guide me to the symbol. Focus.

“How did you do that?” Kye breathes, sounding amazed.

“What?”

“Your ring. It’s glowing.” I open my eyes. A bright beam reflects off the windows and casts rainbows on the walls, like color showing through a raindrop. My whole body vibrates with warmth. Power. Love.

“Huh. No idea.” I grin. “But we should take advantage.”

We get back to work, running our hands along the walls, the floor, around the windows. Dust tickles my nose and I sneeze. When the light dances on something above my head, I direct it at the ceiling, heart pounding in excitement. “Kye! There it is. I think I found it.”

Kye’s
  head jerks up. “Brilliant.” He stretches to his toes but isn’t quite tall enough to touch the symbol etched on the low ceiling.

“Give me a boost,” I demand.

Kye looks incredulous, but steps into a manageable squat. After kicking off my shoes, I wedge my foot on his thigh and swing up onto his shoulders. From here I’m able to scrape the ceiling with my fingernails. Dust and crumbling mortar rains on my face and stings my eyes until I’m sneezing like crazy.

Kye’s hands tighten on my ankles to keep me steady. “You okay up there?”

“Just a hundred years of dust build-up falling in my face.” I’ve rubbed off enough grime so the symbol is visible.

“What are you doing?” Kye leans his head to look up and whacks my hipbone with his skull.

“Ow. Careful.”

“Sorry.”

I probe the ceiling with my fingers again, my stomach sinking in defeat. “There’s nothing.” He crouches enough so I can drop onto the ground, and then straightens. He wipes sweat off his forehead. “It’s here. It has to be.”

The final rays of sunlight cast long shadows on the floor. I wander to the window, raking my fingers through my tangled hair.

“Abby ...” Kye trails off.

“What?”

“Look at your ring. It’s fading.”

The radiance that shone so brightly only a minute ago has dimmed, though the diamonds still glitter. “Why would it do that? How?”

“There has to be something here. A clue at least.” He circles the room and looks up one last time. “I think we need to try again. Wish we had a ladder.”

“We can add it to the list of travel must-haves,” I mutter, “along with my flashlight.”

He crouches again, motioning for me to climb up. “One more time?”

All I can think to do is to rub the dust off the symbol and the area around it. As I do, my ring starts to glow again, the platinum heating my skin. Simultaneously, the lines in the symbol sparkle to life, outlining cracks around the edges. I open my hand and brush the dust with my palm and a burst of color shoots a circle around the symbol, bright enough to hurt my eyes. I yank my hand away in fear of the heat, the light, but the symbol keeps glowing. Pieces of ceiling crumble and rain down on us, leaving a hole the size of a fist. I blink the grit out of my eyes. “Kye, you have to see this.”

A plume of dust falls on his head and he’s coughing as he leans back. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know.”

The opening is small, so I have to squeeze my hand through the hole to feel around inside. The texture is smooth like metal, probably copper, the same as the rest of the statue. My fingernail snags on a piece of cloth. I catch it between my fingers and tug until a small bundle is in my hand.

“I’ve got something,” I say, coughing away more dust.

“Good.” Kye squeezes my ankles. “Are you ready for me to put you down?”

“Not unless you want me to lose my hand. I’ll have to work it through the opening.” The fabric is wadded and tangled, and it takes several minutes for me to wrestle free. Something hard and heavy tumbles out and lands with a tinkling clatter on the floor.

“Are you out now?” Kye’s shoulder muscles quiver beneath me.

“Yes. You can put me down.” He sets me on my feet and I run
over to pick up the pendant. A large, brilliant-green emerald set in an intricate platinum scroll dangles from a shiny platinum chain. The clear green stone flickers with power and feels warm to the touch.

My eyes go misty. “I dreamed about this necklace.”

He stares at the pendant, speechless. The chain drips fluidly through my fingers and I close my hand around it.

“It’s the Key,” Kye says. “I can’t believe we actually found it.”

“If my ring is one Key, and this pendant is another, that’s two of the four.” I drop the pendant in his open palm so he can take a closer look. “And if Juri’s dagger is also one of the Keys, then we still have one more left to find.” I beat the dirty cloth against my jeans to get the dust out.

Kye shakes his head, twisting the pendant so it catches a ray from the rapidly fading twilight and washes the room in flashing green sparkles. “Juri has the fourth, remember? He said he has two.”

After a thorough search of my memory, I realize Kye is right. Juri did say that, though we have no idea what the Key is, or if he was actually telling the truth. “What do we do now?”

“We take the Keys we have to Valdemar and hope he knows what to do with them.”

“Can’t we just ask your dad?”

“No, it has to be Val.” He crosses to where we’ve left our bags. “Dad has a lot of information because he’s studied it, but Val was there. He experienced the fall first-hand.”

Two loud bangs echo in the lower stairwell and we both freeze. Another bang, then footsteps coming our way. My heart thuds as I look around, futilely wishing for somewhere to hide.

Muffled voices and clanging announce someone—or several someones—climbing the ladder.

“Someone’s coming,” I whisper.

“Time to go.” Kye wraps the pendant in the cloth and shoves it in his pocket. He tosses me the backpack and straps my heavier bag across his chest, his eyes darting around the room. “Guess we’re not going down the way we came.” His gaze lands on a door. I assume it leads onto the observation deck. Kye tries the knob.

It’s locked.

He pulls, twists, and bangs, but it doesn’t budge.

Overwhelming fear threatens to consume all logical sense when
I imagine spending the night in a New York City jail cell. “Kye! They’ll arrest us. We shouldn’t be up here.”

Our eyes meet, and my terror is mirrored in his. He kicks the door. It doesn’t open. He kicks it again. On the third try I grab his hand and kick with him, and finally the door flies open. We climb onto the observation deck and push the door closed.

The cool evening wind buffets my ears and whips my hair. The sun has set, leaving only a rim of golden orange on the horizon. Kye unzips his backpack—still on my back—and digs in it, producing a lumpy black bag. He dumps the contents on the ground, mumbling, and sifts through, finding some black straps and threading them between his legs. After hooking the straps to his belt, he connects them with a metal ring and attaches a smaller bag to his buckle. All this is managed in a matter of seconds, as if he’s done it hundreds of times before.

From the bag attached to his waist, he loops the end of a thin, high-tech cable through another metal ring and attaches it to the bottom portion of the iron railing. Once he’s satisfied the cable will hold, he pulls on a pair of fingerless gloves. “Do you trust me?”

“Uh.” I stare at the ground hundreds of feet below. “Do I have a choice?”

He tests the cable again and swings his leg over the railing, letting out more slack from the bag at his waist and wrapping it under his backside, holding with his right hand.

“What are you doing?”

He swings his other leg over and braces against the rail, waiting. “Not getting arrested.” He holds an arm out, looking expectant. “Come on. Climb over and hold on to me.”

I shudder. Being arrested doesn’t sound quite as scary as dying. “Kye ...”

He glances away from his white knuckles, searching my face. “You trust me, right?”

Angry voices bark in the torch room. “They were here. I knew they snuck up here the moment I took my eyes off them. Look at this mess!”

“Well, there’s only one way down, and we would have run into them. They’re up here somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Abby!” Kye hisses. “Come on.”

With a jolt, I scramble over the rail and wrap my arms around Kye’s neck and my legs around his waist. His biceps shake as he lowers us from the edge. I fight the instinct to look down as we slide farther, stopping when Kye’s feet hit something. I open my eyes long enough to see that it’s one of Lady Liberty’s giant fingers. Tangled together, we lean against the base of the torch to catch our breath, listening to the door as it scrapes across the observation deck and feet shuffle out.

“They aren’t out here.”

“Where’d they go?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“They didn’t disappear into thin air!”

“Well, they didn’t come down. We would have seen them.”

“They didn’t jump, did they?”

“Man, I hope not. Who do you think would get stuck cleaning up that mess?”

I tighten my grip on Kye and close my eyes—praying I won’t throw up on him—and fight the urge to scream when I open them again and accidentally look down. I cling to Kye, huddled against the torch handle. His steadiness renews my confidence, and I loosen my strangle-hold on his neck. “They almost caught us.”

“You did well.” Kye drops a kiss on my lips.