Incarnate (A Spellmason Chronicle) (28 page)

Neither of them spoke as I pulled out my phone and dialed Detective Maron. I only hoped I was making the right decision in doing so. If bringing the police in on this created more problems than it solved, I wasn’t sure there was room enough left in my guilty heart to add anything more on top of poor Fletcher’s murder.

Stanis

I
awoke in Alexandra’s replica of Gramercy Park as the last rays of sunlight disappeared behind the horizon, my body aching as always from the painful transformation back into living stone. Having stayed in Strawberry Fields with Alexandra, Caleb, and Detectives Rowland and Maron most of the night had left me with little desire to rush back to Sanctuary. I had returned here after last night’s madness, craving once again the solace and comfort of the space Alexandra had created for me.

The interior of her building on Saint Mark’s was silent as I made my way down through it, my wings drawn close to prevent any damage to Alexandra’s belongings. It was not until I entered the library on the bottom floor that I heard the quiet sounds of activity.

The hidden door to the guildhall was ajar, and, moving the stone with ease, I entered the room behind it. Within the chamber, Alexandra, Aurora, and Marshall were all gathered around a stone table, each of them involved in their own piles of work, no words being exchanged. I watched them for several moments, letting their somber mood settle over me.

“Have I come at an inopportune time?” I asked.

The humans looked up from what they were doing.

“It’s
all
an inopportune time,” Alexandra said and went back to the book in front of her.

I looked from her to our blue-haired friend. “Is this how you have spent your daylight hours?”

“This is what she does,” Aurora said with a shrug. “She throws herself into her work. Forgets to eat, forgets to shower . . . That’s why Marshall and I hang around. Someone’s got to mind the care and feeding of the Alexandra.”

“Alexandra,” I said, stern, but all I garnered from her was a quick glance in my direction.

“Shouldn’t you be giving a speech at Sanctuary or something?” she asked. “Rallying your troops?”

“Many of those who have come to Sanctuary came there for refuge,” I said. “It is at best a difficult task to convince them to put their newly reclaimed lives on the line to seek out this nefarious Butcher and his men. I have those such as Emily and Jonathan who are working among my people, but it will take some time.”

Aurora looked up from the book in front of her and brushed her bangs off her glasses. “The sooner you get them on board, the sooner you might find that Cagliostro Medallion, and could, you know . . .” She nodded her head toward Alexandra.

I looked over to her, but the Spellmason was so intent on writing something down it was clear she had heard nothing Aurora had just said. “So you know about the medallion, of Alexandra’s intentions with it.”

“I do,” Aurora said with a smile. “Don’t you think it would be cool to be able to hit the town with us without it being all combat or shrieks of horror?”

This was not a conversation I wished to have among our mutual friends, realizing we were actually down a member.

“Where is the alchemist?” I asked.

“Fletcher’s death is not going to go over well with the witching and warlocking community,” Alexandra said. “Caleb felt the news would go over easier if he told them. And . . .”

Alexandra looked away as she crossed her arms across her body.

“And what?” I asked.

There were tears in her eyes when she looked back to me. “I
made
him go talk to them,” she said, “but not because their community lost a powerful ally. I made him go because I thought this would be the best way to try and get them on our side. I’m using Fletcher’s death as a bloody
opportunity
.”

Her last word came out with such disgust in it, I wanted nothing more than to offer her comfort.

“You did what needed to be done,” I said.

“That’s what I’ve been telling her,” Aurora said, “but she won’t hear it coming from me.”

“What would you have me do?” Alexandra said, slamming her book down. “Someone else died because of what
I
set into action. And not just someone . . . a spirit of some kind that was trying to help us.”

“Lexi, calm down,” Aurora said, turning to Marshall. “Tell her to be reasonable, Marsh.”

“I’d like to,” he said, “but I can’t.”

“Excuse me?” Aurora asked him as she walked over to him.

Marshall laid down the materials in his hands and leaned across the table to look at Alexandra. “How can I tell her to be reasonable when none of what is happening to us
is
reasonable?” he asked. “I’m not going to invalidate how miserable she feels about it when I can’t think of a better way to process it. If she wants to get down and be obsessive in her research, then let her. There’s no playbook for any of this.”

Marshall’s words silenced all of them and actually brought a smile to Alexandra’s face, which I found myself thrilled to see.

“Thank you, Marshall,” she said.

“For the record, though,” he said, going back to his work, “I don’t think any of us blame you for what happened to Fletcher.”

Alexandra nodded with pursed lips, and without arguing went back to her notes and books. I stepped around the table to her and rested my hand on her shoulder. “These are unusual times,” I said. “Therefore to
not
react with frustration would be unusual.”

Alexandra leaned her head against my chest, and for a brief moment I allowed myself to wonder what it would feel like if we found the medallion and it could be my skin against hers. There was also frustration in the thought for me, but I did not wish to add to Alexandra’s burdens.

“What is it you hope to find in these books?” I asked, stepping back from her.

Alexandra composed herself and went to one of her open notebooks.

“Laurien had said that the Convocation had turned my great-great-grandfather away after one of his first students with them went missing,” she said. “I won’t believe he had anything to do with that, but Laurien was insistent he was up to no good. She practically laughed when I tried to defend his nobility.”

“How would she know?” Marshall asked.

“They have their history,” Alexandra said, holding up the current book in her hands, “and we have ours.”

Marshall shrugged and went back to working on whatever the project was in front of him, tinkering with the bits and pieces of metal as he consulted a notebook of his own. I stepped around the table to him.

“And how does this relate to your search?” I asked, gesturing to his handiwork.

Marshall held up a gleaming cylindrical pipe that was slightly longer than the length of his hand to his elbow. He swung it through the air like he was casting a spell.

“This doesn’t relate to her search,” he said. “But I think it may prove of some help . . . at least to Rory.”

“What is it?”

“Just something I’ve been experimenting with,” he said, gesturing to the empty fixture at one end of the shaft. “I’m making a set of Horseman’s picks. There’s going to be a hammerhead on one side and a sharp point on the other.”

“It is like a maul,” I said, nodding with some understanding. “My father’s men used them in defense of his lands back in Europe.”

“Like a maul, yes,” Marshall said. “Only smaller. Rory should be able to use two at once.”

“If you can get them light enough,” she said, joining us. “Marshall made me try wielding a couple of miniature sledgehammers at Home Depot. I thought I was going to pull my arms out of my shoulder sockets.”

“I’ll work out the enchantments when they’re done,” he said, a bit short with her. “I wish you had half the faith in me that my store clients do.”

Aurora mussed his hair. He tried to duck away, but she was quicker. “That’s because they don’t live with you, roomie,” she said. “Hard to expect attention to detail from the guy who can’t seem to put the toilet seat back down.”

Marshall had nothing to say to that, letting Aurora muss his hair until Alexandra cleared her throat loudly behind them. They turned to her.

“We’re never going to find out if my great-great-grandfather was an apprentice-murdering madman if you two keep screwing around,” she said.

Aurora looked as if she could have argued with her friend, but instead silently went back to the pile of books she had been working on before.

I turned to Alexandra. “You mentioned this apprentice to me the other night,” I said. “If Alexander had an apprentice, do you not think I would know about it?”

“No offense,” Marshall said, going back to his notes and bits of metal, “but you’ve never been the most reliable one as far as memory is concerned.”

“That was
before
, Marshall Blackmoore,” I said, doing my best to hide a bit of exasperation. “My past was locked away from me until Alexandra recovered it for me. And she gave
all
of it back to me.”

Marshall put down the shaft of metal in his hands and looked up at me with complete sincerity in his eyes. “Riddle me this, Stanis,” he said. “If you don’t
know
something, how can you
tell
that you don’t know that something?”

I thought for a moment, my wings fluttering with agitation when I realized I was having trouble following his question. “What do you mean by that?” I finally asked.

“Let’s say several centuries ago you
did
know about an apprentice,” he said, “
but
Alexander blocked it from you. If that information suddenly isn’t in your brain anymore, how can you be certain that it was being blocked, or was it simply something you just never knew anything of in the first place?”

“Stop it,” Aurora said. “You’re giving me a headache.”

“Does it matter?” I asked him. “Either way, I do not recall or think Alexander took an apprentice.”

Alexandra walked over to me, holding open one of her notebooks. “But according to some of his writing, he did,” she said. “Scattered in all his books, there’s a record—a very
short
record, mind you—of his taking an apprentice, but there isn’t all that much to go on. He’s spread the notes in that secret code of his over several books, but the trail goes dead pretty quickly.”

Aurora shut the book she was reading, rubbed her eyes, and sat herself up on the edge of the table. She looked up at the ceiling. “Why build all this, then, if you’re not going to train people?” she asked.

“I did not even know of this guildhall until Alexandra’s brother’s death,” I said. “When the original building collapsed, we dug, discovering this place and thinking Devon dead.”

“Could you at least get back to helping, please?” Alexandra asked. “These books aren’t going to read themselves.”

“I’m sorry,” Aurora said, not moving, “but when I read words like
capitulary
and
catechumen
, my brain starts to hurt.”

Alexandra looked up from her book. “That’s what you were reading? It actually said
catechumen
?”

Aurora nodded. “Why?”

Alexandra moved down the table and snatched up the book.

“In the ecclesiastical sense, it’s a person being instructed in the rudiments of Christianity,” she said, flipping through the pages. “But another, more laymen term for it is
neophyte
, which is anyone being taught the elementary facts or principles of any subject. Like Spellmasonry.”

Like a creature possessed, Alexandra tore through her notes and went through the book before her, and several minutes passed in silence before she slammed her main notebook shut.

“Well?” Aurora asked.

“The book talks about a hidden catechumen, a lost apprentice,” she said. “Marked by the Belarus family seal among the sconces of the wall here.”

Alexandra stepped away from the table and went to the edge of the circular room. She looked up at the protruding stones, but there was nothing carved on them.

Marshall and Aurora ran to others, but they, too, were blank.

I circled around the room looking closely at all the sconces that jutted out of the wall, stopping at a section thirty feet away from Alexandra.

“Only these two are marked,” I said, indicating the ones in front of me. There was no mistaking the stylized
B
set over the batlike wings carved there.

Marshall came over to me, pulling out a small flashlight from his pocket. He shone it across the stone that stuck out from the wall, moving from one to the next.

“He’s right,” he said. “All the rest were definitely blank.”

Alexandra readied herself with a spell, falling into a stance and moving through the motions of it, but unlike the rest of the guildhall, this section of stone would not react to her command.

“There’s resistance,” she said, lowering her arms. “Like it’s locked.”

“So what do we do?” Aurora asked.

The humans fell silent for several moments as they contemplated their next move, but knowing the puzzle-building nature of Alexander so well over the centuries, I had a thought.

“Your great-great-grandfather marked the location on the sconces along this section of the wall,” I said, looking to Alexandra. “I believe you should light them.”

Alexandra’s eyes sparkled with delight. She turned to Marshall. “Can you make some kind of arcane fire?” she asked.

“Can I!” Marshall said with excitement. “Wait . . . Can I?” He went to his coat lying on the table, pulled out a notebook of his own, and began looking through it.