“Everything is gone?” the boy asked carefully.
Dolph licked his dry lips. “Not everything, no. But when I reached through to get Leena, the Brink took enough.”
“The marks?”
“I can’t feel them anymore. I won’t be able to control them either.” He met Nibs’ questioning eyes. “They won’t fear me if they know.”
“So we don’t let them know.” Nibs gave him a long, hard look. “Control doesn’t have anything to do with fear. Control is all about making them think following you is their idea.”
“If they find out, they’ll turn, and without Leena—”
“Even without Leena, you still have Viola for protection. You’re not defenseless.”
Nibs was right. Leena’s ability to defuse the affinities of anyone around him who meant to do them harm had helped him build his holdings, but Viola could kill a man without touching him. He was making excuses, running scared, and that was something he’d never done before.
“Do it for her,” Nibs urged. “If she sent you this message, it’s what she wanted. Going after the Book, going after the Order, don’t you think it’s what she intended for you to do?”
“Fine. Put some people on it—people we trust. But I don’t want word getting out about what we’re looking for. If anyone else found out that the Ars Arcana exists . . .” He didn’t finish the thought, but they both understood how dangerous it could be if others knew that he was after it. A book that could hold the secrets of magic? Whoever had it could be as unstoppable as the Order.
Which meant that Dolph had to be sure to get it first.
“I’ll get on it,” Nibs said, “but would you do me a favor?”
“What now?” Dolph asked, furrowing his brow in irritation.
“Get yourself a bath or something. The gutter out back smells better than you do.”
ISHTAR’S KEY
Present Day—Orchard Street
The first indication that something was wrong was the entrance to Professor Lachlan’s Orchard Street building. When Dakari got them back, the building looked the same from the outside, but inside, things had changed. There was a new, ultramodern lobby, complete with a security desk and a guard she’d never seen before. And extra security measures on every floor, at every door.
The building had always been something of a fortress, an odd place to call home, but now its austerity made the unseen threats outside its walls seem that much more foreboding.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The brightly lit workroom in the basement of their building, where Mari once had produced everything the team needed, was nothing more than a dusty storage closet. Esta had returned from 1926 to find Mari was gone.
It wasn’t just that Mari was no longer part of their team. Mari no longer even existed.
Esta had used every skill she’d learned over the years from Professor Lachlan to look for her friend. She’d searched immigration records and ancestry registries for some sign of Mari or her family, but instead Esta had found the unsettling evidence that her world had somehow changed.
It was more than Mari’s disappearance. Small shifts and subtle differences told Esta the Order of Ortus Aurea had grown stronger and become emboldened in the late twenties and beyond, when they hadn’t before. Waves of deportations. Riots that hadn’t existed before. A change in who had been president here and there. All the evidence showed that the Order was more powerful now than they had been before Esta and Logan went to steal the Pharaoh’s Heart.
With shaking hands, Esta did the one search she’d been dreading—the night of the heist. She had to know if that had been the source of the changes. She had to be sure.
She wasn’t surprised to find herself inserted in the historical record where she never should have been. Not by name, of course. No one there that night could have known who she was. But she found a small article that talked about the break-in and the theft of the Pharaoh’s Heart.
They knew she’d taken the real dagger.
And from the sparse two inches of print, it was clear they knew that Mageus were behind it.
She’d underestimated the danger they faced. She’d been raised to defeat the Order, trained since she was a young girl in all the skills necessary to do just that. Esta had read the history—public and private—and spent her childhood learning about the devastating effects the Order had on Mageus in the past. She trained daily with Dakari so that she could fight and defend herself against any attack, and still she hadn’t truly understood. Maybe it was because the Order of Ortus Aurea and all they’d done so long ago seemed more like myth than reality. The stories had been so monstrous, but in actuality, the Order itself had always been little more than a shadow haunting the periphery of Esta’s vision, the boogeyman in her unopened closet. It had been so easy to slip through time, to take things from right under their noses, that she’d never understood . . . not really.
Yes, the Order had created the Brink, and yes, that invisible barrier had effectively stripped the country of magic—and Mageus—over the years. Maybe there had once been a time when everyone knew magic existed, and certainly there was a time when people feared and persecuted those who had it, but by the end of the twentieth century, old magic—natural magic—had been mostly forgotten. A fairy tale. And as the public forgot magic, they forgot their fears. The Order had gone underground. It was still a threat to those few Mageus left, of course, but without public support, it operated in secret and its strikes were limited.
The changes in the Professor’s building, the small differences in the history books, and, most personally, the erasure of Mari’s very existence made Esta think that might no longer be the case.
She had caused this.
In the choices she’d made, she had somehow traded Logan’s life for Mari’s, traded the relative safety that had been her life for this other, unknown future. She hadn’t even realized that was possible.
She had known that traveling to other times carried risks, but Professor Lachlan had taught her that time was something like a book: You could remove a page, scratch out a word here and there, and the story remained the same except for the small gaps. He had always believed it would take something monumental to change the ending.
Apparently exposing her powers to save Logan had been enough.
• • •
Three days after she brought Logan back, Esta found herself sitting at the end of his bed, watching his slow, steady breathing. He’d lost a lot of blood, and Dakari’s affinity for healing hadn’t been strong enough to stave off the infection his body was fighting. He still hadn’t come to.
It wasn’t that she’d ever been particularly close to Logan, but he was a part of the Professor’s team. They needed him. And seeing him pale and so very still shook her more than she would have expected.
She knew the moment Professor Lachlan entered the room, his soft steps punctuated by the click of the crutch he used. Esta didn’t turn to greet him, though, not even when he took a few steps through the door and paused as he often did when he had something to discuss with her.
“Don’t say it. Please—don’t even say it.”