“On the island of the dead, lies the god with not one head,” recited Enrique, turning the words over in his head, “… show the sum of what you see, and this will lead you straight to me.”
“Did you say something?” asked Hypnos.
“Me? No,” said Enrique quickly. “I’m just, er, reviewing the matriarch’s riddle for clues … again.”
“You still said something,” pointed out Zofia.
“Yes, well,” said Enrique. He could feel his face start to turn red. “The interpretation affects what it is we’re looking for and such. It’s quite a vague sentence.”
“I thought we are looking for a god with ‘not one head,’” said Zofia, raising an eyebrow. “That sounds specific.”
“It still leaves a spectrum of depictions!” said Enrique. “For example, there’s the Chinese deity Xingtian who kept fighting even though he’d been decapitated. And then the Hindu celestial beings Rahu and Ketu—also decapitated—and then there are the deities who have more than one head, so which is it? It seems unlikely that we would find gods of eastern religions on a tombstone in Venice, so there must be something else … something hidden, even…”
Hypnos cleared his throat. “Let our handsome historian work, Phoenix,” he said. “I’m sure he will dazzle us soon with his findings.”
The patriarch of House Nyx grinned. For a moment, Enrique was tempted to return it. There was something intoxicating and dreamlike about Hypnos’s beauty and verve, the way it lulled one to imagine impossibilities within reach. Only now, Enrique felt the force of it like a dream that had slipped past his fingers.
“Thank you,” said Enrique stiffly, turning from them both.
He tried to focus on the riddle, but Hypnos’s smile had thrown him off. A mere handful of days had passed since Enrique had confronted him about the imbalance between their affections and the other boy had confessed: I think, with enough time, I could learn to love you. The memory was still fresh enough to sting.
Enrique didn’t want a forced love. He wanted love like a light, a presence that drove out the shadows and recast the world into something warm. A secret part of him had always suspected he would not find such love with the dazzling patriarch, and maybe that was what hurt him most in the end. Not the loss of love, but the lack of surprise.
Of course, Hypnos wouldn’t feel the same way about him. The fact that he was still surprised was either a sign of his optimism or foolishness, and Enrique highly suspected the latter was to blame.
* * *
FOR THE NEXT half hour, they paced the cemetery again, until they had once more arrived at the entrance. Some three meters away stood an unfinished grave plot. Of the few tombstones there, only one looked to be completed, though the stone mason had left it carved into irregular ridges. It was the only place they hadn’t explored, for it seemed irrelevant. The matriarch’s safe house must have existed for years, and as such, there was no reason for it to be on a fresh plot.
“Mon cher,” said Hypnos, touching his shoulder. “I realize how hard you must be working, but … I have to ask … are you quite certain we are in the right place?”
Enrique felt his face turning hot. “Well, everything in history is conjecture, but this seems to be the only place that would make sense, no?”
Hypnos stared at him blankly, and Enrique almost wished Séverin were there. Séverin had a way of banishing doubt. He connected Enrique’s rambling, historical threads into grand narratives of finding treasure that made everyone feel confident.
“I mean, there are lots of ‘islands of the dead,’ really—Tartarus, Naraka, Nav, etcetera—but they’re mythological, whereas this is the only place close to Poveglia and—”
“We have been walking for more than an hour!” cut in Hypnos. “We haven’t found anything.”
“Soon, we won’t be able to see anything either,” pointed out Zofia.
Overhead, the light was failing faster and faster. The shadows beneath the statues of angels turned long and bladelike, and the cypresses looked unnaturally still. For a moment, Enrique imagined slender enkantos peering out at him from behind the trees, their nocturnal Otherworldly eyes glowing with hunger. His grandmother said they could sniff out dreams and make them real … for a price. In that moment, Enrique’s wound throbbed. Have I not already paid it? He turned from the grove, pushing aside the thought of Otherworld creatures slinking in the shadows.
“We have to keep looking,” said Enrique, “keep thinking. If we don’t find the safe house key, then we won’t have anywhere to go. Zofia needs a place to build her inventions, and I need a library and—”
“Perhaps our time would be better spent finding Séverin,” suggested Hypnos tentatively.
Enrique felt stunned. “Séverin?”
“We know he’s somewhere in Venice,” said Hypnos. “We can use what time we have left to try and find him somehow … then it won’t matter that Laila destroyed the Mnemo bug! I’m certain Séverin will know what to do.”
And there it was. This is not your place. What was he doing thinking he could lead them or solve a riddle? That was Séverin’s role, not his.
“Maybe you can ask him about the ‘island of the dead,’” said Hypnos.
Enrique’s ear felt hot, and his wound throbbed.
“Oh yes, why don’t I do just that,” shot back Enrique. He turned to the empty air beside him, then feigned shock. “What’s this? Oh yes … he’s not here, and we can’t find him without showing our faces and risking the whole thing because the Fallen House thinks we’re dead! But I suppose it would be better to risk death than give me a chance.”
Hypnos stepped back. “That’s not what I said—”
But Enrique had heard enough. He stalked off toward the unfinished tombstones, his heart racing, his breaths coming fast. For a couple of moments, he stood in the shade of a cypress, watching the shadows swallow up the graves. Maybe they were right. He should give up and go back, and not waste more of anyone’s time … especially Laila’s. She barely had any time left to waste. How would he show his face to her? Footsteps echoed behind him, and Enrique’s hands balled to fists at his side. He didn’t want to apologize to Hypnos.
But it was not Hypnos who appeared beside him. “I don’t like the dark,” said Zofia.
She looked small and sylphlike in the dusk. The rising moonlight picked out the silver in her white-blond hair, and her huge eyes seemed unearthly. Enrique tensed. Was she blaming him too? But then Zofia reached up to unclasp a pendant from her necklace.
“I don’t have many left,” said Zofia. “But it does help with finding your way through the dark.”
The pendant exploded with illumination, like a star caught between Zofia’s fingers. Enrique blinked against the sudden brightness, and when his eyes adjusted, the world seemed a little different. Zofia did not smile, but held the pendant out expectantly. In that moment, the light silvered her, so that it seemed as if she was what gave off the light in the dark.
He’d barely had a moment to hold that thought when the light off the pendant caught on the ridges of a tombstone. The tombstone stood about a meter high and looked as if it had been fused together from two separate pieces. Lichen splotched the surface, but as Enrique took a step toward it, he noticed the granite was curiously blank except for a string of numbers etched in relief on the stone: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The hairs on the back of Enrique’s neck prickled as he got closer and took in the object—the earth around it was slightly sunken, and under the light, he could see that the curious shape of the tombstone was in fact the suggestion of two faces looking in opposite directions.