The god with not one head.
“Look,” said Enrique. “I … I think we’ve found something!”
A moment later, Hypnos appeared. He clapped his hands. “Mon cher! You did it! I never doubted you.”
Enrique glared at him. “Zofia, come look!”
But Zofia stayed some three meters away, holding up the pendant which cast plenty of light. Her hand was placed right above her heart, and she fidgeted where she stood, as if the grave and the falling dark had unsettled her.
“Felicitations etcetera,” said Hypnos airily. “Now what am I looking at? Also, it seems prudent to say that in the event I die with you all, which is seeming more likely by the day, please get me a far more elegant tombstone than that.”
“I thought we were looking for a god,” said Zofia.
“It is a god,” said Enrique, grinning. “It’s Janus, the Roman god of time … he looks backwards and forwards. He’s the guardian of gates and beginnings, passages and thresholds.”
“Janus?” repeated Hypnos. His nose wrinkled. “It also happens to be the name of the rudest House in the Italian faction. They’re keepers of cartography or some such, and always throw an epic, secret party for Carnevale. Have I been invited to a single gathering? No. I am not envious, per se, but I am—”
Enrique placed his palm against the front of the tombstone. He wasn’t sure what he thought would happen … maybe the lichen would clear, or maybe the faces would spit out a key. But instead, a Forged image contorted the stone revealing a fifteen-centimeter square outlined in light:
A few centimeters below the grid, the stone numbers quivered, and the riddle clicked into place.
“Show the sum of what you see, and this will lead you straight to me,” recited Enrique. “That seems simple enough … maybe even too simple. If it’s the key to a safe house, wouldn’t the matriarch have protected it more?”
“Sums?” said Hypnos. “Sum of what? The squares?”
“I’m no good at maths, so I’ll leave you to—wait,” said Hypnos. He glanced down at his feet at the same time that Enrique felt a curious suctioning on the bottom of his boots. The sunken ground of the grave had started to pull them in bit by bit. Hypnos shrieked and tried to lift his leg, but it was stuck fast in the earth. Enrique gripped the tombstone, trying to haul himself out, but that only made the Forging mechanism work faster. Within seconds, he was up to his knees. The light around them leapt wildly, swinging from the grave to the tombstone and the flat eyes of the two-headed god. Enrique wrenched around to see Zofia jumping for a branch in the cypress tree to pull them out, but the branches were too high—
“Hurry!” said Hypnos. “Put in the answer! It’s nine, isn’t it? Just do it!”
Enrique dragged his fingers across the stone, his heart sinking.
“Nine isn’t an option! Maybe it’s ten because the whole thing is an additional square?” he said.
But when he looked at the numbers, there was no zero either. Panic laced up his spine.
“Six?” tried Hypnos.
“How could there be six?!”
“I’m no good at maths!” shouted Hypnos.
“I couldn’t tell!”
The grave dirt made loud squelching sounds, seeping through the buttons of his shirt front and pouring cold across his skin. Enrique tried to kick his feet, only to feel something hard and smooth slide along his calf. On instinct, he recoiled, which only dragged him down farther. Enrique scrambled to hold on to solid earth, but all of it turned soft and sinking to the touch. Hypnos started whimpering, but Zofia shouted out:
“One and four!”
“That makes no sense!” said Hypnos. “Maybe it’s only one large square and it’s just a terrible joke…”
Enrique studied the grid. Nine squares. One big square encompassing it … and four squares made up of four blocks within the pattern. 14.
With shaking hands, he tapped the number 1 and then hit the number 4. The numbers depressed farther into the rock as the earth pulled him down farther. Cold mud pooled around his shoulders when light abruptly flashed across his eyes.
The sinking stopped.
“Thank gods!” screamed Hypnos, hoisting himself out by his elbows. Enrique grabbed fistfuls of earth, dragging his body halfway out. Hypnos and Zofia reached for his hands, pulling him the rest of the way until he could slump onto the land, breathing hard.
“The—key—” he managed, facing the tombstone.
The Forged stone had contorted once more. Now, an address appeared on it:
Calle Tron, 77
A large key, the kind that might unlock a manor in the countryside, bubbled up out of the stone. Enrique stared at it in wonder. He felt Hypnos clapping his back enthusiastically and heard Zofia demanding that they leave now, and hope swelled in his chest.
The key to the safe house was not the solution to everything. They still needed to find the map to the temple beneath Poveglia. They still needed to play the lyre and save Laila’s life. And Enrique still did not know where he belonged … but he felt a little surer at the front of the group as he turned to them and said:
“You’re welcome.”
6
SÉVERIN
All night, Séverin turned the divine lyre in his hands, counting down the moments until dawn. He could hear the Fallen House members standing guard outside his chamber. Carmine and garnets studded the four walls. A Forged chandelier of red Murano glass rotated slowly overhead. There were no windows, but dozens of candles flickering in bronzed sconces conspired to make the red walls look shiny with blood.
In the center of the chamber stood a claw-footed golden bed with a scarlet canopy and matching silks. Every time Séverin looked at it, he remembered a different bed, one carved of ice and draped in frost and gossamer. He remembered Laila astride his lap, looking down at him the way a goddess beholds a supplicant.
On that night, he wondered if his touch was the inverse of alchemy. One touch, and she was no longer as golden and distant as paradise, but human and earthly and entirely within reach. When he touched her, he felt her heartbeat beneath the hot velvet of her skin. When he rose over her, he watched her eyes widen, her teeth catch on her bottom lip, turning it a red so vivid, he had to know what it tasted like. Even now, the flavor haunted him. Rose water and sugar, and the faintest trace of salt from where she’d bitten down on his lip, drawn blood, and apologized with a kiss a moment later.
Séverin knew she must have read the Mnemo bug he had left beside her on the ice by now. He’d had only moments to record it, barely enough time to give her the name of the meeting place in three days’ time. But before he had ended the Mnemo recording, he had said one last thing:
Don’t forget that I am your majnun. Always.
Even without sleeping, he dreamt of her face and the faces of Tristan, Enrique, Zofia, and Hypnos. By now, they would understand he’d manipulated them. They would be furious at his lies and all his cruelty until that moment … but they would forgive him, wouldn’t they? They would understand that all he had done, all the ugliness he had committed, it was all for them. Or had he gone too far? He knew he’d made terrible mistakes and broken their trust, but he hoped what they’d seen in the Mnemo bug was enough to earn back a sliver of their belief in him. And once they were together, he would begin to make full amends.