Heartland

Marielle eyed the card with some trepidation, and when I tapped it, she looked away somewhat nervously. The Chorus couldn't read her: her pulse was gone, and the swirling energy caught beneath the boat dispersed into the general stream of psychic force that ran through Paris.

'Daughters.' When she appeared to not hear me, I said it again. 'Tell me about the daughters, Marielle.'

She searched my face for some sign that I knew what I was talking about, and the Chorus slapped away her subtle attempt to read my aura. I locked myself off as completely as she had-two can play this game-and stared back at her. Willing to wait her out.

When I had started to explain to her how her father moved in the cards, she had been nervous. Anxious, as if her father could tell me something she didn't want me to know. Like father, like daughter: the family couldn't help but keep secrets. Was that what Lafoutain was talking about? The age-old argument that men are transparent, unable to keep a secret to save their lives, but it is women who are impossible to read. If you want any secret to be truly kept confidential, you tell your daughter and not your son.

'All right,' Marielle said. She nodded toward the quay. 'Find us a cab. I'll call ahead and let them know we're coming. They can tell you themselves.'

She seemed relieved that I hadn't asked about the High Priestess.

Tour Montparnasse stuck out of the glittering landscape of Paris like a bruised middle finger. The skyscraper was one of those concessions to modernity that was immediately regretted as soon as it was finished; shortly after the building was done, Paris outlawed any further skyscrapers within the central part of the city. One of those rare moments of humility from a civic government, and some believe the building remains so that no one ever forgets. You can kill the magic of a city by changing it too much.

It reminded me of the Eglanteria Terrace, the building in Portland where Bernard took the theurgic mirror and launched his assault on humanity. A spire to Heaven, drenched in darkness.

At the tower, Marielle typed a security code into the pad in the elevator, and we ascended to an unmarked floor. The doors opened onto a simple foyer, with a rose marble floor and pale green walls. There was no other exit, just a small marble plaque-the same sort of rose stone like the floor-with the letters 'l F d M' engraved in it and another security keypad.

Mounted in each of the four corners of the room were tiny blisters of security monitors. Discrete enough to be easily missed, but not so invisible that you didn't see them if you were looking.

Marielle entered another passcode and the light on the pad flashed green, but nothing happened. In response to my raised eyebrow, she nodded toward one of the security cameras. 'Entering the right code only announces you,' she said. 'You still have to be invited in.'

'In where?' I touched the plaque, tracing the letters, hoping the Chorus would provide some clue as to what they meant.

'Les Filles de Mnemosyne,' Marielle said.

The daughters of Mnemosyne, who, according to Greek legend, lived on Mount Parnassus. The nine Muses.

The Chorus registered the magickal release of a seal, and the walls of the anteroom flickered out of existence, leaving us standing at the edge of an immense room, filled with rows upon rows of tall bookcases. The marble floor around the elevator remained, as did the elevator column itself, and Marielle stepped across the line separating the marble from the warm polish of the library's wooden floors.

I followed, and the Chorus shivered as we crossed over, an animalistic twitch that ran through my veins. The seal activated as I crossed, binding the walls solid again, and on the inside, layers and layers of magickal script vibrated with activity. The wards of Les Filles de Mnemosyne.

'Welcome to the Archives,' Marielle said. 'Don't touch anything.'

I snatched my hand back. The case next to me was devoted to books, and as I looked more closely at the nearby shelves, I noted that some of them held display cases of varying size. Most of them weren't lit with any sort of track lighting-this wasn't a public museum after all, and long-term exposure to artificial light could very well damage some of the artifacts held here. The ambient lighting of the grand chamber was purposefully restrained, leaving the contents of the cases in mysterious-and tantalizing-shadows.

'That's a copy of the Secretum Secretorum,' I said, indicating the book I had almost touched. 'One of the Tulbriss editions.' Only fourteen were reputed to have been made, and they were a facsimile of the original translation done by John of Seville back in the twelfth century. There were English translations readily available-some of them even on the Internet-but they were very literal, and a great deal of the symbolic richness- the magick bound into the text-had been stripped out. This edition had been commissioned to re-create the arts lost in the mundane translations, and before I could stop myself, I found the catalog description on my lips, the words nearly falling out of my mouth like money out of the wallet of a drunken old bookseller: Roxburghe-style binding, lambskin leather, gold stamp lettering, Fabriano Ingres endpapers, an oyster paper interior-

'You know the Tulbriss?' The speaker was a robust woman, dressed in a charcoal suit that managed to be corporately stylish and haute couture at the same time. Her blonde hair was pulled back from her round face and plaited in a long strand down to her mid-back. Perched on the peak of her forehead was a pair of red-rimmed glasses. Definitely going for the sexy academic look, and succeeding very well, though the arch of her eyebrow at my expression suggested she had heard enough variants of 'hot librarian!' over the years that for me to mention it out loud now would be as banal as pointing out that she was wearing shoes.

And they were pretty great shoes too.

'Yes,' I said, with no small amount of clumsiness. My chest was tight, and it took me a minute to realize the sensation wasn't some schoolboy reaction (you never forget your first librarian crush), but a spirit sensation from the Chorus, an agonizing pang of loneliness. I knew why she looked familiar. 'You're-'

'Vivienne Lafoutain,' Marielle said.

Lafoutain's daughter.

Stricken, I looked at Marielle for help. The pain in my chest increased, and my heart skipped. Once was enough. Don't make me do this again. 'I can't,' I whispered. Don't make me tell another daughter that her father is gone. That I've taken the soul of someone they love.

Marielle's face softened. 'I'll tell her.'

'Tell me what?' Vivienne asked.

'Your father is gone, Viv. I'm sorry.'

Vivienne took her glasses off her head, glanced at the lenses for a second, and then settled them on her face. 'The Tulbriss,' she said, after clearing her throat, 'how familiar are you with the edition? Have you actually handled one?' Behind her glasses, her eyes were shiny, the only outward sign that she had heard Marielle.

'Yes,' I said, feeling incredibly awkward, even more than I had a moment before. Little chicken, a voice cried from the Chorus, don't hold it back. 'I, uh, acquired a copy once. For a private collector.'

'One in Hong Kong?' She touched the corner of an eye, wiping at something so faint neither Marielle or I could attest that it had ever been there.

'I can't say.'

She favored me with a tiny curl of her lips, an expression so haunted with a different emotion entirely that the Chorus nearly exploded in my chest. 'You don't have to. Aleister Forge is the only collector who knew there were copies still out there.'

'Viv-' Marielle took a step forward.

Vivienne shook her head, and her face hardened. 'No, sister.' Her hands clenched into fists. 'I won't share this with you.' Her anger shook a tear loose and it slid down her cheek. Her hand still balled tight, she swiped the tear away. 'So, you're the one.'

'Yes,' I said, knowing without knowing why that I was.

'Come with me,' she said, turning and walking further into the stacks. She hadn't glanced at Marielle. 'She said earlier that you two needed some guidance. An understanding of the process by which the Coronation is completed. Yes?'

'Yes,' I said, sticking with the safe answer.

'There is an artifact that must be retrieved. The Hierarch had a key. I can tell you where the lock is.'

And there went sticking with the safe answer. 'I. . ' The key. 'I don't have it.'

Vivienne stopped, reversed her direction, and walked close enough to me that I could see the cracks in her