“Your face turned white with essence. Black flames shot around your head,” she said.
I rubbed my eyes. Red and yellow spots danced behind my eyelids. “Sounds kinda cool.”
“It was a negative image of the painting,” she said.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my temples to counteract the pounding. “You saw the same thing? You saw the flamy, whirly thing?”
“Bright and clear, and so were you. I thought something was going to explode,” she said.
“Me, too. It was pretty for a while, but then, it always is,” Joe said.
“What always is?” I asked.
“The Wheel of the World,” he said.
Meryl placed the painting faceup on the floor and pulled the cheap plastic tablecloth off the table. “I’m taking this home. I don’t think you should be around it.”
I wasn’t going to argue. Even if Meryl reactivated Ceridwen’s wards to keep the scrying from hurting, there was little she could do to stop the temptation to look at it. Right then, looking at it was the last thing on my list, but I knew me. I had never been one to resist temptation well. I slumped onto the bed. “When will this be over?”
Joe hovered above the painting, staring at it as Meryl wrapped it. “Looks like Tuesday next, after dinner.”
15
Lunch had to be postponed while Meryl took the canvas back to her place. She refused to let me tag along because she never let me go to her place, but this time she had a point. If I knew where the painting was, knowing me, I’d want to check it out. She wasn’t interested in pretending she wasn’t home while I leaned on the doorbell. Instead, I went to the Guildhouse, which had been our postlunch plan anyway. We both had work to do there, so she met me afterward. We spent most of the day apart, though, me working in various library stacks while Meryl tended to mysterious chores on another floor.
Meryl’s office was a mess. Boxes filled with salvaged items from damaged storage rooms competed for space with her usual stacks and stacks of ephemera. Some things stayed for a few hours while Meryl found a better place for them, but I suspected a good chunk of it was going to hang around for a long time. I wasn’t helping by leaving books on her desk, reference titles I had found in the library section. Under normal circumstances, Meryl would scream at me for unshelving so many items at once, but I was digging in the older sections of the archives that she hadn’t cataloged. No catalog number technically meant no proper place.
I moved some files on the desk to place a stack of histories that I was going to take home. I was about to leave and resume my search when a piece of parchment on Meryl’s chair caught my eye. Hand-painted illuminations weaved up the side margins. At the top of the sheet was a blue heart pierced by a sword with white flames surrounding it. The stone in my head was blue beryl, at least when it had a physical form, and shaped liked a heart to some people’s eyes.
I picked up the sheet and skimmed the text. It was Old Elvish, dense and hard to decipher. The best I could make out was that it was a list of names, a lineage of some kind. Other sheets on the chair seemed to be from the same source. The illustrations and writing looked the same, but my translation skills of the language were rusty.
“You ruined my surprise,” Meryl said.
Startling at the sound of her voice, I held up the parchment. “What is this?”
She dropped some files on the floor. “I found it this morning. It refers to a faith stone.”
“Why didn’t you show me when I got here?” I asked.
She held her hand out. “I was looking for the rest. Pages are missing.”
I passed the first few sheets to her and picked up the rest. “My Old Elvish is rusty.”
Meryl hummed. “There’s not much here. The illuminations caught my eye. It starts with a recounting of an old German clan’s victories over its rivals. A war breaks out, and the clan chief finds a talisman that stirs the hearts of his followers. Sound familiar?”
“Does it talk about rituals or spells?” I asked.
She dropped the pages on her desk. “Not in this stuff. Maybe in the missing parts. I found them in a hallway upstairs, outside one of the temperature-controlled storage rooms. The ventilation system wasn’t warded inside. It looks like a tornado went through the room when the building came down.”
“Show me,” I said.
She slipped her hands on my chest and tugged at my jacket. “No. I warded the area until I can get someone to straighten it up.”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
“No, you won’t. I’ve seen you do research. You’ll start on it, then get focused on looking for the pages and tossing stuff aside until you make more of mess.”
“Meryl, this could be the answer I’m looking for. I need to know what do about this thing in my head,” I said.
She used the jacket to shake me from side to side. “Could, could, could. We have a few floors of stuff that could answer your questions. This is my playground, not yours. I’ve been pointing you to likely areas first,” she said.
I held up the papers. “This seems likely.”
She glowered at me from under her bangs. “Do not question the Chief Archivist. The Chief Archivist knows all. She will smite you if you ignore her.”
I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her close. “I love when you talk tough.”
“Crotch-grinding will not change my mind. Unlike you, my thinking parts are above the neck,” she said.
“Maybe it will change
She laughed. “Really? Maybe?”
I pouted in the best innocent expression I could muster. It wasn’t very good, which occasionally made it cute. “Wouldn’t hurt to try,” I said.
She slipped out of my arms and neatened the parchments on the chair. “No, thanks. That’s taking ‘love among the ruins’ a little too literally. Wanna see a dead body instead?”
I leaned against the doorway. “Now there’s a sexy segue.”
Meryl straightened up and destroyed my view. “I’ve been working upstairs. Druse is up there,” she said.
Meryl knew how to redirect a conversation better than I did. Druse was a
I had complicated feelings about Druse. Her ability had accessed the same darkness as the one in my head. She used it to survive by draining essence from living beings. I thought I could learn something from her, that she could show me how to use the darkness without being overwhelmed by it. The darkness was seductive, though, and draining essence was addictive. I found myself acting like a drug addict—not caring how I went about getting my essence fix. That road led me to almost killing Keeva macNeve and too many other people. Meryl knew I wouldn’t be able to resist seeing Druse’s body, if only to discover answers from her death that I didn’t get from her in life. “Okay,” I said.
Meryl’s office was in one of the lower subbasements of the Guildhouse. Between its depth and her security shielding, it had sustained little damage when the building came down. The levels above were another matter. The next floor up had survived the collapse with mixed results, mainly because Meryl hadn’t had control of the entire area. The floor was devoted to research and investigations—some of it academic, some the Guild equivalent of the police medical examiner’s morgue. We passed a series of rooms that looked all too familiar.
“When did they put holding cells up here?” I asked.
Meryl glanced at me with a sly grin. “Oh, something about discovering the dungeon had secret trapdoors and passages.”
Last year, a prisoner had escaped through one of the secret tunnels. Meryl knew more about the Guildhouse
