“I know it wasn’t,” she said, standing up again. “But now you see the problem.”
I did, and it was made all the more vexing by the fact that Bethany had an annoying habit of always being right. Frankly, she hadn’t been wrong about anything yet. Which meant I probably owed Isaac an apology. I wasn’t looking forward to that.
Still, if the traitor wasn’t any of the others, and it wasn’t me, who was left?
Twenty-five
At the table under the stained-glass windows, Isaac and Philip inspected the box. The windows flashed with a sudden bright light, followed by the distant boom of thunder. A heavy rain began to patter the glass, then wash down it in sheets as the storm clouds that had been gathering all day finally opened.
Isaac glanced up at me. He still didn’t fully trust me. I couldn’t blame him. It was going to take a long time to earn his trust. The question was, would I stick around long enough for that to happen? What was my plan, exactly? I didn’t know. On the one hand, part of me wanted to stay. These people were freaks like me. I felt like I belonged with them, like I was a part of something in a way I never felt before. On the other hand, there were answers out there I needed to find, and I had unfinished business with Underwood.
Isaac ran his hand reverentially over the box lid, his fingertips tracing the words written along the metal crest. “
Bethany glanced nervously at the box. “Is it safe?”
“It should be. The equinox isn’t until tomorrow.” Isaac bent to inspect the lock. It was bulky and hinged, the kind of lock you’d see on a steamer trunk, but instead of a keyhole there were three rotating cylinders. A combination lock, only there weren’t any numbers, just strange, blocky symbols. Isaac tapped the lock with his finger, then narrowed his eyes and rubbed his tightly cropped beard in concentration. “It’s hexlocked. The box can’t be opened by force or by magic. Willem Van Lente didn’t want anyone finding it, and he certainly didn’t want anyone opening it. I should have known he wasn’t going to make it easy.”
Philip nodded, the box’s reflection bouncing in his mirrored sunglasses. “So what’s the combination? His birthday?”
“I doubt it’s anything so mundane,” Isaac said. “The symbols are a kind of puzzle. All we need to do is figure it out.”
“Like in Gregor’s tunnel,” I said. “Could it be Ehrlendarr again?”
“It’s not,” Isaac said, “but it’s definitely an older language. Hold on a moment.” He took a hand mirror out of one of the table drawers and held it up to the combination lock. “Ah! I thought so! Look at this.” All I saw in the mirror were the same symbols backward. Isaac, on the other hand, saw an epiphany. “It’s so simple I should have known. They’re Egyptian hieroglyphs, only reversed. Van Lente studied magic in Egypt with the Order of Horus before he relocated to New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century.” He spun the cylinders, examining each of the hieroglyphs. Then he grinned. “Oh, you clever, clever magician. It’s perfect.”
“What is?” I asked.
“The combination,” he said. “Back then, very few people would have known the password to the Order of Horus’s inner sanctum, especially in the New World. That’s how Van Lente ensured that even if the box were found, no one would be able to open it. Lucky for us, I’ve been to the inner sanctum myself. Now, let’s see. It’s been a while.” He started turning the cylinders one at a time. “First is life, the ankh. Then growth, the papyrus stem. And finally Horus, the falcon.”
The lock sprang open with a sharp
Isaac opened another drawer in the desk, took out a box of thin latex gloves, and pulled a pair over his hands. Then he gently opened the lid of the box. White wisps of steam drifted out and dissipated in the air around him, as if the box were full of dry ice. He squinted into it. Then he tipped the box over.
Something big, round, and as gray as gunmetal rolled out, landing on the table with a heavy
It was a severed head. A gargoyle head, to be precise, only it looked a hell of a lot bigger than the head of any gargoyle I’d seen. Its eyes were closed but its mouth was open, frozen in a silent roar that revealed rows of sharp teeth. Its tusks had been broken off, though whether from injury or simply to make the enormous gargoyle’s head fit within the confines of the box I couldn’t guess. At the stump of its neck, bone and dried gray muscle tissue were still visible where a clean, precise cut had severed the head from its body.
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to see, but this wasn’t it. Not the head of a giant, dead gargoyle. It didn’t make sense. How could all the danger we’d faced, all the deaths, have been over
Isaac lifted the head in his gloved hands and inspected it, as excited as an appraiser evaluating a rare, lost antique. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are in the presence of royalty. Meet Stryge, the first king of the gargoyles. It looks like he hasn’t aged a day since Willem Van Lente cut off his head four hundred years ago.”
Ingrid had mentioned Stryge was the king of the gargoyles before the Black Knight came along, I remembered, but that was all she’d said about him. “What happened?” I asked.
“For millennia, Stryge was the scourge of Europe,” Isaac explained. “He viewed all human life as vermin, an infestation deserving nothing short of extermination. Finally, in the eleventh century, the magicians of Europe banded together and banished Stryge and his gargoyles across the ocean to North America. Stryge continued his reign of terror here, leading the gargoyles in attacks on the natives and, later, the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam. By the time Willem Van Lente came to New Amsterdam in 1660, the gargoyles were regularly ambushing the trade routes between settlements. It was one massacre after another. No one came back alive. Some of the victims disappeared. Others were found in pieces, as if they’d been torn limb from limb.
“The authorities blamed the local Lenape Indians, but Van Lente suspected it wasn’t the work of anything human. He decided to run his own covert investigation and learned from the Lenape elders that the attacks were perpetrated by creatures they called Mhuwe, man-eaters. Van Lente recognized them for what they were: gargoyles from the old country. He knew the only way to stop the slaughter was to cut off the head of the snake, as it were. Kill Stryge and leave the gargoyles powerless and in disarray without their leader. So he made a deal with the Lenape to fight Stryge together.
“The battle lasted weeks. The sacrifices Van Lente made were unbelievable. He cut off his own hand to create the Anubis Hand, the only weapon that could hurt Stryge, though even that wasn’t enough. In the end, it took the combined might of all his magic and the entire Lenape nation to bring Stryge down.”
I looked at the black, mummified fist of the Anubis Hand poking out of Thornton’s coat pocket on the floor. Willem Van Lente’s own hand. It was a crazy story. Completely unbelievable. But something itched in my mind, a kernel of a thought. Something about the Lenape Indians. I’d heard the name before.
“There are no records of Van Lente after the battle,” Isaac went on. “He must have died from his wounds shortly after he hid the box. He gave his life to save New Amsterdam, but it was all in vain. Not long after, the Black Knight came out of nowhere, stepping in to fill the void as the gargoyles’ new king and leading them in further acts of evil to this very day. Nothing changed. Willem Van Lente fought and died for nothing.”
“Why did he bother hiding the head?” I asked. “I mean, we’re talking about someone who cut off his own hand to make a magical weapon, right? If Van Lente was half the badass he sounds like, you’d think he would have stuck the head on a pike or something as a warning to the gargoyles not to mess with them anymore.” Bethany and Isaac arched their eyebrows at me. “What? I’m not saying that’s what
Unlike the others, Philip smiled at me. “Nasty. I like the way you think.”
I sighed. “Look, forget all that, you know what I mean. Why go through the trouble of a puzzle box and a
