“This is stupid,” I whispered eventually, my legs cramping up.
“So go inside. I’ll wait here.”
“Right. I’m trusting you to lie in wait for her.”
“You know I wouldn’t—”
“Forget it. We’ll wait together. Just so I can be here to say I told you so when nothing happens.”
She showed up as the bells were chiming eight-thirty. Half an hour early, but she raced into the plaza, ruddy-cheeked and out of breath, spinning in a slow circle, her gaze a lighthouse beam scanning the area—for us, I thought, though there was no reason for us to be there. Seeing her, knowing I hadn’t lost the last person I had left, knowing that Eli had been wrong, that despite everyone else’s lies and hidden agendas, Adriane was still simply Adriane, I could finally breathe again. Then I saw my mistake.
Actually, first I heard it, recognizing the irritated inflection of the words almost before I recognized the voice, so many times had I heard it directed at her. “You’re late.”
Eli’s hand was over my mouth before I could gasp. Or scream. Or whatever the appropriate response would be to your dead boyfriend taking your best friend in his arms and slipping his tongue into her mouth.
Eli grabbed my shoulders, holding me in place, or maybe just holding me up. He didn’t know me as well as he thought, if he thought I would fall.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise, I thought, for the second time that day, as they came together, Adriane’s calisthenically honed body twisting around his, lithe arms caressing, Adriane up against a wall, perched on his narrow hips, Max’s greedy tongue roaming her lips, the nape of her neck, beyond, below.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise, I thought, because Eli was right about the signs—Eli had seen them, Eli had read them, Eli wasn’t blinded by his desperation not to know. What else had I decided not to know? What other rock-solid facts of my life were a lie, and how many rocks could crack before the foundation gave way, and I fell through to whatever emptiness lay below?
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. But it was.
Wait for me, the note in the pocket had read, the pocket of the jacket that Max had slung over Adriane’s shoulders, though I was the one he claimed to love and I was the one who’d been cold.
“I was worried,” Adriane murmured.
“I told you I’d be fine,” Max said. “Did you do it?”
“She’ll be here.”
“Alone?”
Adriane nodded, then kissed him again. I forced myself not to close my eyes. We were so close, and dangerously obvious, peering around a corner like cartoon detectives; all they had to do was decide to look—but their eyes were locked on each other. We were invisible.
“I’ll be by the service entrance,” Max said. “Don’t wait too long.”
“I got it. But I still don’t see why we have to—”
“I told you, it’s safer if you don’t know. Safer for her, too. I promised you I could fix all of this if you just trusted me, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“And you believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So we’re good?”
She kissed him.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said.
“Once this is all over, we’ll tell her about us, right?”
“Definitely. As soon as we’re all safe and this is over. We’ve waited long enough.”
“She’ll understand.” Adriane sounded unsure. That was a lie even she couldn’t pull off.
“We’ll make her,” Max said. There was no uncertainty in his voice.
The worst part wasn’t seeing his hands on her, or imagining the things I hadn’t seen, the things they’d done together, the things they’d said about me—or worse, not bothered to say. It may have been the straw that broke the camel’s heart, but it wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part was knowing what this meant. It was all true. Max had faked his own death. Which meant Eli was right, and Max was aligned with the Hledači. Which meant Max had done their bidding, had drawn me to Prague, had acted the victim, had manipulated us into tracking down the Lumen Dei, had cared only about the clues, the letters, the map. Which meant Max had been using me from the beginning, for my special vyvolená-ness and my stolen letter. Which meant Max, who had lied about who he was and what he wanted with us, had wanted only the Lumen Dei; the same Max who had stammered poetry and blushed at my touch and declared his love in a Wal-Mart parking lot, had killed Chris.
I wondered what Adriane had for him to take.
Some infinite time later, Eli grabbed my elbow and jerked me away from the sight of the two of them devouring each other.
“The service entrance,” he whispered, and I nodded, mutely obedient, happy to follow anyone who had a suggestion for where to aim myself, for how I was supposed to get through the next several seconds, and the next after that.
He circled the restaurant, and I followed him.
He slid into a narrow gap between two large, whirring metal machines: cooling units or freezers or backup generators, I didn’t know. I knew only that the entire area stank of fish and rotting fruit, and that I followed him there, too, squeezing in beside him. “ ‘What fresh hell is this?’ ” I murmured, but Eli only looked at me in confusion. I wondered whether Max recited poetry to Adriane, too, or whether he saved that technique exclusively for the pathetic lovesick girls he wooed on Hledači command.
“Did you know?” I panned my gaze back and forth between the service entrance, the parking lot, and the river that curled around it, avoiding Eli, who had seen me see them, which was too much.
“I didn’t know he was alive.”
“Not that.”
“I suspected something. I told you.”
“But did you know?”
Silence.
“You didn’t want to hear it from me.”
I felt the bile rise again, tangy and sour. Eli touched my shoulder.
“Don’t.”
“Nora.”
“Don’t.”
Max’s arrival shut us both up. He leaned against a truck with bright, cartoonish potatoes painted on its side that was idling by the service door and checked his watch. Then he checked it again, thirty seconds later, and thirty seconds after that.
My muscles were screaming for release: to leap out of the hiding spot and tackle him, pin him to the ground, interrogate him, my knee pressing down on his chest, or maybe his balls, forcing him to tell me who he was, how he’d survived the fall, why Adriane, why me. Whether any of it had meant anything. Or maybe I would just bear down on his trachea until time ran out.
These were not the kinds of things people did in the real world.
But then, we had left the real world behind. It was busy touring the Louvre and breaking curfew and sleeping through lectures on the French Revolution. In this brave new world, my world, there were clearly no restrictions on the kinds of things people did to each other.
Eli’s hand clamped down on my wrist. I left it there. Max watched the door, which, after fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, never opened. And somewhere beyond it, presumably, Adriane sat at an empty table set for two, sipping her drink, waiting for her clueless best friend.
I could kill her, too, I thought. Smother her in her sleep, Max’s coat pressed over her nose and mouth, but not her eyes, because that would deny me the pleasure of watching them fill with surprise, then confusion, understanding, guilt, and terror, before glassing over into a final emptiness.
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, I thought. Yeats.
Max would have been proud.
There was obviously something wrong with me.
By ten, darkness had descended over the back lot, the single lamp overhanging the doorway casting Max in orange. Adriane stepped out, her black hair glowing purple under the light.
“She never showed up.”
How sweet, I thought. She sounded almost like she cared. Of course, probably she did—for Max’s
sake.
They argued. He told her that she had promised, that she had ruined everything. He accused her of warning me, or telling me too much of the truth too soon. Then she cried, and he held her, looping an arm around her waist, pulling her to his side, and walking her, head on his shoulder, toward the back of the truck, murmuring what I could only assume were sweet nothings, and I steeled myself for the inevitable end to the foreplay.
Eli had relaxed his grip on my wrist, and his fingers were only a gentle pressure against my skin, less a warning than a reminder.
When it happened, we weren’t ready.
“I’m sorry,” I heard Max say. “I’m out of options.”
The truck doors swung open, and the Hledači swarmed. She disappeared into the horde, and it flowed back into the truck as swiftly as it had emerged. The doors slammed. The tires squealed. The truck sped away, Max at the wheel. That fast, she was gone.
22
One moment. That was all.
One thought—no, not even a thought, an impulse. Instinctive and inchoate.
Leave her.
I could turn my back. Go inside, sit down to a quiet dinner, board a plane, leave it all behind.
I could spin a tale for the cops; sell the letters on eBay, rare and certainly valuable pieces of the past that could pay for college somewhere far away, where I could major in something practical and meaningless that would bear no baggage and require no long, silent afternoons in a musty library, alone with my thoughts. Something like accounting or biology or graphic design that would guarantee a safe, uneventful life that had nothing to do with the past.
She had gotten herself into this, whatever it was. Let her take care of herself.
One moment, that was all, and then it passed. One moment, one impulse, wiped away almost as soon as it appeared.
But if nothing is ever erased, how can anything be forgiven?
23
There would be a ransom note waiting for us at the Golden Lion, Eli guessed, and there was, though not the madmen’s message of cutout magazine letters Hollywood had led me to expect. Eli—forbidding me to go back there and, when I pointed out what would happen the next time he tried to forbid me to do something, reminding me that the Hledaýi, and most likely the Fidei, would be waiting—retrieved it while I waited at the cemetery, telling myself that it was me they wanted, not Adriane, and once they got me, maybe they would just let her go.
Sure. Because up till now they had certainly demonstrated themselves to be on the generous, merciful end of the psycho-killer spectrum.
“Anything?” I asked as soon as Eli came into sight.
Only when I saw him did I realize how terrified I’d been that he wouldn’t come back.
He nodded. “But first can I remind you of what you saw behind the restaurant?”
Like I would ever forget. “Give it to me.”
“You don’t know how long this has been going on,” he said. “Max killed Chris. You know that now.”
It was the first time either of us had said it out loud.
“For all you know, Adriane was a part of it.”
“Not possible.”
“How can you still be that naive, now?”
He couldn’t understand, because we were all strangers to him. But Max and Adriane weren’t the same. Max was an unknown quantity, a stranger who’d passed into our lives and been too good at being too good to be true. Adriane I’d known for years. I’d had dinner with her parents and stayed up until three a.m. listening to her rants about their meddling; I’d given her pedicures when she’d sprained her wrist and couldn’t do it herself; I’d rubbed her back when she’d puked up a night’s worth of vodka. I knew her locker combination and her favorite deodorant and the name of her first pet, a turtle who’d died when she was seven because she forgot it had to be fed. I didn’t know everything, that was clear. But I knew enough.
“There’s still such a thing as impossible,” I said. “She’s not a killer.”
“You’re in denial.”
“I wish.”
“Fine. Let’s say she’s not in on it. It could still be a trap.”
“Of course, it’s a trap. Let me see the note.”
“I mean, it could be her trap. You could be saving someone who doesn’t need to be saved.”
But he gave me the note.
Vyvolená. We have your friend. Bring the map to Letohrádek Hvězda, sundown tomorrow, and we will give you the girl.
“It’s obviously a lie,” Eli said.
“Not necessarily.”
“Have you lost it? They don’t want the map, they want you.”
“They probably want both,” I said. “And if they get them, maybe they’ll let Adriane go.”
“They won’t. They’ll kill her. As soon as they have you. That’s who they are.”
“You’re not exactly an unbiased observer.”
“Chris was.”
“You don’t get to use him again,” I said. “Don’t even say his name.”
“Even if they’re telling the truth about letting her go, so what? Are you really willing to trade your life for hers?”
Even I was surprised to find the answer so simple. Adriane wasn’t a part of this, not really, and no amount of screwing Max would change that. It wasn’t about her, and it wasn’t even about Chris, not anymore. It was about Elizabeth, and it was about me: If I didn’t go to them, they would keep coming after the people I loved, or thought I did. They wouldn’t stop until I stopped them, or until they got what they wanted.
Either way, it ended tonight.
“No,” Eli said. “You don’t know what they’ll do to you.”
“They’ll use me to get the Lumen Dei to work, right? Isn’t that the deal with the vyvolená? Is that what you’re really worried about here? Keeping humanity pure and ignorant, holding off the apocalypse?”
“I’m worried about you,” he said.
“You don’t get to do that, either.”
He sighed. “If we’re going to do this, we’ll need help.”
“The cops?” I said, though I knew that wasn’t it.
“If you think they’d believe your story and come rushing to the rescue. We do have the ransom note.…”
“We also have a warrant out for our arrest and some kind of Interpol most-wanted alert. So not the cops. You want me to team up against these nutcases with the other nutcases. Who, not incidentally, also want me dead.”
“Let me take care of the Fidei,” he said.
“I feel better already.” I allowed myself a faint smile. “Adriane was right, you know. Seems like someone like you, who does this kind of thing on a regular basis, really ought to have a gun.”
“Funny you should mention that.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a palm-sized black revolver I recognized, as a few hours earlier I’d been staring into its muzzle, waiting for a bullet. “Now I do.”
24
“I don’t see them,” I said, more nervous than I thought I’d be. We’d gotten off the metro at a stop a couple miles from the Letohrádek Hvězda and were taking a circuitous route toward the hornet’s nest. This is me being brave, I thought, watching my traitorous feet carry me, one step after another, toward whatever was going to happen next.
“Because they’re good at what they do,” Eli said. “But they’re watching. As soon as we find Adriane, they’ll move in.”
“You hope.”
“We can trust them.”
“You broke your oath,” I reminded him. And then there was Father Hájek, whom I still hadn’t asked about. But Eli had his gun. “They’re not exactly your biggest fans. Or mine.”
“This isn’t about us. They’ll never let the Hledači activate the Lumen Dei. They’d burn the place to the ground first.”
“With us inside,” I muttered, but I kept going. The map was tucked into its money belt again, wedged safely between my hip and my jeans. Not because I believed the Hledači had any interest in Elizabeth’s cipher now that they ha
d what they wanted, and not that I believed it would bring me luck—if anything, the letter had proven itself a Typhoid Mary, gifting everyone it touched with a fine helping of plague—but because the letter had been the beginning, and it felt only right that it should be present for what promised to be the end.
A block later, we hit a wall of people, lining the wide boulevard shoulder to shoulder as they munched on fried dough, slugged back beer, and roared with excitement as a pageant processed down the street, radiant Amazons in medieval warrior garb firing rubber arrows at a barbarian horde. Wheeling majestically through the battle was a massive float whose speakers blasted some kind of Czech fight song at the eager crowd. Atop the float, a Bohemian queen waved from her golden throne, Libuše herself, watching her faithful maidens spill the blood that had marked the birth of Prague. This was no tourist spectacle—those were Czech toddlers on their Czech fathers’ shoulders, waving tiny Czech flags and shouting lisping Czech encouragements to the passing Czech warriors. But, except for the lack of cotton candy and Yankees bashing, it could have been any New England parade on any dreary, cold New England day. Headache-inducing under the best of circumstances. Nearly murder-inducing under these. Especially when the crowd surged into the gap between me and Eli, and he disappeared into the sweaty, sugar-buzzed sea of people.
I caught sight of his head bobbing through the crowd, a few feet ahead. “Eli, wait up!” I called, trying to muscle my way through the crowd, one jabbing elbow at a time.
Somehow, he heard me over the trumpets and war cries, and turned back—just as a steel baton slashed down toward his head.
“Eli!”
The baton made contact. His eyes widened, his mouth twisted in what almost looked like a smile, as if, a connoisseur of such things, he couldn’t help but appreciate the efficiency of the attack, and then he dropped out of sight. “Help!” I screamed, my voice pitiful and small in the din of the crowd, and I pushed forward, saw Eli on the ground, a circle of concern forming around him, saw the hand that held the baton attached to a man in a police uniform, a man who spotted me and knew I saw his costume for what it was. There was a sharp pain at the back of my head, and I saw, though I had always believed that was just a story, spots, bright and fiery, dancing before my blurry eyes, and then I saw nothing.