Alchemystic (29 page)

“I
can’t
leave,” he shouted into my face. “Not now. If I disappear, they’ll come looking for the family all the quicker. There are at least a dozen of them like me.” He looked down at Stanis. “You’re lucky I found you first. If the big guy had found you, you might not be alive right now. I’m at least giving you a chance here.”

Some chance,
I thought. “What do you want me to do?”

“You’ve taken such an interest in our family’s artist legacy,” he said. “Now’s your opportunity to put some of that knowledge to use. Find the secrets our great-great-grandfather stole.”

“I don’t think I’ll find the answers you’re looking for,” I lied, the weight of the book on my back feeling all the heavier.

“You
will
.” He looked down at Stanis. “You hold some sway over big ugly here. That means you know something about the Spellmasons. It’s only a matter of time for you to figure it out. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“And be quick about it,” he said. “I cannot keep them away forever.”

Despite being a rag doll in his hands, something inside me snapped. “You…selfish
asshole
,” I said, pounding ineffectively against his jagged stone chest. “Do you know what you’ve put me through? First, there was the grieving we’ve done over your sorry ass. Then I was pretty much forced to
put aside everything artistic that I love so I could learn the family business—”

“At least you’re doing it out of
real
familial obligation and not because someone bought you from another set of parents to do it,” he said.

“So kill us yourself, then!” I screamed at him, the sound echoing in the hollow chamber. Somewhere far off a commotion rose up.

“I don’t wish harm on you or our ‘parents,’” he said, “despite my initial anger at them. I’ve gotten what I wanted. Sort of. Well, soon I will have, thanks to you. So, go. Enjoy the money. Enjoy your birthright empire. Either way, these are mortal concerns now.” Devon tossed me aside as if I were made of paper. I rolled across the length of the cargo hold until I hit the wall with a solid
thump
. “They no longer matter to me.”

Devon took his foot off Stanis’s throat and turned, walking away as the sound of others came from down the hall behind him.

“Find what I need, Lexi,” he said. “Find the stolen knowledge. Now go. They’re coming.”

As I lay crumpled on the floor, anger had me stumbling to my feet in seconds, charging after him, but one of Stanis’s stone arms grabbed me gently but firmly around my waist.

“Let us go,” he said, calm. “We must go or we will die. We are outnumbered.”

“I don’t care,” I said, trying to pull free but to no avail.

“But I do,” he said, which I was surprised to discover calmed me. “And I must protect.”

Whether he was simply following his programming or not, I didn’t know, but I stopped struggling as he brought me up through the ship and out onto the deck as shouts of anger grew closer and closer behind us.

“Your brother has one thing I envy,” Stanis said, stopping, standing stone still, unreadable.

“Which is?”

“Your brother may be forced into that unfortunate form,” Stanis said, spreading his wings, “but at least he knows who he is.”

“We
will
restore you,” I said, more determined than ever. The wave of emotion coming off of him broke my heart, how much it would mean to him to feel complete. My anger against my possibly traitorous great-great-grandfather only made me more resolved. “You deserve to be whole, Stanis. I don’t know why Alexander would be so cruel as to take away parts of you. But I will make you whole. I swear it.” And if it made Stanis stronger to fight my brother and his newfound friends at the same time, well, that was just a bonus, wasn’t it?

Without another word he leapt into the sky with me in his arms and we flew off to the fading sound of outraged cries down below.

Alexandra

M
y day was spent pushing back morning meetings to spend some time following reference book to reference book all over my great-great-grandfather’s library, investigating one of the soul stone threads, the one called the Ruler’s Chest. I crushed all my meetings into the early afternoon, throwing down contracting decisions and job-site zoning rulings like I was Donald Trump. All of this in an effort to meet Rory and Marshall at a diner on the Upper East Side around four after pleading via texts, e-mails, and voice mails for them to
please, please, please
show up. I even sweetened the deal by promising gyros, onion rings, and milk shakes all around, which I had waiting when they both sat down at the booth.

The two of them looked at the food like I had maybe poisoned it. I didn’t blame them.

“Our favorites,” I said. “A sort of peace offering. I think maybe I might be a bit overburdened here and emotions
might
be running a little high.”

“Might?” Rory repeated, and grabbed the straw of her milk shake, diving in.

“Okay,
are
,” I said. “I’m not excusing my behavior, but with work, people trying to kill me, gargoyles to train…I’m
in over my head and I’m sorry if I’ve been lashing out. We good?”

Rory nodded, picking up her gyro and taking a bite big enough that I thought she was going to choke. I envied her metabolism sometimes, then remembered it came from five to eight hours of dance regimens every other day, and my little green monster died on the vine. I looked to Marshall. He still hadn’t touched his food.

“Stanis and I had a talk,” I said to him. “He feels horrible about what happened. This whole restoration process flooded him with memories and emotions—”

“It dials them up to eleven,” he said.

“It does,” I admitted. “And moving forward we need to
all
keep that in mind. Especially tonight, because I think I have a lead on a second gemstone.”

Marshall, on the verge of dipping his first onion ring in his milk shake, paused. “You do?”

“Are you sitting down?” I asked, drawing looks like I was stupid. “All right, all right. Let’s just get all the emotional stuff out of the way at once, I suppose. I went back to that freighter last night, with Stanis. We met someone who gave me a name. Kejetan the Accursed.”

“Sounds pleasant,” Marshall said.

“A real tyrant. He ruled Kobryn. It’s near the Polish border, but that’s not the important thing. This informant gave me that ruler’s name: Kejetan, which is one of the statues in my great-great-grandfather’s puzzle path of clues. The other night after we found my attacker dead in Gramercy Park, my father pointed out a statue model of him my great-great-grandfather had done. So I checked the markings on it. The inscription read, ‘The soul of a ruler lies in his chest.’ That’s the Ruler’s Chest, what the master book was pointing to as a hiding place for the next soul stone.”

“So you found the stone with the statue in your great-great-grandfather’s art studio?” Marshall asked.

I shook my head. “No, but a
full-sized
version of that miniature model resides in one of the historic buildings Alexander
worked on in New York, so I think I have a fair idea where we might find the next stone.”

“Where?” Rory asked.

I turned my head to look out the window, both of their eyes following mine. The Metropolitan Museum of Art stood occupying the city block directly across from us.

“Is this source reliable?” Rory asked.

Now came the hard part of the news I had to break to them. “Not in life, no,” I said, “but in death, I believe him.”

“In death?” Marshall repeated, eating another onion ring. “Who the hell is it?”

“Hurry up and eat,” I said, opening up my backpack and pulling out three baseball caps. “I’ll tell you on the way over.”

Once I had paid for our late lunch, I told them about Devon, his not being dead, his new monstrous form, and the events on the freighter last night. Both of them had a ton of questions as we started through the museum, all of which I tried to answer, but they seemed never-ending.

“Enough!” I finally whisper-shouted. “We need to focus here.”

Normally I loved visiting museums, but not at the pace we were rushing around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, especially with the added weight of Alexander’s secret tome in my backpack. I couldn’t take the time to appreciate the actual art within it or really take in the work my great-great-grandfather had done on the building centuries ago.

“What are we looking for exactly?” Rory asked, the brim of her hat sliding down onto her glasses every few steps as we sped through the museum. The other visitors, few that there were, were snailing their way around, but we were purposeful and driven in our movement.

“I’m not one hundred percent sure on that,” I said, “but we need to find the rest of the soul gems to restore Stanis completely, give him his memories and his power back, the things that Alexander—be he good or be he bad—deprived him of. But I’ve
only seen the reference to the Ruler’s Chest on a miniature of the statue, the real one residing somewhere here. Not only did he give them the statue, but my great-great-grandfather carved a lot on this building, so he had all his lifetime to hide something here. Still, my money’s on it being embedded in Kejetan’s armor.”

“So we’re looking for another stone that fits into the symbol carved on Stanis?” Marshall asked from under the pulled-down brim of the
Ghostbusters
hat I had given him.

“Maybe,” I said, “but don’t just focus on that or we may miss whatever we’re looking for.”

Corridors of gorgeous ancient tapestries wound around like a carpeted maze, leading from one massive room to another. I definitely had to come back here some time when my dead brother and a cultish group of Lithuanian dictator worshippers weren’t forcing me to restore my gargoyle faster.

“So what
can
we focus on?” Rory asked as we moved into another room, this one full of paintings and benches.

“Alexander died in the early nineteen hundreds,” I said. “I say we look for anything that predates then.”

I adjusted my brother’s old Yankees cap, pulling at the hair I had stuffed through the sizing loop at the back of it, then drew the brim of it down as far as it would go. I hadn’t wanted to look too suspicious coming in off the streets but I had to do something to disguise us from the security cameras, so it was hats all around.

We hurried down another hallway and into the promising-sounding Lives of Our Leaders section, continuing our search.

“These statues all look so serious,” Rory said, examining a group of imposing-looking men nearby. Their carved robes and armor were impressive. “Well carved, but serious.”

“Nice looking,” I said, moving on, “but the styles aren’t Alexander’s.” The full-sized statue of Kejetan Ruthenia stood among several others farther into the room, and I went to it. Alexander’s hand had captured a cruelty and harshness in the stone, especially in the armored lord’s features, but when I checked the figure over, there was no sign of any kind of gemstone on it.

Marshall came running over to us, one of the guards at the far end of the exhibit hall shooting him a stern look.

“Did you find something?” I asked, excitement causing my stomach to clench.

“Hell yeah,” he said. “They’ve got glaive-guisarmes here!”

Both of us gave him a blank stare, but it was Rory who asked, “What the hell is that?”

Marshall’s eyes went wide while he tried to both talk and catch his breath at the same time. “It’s a pole arm,” he said, like we were the dumbest people in the world for not knowing what it was. “Kind of like a staff with an ax head or sword at the end of it. My warrior monk uses one.”

“Gisarme,” I repeated. “That sounds French.”

Marshall nodded.

“Slavic,”
I said. “We’re looking for things a bit more Eastern Europe than France. Focus.”

“Sorry,” he said, his excitement deflating.

Rory had finished looking over another section of well-carved, well-dressed Russian-looking minions. “Well, nothing stands out to me, but really the only art I pay attention to are those dancer statues by Degas.”

I took my time going over the other statues nearby, shaking my head when I was done. “None of these other ones are half as good as Alexander’s work,” I said.

“I’ll say,” Marshall said. “They don’t even come to life!”

“Shut it,” Rory said. “Before I decide to take up the glaive-guisarme and make you my practice dummy.”

“Watch it,” he said. “Or I’ll up your half of the rent.”

“Stop it,” I hissed out as quietly as I could in the large open space, my voice echoing. “You’re drawing looks from security.”

Thankfully that worked and the two of them fell silent. “Sorry,” Marshall said.

Rory sighed. “Me, too,” she said, forcing it out.

“You two can get back to bickering like a married couple once we find what we came here for,” I said. “Promise.”

“Awesome,” Marshall said, sitting down on a stone bench along the wall.

“Hey!” the guard shouted from across the room. “Off the exhibit!”

Marshall didn’t move. His hands were spread out on the stone he was sitting on, oblivious.