Altar of Bones (58 page)

She started with the ruby in the center and traced two circles on either side of the skull cup, lightly touching each jewel in turn. “It’s a figure eight, lying on its side.”

“The symbol for infinity,” Ry said, and his pulse leaped at the thought of it.

“‘Look to the Lady, for her heart cherishes the secret, and the pathway to the secret is infinite.’ Infinite. Infinity. I think we were right all along, Ry. The amulet is inside of her, in some kind of secret compartment. And the jewels are the pathway to opening it.”

Ry picked up the icon, looked at it closer, but he still didn’t see any breaks or seams in the wood.

“It could be a spring-lock mechanism,” he said, as he carefully set the icon back down on its pouch. “And the stones could work on the same principle as keypads do today. Push one after another in the right order and the lock will spring open.”

“That’s it,” Zoe exclaimed, bouncing up and down on her toes, she was that excited.

She reached out with her finger, and Ry realized she was about to start pushing the stones willy-nilly. He grabbed her wrist. “Whoa, hold on a sec. The whole point of an infinity symbol is that it has no beginning or end. So where are you going to start?”

“With the ruby in the skull cup.”

“Okay, that’s probably logical, but then what? Do you go up and to the right, or up and to the left? Down and to the right? Or down and to the left?”

“So I got four choices. If one way doesn’t work, I’ll try another.”

“Yeah? And what if the guy who designed this was a tricky bastard. He could’ve—”

“Why are you assuming it was done by a he? It was probably a she. A Keeper.”

He held up his hands. “Okay, okay. I concede the point. It probably was a Keeper, but if she had a quirky mind like another Keeper I happen to know, she could have designed the locking mechanism so that if the jewels get pressed out of order, the spring jams and the lock won’t open.”

They both stared down at the icon a long moment. Then Zoe said, “Well, if that doesn’t just suck.”

Ry studied the face of the Virgin. It really was uncanny how much she looked like Zoe. Had a Keeper painted this herself five centuries ago and used her own face as the model?

“Do something for me, Zoe. Draw the infinity symbol in the dust here on the hood of the car…. No, don’t look at the icon. Just do it without thinking. In fact, draw it with your eyes shut.”

She closed her eyes and drew the symbol, starting in the center and
going up and to the left, which was probably the last way he would have done it. He’d have gone up and to the right.

And maybe that just proved his point. If Zoe and the Keeper on the icon looked so much alike, then maybe they thought alike as well.

“I say we go with your instincts, babe,” he said. “We’ve got a one-in-four chance of being right, and so far we’ve been beating the odds.”

But now Zoe was the one to hesitate. “I don’t know…. You said the whole point of an infinity symbol is that it has no beginning and no end—The riddle, Ry! It’s in the riddle. ‘Blood flows into the sea … Blood flows on into the sea without end.’ “

She snatched up her satchel, opened it, pawed through more stuff than you’d find at a Walmart, and produced the unicorn postcard with a flourish. She turned it over and read out loud the riddle her grandmother had written on the back even though they both knew it by heart by now.

Blood flows into the sea

The sea touches the sky

From the sky falls the ice

Fire melts the ice

A storm drowns the fire

And rages through the night

But blood flows on into the sea

Without end
.

“This is it, Ry. This is it! Blood, sea, sky, ice, fire, storm, night—they all represent colors, in a way. Blood for red, sky for blue. And the colors match up to the jewels. Red ruby, blue sapphire. The riddle is the code.”

“And your instinct was right on, too. ‘Blood flows into the sea’ … ruby to aquamarine. Up and to the left.”

She grinned up at him, looking pleased with herself. “Let’s do it,” he said, his voice a little rough. “I’ll read the riddle one line at a time, and you press the stones. One at a time, nice and slow.”

“Okay.” She did a big inhale, exhale, then held out her hands and wriggled her fingers like a safecracker. “I’m ready.”

“‘The blood flows into the sea.’ “

“Ruby to aquamarine,” Zoe said, and slowly, carefully pressed first the ruby, then the aquamarine.

“‘The sea touches the sky.’ “

“Sapphire,” she said.

“‘From the sky falls the ice.’

“Diamond.”

“‘Fire melts the ice.’

“Fire opal …”

“No,
wait
,” Ry yelled, and he grabbed her hand just as her finger was within a hair’s breath of pressing down. “I think we almost blew it. We should’ve pressed the ruby again. Then the opal.”

“The riddle doesn’t say that.”

“I know. But if we’re making an infinite loop, then we’re crossing back through the center, and the ruby is in the center.”

She wiped her hands on the sides of her jeans. “Oh, man, O’Malley. I hope you’re right.”

She hesitated a moment longer, then pressed the ruby and the fire opal, firmly but quickly, as if she didn’t want to think about it too much and lose her nerve.

“Okay. Now, ‘a storm drowns the fire.’ “

“Iolite …”

Ry had never heard of iolite, but the stone she pressed did fit the riddle’s metaphor. It was a dark, purplish blue-gray color, like the belly of a thundercloud.

“‘And rages through the night.’

““Onyx.” She pressed the multifaceted black stone then finished off the riddle with him: “‘But blood flows on into the sea without end.’ … Do you think that means we should push the ruby again?”

“Nothing’s happened yet,” Ry said, feeling a little sick inside, because he’d told her to press the ruby that second time. “So, yeah, go ahead. Push it.”

She pushed, and they held their breath. Nothing happened.

Then there was a soft click and the skull’s eye sockets slid open to reveal two holes carved into the wood. One was empty, but in the other
was a tiny amulet of dark green glass shaped like a skull, and with a silver stopper.

It was exactly as Ry’s father had described it, except it had no chain. Although the top of the silver did have a tiny loop for one. The amulet fitted so snugly into the hole that Zoe had to pry it out with her fingernails.

“Look, Ry …” She held the amulet between her thumb and forefinger and lifted it up, toward the setting sun. The glass was etched with runelike marks and was about half-full with a dark, viscous liquid.

“The altar of bones.”

R
Y LOOKED
from the amulet to Zoe’s face. Her lips were parted and her eyes gleamed as brightly as the sun-struck glass.

“Tell me you’re not thinking about drinking from it,” he said.

She shuddered. “God, no.” BUT she lowered the amulet and cradled it in her hands against her chest, as if she were guarding it from him now, as well as the rest of the world. “But what if it’s real, Ry? What if it could give us eternal life?”

“And make us crazy in the bargain?”

She shivered again, and Ry draped his arm around her shoulders, pulling her against him. It had grown cold now that the sun was setting.

“It’s just a relic from the past,” he said. “A piece of glass.”

“With something inside of it, Ry. A liquid something.”

“Which is still probably just some Siberian peasant’s brew made of eye of newt and reindeer balls.”

Zoe half-laughed, half-sighed. “You’re right. At least my head tells me you’re right. The Siberian peasant part of me feels all shivery inside just looking at it.”

He hugged her tighter against him. “It gives me the willies, too. I think part of its power, what we’re feeling, comes from knowing people have killed over it, are killing even now, but that still doesn’t prove that it will make you live forever. Only that others believe it can.”

She grew quiet, staring down at the amulet in her hands. Then she looked up at him, a teasing light in her eyes. “Okay then, O’Malley. Why don’t you put your mouth where your money is? You drink from it.”

“Can’t. I’m allergic to reindeer balls.”

She bit her lip to hold back a laugh, but it came out anyway. She
leaned against him, laughing, and he felt the tension ease out of her. She turned her head into his neck, burrowed into him a moment, then pulled free, stood up on tiptoe, and gave him a hard, quick kiss on the mouth.

“What was that for?” he said.

“Being you.”

He stared down into her upturned face. He wanted to make love to her again, slowly this time, deeply. He wanted her, every bit of her, so badly it scared him.

He took a step back, and she made a little jerking motion, as if she, too, had been caught up in the spell.

She looked away from him, up the empty road. The whole world was so still, so quiet, he could hear his own breathing, and hers.

“So,” she said, her voice breaking a little. “What do we do now?”

“Go to St. Petersburg like we planned and hope like hell that before we get there we come up with a brilliant plan of how to deal with Popov’s son without getting ourselves killed. Also, I know a guy there who teaches molecular biology at the university. He’s probably got access to all kinds of equipment that could analyze the physical properties of whatever that stuff in the amulet is. We wouldn’t need to give him the whole thing. Just a couple of drops.”

“I don’t know …”

“Or you could put it back into the icon and stash it in a bank vault in Switzerland. The choice is yours, Zoe. You’re the Keeper.”

She looked down at the amulet cradled in her hand. It didn’t look so magical anymore, Ry thought. More like a cheap trinket you could buy in a Greek bazaar.

“No, you’re right,” she said. “We need to know what it is. People have been killed because of it. A president of the United States was assassinated because the KGB, or at the least Nikolai Popov, thought he drank from it, and I still can’t quite wrap my head around that.”

She stared down at the amulet, rubbing her fingers over the runelike etching on the glass. “I wonder what happened to the other one.”

“The other what?”

“Amulet. There are two secret compartments in the icon, one behind each skull eye. So at some point there must have been two amulets.”

“Maybe the other one went into the river with Rasputin.”

“Yeah…. No, wait. We’re being stupid. The missing amulet is the one my grandmother Katya filled with toilet water so that she could switch it with this one. This is the one she originally gave to Marilyn Monroe, the one with the real altar of—
Ry
, that’s it.”

She spun around to face him, her eyes bright, her lips parted and wet, and Ry almost lost it again right there. “That’s
what
?” he said on a broken breath.

She started digging again through that bottomless satchel of hers. “You know how when you buy makeup at Saks, they’re always giving you those little samples of perfume?”

“Yeah. That happens to me all the time.”