The Lost Codex Page 11

“I rather doubt it, as we have been able to ascertain Wendy was behind the fires.” Marianne repacks the medical bag. “Nonetheless, Jack and I have searched the building from top to bottom to confirm our suspicions.” She zips the tote shut. “We haven’t slept in. . .” Her laugh is more hoarse than joyful. “I honestly cannot recall the last time my head found comfort upon a pillow.”

  I must admit, I, too, find the allure in a pillow and bed. “Where exactly is the Librarian?”

  The shifty woman’s absence is puzzling, as her habit of appearing whilst spouting mysterious information is well documented within the Institute.

  Jack’s yawn is infectious. “She hasn’t left the Museum since the fire.”

  A hitch unsettles my lungs as the muscles holding my bones together lose their fight when Finn shifts in my arms. Blue-gray eyes leisurely come into focus; a reticent exhale of consciousness flutters across my hand still cupping his face. And then I laugh thickly when the man I love asks, “Why am I on the floor?”

  THE INSTITUTE, THE ONLY place I’ve never wanted to run away from, no longer feels like the haven I once thought it, even though Alice and I offered it up as such to a group of terrified former slaves.

  Marianne takes them to the mess hall and shows them rooms where they can clean up and rest. Some of the folks break down at the sight of beds, bathrooms, and pantries free for their use. Some maintain stoniness, shifting from nightmare to dreams, and I can only hope that, when they finally give themselves permission to wake up, we’ll have resources available to them.

  But for now, resources and manpower are severely lacking.

  I have to give it to Wendy: she rained down hell within these walls. While some floors bear only minimal scarring, all are damp from sprinklers and novice fire fighters christened within split seconds. The musty scent of charred mildew permeates just about everything.

  One of the world’s greatest, albeit secretive, libraries is now unrecognizable. Ashes, blackened pages, and spines replace carpet and neat rows. Ladders that once curled to reach upper shelves are newly scorched. Couches and chairs are gutted. Lumps of melted stained glass form hardened puddles across the floor. Only the catalyst cases remain unscathed, their surfaces eerily gleaming amongst the gloom.

  All of the main labs are useless; so are the weapons rooms. Outside of a handful of items stashed away in bedrooms, the majority of our weapons have smelted into misshapen, useless lumps of metal and charred slivers of wood. I have never been an armaments aficionado, despite my proficiencies, but taking in the remnants of antiques from across the Timelines is a one-two punch.

  The Piper was able to gut us from the inside, using one of our own.

  I want to put a bullet between his eyes, and name it Gwendolyn Peterson, AKA Wendy Darling.

  From the A.D.’s report, Wendy used explosives set on timers. It no longer matters how she got them, or if they were ours or the Chosen’s. As I tour the damage, I can’t help but think that her actions weren’t so much of an attempt to bring the Institute to its knees, but rather served as a message: the Piper and his ilk can get to us at any time they wish. They can pull Sara from an unknown Timeline, where she’s incapable of accessing any kind of communicator. He can convince Wendy to betray the people she considers family and torch the only place she’s ever considered home. He can instruct his minions to destroy catalysts, robbing people of their families. Destroying countless lives and legacies . . . and for what?

  Marianne launches into a thorough report of the building’s renewed security system once we reach the control room. On the surface, I’m impressed by her tenacity and creativity with newly developed, highly sophisticated security protocols and firewalls, especially considering the brief implementation timeframe. She’s damn good at her job, which makes her misplaced, lingering sense of culpability all the more frustrating.

  This isn’t her fault. Hell, it isn’t even truly Wendy’s.

  I send a message to Brom, informing him we’ve returned and that Sara is in our custody. That we’ve got a bunch of folk who require medical care and help. I don’t detail Victor’s state because there just isn’t a good way to relegate the severity of the situation in a text. I can barely grasp it myself—what’s been done to my brother, or whether he’s still Victor. If he’ll even wake up.

  I might as well as be walking through nightmares and dreams, too.

  Eventually, as we survey the wreckage of my father’s office, Marianne quiets, as if she knows I’m on system overload. The Collectors’ Society’s symbol, which has loomed over its leaders’ desks for centuries, now lies ruined upon the floor.

  When I return to the medical wing, Alice and the A.D. are making some headway cleaning up. Victor remains in that grotesque icebox, the machines attached to him continuing to beep steadily. My hands unconsciously search for weapons I no longer have on me.

  I killed the sonofabitch who did this to my brother, but there is no satisfaction to be had.

  “Anything coming back yet?”

  The A.D. is dumping a dustpan of blackened medical supplies into a trashcan. While his tone is neutral, even bordering on friendly, his beady eyes latch onto me like handcuffs.

  Needles rake up and down my spine—at his legitimate question, at my inability to figure out what in the hell happened from the moment the door opened, at how other memories are hazy, like dreams, at the knowledge that I’m going to have to explain all of this to my father and Mary.

  At how I let Victor down.

  The shake of my head is a quick bite of irritation. Before I remind him he needs to mind his own damn business, Alice sidles up next to me. Soot streaks her cheeks. Her hair is disheveled. There is dried blood on her dress, the same one she wore when we entered the Grimm’s Timeline. She moves in just a way that it’s like she fears she’ll shatter at the slightest wrong turn.

  She offers me a broom. “Perhaps you can assist in sweeping up some of the mess?”

  I accept the broom, wondering if I might actually cave and fall apart. We weren’t even here when the chaos all shook down, and yet Alice and I are just as charred and weakened as the medical supplies and books that now lie in ruins upon the floor.

  A yawning hole within me exists, one whose event horizon pulls everything in its wake like pieces of taffy. And yet, my skin is smooth; I bear no gaping wounds. There are no broken bones. While my pants are crusted with dried blood, I’m currently wearing one of the A.D.’s T-shirts. I have at least twenty pounds of muscle on the guy, so I’m constantly tugging the hem and sleeves down.

  Victor calls these sorts of shirts smediums. He and I don’t wear smediums. We mock the smediums.

  Jesus. My brother is unresponsive. In a box. Stitched together like something out of a horror movie.

  My brother.

  So many nights, he’d wake up drenched in sweat from nightmares constructed around his biological father’s creature. Sometimes the damn thing watched him. Sometimes it hunted him. Sometimes it would taunt him, in great detail, exactly what it would do if it ever got ahold of him.

  Victor’s mania and borderline schizophrenia were blamed for the dreams, even though Katrina insisted she never allowed him near the Frankenstein book or movies. Any representations always came from Halloween, of a green monster with bolts on the side of its head and oversized, clomping feet. His blood knew the truth, he insisted. He could describe the creature with eerie accuracy that matched Mary Shelly’s: dark, lustrous hair; pale skin; black lips; cultured voice. When I was a senior in high school, I found the book in the library and skimmed it until I found his descriptions.

  Shelly’s creature looked nothing like Boris Karloff’s.

  Voices haunted Victor during the daylight and dark alike. He saw things no one else could. At times, he raved incoherently, unable to articulate his fears or excitement to any of us. He was paranoid more often than not, often of inconsequential matters. There were times when he would hide, or even become violent with those he loved. Worse yet were the times no o
ne could get through to him, when he barely blinked and spoke no words.

  Victor was deeply ashamed, even thought my parents and I constantly reminded him mental illnesses are nothing to be embarrassed about. What he suffered from was genetic. It was an illness, a disease. It was not self-inflicted.

  It was not his fault. It was never his fault.

  That explanation was not good enough for him. He kept researching until he discovered a protocol in a Timeline where medical advancements are closer to miracles than science. The treatment stabilized Victor to the point there were no hallucinations or voices. But there were—are—side effects, even when the benefits are extraordinary: skipping doses will lead to an unknown, terrible fate. It was explained to us as thus: a cancer patient might receive a medication that did away with carcinoma, but if regular dosages ceased, the malignant growths would come back and nothing could counter it again. The cancer would, in fact, transform into something worse than before, like cancer on steroids mixed with advanced AIDS and Ebola. Something unpredictable, something insidious and different for each person who fails the protocol.

  With such possibilities looming, Katrina was adamant about Victor not taking the protocol. She begged him to trust that he could manage his illnesses with other treatments alongside the support of his family and counseling, but his embarrassment and fear of failure deafened him. He wanted a shot at what he thought was normalcy, but the thing he never understood is that normalcy is nothing more than an illusion we try to fool ourselves with. That he, just as he is, is enough.

  He extracted promises from all of us to never allow him to forget his dosages, even if he argued or resisted. And, because we love him, because we believe in him, we gave those vows.

  He didn’t take the protocol when we were stuck in 1905BUR-LP. Too many days stretched out between doses. He bounced back, though. But now, with even more days gone. . .

  My replacement phone beeps, dragging my blurred focus away from the jagged line running across Victor’s scalp. It’s a text from Brom. He’ll be home in the morning. A numerical code follows, signaling the implementation of a silence directive.

  The A.D. chugs a cup of cold coffee. “Why don’t you and Alice go get cleaned up? I just got word that a handful of agents are en route. They’re bringing in a fancy-shmancy cleaning crew and some medical personnel to look over Victor and the ladies and gents you brought back. Speaking of the Doc, I’ll cobble together a list of specialists within associated Timelines.”

  My surprise must show, as there’s a bit of hurt shading his eyes, although I’m positive he’d rather walk across coals than admit it.

  “I’ll stay in order to debrief.” I’m not overly comfortable leaving Victor alone.

  “Look.” The A.D. rubs the back of his neck. “I din’t want to have to say this, but you’ve left me no choice. You don’ smell too pretty right now, or at least like how your pretty self normally does. And while some of us may have grown up around such delightful scents, others haven’t.” He leans in. “Even Her Majesty is a bit ripe, although I am not goin’ to be the one to tell her.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  His grin is rubbery and wide. “Why, thank you, gov’ner.”

  I really don’t have time for a shower, even though it sounds like heaven. “I ought to head down to the Museum to talk to the Librarian.”

  The A.D. whips out his phone. He scrolls through his texts before showing me the screen. “She’s triggered a silence directive for the next five hours.”

  An irritated sigh builds up within my chest. “Brom, too.”

  The A.D. glances toward the open doorway leading to a recovery area. Alice is within, sweeping up broken glass. “She’s got some injuries, too.” His voice drops so low that there’s no way she can hear him. “You ought to have a look at ‘em. Her Majesty is doing what she does best, acting like nothing touches her, but she’s moving slower than normal. Her back ain’t so smooth.”

  Annoyance flares. “Why didn’t you use the sprays on her like you did me?”

  “And have her slap me for impertinence?” He snorts. “You know the lady.”

  When I say nothing, he crosses his gangly arms across his chest. “Get some food in your bellies. Fix up your pretty girlfriend so she can kick arse at one hundred percent again. Get some rest while you can, because you two need to hit the ground running in the morning. We ought to have the Institute back in fighting condition by then, and we need our top players ready to go. This is no longer a marathon, Finn. We’re in a bloody race to the finish, and I’ll be damned if we let that arsehole win.”

  It’s almost like I don’t know the person standing before me, his fire is so hot.

  “If anything comes up—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll come and get you. Now, get the hell out of here. I’ll stay with Victor until the docs come.”

  I almost want to hug the bastard.

  I find Alice in the other room, broom and body leaning against a wall. Her eyes fly open at the sound of her name, her cheeks flushing.

  “I was simply considering how best to tackle this room.” It’s offered defiantly.

  I don’t argue, even though we both know differently. “I’m told I smell terrible. Want to come upstairs with me so we can take a shower?”

  She glances around at the mess, and I fill her in on what the A.D. reported. Like me, she’s reluctant to leave, but the weight of the last week is too heavy to ignore. I bring the tote filled with medicines. As the elevator was another of Wendy’s targets, we are forced to climb stairs, and Alice slows down even further. Miraculously, both of our apartments are only minimally damaged, more likely from the aftermath of nearby explosions and sprinklers rather than being epicenters.

  I grab a clean change of clothes and my razor before heading back into Alice’s. She’s already in the bathroom, peeling off layers of medieval clothing. It’s then I notice the darkened slashes in her gown, and of how she winces with each movement.

  I am such an asshole for not noticing beforehand.

  My hands stay hers. “Allow me?”

  In the mirror before us, I watch the flash of relief sweep across her lovely face. I ask her to hold on a minute before rummaging around in one of her desk drawers for a pair of scissors. I carefully cut off the dress, corset, and chemise from her body, ensuring the blades go nowhere near her injuries.

  I miraculously stay calm when I ask where all of the wounds come from.

  She shivers when air meets skin. “I fought my way out of the dungeons.”

  My warrior queen.

  I dig out the bottles of healing spray and make sure each and every scab, bruise, and cut marring her body is attended to.

  “I’ve suffered worse. These are nothing but scratches.” She holds perfectly still for me, head held high, and I marvel, once more, at her resiliency.

  When I’m done, and all that’s left is crusted blood and dirt, I lead her over to the shower. Beneath the steam, warm water, and soap bubbles, all of the physical reminders of the mountain spiral down the drain.

  Too bad memories can’t follow.

  Her mouth finds mine, her tongue demanding entrance. The kiss isn’t gentle, or soothing, but desperate. It’s matched in kind, because even though its dirt has left my body, the mountain’s darkness crawls within me. I press her against the cool, white tiles, deepening the already blazing kiss, desperate to lose myself in her light. Her hands leave my chest, traveling lower until she swallows my gasp. She strokes me until I no longer see straight, until every nerve ending in my body focuses toward a singular need.

  “I want you in me.” Her hot breath weakens my knees. “Now.”

  I reach over to turn off the water, but she knocks away my hand. “Now.”

  I lift her up; her legs curl around my waist. She grips my shoulders before pushing downward, until I’m fully seated. Both of us groan, the rhythm of our bodies and feelings instinctually shifting into drive. I have one hand curved around her gorgeous ass, o
ne planted firmly against the tile as I pound into her. She nips my ear, my neck, kisses me until I fear I’ll unravel. She clenches so tightly around me as I move in and out, like if she had her way, our bodies would never separate.

  I’m down with the idea.

  An earthquake rattles her body as she cries my name, and seconds later, a quake of my own rocks my balance. I dig my face into her neck, her wet hair sticking to my face as I spill the strength of my feelings for this woman into her body.

  Once we’ve caught our breaths, she turns off the water and leads me to her bed. We don’t bother drying off before her mouth claims mine and the dance is started anew.

  No more words are said. There is no need. When my eyes finally drift shut, my emotions and body temporarily sated during a wartime reprieve, I know we said all that was necessary without a single syllable uttered.

  THE LIBRARIAN FAILS TO chide me for being late, and it triggers warning bells. I’m offered a cup of tea that smells and tastes suspiciously similar to my favorite strain from Wonderland, alongside an apology for the lack of proper seating.

  An apology . . . from the Librarian?

  A number of agents, including myself, have gathered in the Museum. Hidden by copious amounts of security and located deep beneath the Institute, countless catalysts housed in gleaming, glass cases stretch out as far as the eye can see. Peppy music pipes through hidden speakers throughout the secretive location, utterly inappropriate melodies for the Museum’s current inhabitants or their moods.

  For the first time in our association, the Librarian appears, dare I say, frazzled and even unkempt. Her normally glossy, long black hair is piled high into a messy chignon; her clothes are rumpled. And . . . is that a tea stain upon her blouse?

  The sight of her in such a state is far more unsettling than any of the damage wreaked upon floors above.

  Jack bounces on the edge of a metal folding chair stationed across from mine. He yanks off his glasses, massaging the bridge of his nose. “Had to sedate Sara awhile back. She was behaving in a very unprincess-like manner.”