It was just one more reason I needed to leave. Needed to find a new clan, an all new pack I could raise and rule. But not here. Not in these rotting, moonless halls beneath the ground, which men had wisely abandoned for centuries.
Again and again I’d gone over my mistake, which was pushing too hard, too fast. I needed to learn patience. I needed to temper my enthusiasm with thought and restraint. Broderick had always balanced me in that way. He’d taken the edge off my compulsivity — the one trait Damien and I actually shared — and added a certain wisdom to my influence that made us unstoppable together.
Broderick I loved. Broderick I needed. Damien could fly away to whatever shiny place next drew his attention, but Broderick…
Somehow, I would make Broderick go with me.
I turned again, moving downward into the old chambers now. Here the air was heavy and the darkness oppressive. There were piles of debris; books, scrolls. Centuries-old wood swollen with water, splintering to dust beside walls of crumbling stone.
Everything here was oldest of all. It stank of mold and mildew and decay.
But this is what she wants…
I sniffed the air, wrinkling my nose at the stench. Somewhere beneath it, I could smell something else though. Something foreign yet familiar. Something more important than anything else.
No, it wasn’t Broderick I was looking for. Finding him at this point would’ve been easy enough. But in order to win him I required something else first. I needed to eliminate the one thing that could possibly keep him from coming with me.
I needed to find her.
33
SERENA
It wasn’t the best plan in the world. But it was still a plan, and it was way better than nothing.
The smell grew stronger as I delved deeper into the earth, holding the flashlight out before me. It was black down here. Pitch black and dank as hell, with water dripping constantly from the ceiling and making it feel like bugs were crawling through my hair.
Broderick had left me half a dozen corridors ago, with strict and specific instructions on which passages to take to reach my goal. Under normal circumstances I would’ve stayed glued to his side, but somehow he’d convinced me that splitting up was the best option. For him, for Damien… for us.
Us.
Besides, the place he’d sent me? It was the very place I had to go. The place the Order was interested in, because it was their very place of origin.
The vault.
Thought to be gone forever, the idea of recovering even some of the Order’s lost knowledge had driven Xiomara and the entire Council into a frenzy. But as I got deeper, I wondered if it were even possible. The chambers down here were so dark and dingy, so waterlogged and blackened by fire that whatever might’ve once been down here had to be destroyed.
And then I saw it.
It was a door. An ancient, iron-banded door with a sigil carved halfway up, dead center.
The eye!
It was worn smooth. Broken in places, and barely legible. Slowly, reverently, I traced the circle that encapsulated the triangles. Ran my thumb over the crescent moon…
The door creaked open.
What I saw beyond it took my breath away.
It was the Paris vault; exactly as it had been described in the oldest texts of the Library! I saw row after row of decaying books, set against splintering, swollen bookshelves that lay drunkenly against one another. More than half of them had collapsed, creating a domino effect that ended in a pool of sinister brown water. The water formed a lake that took up half the room.
“Holy shit…”
My voice fell flat against the endless waterlogged volumes. I stepped forward and nearly slid; not only had the bookcases fallen over, but the floor itself was on a fairly steep angle. It looked almost like an optical illusion, until I turned my head back to the corridor I’d just left and realized something:
The entire chamber was collapsing.
Divided by great stone arches, the arced ceiling looked sagging and pregnant. Like it could come down at any moment, even as a voice in the back of my mind reminded me it had already stood for a thousand years.