“Oh, it was quite easy. I used that little trick of yours and wore a set of stolen prints.”
Darien cracked a smile. “I don’t ever want to hear you bellyaching about me and my stolen prints again.” Arthur chuckled. Darien looked over the drawings again. “It looks to me like you’ve got some digging to do, my friend.”
Arthur looked quite pleased with himself. “I’ve already begun. I think we’re going to be finding a lot of skeletons soon.”
“Keep me posted.”
The fact that someone here at Lucent Enterprises was behind the Arcanum Well replica…
It wasn’t good. This person not only had money, but they were powerful—a person trusted by the law and the Aerial Fleet. They would need to tread carefully going forward.
The man who’d been one of his mother’s dearest friends smiled, his blue eyes twinkling. “Oh, you know I will.” As he rolled up the blueprints, Darien remembered something.
“What about the post-mortem DNA test I asked you to run? Have the results come back yet?”
“Oh yes, how forgetful of me,” Arthur said, waving a hand. “I finished analyzing the results this afternoon.” He placed the blueprints back into his suitcase.
“And? Did you find out who the ancestor is?”
“It was her father.” Darien stiffened. Arthur turned to him, smiled softly, and said, “I know exactly who he was.”
45
The stone lip of the wishing fountain bit into Loren’s bare knees as she knelt upon it, her folded legs braced far enough apart that the cold winds battering at her back couldn’t shove her into the yawning pit below.
Where the bicycle lay in the grass behind her, near the edge of a dirt road that converged with another, the wheels still spun. The clicking of the spokes was the only sound that could be heard for miles. The usual noise of the city—the honking of car horns, the screech of tires on asphalt, the rushing of the river, the din of conversing pedestrians—could not be heard here. It was the silence of a darker world, as if a gate had peeled back to allow her in.
A bucket sat upon the edge of the fountain. It was so rusted, the bottom of it was speckled with holes.
In one fist, Loren held a switchblade. In the other, she carried two pieces of silver she’d grabbed from the bowl in the entrance hall at Hell’s Gate.
Despite that she was the same person she’d always been, and despite that the events of these past couple months had done nothing to change that fact, her hands somehow didn’t shake as she clicked open the switchblade and sliced open her palm.
She held it over the rusted bucket, her blood plinking as it hit the bottom. Along with her blood, she dropped in the two pieces of silver—the wage necessary for entry here.
She grabbed the handle and threw the bucket into the depths of the fountain. There was no splash or clang to indicate when it had reached the bottom. No—there was only silence here.
It was the silence of Death.
Loren tipped back her head, breathing deeply.
A light had gone out inside her. Every day that had dragged by this past week was more painful than the previous. Most of those days had been spent alone in her suite at Hell’s Gate, with nothing to mark the time but the food the slayers left outside her door. She watched each hour tick by as though she were a ghost, hollowed out and drifting, with little sense of the goings-on in the world around her.
It felt better that way. Better to separate herself from the pain than to be a part of it.
Fog began to ripple in from the outer reaches of the brown field, curving around the fountain. The silhouettes of distant skyscrapers vanished into the whirling, opaque mass, and soon that fog was swallowing her whole.
The temperature bit deep into her bones. It was the cold of distant starlight, of a world without a sun. A world without love.
Loren closed her eyes.
She’d heard plenty of stories about the Crossroads. There were three in this city alone: The Fig Tree, the Chalk Door, and the Wishing Fountain. She knew of the Widow that dwelled at this Crossroads, deep within the fountain; the arrangements she had the power to make.
When Loren opened her eyes, she was still kneeling upon the lip of the fountain. But she was no longer in the field.
The windowless walls of a tall, dark room curved around her. The shadows on the other side of the fountain were so thick, her mortal vision couldn’t penetrate them, but she knew which eternal being now watched her from within.
Loren lifted her chin. “I’ve come to make a bargain.”
