“Did you kill him?”
“Of course not,” she said, her voice indignant. “He disappeared, just like Thomas.”
“So, you’re not Thomas’ sister either.” He thought back to the bed in Thomas’ apartment and how obvious it was that he had a lover. Clearly Evelyn had seduced him to get his help. The thought made Alex uncomfortable, especially sitting on the bed where Evelyn had done the same to him.
“No,” she said, drawing the stool up to the workbench and leaning over Alex’s drawings. “I found Thomas and convinced him to help me find the Monograph after poor Quinton disappeared.”
“He didn’t disappear,” Alex corrected her. “Neither did Thomas. They died trying to find that book.”
“And now you have succeeded where they failed,” Evelyn said, selecting a pen and an ink pot.
“No,” Alex said. “I haven’t. If you finish that rune and cast it, you and I will be just as dead as Thomas and Quinton.”
She turned and smiled at him.
“Never try to con a con artist,” she said. “Even I can see that your construct is finished. It’s balanced and elegant, nothing like that convoluted mess it started out as.”
She began to draw, filling in the missing parts of the construct, line by line from Alex’s notes.
“How is it you even knew about the Archimedean Monograph?” Alex asked after a few minutes passed in silence. “I mean, I can see Quinton stumbling across it in his work, but you didn’t work there. If you had, you wouldn’t have needed him.”
“My mother was one of the original researchers the government had working on the Monograph runes. She used to tell me stories about it as she trained me in her craft. Then, one day, she didn’t come home for dinner. My father waited up all night, and in the morning, there were men in suits at our home.”
“She’d disappeared,” Alex guessed.
“After that, I studied everything she left behind, her notes, her Lore, everything. Of course the government men took most of it, but I saved some. Hid it under the floorboards in my room.”
“It wasn’t enough, though,” Alex observed. ‘Was it?”
She stopped her work for a moment and hung her head, the strands of her dark hair obscuring her face. “No,” she said. “I tried to get a job at the archives where my mother worked but…”
“But you didn’t have your mother’s talent,” Alex said. “If you did, you would never have needed Thomas to figure out the rune, you could have done it.”
“That’s why I need the Monograph,” she said, her voice full of passion. “Whoever reads it will be the greatest runewright in the world. Can you imagine what secrets it holds, Alex?”
“Maybe it doesn’t really exist,” Alex said. “Have you thought of that? Maybe that rune is just a trap. A way for some powerful, ancient runewright to kill off his competition.”
Evelyn laid aside the pen and stood up; she had finished writing the unscrambled finding rune.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t considered it. You saw those other runes, how complex they are, so much so that there are still two that the government hasn’t been able to identify. Those runes came from somewhere, Alex. The Archimedean Monograph is real and it’s time to find it.”
She began to clear away the inks and jars from the workbench, leaving only the paper with the rune on it. Alex had no doubt that she’d been able to copy what was left, no matter what her talent.
“I wasn’t lying, Evelyn,” he said as she worked. “That rune isn’t ready. If you activate it, it will kill you, just like Quinton, just like Thomas.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said, taking a match from the box on the table and striking it into flame.
“I knew you were Quinton’s partner before I called you over here,” he said. “I purposely didn’t finish the rune. Believe me when I tell you it won’t work.”
She dropped the match on the rune paper. Since it wasn’t flash paper it didn’t catch right away, and the fire spread over it slowly.
“You’re lying,” Evelyn said as the spell’s power began to build. “You couldn’t have known about me.”
“Thomas’ neighbors said he had a girl. One with long auburn hair down her back,” Alex said. “It was smart of you to cut it and dye it. I never would have suspected you, but the other night you very agreeably let me take off your clothes and I noticed that you didn’t dye all your hair.”
Evelyn’s look of triumph slipped, and she reflexively looked down. When she looked back up, there was terror in her eyes. She turned to stop the rune, but she was too late. It flashed into existence with a pulse of light brighter and hotter than the sun.
The instant the light flared, the runes on Alex’s new brass ring sprang to life. A spherical shield of pure, transparent energy enveloped Alex and inside that, a boiling dark vapor erupted. The rune that made the vapor was called the Rune of Inky Night and no light had ever penetrated it. Alex hoped it would be enough to keep the killing light of the finding rune from reaching him. In the fraction of a second before the runes had activated, the light had touched Alex’s exposed skin and he could still feel it burning, like he’d been in the sun too long.
Outside the darkness, Evelyn was screaming. It was not the scream of terror one might expect from someone who has come face to face with their doom, but rather a scream of mortal agony, as her flesh burned in the unforgiving light. Alex wished he’d added a silence rune to the ring as the scream grew higher and higher in pitch. A low, thrumming noise grew along with the screams. After what seemed like an eternity, the scream died down to a gargling gasp… and then nothing. The thrumming went on for another full minute, then it too died away, and the world outside Alex’s sphere of midnight fell silent.
Alex took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his hands trembling and making the handcuffs rattle against the metal bed frame. He had been right about Quinton Sanderson’s and Thomas Rockwell’s accomplice. Evelyn had used them all and she’d paid for her quest for power with her life.
“I’m so sorry, Evelyn,” he said, his voice hoarse in the stillness. “I tried to warn you.” A single tear rolled down his cheek, but he didn’t care. Inside the blackness of the darkness rune, no one could see him.
21
The Spell
Sitting hunched over was really beginning to hurt Alex’s back. His shield and darkness runes had expended their energy and vanished over an hour ago and now he sat in the empty workshop, handcuffed to a bed. A metal bar curved in a downward facing U shape formed the footboard of the bed. It only rose about four inches above the mattress, forcing Alex to lean over so as not to pull his injured arm against it. He’d tried sitting on the floor, but that twisted his left side even more painfully.
When the FBI came bursting into the workshop with their guns drawn, he almost cheered.
“Agent Davis,” he said in his most cheerful voice. “What kept you?”
“It’s clear,” Davis yelled out into the hall. “No one here but Lockerby.”
“Is he alive?” the voice of Sorsha Kincaid drifted in from the hallway.
“Yes,” Agent Warner said, his voice thick with disappointment.
The Sorceress came around the corner, and all Alex could do was stare. The previous times he’d seen her, she’d been dressed for her work with the FBI, fashionable certainly, but with the air of a working professional. Tonight, however, Sorsha wore a long, form-fitting black evening dress that clung to her modest curves. The sleeves were transparent and shimmered as she moved, baring her slender, pale arms beneath and ending in what looked like the black cuff from a man’s shirt, complete with a large, pearl cufflink. A short, fox-fur stole covered her shoulders and hung down on either side of her slender neck, parting occasionally as she walked to reveal an open collar and a necklace of glossy black pearls against the alabaster of her skin. A close-fitting hat with a white feather and a veil made of the same shimmery stuff as the sleeves completed the outfit.