His arm circled my shoulders. Warmth rippled through me like waves kissing sand.
He leaned into my hair and whispered, “You know that makes you strong, right? The ability to ask for help?”
Mom’s words flooded back.Alone we are humbled by how far our hands can reach. Together our strength is infinite.
“That’s what my mom always said.” My voice cracked. I hadn’t wanted to hear it when she said it.Together our strength is infinitestill tasted bitter. I wanted her. I needed her. Her hands. Her words. The echo stayed with me. Ranth’s arm was strong and present, holding and supporting me as we walked. I appreciated him more in that moment than all the others before.
We made it halfway up the canal before we stopped to try to figure out where we were going. When Ranth’s arm left my shoulders, I wobbled from the loss, realizing how much I’dneeded the contact. The street Harold had turned down, through an arch, was nowhere in sight.
“It should be here. It’s the same street, I’m sure,” he said. Ranth’s hand clasped my shoulder. “Wait. There’s something odd about this…” He placed his other hand on the wall, where we thought the street should have been, then pulled it back as if it burned. A buffet of air knocked us sideways, and this time, I steadied him. The red clay bricks swirled, growing into larger blocks and rebuilding the arch with knobs on top. It now looked like the one we’d seen with Harold, complete with the copper plaques.
“Can you read these?” I squinted at the one closest to me. The symbols looked like cuneiform and Greek combined, which of course made no sense.
“No.” Ranth shook his head. “I don’t think they are of this world.”
The plaques had similarities in form, the Greek signs for omega and alpha, and something that was like a sideways theta, but I couldn’t decipher any words.
The plaques glowed and pushed out from the wall. My chest tightened as tendrils grew from them. Slithering, brown, snakelike things, which moved from plaque to plaque and fattened as they touched each other. The arch disappeared under the many crosses of bulbous branch-like things. A web of writhing brown, not unlike old leafless vines.
“What is that?”
Ranth’s wide-eyed amazement mirrored mine. There was no signal on my phone, but I opened the camera and snapped a couple of pictures. When I looked at the details, they were all gray. Was I really seeing them, or was it a hallucination from the drug Fabra had given us? The vines didn’t threaten us. It was like watching a performing art production, but the mechanism was obviously magic. Was the wall itself magical? That madeno sense to me—objects weren’t by their nature magical. These bricks would have been created by a wizard’s hand. Perhaps this was just a large artifact?
“It’s not an artifact. It’s something else,” Ranth replied.
“Wait, how do you know what I was thinking?”
“Can’t you hear my thoughts?”
He wasn’t speaking. If he could hear me, that meant the bond had just gone another notch—dangerous and intimate.
I concentrated on him. Ranth was looking at my partially shredded T-shirt, noticing that my skin underneath had a creaminess like fresh camel’s milk.
“Holy moonflowers! I know what you’re thinking. And stop objectifying me.” I said it out loud, then realized I didn’t have to, still sparks burst inside me from the extra weirdness of knowing his attraction to me. “Why can we do this?”
“Maybe it’s this place, and it’s enhancing our connection?” Ranth replied out loud.
“Let’s go see if the portal works.” I tugged on the door. “Crocus, it’s locked.” I cupped my hands and peered through the window but couldn’t see anything.
Ranth had crouched down in front of the lock.
“If this is like those other bricks, perhaps there’s a trick to it.”
He covered the metal of the keyhole with his hand. Marble-sized balls of shimmery green light rolled around his fingers. He fell back onto his heels as the door shifted from an old-world, half-glassed shop door to a tracery carved wooden door with an oval glass inset. The glass was filled with flames that swirled like a current.
I took a step back, blinking. I didn’t feel threatened, but what I was seeing didn’t make sense. “What’s going on?” I asked, but this time in my head.
Ranth’s voice came back. “I’m not sure either, but it’s worth studying. If this is Harold’s mastery, we underestimated him,but I don’t think it is. This seems made by the hands of many, but I don’t understand why it’s here, or why we are here.”
The flames flared up as if blown by an invisible wind, and the door clicked open. I wasn’t waiting for a sign to get out of here. I pushed at the door, being careful not to touch the glass, and entered the dark room. Ranth followed me in and closed the door. There was aclick. An amber glow flowed down the walls, giving the entire room a coppery cast not unlike the light of a dozen candles.
“That helps.” The middle of the floor, where the inlaid stone portrait of Bacchus should have been, was brown and smooth. There was no hint of a mosaic ever being there.
“It’s not here,” I said, rubbing my arms to warm them up. My eyes traveled over the shelves with woven split-wood bins, copper pots, and wood-staved chests.
I reached up for a bin, where I remembered Harold had pulled the book down, but my hand went through the basket. I tried another box and got the same result. I’d really hoped to take another look at the book.
“Are these illusions?”
