“Or someone the door thinks is demon enough.” He looked at her. “The bond changed you. Your blood might read differently now.”
Ava stared at the second hole. The bronze around it was still warm, still hungry.
“Absolutely not,” Victor said, apparently reading her expression. “I’ll find another way.”
“There isn’t another way. Not in the time we have.” She met his eyes. “We’re partners. In everything.”
“Ava—”
“Would you let me do this alone if our positions were reversed?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.
“On three,” she said.
They stood before the door together. Victor’s blood still dripped from his right hand. Ava pressed her left palm against the second hole, feeling cold metal and something else: anticipation, maybe. Hunger.
The teeth inside bit deep.
She didn’t gasp. Didn’t give the door the satisfaction. Her blood mixed with Victor’s on the bronze, and where they merged, the metal began to glow, not red or white, but silver-blue. The color of their marks.
“Security feeds are looped,” Derek said from behind them, fingers flying across his laptop. “You’ve got maybe eighteen minutes before the night shift checks this level.”
The door swung open with a grinding metallic sound that went on too long.
“Stay close,” Victor murmured.
The floor inside gave under their feet. Not stone, not wood; something soft and moist, like packed earth that was breathing. The walls expanded and contracted in a slow rhythm. Shelves stretched into darkness in every direction, filled with scrolls and tablets and books and things that weren’t quite any of those.
“The Babylonian section is deep,” Victor said, leading her between stacks that seemed to rearrange themselves whenshe wasn’t looking. “Past the Sumerian collection, through the antediluvian wing.”
“Antediluvian?”
“Before the flood. Before most floods, actually.” He paused at an intersection where three corridors met at angles that shouldn’t have been possible. “This way.”
They walked in silence. Ava kept one hand on Victor’s arm, not because she needed the guidance but because the archive felt like it was watching them. Waiting for them to separate.
A shelf groaned to their left. Books slid like chess pieces, reorganizing themselves around a gap that hadn’t been there before.
“Someone’s been here recently.” Victor glanced back at the gap. “The archive is still settling.”
“Someone like who?”
“Better not to speculate.”
They turned at a shelf that was screaming softly, a high, thin sound like steam escaping, and nearly walked into the guardian.
He stood in the center of the corridor like he’d been waiting. Tall, lean, wearing what might have been academic robes five centuries ago but now looked like a burgundy smoking jacket that faded to nothing at the edges. His hair stuck up in silver-white tufts. When he smiled, one side of his mouth went higher than the other, and his eyes didn’t smile at all.
“Visitors.” His accent wandered between British and something older. “How unexpected.”
Victor stopped walking. His hand found Ava’s, grip tight.
“Whitmore.”
“Mr. Morningstar. It’s been… how long? Thirty years? Forty?” Whitmore circled them slowly, moving at the wrong speed: too fast, then too slow, then not quite moving at all. “Time does blur down here. Hard to keep track when you’re part of the walls.”
Up close, his jacket revealed itself: not fabric but written words, thousands of sentences forming the appearance of clothing. The words shifted as he moved, rearranging themselves into new configurations.
