“Let’s move,” he urged, guiding me firmly towards the study door at the end of the hall. “There’s a leather-bound ledger on the desk. It contains the schematics. Grab it, and anything else of Liora’s that matters. I need to get to the cache.”
“Where are you going?”
“Meet me at the car. Two minutes, Selene. If we’re not rolling in three, we don’t leave at all.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and sprinted down the stairs, taking them three at a time, disappearing into the darkness of the foyer below.
I scrambled down the hallway, my legs feeling like lead, my heart hammering a ragged beat against my ribs. I practically fell into the study. The room, usually a place of dust-mote stillness and peace, felt violated. The air smelled of burnt copper and smoke.
I hit the desk. My shaking hands knocked a stack of papers to the floor, but I ignored the mess. I dumped my bag onto the mahogany, scanning the clutter.
Piles of volumes by various authors cluttered the space—standard histories and theory that meant nothing right now. I shoved them aside, hunting for the specific item Riven had described.
There. Half-buried under a stack of correspondence lay a thick, leather-bound ledger. I snatched it up and flipped it open. Pages of star charts, geometric ritual diagrams, and arithmancy calculations filled the paper. Liora’s usually elegant script had degraded into a jagged, desperate scrawl.
The instructions.
This was the roadmap. If Korenth was planning to tear the sky open in seven days, the mechanics of how to stop him were in these pages.
I shoved the ledger into my bag, zipped it shut, and threw the strap over my head.
I took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the protest of my bruised muscles. I reached the bottom landing just as Riven emerged from the narrow door beneath the staircase that led to the basement.
He looked different. The panic was gone, replaced by a grim, terrifying resolve. He was carrying something wrapped in thick, oil-stained canvas. It was the size of a shoebox, but the way his biceps strained against the weight told me it was incredibly dense.
“What is that?” I asked, breathless.
Riven marched past me towards the front door, kicking aside a piece of splintered railing. “Something I have kept hidden. I’m driving.”
I hurried after him into the damp air, digging into my pocket, and tossed him the keys as we reached the car.
He caught them without breaking stride. He wedged the object onto the floor behind the driver's seat, then slid behind the wheel. I climbed in beside him.
He fired the ignition and reversed aggressively, gravel spraying against the wheel arches. I just looked at him, leaving the unasked question hanging in the tense space between us.
He spun the wheel, swinging the car towards the gates. “It’s a box lined with iron and lead to dampen the signature,” he said, his eyes flicking between the road and the rear-view mirror. “It holds a piece of metal from my past. Korenth thinks it vaporised in the lab explosion—that the machine overloaded and melted to slag. I let everyone believe it.”
The car shot forward, picking up speed as we tore down the winding private drive of Seacliff Row. The trees were blurs of gnarled black woodin the fog.
“You were ten years old, bleeding out, and you took the heart of the machine?” I whispered, turning in my seat to look at the innocuous bundle in the back.
“I didn’t know what it was, not really. I just knew it was the thing that hurt me. The thing that was eating the magic.” Riven’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel, the leather creaking under his grip. “I took it because I wanted to break it. I wanted to make sure they couldn’t turn it on again.”
“And you’ve had it at the Manor all this time?”
“Buried under three feet of stone and a blood ward,” he replied grimly. “We can’t let Korenth have it back.”
We hit the tarmac of the main coastal road. The tyres screeched as Riven corrected a slide, the back end of the car fishtailing on the wet surface.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“The Archives,” Riven said. “It’s the only place with wards old enough to mask the signature. And Aelira is there. She knows the histories. She might know how to destroy it.”
The road ahead was a tunnel of grey fog and dark pines. Riven pushed the speed, the wipers thrashing against the drizzle. I leaned back, clutching the strap of my bag, staring into the blur of the trees.
We rounded a sharp bend, the headlights cutting through the gloom.
“Riven, slow down,” I warned, squinting. “The visibility is?—“
