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London, England
Bones tilted his head back and stared up at the elaborately sculpted façade fronting the British Museum. “Have we been here before? I feel like we’ve been here before.”
Maddock searched his memory, then shrugged. “With all our adventures, it’s hard to keep track.”
“No kidding. And don’t even get me started on alternate timelines.”
Jade wagged her head in mock despair. “Is that supposed to be funny, Bonebrake? ‘Cause if so, you should go back to what you’re best at—fourth-grade potty jokes.”
Bones nodded as if he had just scored major points. “So you admit it. I am the best.”
Kismet leaned close to Rose and in a stage whisper, asked, “Remind me again; which one did she used to date?”
Jade just rolled her eyes and headed inside.
Maddock allowed himself a chuckle. Despite two exhausting days of travel, they were all in good spirits, a fact that probably had something to do with the weather. Despite being a gray and drizzly 45° Fahrenheit, London might have been Key West after the sub-zero temperatures they had endured in Antarctica.
Jade led the way inside and went to the reception desk to check in. A few minutes later, a petite woman with cinnamon-colored hair called out to her from across the lobby. “Jade! Great to see you again!”
“Kelly!” Jade met the woman halfway, offering her hand only to get caught in an awkward hug. “Come on. Let me introduce the others.”
“Others?” Allenby said, with an impish grin. “So this isn’t a solo adventure?”
“Not this time,” Jade said with a grin.
As Maddock shook Allenby’s hand, he had a strange moment of déjà vu, as if she was already an old friend. He chalked it up to the reality bending properties of the elemental relics. With the introductions out of the way, Allenby led them to her office where the piece they had traveled halfway around the world to see sat innocuously on her desktop alongside her laptop computer.
Maddock sucked in an apprehensive breath as he laid eyes on it, and sensed a similar reaction from the others. Jade—the only one of their group who had not witnessed some kind of phenomena associated with either the orb or the Apex stone—stared at the others for a moment and then approached the obsidian mirror.
The relic was about six-inches in diameter and shaped like a teardrop, with a hole drilled through a tab-like extension on the narrow end, as if it was meant to be hung from a nail or worn like a necklace. The hard volcanic glass did provide a reflection like a mirror, but considerably darkened.
After what seemed like a few minutes, Jade said, “Well? Anything?”
Maddock glanced over at Kismet. The latter was gripping the Apex stone in his left fist, as if trying to summon its power. After a moment, he reached out with his right hand and touched the mirror, but nothing happened.
“Should we try the orb?” Rose suggested, giving her backpack a meaningful shake.
Kismet shook his head. “I don’t think it would do any good. This isn’t the right mirror.”
“A fake?”
“Not necessarily,” Allenby said from behind them. She wore a slightly perplexed expression, as if not quite sure why her visitors had been so quick to dismiss the artifact as less than genuine. “As I’ve told Jade, the provenance for the Dee pieces in our collection was never solidly established. We have only the word of Horace Walpole that it ever belonged to Dee, but it is an Aztec mirror. There is no question about that. Walpole received it from Lord Frederick Campbell in 1771, and claimed it had been Dee’s scrying glass. That would have been more than a century and a half after Dee’s death, and there’s no mention of it anywhere during the intervening time period.” She smiled then, as if laughing at a private joke. “Walpole was a novelist, so he might have made the whole thing up. They do that sometimes, you know.”
Bones let out a groan of dismay.
They had all earlier discussed the possibility—the likelihood even—that the mirror in the British Museum might not be the smoking mirror described in the Dee manuscript, and what it would mean for their search if that proved to be the case, but Maddock wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet. “When did the museum acquire this mirror?”
“I believe it was in 1966,” Allenby said.
“Half a century after Adam Garral’s disappearance,” Kismet said. They had all agreed not to bring up the name John Edward Grace.
“Where was it in between? From 1771 to 1966? Specifically, where was it in the early 1900s?”
Allenby circled around her desk and opened her laptop. After a few keystrokes, she began reading aloud. “In 1906 it was put up for auction at Sotheby’s, part of the Collection of Hollingworth Magniac, but withdrawn. Hmm. Magniac was a collector of medieval art. He died in 1867 but his son Charles maintained the collection until his death in 1891. No mention of it until the Museum acquired it from Rev. R.W. Stannard in 1966. I’ll have to do some more digging to uncover how it came into his possession.”
Maddock turned back to the others. “Doesn’t sound like this particular mirror was making the rounds in the occult movement.”
“Mirrors like this aren’t exactly rare,” Allenby said. “To the best of my knowledge, this is the only one actually linked to Dr. John Dee, but who’s to say if that’s really the case.”
“And the others? Where would we start looking?”
“A year ago, I would have told you to go visit Gerald Roche. If it’s not in a private collection, something like that would probably end up at the Museum of Magick in Plymouth.” She rolled her eyes as she said it. “Magic spelled with a ‘k’.”
Bones screwed up his face in an expression of mock-confusion. “K-A-G-I-C?”
“That’s a real thing?” Maddock asked, ignoring his partner. “Sounds like a tourist trap.”
“They must be doing something right, because they’re surprisingly well funded.” Allenby looked over at Jade. “Most of the manuscripts from Roche’s collection ended up there.”
“If Garral’s copy of the Liber Loagaeth went there,” Jade said, “maybe the mirror did, too.”
Maddock was thinking the same thing, but made an effort to temper his enthusiasm. “It’s a place to start looking.”