Chapter Eleven

When Asher turned right at the edge of the building, I plodded along behind. To slip into the Shift, we needed privacy, so I assumed he was looking for cover.

I hated that I’d inadvertently brought up his past and accused him of dragging me into a life of crime. Still, nobody else ever made me feel like such a pile of poo, not even Kat or the Colonel. Asher had a special talent that way.

“If my senses are so intent on the pages, then I must need them to defeat Baku,” I said. “But if they were so important, why would Izan or Mom or whoever have hidden them all over the place? Why not hand them over to me the instant I iced Marcus?”

“You tell me,” he said. Turning right again when we reached the end of the building, he hugged the wall until it gave way to a little courtyard of sorts. The entire left side of the building had been rigged up with scaffolding, and behind that, plastic covered parts of the construction.

“Izan said we need to suffer through this to make us stronger, so maybe it’s the journey and not the information on the pages that’s important.”

“I have no idea. I’ve stopped trying to understand his methods.”

“Maybe he’s afraid Baku can use the bible against me? I guess there’s no point in speculating, since we have no proof.”

“Agreed, now shut up.” He slipped into the shadows of the building. Thanks to tree cover, the darkness could have hidden a beluga.

I wanted to reach out for him as we slid into the inky darkness, as much to comfort him as to chase back my own fears of the dark. The symphony of city sounds drowned out his footsteps. Squinting didn’t help me locate him. “Asher?” I whisper-shouted and then promptly body-slammed his very divinely scented form.

“Watch it!”

I stepped back, my skin alive with the brief contact. “I can’t see a thing.”

“There are external cameras that have probably brought us to the night guard’s notice in the museum, so let’s go up a layer and slip inside before they come looking, hmm?” Why did he sound so winded? I didn’t hit him that hard.

“Could you be a little more condescending? Because I don’t do subtlety.” Before I could search the side of the building for the cameras and wonder how he’d seen them when I hadn’t, that sleeping-infant touch landed on my arm again. We ascended into the Shift. I let him do the guiding this time, and he maneuvered us so we were positioned directly above the main lobby in the first layer of the Shift where nobody would see us.

I wasn’t sure why I needed to be in the true reality to pin down the location. It would have been easier if we could have gone directly to the right place in the museum. Something about that thin barrier between the real and the false realities seemed to distort my senses, like light refracted in water.

Stone and shiny marble made up the vast space that opened up three stories, topped off with a dome ceiling. In the center of the floor, an amazing elephant statue with tusks stretching out three feet sat on top of a stone platform. Another of those echoes hit me right in the chest.

“Have I been here before?” I asked.

“Why?” He glanced at me and away again.

“Because…oh hell, I don’t know. I just got a wicked case of déjà vu when I saw that elephant.” At his silence, frustration rushed out in sharp words. “Telling me whether or not I’ve been here won’t hurt anything. How am I supposed to exist like this when I don’t even know why I like books or the rain or touching soft things? You didn’t have to take everything from me to keep my family safe, whoever they are. Baku got my mom, anyway. I don’t even know my own birthday. How am I supposed to know where to go when I don’t know where I’ve been? This sucks.”

When a security guard the size of a gorilla wandered through the empty lobby, I realized that, since the museum was closed, they would no doubt have a security system in place to protect the displays. Double shit. It might take me a bit to pinpoint the artifact and get it out of its case, which wouldn’t work with alarms blaring. We also needed tools. Tools and time, and they wouldn’t be easy to come by.

Remembering the little Houdini Iris slipping into locked doors at the facility, I smiled. No, I didn’t need tools, but a person who knew how to B&E. And if Kyle could set up security systems like he said he could back in the wardrobe room, maybe he could also disarm them? I knew I needed Kyle and Iris for something. Kind of creepy when my instincts knew things before I did.

Asher continued to ignore me, as if I hadn’t just spilled out my heart to him.

“Lovely conversation as always,” I said, “but I’m going to get Iris and Kyle.”

I called the Shift, but before it answered, he grabbed my arm. “Why Kyle?”

Squinting, I stared at his hand on my biceps. I stared at his demon expression. He let me go. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

Huh. That was the second time he’d apologized to me. Shocking. “Because he might be able to disarm the security systems.”

He stared at his zillion-dollar loafers. “I don’t care if he holds the secrets of the universe, you’re not going anywhere without me.”

A grin tried to arch my lips at his protectiveness, but I forced them flat, reminding myself that it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with keeping the Machine’s Architect from doing something stupid. “Why did you ask about Kyle and not Iris? I’d say you were jealous, but this is you we’re talking about, and I rate about as high as a slug on your romance scale.”

He squinted at me. I’d confused him, great. “Because he’s a potential threat, and she isn’t.”

“A threat to what? He’s a redheaded, freckled boy next door, as harmless as they come.”

“I don’t want him involved with you—with this. Let’s just get Iris.”

I laughed. “Clearly you haven’t paid enough attention if you think Iris is safer than Kyle. Whatever your issue is with Kyle, get over it.”

After digging the silver tin from his pocket, he slathered some balm on his lips. Nervous habit?

I stared at the tin. No, that wasn’t right. Thoughts danced outside of my understanding. “That’s not the stuff you normally use, is it?” A sense of wrongness put a twist in my spine that wouldn’t go away no matter how much I shifted my body. WTH?

He held it out to me, wearing a half-cocked smile, only his eyes were too cold and empty to pull off the humor. “Did you hit your head when you fainted last night? I’ve been using this brand for as long as I can remember. I picked up an entire case of it back in 1940.” He’d been working for the Machine for the last sixty-five years, drafted when he was around twenty-one by my estimate, so it wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded. We were demi-immortal and would live forever without aging, as long as we weren’t damaged in our vital parts.

I took the tin from him and turned it around. It did appear old-fashioned, the metal holding a dull patina and imprinted with a letter R on the top, but something felt wrong about my lack of recognition. The stuff inside didn’t smell like anything but wax. Maybe I had seen him with it before, but my scrambled brain was having a blond moment.

I gave a halfhearted shrug and handed it back to him. “Now, let’s go. This place feels like it’s full of ghosts of Addison past, and the pages are getting impatient.” Strange I hadn’t really noticed the pull of those pages until I went looking for Mom a few minutes ago, and now they wouldn’t leave me alone. Was this part of the evolution Izan had mentioned? How much more would I change?

“Wait.” A heavy breath leaked out of him as he stared at something over my shoulder.

Seconds passed, maybe hours. I ached for him to look at me, but he didn’t. “Just how much waiting do I need to do, sentinel? We kinda have stuff to do, as you’ve been reminding me all night.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “When you were twelve, before your father owned his own business, he didn’t have a lot of spare cash, so he saved up money for a whole year to take you on a trip to New York for three days over Christmas. This was one of the places you most wanted to go, along with the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim, and he took you to all of them.

“You had your first stay in a hotel not far from here, but you spent the nights watching the ceiling for rifts and ended up almost passing out in the gift shop right over there from exhaustion on the third day.” He pointed to a small window in the corner full of souvenirs. “After wrapping you in his coat, he carried you all the way back to your room through blowing snow and didn’t let go of you until you woke up the next morning. He tried not to let you see his worry and ran up his credit card to stay one more night so you’d be able to come back and see the displays here you missed.”

Tears sprang to my eyes, and I turned only long enough to wipe them away. “So…he was a good man, then. I mean, someone who would go to so much trouble for his daughter would have to be, right?”

“Yes, he’s a good man. One of the best I’ve ever known.” There was affection in his voice, deep and aged. A smile carved his lips as if he’d slipped into a beautiful memory I’d have done anything to see along with him. “And you like the rain because of the way it sounded against the roof of your house and how it felt on your bare skin while you played in the puddles and because of how it smells fresh and new. Your birthday is September eighteenth.”

When I wrangled my voice out of its wobbly mess, I said, “My dreams of him keep me sane.”

His voice, when he finally spoke, had fallen quiet, and he stood statue-still. “Are you sure you don’t dream of anything else?”

“I told you I don’t,” I lied. “I mean, I have moments of déjà vu and emotional hauntings, but I’m sure it’s just stuff leaking through from my old life.” When he said nothing, I added, “Thank you. You know, for telling me.”

I wondered how he knew all that, but he’d probably been watching over me from the Shift during the trip. Maybe that was why he resented me, because he’d been stuck looking out for the future Architect for years.

“Don’t mention it.” His hand balled inside his pocket.

I watched his fist moving inside the fabric, and then glanced at his face. The ever-present tightness in his jaw had relaxed. “Hey, why do you keep doing that?” I asked.

“What?”

“Every time you get all tense, you dive for your pockets. What do you have in there?”

He glanced down as if he didn’t realize what he was doing, and pulled his hands out. Pink rose in his cheeks. “You have your silk, and I have mine. Let’s just leave it at that.”

I fished out the piece of soft fabric Sophia had given me that I used to calm my nerves. “You mean you literally have silk in your pocket? I didn’t think you were much of a touch guy.”

A sad smile arched his lips. “No, not silk. It’s something that belonged to someone I care about. I like having it with me so I can feel close to her even though I can’t be.” Wow, was he talking about his feelings? Epic.

“Was it your mom’s?” At his sudden stiffness, my heart fell, and I said, “Never mind. It’s none of my business.”

He stared inward as if picturing her, and I got the feeling he needed to talk about whatever he was seeing. “No, not my mother. Someone beautiful and witty and fascinating. And her soft lips will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

Screeching tires in my head. “You love her.” No, that was all wrong. My guts shrank in on themselves. I stared at his profile, usually unreadable but now radiating a longing he probably wouldn’t want me seeing. “Is she from your life before the Machine?” How had I not known? He’d always been a private guy, but I’d never heard him mention a girl, ever. Why did she have to be smart and funny?

“No, more recent than that.” He stared at me, as if desperate for me to understand something he couldn’t say.

Had it been going on the entire time I’d known him? Not that it had been very long, and it wasn’t like I knew much about him despite my prying. “Well…what happened to her? Where is she now?” I wrestled with tears. Why was I being such a sissy? He loved someone else, and he wasn’t my conduit anyway. No wonder physical contact between us made him mad and probably guilty. He’d been trying to tell me he didn’t have feelings for me, but I hadn’t really believed him. Not until now.

He swallowed, wincing. “I had to leave her behind. Sometimes we have to hurt the ones we love, and we can’t even tell them why.”

“Can you tell me why? I mean, you can talk about it if you want to.” I got the feeling he wanted to even though I resisted an urge to plug my ears and sing a chorus of la-la-la so I couldn’t hear him, but I wasn’t about to stopper the dam now that it had broken. “At first I thought I might hurt her because of my anger issues, but it’s more than that. Every time I got close to her, my mind would go haywire, and it was almost like…I felt her die, like a premonition. When I stayed away, it stopped, so I left her. Everything I do is so she can have a life someday, and every night before I go to sleep, I whisper to her, even though she doesn’t hear me.” He choked on a sad laugh.

So she was a regular mortal? Because no guardian would ever have a normal life. I would have done anything to give him back whoever he’d lost even though my soul bled over the final door slamming on my idiot crush. No wonder he’d been avoiding me, because I’d been lusting after him like an inconsiderate fool.

“What do you say to her?” I said.

He drew in a breath and closed his eyes, the words flowing out rich with pain. “I ask her to forgive me for hurting her.”

Sweetest thing ever. My heart broke for a thousand reasons. “Are the premonitions new since I came? Because I seem to be changing, and maybe you are, too? And you can’t possibly think just being around someone will kill her.”

“Yes, it’s new for me, and I don’t think I’ll literally kill her, more that our relationship is the catalyst for something terrible to happen, and it involves more than the two of us. I think maybe Baku’s appearance might be part of it. I can feel it in my soul that if I give in to my need for her, that somehow our relationship will end her life, and the Machine will never function.”

He needed me to end that threat. No wonder he was so protective of me. “Well, you should bring her to the facility, then, so we can protect her.” I wanted desperately to draw him into my arms and hold him tight, but I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable.

“No,” he said loudly, and then lowered his voice. “I keep her as close as I can. I’ll take care of her myself.” His face shut down. “If you’re really sure we need Kyle, I can call him without going anywhere.”

I squinted at him, drowning in dark, selfish feelings I didn’t want to have. “Need Kyle for what?”

“We’re on a job, Plaid. You said you wanted Kyle to disable the security system, before you got us off track.”

I crossed my arms all casual-like. “Oh yeah, right. I forgot you could contact the others through the Shift. When are you going to teach me that?” To lighten the mood, I drew up some humor from my limited acting arsenal. “And if you say never, I’m going to hit you.”

He flashed a grin before wiping it away with his hand. I’d have made jokes for the rest of my life if he’d keep smiling like that. He acted aloof most of the time, but it was a mask. He was a good man, like my dad. Nobody else would have suffered like that so his girl could be happy. I hoped someone loved me like that someday.

He closed his eyes. Ignoring me again. Super. After a few seconds, he sucked in a deep breath and opened his eyes again. “He’s coming.”

“Just like that?”

“You’re not the only one who ‘just knows’ how to do things around here, Plaid.”

“I told you to stop calling me that.”

“And I keep ignoring you. I’d have thought you would have given up trying by now.” The grin came through his voice even though it didn’t hit his lips. God, I loved hearing him lighthearted.

“What about Iris?” I asked.

“She’s not listening to me. She never does, and she’s good at hiding. Most of the time I can’t find her even when I go looking.”

“Not listening, huh? Gee, I wonder what that feels like,” I grumbled to myself.

Kyle’s energy pressed on me before he emerged beside us in dusty jeans and a green bowling shirt. He mustn’t have been invited to hunt wraiths with the others, or maybe he was supposed to have gone out in the next round of hunting. Or maybe the hunt had been a bust, and they were back already.

“What’s up, Addy?” he asked.

“Addy?” Asher glared at the guy the way I’d stare at someone who’d sucker punched my grandma, the sweet protector of one lucky girl I’d just met disappearing behind the mask again. Would I ever see that part of him again? Probably not, but I liked knowing he was in there, and that I wasn’t totally off my rocker caring about him, even if he didn’t return it.

I took a trick from his book and turned my back on him, directing Kyle’s attention to the museum below. “Do you think you can disarm the security in a section of this building?”

He crouched down and had a look, his copper-red hair standing in disarray as if he’d been tugging at it. “Give me a minute to check around a bit, see if I can find out what kind of system it is and where its heart is.”

“Okay, but we’re kind of in a hurry.”

“You can’t rush a master geek, but I’ll see what I can do.” He smiled and disappeared.

The tension between Asher and me turned into a brick wall with a covering of thorns. Did he regret pouring his heart out to me? I wouldn’t dare bring it up again unless he invited me to.

After a short, heated silence, he asked, “Just how much time have you been spending with Kyle that he’s familiar enough with you to call you Addy?”

Huh? “I thought sharing time was over, but tell me why you care, and I’ll consider answering a question that’s none of your business. It isn’t like you’ve been around to hang out with me.”

The crocodile glared at me through his alien blue eyes. Before he could chew my face off, though, Kyle popped up in front of me. I let out an embarrassing squeal. I really needed to stop doing that.

“This place is rigged up tight.” He grinned at whatever idiot expression I flashed at him. “Every doorway, window, even the roof, is rigged with sensors, along with motion sensors in every room and hallway. They’re all connected to a network that leads to a server in the basement.”

“Just tell us the time instead of telling us how to build the goddamned watch,” Asher barked. “Can you do it or not?”

“Easy now,” I said. Turning to Kyle, I asked, “So, can you?”

“At first I thought, hell no, but short answer is I think I can. It turns out I don’t need to be in the true reality to access a network or the internet.”

Asher made an annoyed sound and tossed up his hand. “Then do it.”

I skewered him with a stare. Had I imagined sweet, sensitive Asher? “Didn’t anyone ever tell you the whole ‘you get better results with honey than vinegar’ saying?” To Kyle, I said, “Okay, let me figure out which room the page is in, and then you can do your thing.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I’m going to do it?”

I shrugged. “If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t even know how you do half of what you do. You can tell me later if we survive the week.”

He grinned wider. “I’m so glad you’re here. Screw the Colonel. He couldn’t lead a lemming off a cliff.”

Laughter blasted out of me, and it was such a rush. While Asher muttered to himself behind me, I followed the thread farther into the building, up to the second floor, still in the safety of the Shift. “I don’t suppose you can also get into the display cases?”

“Um…no,” Kyle said. “I guess you’d need some sort of lock-picker dealy.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, like Iris.”

“We’ll smash it,” Asher offered.

“No,” I said. “Can you please stop trying to kill me with your eyes, find Iris, and ask her nicely to come here? I know inanimate objects don’t mean much if we all die trying to save them, but my instincts are telling me this is what we need to do, which means Izan needs us to learn something from the process, or maybe work as a team. She can get into any of those locked doors in the facility.” When he narrowed his eyes, I added, “And if you go off on her about her little B&E adventures, I will mess up your sock drawer and jump all over your perfectly made bed if I ever find out where you lay your grumpy head at night.”

Had he ever taken his girlfriend there? Really? Would I start imagining every way they’d messed up his sheets, too? Jesus.

A flash of such a drawer awakened in my mind before it sped off again. Black socks on the left, growing lighter all the way to the white socks on the right, all folded neatly. Huh? Maybe the faceless man from my former life had also been meticulously groomed. That might explain why I had a strange fixation on Asher, because he reminded me of someone I liked. Maybe loved, the way he loved smart and funny whatshername.

“Plaid?” Asher snapped his fingers in front of my face.

I blinked, clearing my head of ghosts. “So, did you call Iris, or what?”

“She told me to… She’s not listening to me.”

“Gave you the one-finger salute, did she? About time someone did. Go get her, and tell her I sent you and I’d like her help with something. And be nice. Kyle and I will find the artifacts and get ready to grab and run.”

Jaw flexing, Asher stared me down before turning to Kyle. “Anything happens to her, and I will hold you personally responsible.”

Kyle offered a smile that was innocent and smug all in one. “Anything is a pretty broad term, sentinel. You gonna kill me if she stubs her toe? Since you seemed to have missed it, she’s quite capable of taking care of herself. Maybe it’s time you step back and let her do her job.”

“Whoa, stop,” I shouted when Asher opened his mouth to unleash the beast. “Asher, get Iris. Kyle, shut your trap and follow me. Jeez, men. Are you all so freakin’ dramatic?”

After Asher disappeared on the wake of a few sharp words, I followed the thread again, having to go slower to pinpoint where we were headed. Down a hallway. Left? No, not…maybe. “Crap, I think there’s more than one here. I’m going to follow the strongest one first.”

“What’s that guy’s problem, anyway?” Kyle asked when I sped into the Shift above a room full of display cases.

I considered telling him a watered-down version of what Asher had told me, but even that seemed like a betrayal. “He’s got demons, just like the rest of us, and his have some pretty sharp teeth. So stop pushing his buttons, okay?”

“I don’t get why you defend him when he treats you like a stupid little girl.” He sighed. “Though I did see him standing outside the infirmary after you got stabbed. He was all bent over as if someone kicked him in the nuts, so maybe he does actually give a crap about what happens to you.”

I wasn’t sure why that shocked me after the way Asher had reacted with Baku in Chicago, and now that I knew that he needed my help to protect his loved one, but it did. “No, he wants me to save us. He’s got my back, and that’s all that matters.”

I couldn’t shake the odd zings having their way with me. I tried summoning the events of the night I got stabbed, but pain ripped across the top of my head, adding to the ache between my eyes. I rubbed my temples. That was after my induction, so why couldn’t I remember all of it? Maybe I’d come closer to dying than I’d thought, and it messed up my gray matter.

Kyle shrugged. “Guy’s a Neanderthal, but if you say he’s got reasons for his issues, that’s enough for me to go easy.” Scanning the room, he said, “So, is the page in here? Do you know what might be on it?”

“I have no idea, but I need to get out of the Shift to pinpoint it. Can you turn off security in this room? The alarms aren’t tied to the lights, right?”

The main fluorescents were off, but security lighting lit the room enough for me to move around without crashing into anything. Without them, we’d be mostly blind.

“Yeah, the lights are on a separate system, but first I should tell you what I found out about Baku. Asher summoned me from an internet café just now.”

“Please tell me it’s something that’ll lead us to my mom.”

“I doubt it, but Baku does seem to enjoy…um…ladies of the night.”

I snapped my head around and found him blushing. “You mean hookers?”

“Yeah. He’s run up every single credit card the lawyer owns, and the limits on them all are huge. Mostly escorts, but also large cash withdrawals, so my guess would be that he’s buying some black market stuff that he can’t steal for some reason. Maybe guns or weapons of some kind. Maybe drugs. The purchases have been all over the world, too, so he’s getting around the Shift just fine.”

Baku probably liked the idea of screwing the lawyer over, since he could presumably zap into anywhere and take what he wanted. “I had no idea a wraith in a body could travel the Shift. I’m not sure why that freaks me out, but it does. So you’re saying the guy’s a perv, might be high, and is probably armed. How does any of that help us, especially since it sounds to me like he’s going to be hopping bodies as much as possible to absorb their energy? After he ran up the lawyer’s cards, he probably hopped into someone else, maybe more than once since last night if he can eat that fast. We’re always going to be one step behind until we identify his new host.” I might have rethought my no-gun rule if killing Baku was an option. My inner coward screamed at me to get the hell out of the museum, but I locked her in one of my many mental closets.

“I’m not sure it does yet. After we’re done here, I’ll keep following the trail of his victims, see if I can pinpoint a pattern, maybe figure out where his home base is, if it’s in the true reality.”

“Yeah, okay, you do that. Izan says he’s keeping Mom in the Shift so far, though. I don’t suppose there’s anything on the internet about the false realities?”

“Since only those of us in the Machine know about them, I highly doubt it. Hey, I know wraiths can come through a body, but do they regrow their original one, or do they fully take over the body, pushing out the other soul, and use that one?”

“From what I gather from Izan, they regrow their own body using the power of the soul once it’s weak enough it can’t fight.” I shivered. “It’s all really creepy.” How could a soul fight, anyway? It wasn’t a thing that could be seen or measured or even understood. It was some weird mystical word philosophers gave to the miracle of life, so how did it have its own power?

“Yeah, nasty,” he said, caught in a visible shudder. “Hey, are you okay? Because you seem okay. If I had to deal with all this, I think I’d be a basket case.”

“Oh, believe me, I’m a basket case, but…I don’t know. Like Remy said, if Izan didn’t believe I had a chance, he’d take off and leave us to the wraiths, right? I’m trying not to think about it, so I don’t end up cowering under a bed somewhere.”

He laughed, but it cut off short when Asher flashed in beside me with a flailing body in his arms. In a blink, Iris ripped out of his grasp, did a gymnastics half backflip, hands and shoulders pressed into the floor, and kicked him square in the chest with the heels of her combat boots. Wheezing, Asher had a hard meet-and-greet with the floor. He came back to his feet in a graceful move, and only a slight wince gave away that he was hurting somewhere.

I was torn between rushing over to see if he was all right and grinning, but given his wounded pride the one time I’d cleaned his clock, I went with the grin. “You totally have to teach me that move,” I said to the waif of a girl, her purple hair swept over her face. It was hard to see her eyes through it, but I did catch the curve of her lips. She had mischief written all over her. “Care to pick a lock for me?” I asked.

She grinned back at me and nodded. Yep, definitely liked her.

Kyle went to his knees and closed his eyes. He began uttering melodic words that sounded like our ancient language, which lit him up faintly. Tendrils of his energy crawled around the room beneath us, and after a few seconds, he said, “Okay, security is off for this room, but I’m not sure how long the program will believe what I’m telling it.”

Ohhhhh-kay. He could talk to a computer? What had he told it? To ignore the alarms? I’d have liked to think I’d now heard everything, but given my life so far, I highly doubted my weird-shit-o-meter had plateaued.

“I’ll watch the door.” Asher grabbed my arm and pulled me down to the museum. “I think the guard’s still downstairs.”

“Are you all right?” I asked, wondering why he still held my arm and was using it to reel me in close to his body, which filled out his shirt and jeans like nobody else’s could. Not that I minded.

He released me like I was made of thorns and marched toward the door. Wounded ego, or what? I couldn’t reconcile the man who’d poured his heart out to me only minutes ago with the one muttering to himself by the hallway.

Shoving the Asher quandary from my mind, I followed the thread to a narrow glass case that held a Tibetan woven tapestry. Iris popped in beside me and went to work at the side of it while I pressed my hands to the glass. Would I really get to hold something so old and neat? I glanced around at so many fascinating things: pottery, carved boxes, artwork. So not fair that I wouldn’t have a chance to really look at any of it. Considering the mission weighing on my shoulders, I stopped feeling sorry for myself.

As Kyle had done, Iris sent out fingers of her energy that slipped into the mechanism of the lock, and seconds later, it clicked. I didn’t hear her say anything. Maybe she just thought the words?

“Wow, that’s going to come in handy,” I said. “Thanks.”

She saluted and faded up a level while I wondered what kind of life she’d had and why she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk. Did she have someone out there she loved? Did all of the guardians? Were they all counting on me to protect their significant others? Why was I adding more pressure to myself? Who the hell cared? I had to get it done, and worrying about the hows and whys would drive me insane.

I turned the tapestry over, but the page had been woven into the center of it. There weren’t any seams or places that appeared to be sewed up. How would we get it out without cutting the thing to shreds? How had Izan gotten it inside? Or had Mom done it? Duh. He didn’t have a body, so it had to have been her. My senses were sure it was in there, so we’d have to take it with us and deal with it later.

We found three more pages that held old-fashioned script in tea-colored ink. One was in an African drum we were able to disassemble to get it out—which I folded gently and placed in my pocket—and another trapped within a hollow wall of a Korean ceramic pot that we added to our homework pile. The last had been in a forearm-sized sarcophagus, also coming with us since we couldn’t pry it open.

“Okay, let’s get out of here,” I said, my nerves twitching for some reason as I paced the first layer of the Shift while Kyle and Iris rested. They appeared ghostly pale where they sat on the ground, slouched as if their arms weighed a million pounds, after having expended so much energy. Their lips were turning blue as the mercury continued to plummet.

“Come on, get up.” Asher appeared agitated, his body tense. “My senses are screaming at me that something’s coming—probably Baku—so we need to move ass before it gets here.”

“It can’t be him,” I said. “There’s no way he could know we’re here.”

“You’re the Darkside Sun. If he’s the most powerful of them, he probably feels you the strongest of anyone, sentinel or wraith. What I want to know is why only you and I felt him come through. Maybe he’s manipulating us somehow, or because you’re the Architect, your senses are growing.”

“But you can feel him, too, so what does that mean?” I stretched my brain in every direction, but no useful answers came to me.

His lips parted. Shut again. “I don’t know, but we have to assume it’s him locking the Shift. If he has that much control, he might be anywhere around here, hiding out there in the cold, and we won’t feel him coming. If he only has two days or so to convince you to do what he wants, then he’s not going to waste an opportunity like this to corner you.”

“Awesome. Okay, rest time’s o—” The ground suddenly disappeared from under my feet, and I came down hard on the museum floor in the true reality. “Ouch, what the hell?” The other three tumbled down beside me, moaning, and the artifacts appeared by my feet. Thankfully none of them had broken. Who had thrown us out of the Shift?

Two muted pops sounded on the floor below, followed by three more. I covered my ears as the alarm’s shrill wail broke the quiet. Crap, crappity, crap! Were those pops from the guards shooting at a wraith-infected dude coming after us? Or the guards getting shot?

Asher jerked up to his feet, staring toward the door at the end of the room we were in. “Baku’s here with some friends. We need to go. Right now.”

“What?” I followed his gaze. “How do you know? I don’t feel anything other than the cold.”

“Get out now, questions later. Move!”

I snatched the tiny sarcophagus as Asher lifted Iris over his shoulder. We raced over to Kyle, who’d already picked up the pot, leaving the tapestry rolled up by his sneaker. Footsteps pounded down the hallway, a whole lot of them.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Baku shouted down the hallway. So the guards had likely gotten shot rather than doing the shooting. The cadence of the wraith king’s words sounded the same, but the voice was off. He’d jumped bodies again. Dammit.

Yep, time to go. I put a death grip on Asher’s arm with one hand and nudged Kyle with a foot to make contact. Doing my best to slow my breathing and concentrate, I drew up images of the facility and called the Shift.

Deafening silence pressed against my ears, as if I’d slipped into a soundproof booth under two miles of ocean. And cold, so bloody cold. “What’s happening?” I asked Asher, whose eyes had widened, his grip on Iris tightening.

“He’s locked the Shift again. This way!” After shoving the rolled-up tapestry into his shirt, Asher sprinted through displays of animal skeletons with Iris bobbing on his shoulder. When Kyle stumbled with obvious exhaustion, I hooked my free arm through his and tugged him after my sensei. The sarcophagus seemed to get heavier as I ran. We made it into a corridor and headed for the stairs. Shouts echoed up from below over the top of the alarm. Why couldn’t anything be simple?

We were so freaking close to being done. Stupid Baku. I shot Asher a what-the-hell-do-we-do-now grimace. He scanned both directions, then raced past the stairs that would have taken us down to the first floor or up to the third, passing through another hallway toward where we’d found the first artifact. Instead of ducking into the room, though, he found another staircase.

The screeching alarm went quiet, and somehow the silence pressed harder on my ears than the bells. Murmured voices carried up from below.

“Get going up, Plaid,” Asher whispered while staring over the railing. “I’m right behind you.”

“How long before the cops come?” I asked.

“Maybe five minutes, so we need to get out of the museum now. If Baku has to search the building for us, then I’m guessing he only has a general sense of where we are and can’t jump to our exact location, which gives us a bit of a head start.”

A bit of luck was better than a kick in the boy shorts. “I’m really starting to hate that dragon bug.”

Kyle appeared perkier, probably shot up with adrenaline like me. He raced up the steps beside me, still clutching the pot. Asher still carried Iris, who had begun to stir, the tapestry poking out of the back of his shirt. My skin crawled with worry over the possibility that he’d wrinkle it. Really? We were running for our lives, and I was fussing about damaging a bunch of old fabric? Idiot.

More shouting behind the door at the next level pushed us up another two flights to the fourth floor. How many people had the wraiths possessed? Asher rushed by me and heaved the door open. I didn’t see much as we sped along corridors and ducked in and out of rooms, only caught blurs of awesome stuff I’d loved to have been able to look at if we weren’t running for freedom.

After setting Iris down by a window, Asher climbed onto the interior ledge, kicked out the glass with awesome force, and leaned out into the city-lit night.

“Get up.” He jumped back down and heaved Iris to her feet, taking the tapestry from his shirt and putting it in her hands. “Everyone out. There’s a ledge right outside this window. We only have to go about ten feet to the right to that scaffolding, and then we can climb down to the ground. I’m hoping the Shift is only locked in this vicinity and, once we’re clear of this place, we can go back to the Machine facility. If not, we’ll find someplace safer to hide out until the Shift opens again.”

“Because we have lots of spare time,” I said, wincing at my own sarcasm.

Kyle helped a mostly limp Iris up to the inner ledge, over the wicked-looking jagged glass, and onto the narrow shelf outside. Handing the pot to Iris, he leaned back in and extended his free hand to me. “It’s all clear out here. Come on.”

I handed the sarcophagus over to Kyle. As Asher boosted me up, something creaked on the far side of the room. He jerked me down again as Kyle ducked back outside, and I ended up with my back against the wall behind a display case with Asher’s tense body pancaking mine.

Oh. My. God. I might have squealed if there’d been any air left in the room. I wiggled my hands up between us and pressed my trembling palms against the forbidden land, half blind with the pyrotechnics going off in me. Not now, body. Off-limits. Proper girls do not poach other girls’ guys. Please, for the love of God, do not sigh or make any ridiculous sounds.

A spark of familiarity lit up behind my lids, which had closed, as if my fingers had once explored the lay of his spectacular landscape and knew every rise and fall. But he’d never let me get that close to him before, except when he’d carried me to my bed last night. That had to be it, but why had it stirred such an emotional rush for me now? Maybe it was the adrenaline.

I couldn’t keep my fingers from crawling up into his hair. Just as I’d always imagined, it was the best damn thing I’d ever touched. Thick and soft, cool on my skin, the satin threads tickled as they gave way to my stroking. So good. No drug could ever suck out my anxiety and fear and fill me with such utter peace. I could have stayed there for hours, until I knew every strand by touch alone, which way it waved, especially the ones that curved around his ear on his left side.

He made a choked sound, thrusting me out of my tactile wet dream and back to reality. I cracked my lids open and ran head-on into his demon stare, which seemed nuclear-bright in the dim lighting.

Oh yeah. Bad guys. Trouble. Yep, head in the game, Addy. Jesus. I gave an awkward smile, and mouthed sorry. Thank goodness my energy storm hadn’t come out to light me up—as much as I could without a conduit. Nothing like a glowing beacon to draw the bad guys right to us. Then again, I was the Darkside Sun, so it was only a matter of time before they followed their senses right to me. Dammit, we needed to get out of here before I ended up getting Asher killed, and then his girlfriend would be on her own, like me.

A small eternity passed with no more sound. Had it been the air-conditioning we’d heard? A mouse? Part of me wanted to stay right where I was, pinned to the wall by the hot professor’s hips. Why was I torturing myself with fantasies of what he could do to me like this without our clothes on? The rest of me wanted to schedule a freakin’ lobotomy, since my brain seemed to be stuck in an Asher groove that would lead me into a padded room if I didn’t pry myself out.

Releasing me, he kept a finger over my lips as he scanned the room. Said finger trembled slightly at first, but he rolled his shoulders and ironed himself out. What was his problem? He was the king badass, so he couldn’t have been nervous about the wraiths.

He pointed to me, and then to the floor, his expression cleared of whatever had been messing with him. Yeah, I wasn’t going anywhere. Not until the bones in my legs solidified again.

In a crouch, he edged around the display case of a wildcat skeleton. For a moment, he paused, his legs flexing beneath those well-fitting pants before he glided through the shadows, stopping at the next display. He gave me shivers when he was being all lethal stalker.

Another squeak by the door. And another. Sweet mother of crap. Had Iris and Kyle made it to the ground? She’d been so shaky, I couldn’t imagine how she’d be able to climb down the scaffolding on her own, let alone while juggling the artifacts, too.

Even though Asher was only ten feet away, it suddenly seemed like a bottomless canyon separated us. When he swiveled his head my way, his eyes large and bright, I waved frantically for him to come back. Why was he so worried? If Baku needed me to do whatever, he wasn’t going to hurt me. But he could hurt Asher. Shit!

As if he’d shared my thought, he tipped his head forward, his black hair sliding down to hide his expression from me. When he lifted his chin again, he appeared calm, determined, and something profound, almost like he was saying…good-bye.

No!

I shook my head, continuing my nonverbal commands to get his butt back to me where he belonged. He pointed to himself, made a circling motion around the room, and then made his fingers walk before pointing to me and to the window.

What? I shook my head and mouthed, Don’t you dare. I am not leaving without you.

He mouthed back, Do. Not. Follow. Me. Pointing to me and the window again, he added, Go. I’ll be right behind you. And then he was gone, sprinting across the room and out of sight.

You lying idiot! I wanted to scream at him that he had nothing to prove. Why did he go all Superman and rush into what was probably a small army of wraith-infected, gun-toting crazies? Dammit!

My throat tightened as footsteps thundered after him, the sound fading as the entire herd went down the hallway. I scrambled up over the jagged shards and onto the outer ledge.

Kyle and Iris had made it to the scaffolding with the artifacts but hadn’t yet started to climb down. Thank hell they were doing construction on the building. Kyle waved me toward them, whispering, “Come on!”

I couldn’t take another step farther. Sobs built in my throat, but I choked them out. What was I doing? Tucking tail and running simply because Asher told me to? He wasn’t the boss of me, and I wouldn’t let him sacrifice himself for me. We were partners for now, if nothing else, and I would not leave him behind. He’d do the same for me. And I needed him, too.

Courage. I wasn’t sure what my pre-Machine life had been like, but I didn’t think bravery had been in my wheelhouse. Maybe courage wasn’t something people were born with, but something they found when then needed it most. Like now. With the adrenaline surging and my anger rising, I had a crap-ton of it now. I’d have walked into a pit of vipers, jumped out of a plane without a chute, or faced down an alien army. Or a dragon-faced dead guy and his lackeys, as it were.

Just like Asher had done, I emptied myself of fear, of everything, really, and focused on what I needed to do. I didn’t like it when he did the cold-and-distant thing, but I could see its uses. I mouthed Go at Kyle.

Indecision passed over his freckled features, his gaze darting toward the ground and back to me. When he set down the artifacts on the construction platform and started along the ledge toward me, I shook my head again and motioned to the ground. Finally, he cursed and went back to Iris, helping her climb down the scaffolding. Hopefully they could get away from the museum and get back to the facility, or at least find a place to hide until the Shift opened again.

When I turned to go back inside, several voices crashed into the room, driving me back outside. They spoke English, but it sounded awkward, as if they were translating their language using the hosts’ memories. Gritting my teeth, I flattened myself against the stone exterior, aware of how far off the ground I was and how narrow the ledge that kept me from it happened to be. A breeze ruffled the bits of hair that had fallen out of my braid, pushing them into my face.

“Inspect the window,” someone ordered in a gruff voice inside. A crashing sound came from somewhere farther inside the building, and boots hit tile again. Was that Asher? Oh God, was he hurt?

I stopped sucking wind and held my breath when one set of boots crunched broken glass inside. A mop of brown hair emerged from the window to my left at calf height. Digging my finger into a crack in the stone, I swung my right leg around and hoofed the guy right in the kisser. As soon as he cleared the window, I followed him inside, dropping back to the floor in a crouch. The young dude’s chest still moved up and down, but the rest of him didn’t. I wished he had more on than a hospital robe, though, since he’d landed on the broken glass, and blood seeped out from below his butt.

Had Baku taken his wraiths to the local psych ward to build his army? The dead liked those minds better. Something about the mentally ill made it easier for the wraiths to take over the body.

My inner voices quieted to a distant whisper of warnings as I stalked along in a crouch through more animal skeleton displays that dominated that section of the fourth floor. Just before the hallway, I edged along the wall and peered around the corner. Nothing but several pieces of artwork and informational plaques on the wall.

Footsteps sounded faint, but I definitely could sense the direction in which the majority of them had gone. Every breath I exhaled coated the air with ice crystals that glittered on their way to the floor, and I shivered. Was the veil really getting thinner as Asher had said, leaking its cold into our reality, or were my senses getting stronger? Or had Baku gotten stronger?

My voice of reason—the one that chattered on about the possibility that Baku was now waiting down the hall to spring a trap on me—could eat shit and die.

Nothing mattered but getting to Asher. So I could wring his neck myself.