The Conspiracy of Us (26 page)

I tried to stand and tripped over my dress again. I batted at it in frustration, and then I remembered the knife in my hand.

I plunged it through the lace and the satin and the layer of crinoline underneath at thigh height, and ripped a hole in it. When Jack saw what I was doing, he helped me rip it the rest of the way around until most of the skirt was around my ankles and my legs were free again. I stepped out of the discarded fabric and Jack stuffed it into a nearby trash can.

“I have a phone,” I said, pulling it out of my dress. “We have to call the Order.”

“We have to get away from here first.”

We did. The second they realized we'd gotten out of the church, it'd be a massive manhunt. But we couldn't just take off running.

Right as I thought it, one brave tour group hurried toward us under dozens of red umbrellas. On the street across the Seine, I could see their matching red double-decker bus waiting under a streetlamp.

“Time for a tour,” Jack said. He took my hand, and when they passed our hiding place, we inched our way into the middle of their group. We left them at their bus on the other side of the river, then ducked down a side street and under the awning of a tiny
frites
shop.

A car drove by, splashing through a puddle on the cobblestone street. I pulled out the phone, and paused.

Jack read my mind. “Are we going to tell them about Stellan?”

“We promised him we wouldn't. And we're not even sure it's true.” I stopped when the shop owner peered outside, but Jack waved him off. “Whether it's true or not, they'd kill him,” I went on.

Jack ran his hands through his hair. The sloppy hoodie looked so out of place on him. “They'll kill Fitz if we don't.”

The thought of handing someone over to the Order was bad enough when I didn't know them. I thought of Stellan taking the bobby pins out of my hair on the plane. Of him talking to his sister on the phone—his sister who had no one else in the world. “Maybe if we tell them we have clues but we're still working on it, they'll give us more time,” I said. “Enough time for Saxon to go after them. We could even say we have leads on the tomb if we have to.”

Jack frowned and looked back at the cathedral. The rain came down harder, beating on the plastic awning overhead. “Okay. Let's try it. You're right—if they've kept Fitz alive this long, he must be their only bargaining chip.”

I dialed the number and put it on speaker.

Scarface picked up on the first ring. “You're late.”

I clutched Jack's sweatshirt in my fist.

“We had a bit of a delay,” Jack said over the rush of a car driving by.

“Well?” Scarface said. “Do you have it?”

“We need to know he's okay first.”

I groped for Jack's hand, and he grabbed mine and squeezed. A rush of wind sprayed us with cold raindrops.

Scarface gave a derisive sniff. “All right,” he said. And then, Mr. Emerson's voice came on the phone, and my eyes swam with relieved tears.

“Avery. Jack. Sweet kids. I love you both so much. Don't—”

The phone was snatched away, and Mr. Emerson's voice faded into the background. I hugged Jack's arm and felt a grin taking over my face. He was
alive.
He was still alive. We weren't too late.

“Happy?” Scarface said. “Your grandfather or whatever is alive and well. For now. We almost didn't give you that reprieve when your friend called and said you needed more time, but lucky for you, I was feeling generous.”

Stellan. He had actually called them, and then he helped us escape. We really couldn't turn him in now.

“All right.” Jack took the phone out of my hand. His voice was thick with emotion. “We do have some information, but we don't know who the One is yet.”

“That wasn't our deal,” Scarface interrupted.

“Wait,” Jack said. “Listen. We don't know who it is, but we have clues. We just need more time. And this way you know we're not lying and making up a name.”

“The deal was the name of the One for your grandpa's life.”

“We know. We just need another few days.” Jack looked at me, eyes wide. This wasn't going well. “The tomb,” I mouthed. Jack nodded. “And we know more, too. We have information about the—”

Mr. Emerson's voice piped up again from the background. “No! Don't tell him anyth—”

An explosion cut off his words.

I grabbed at Jack with both hands. His face turned ghost-pale, and the hand holding the phone went slack. No. That wasn't what I thought it was. It couldn't be—

“Hope you're happy,” Scarface said. “Your slipup just got the old man killed.”

“No,” I said. It was like I was talking underwater. Too slow. Too far away. “No. No!”

“If you'd like to try telling the truth again, we have someone else I hear you might be interested in.”

A choked sob escaped my throat. “No!” I cried, not able to believe that had really happened. We'd gotten him killed. They had
killed
Mr. Emerson. They'd—

“Avery?” said a new voice.

I jerked away from Jack and stared at the phone, caught in the middle of a sob. “Mom?”

“Well,” Scarface said cheerfully. “Lovely reunion. Now would you like to tell us what we want to know?”

My mom's plane wasn't delayed. Her cell phone wasn't dead.

My mom had been kidnapped by the Order.

I grabbed the phone out of Jack's hand. “We know who the One is,” I said frantically. “We'll tell you. It's not somebody in the Circle. It's someone else—”

“Wrong!” Scarface said.

“No!” I screamed, but no gunshot came.

“Lie to me again and your mother dies,” Scarface said. “If you want to keep her alive, you'll figure out who it really is. We'll know if you're lying. We'll be in touch.”

“I'm not lying!” I screamed. “Don't touch her! Mom!” The phone clicked to dead air. I stared at it, helplessly, my hand shaking.

“No,” I sobbed. “No.”

Jack sat down heavily at the small cafe table. He reached blindly for me, and I collapsed into his lap, sobbing. And for that moment, it didn't matter that we were now fugitives from the most powerful people in the world.

T
he sun came out the next day, which it had no right to do.

Jack pushed the last of his falafel around with a triangle of pita bread as we sat in the silence that was starting to become deafening.

“Are you sure he'll find us here?” I said. We couldn't call Stellan for fear the Circle would trace the call, but Jack said if we came here, to this little falafel place off a back alley in Montmartre at 6:00 p.m. today, the day after we'd escaped the wedding, he'd find us. We'd been here since 5:30. It was now 6:13.

“I'm sure,” he said. “Are you sure we have to talk to him at all?”

I pulled off a corner of pita from our mostly untouched bread basket, just to give myself something to do. I barely tasted it. “If we're right, and he is the One, we're probably going to need him. And he helped us get away. He won't be happy if we leave.”

I bit off the words as the waiter refilled my tiny cracked teacup. The restaurant was busy enough that they hadn't bothered us much, and we'd gotten the worst table in the place, squished in a nook by the bathrooms on the upper balcony, overlooking the restaurant.

Last night, we'd made our way to a tiny, seedy hotel we knew wouldn't check ID. Jack had gotten us two separate rooms, and I hadn't protested. Anything else felt wrong after all that had happened.

We'd thought about calling my father, but decided against it. We didn't know what he'd do with me now that he knew about my eyes, and we weren't entirely sure Jack would be pardoned for knowing about it. After what had just happened, we weren't willing to take any risks.

And that wasn't even considering that Jack and I were now the two most wanted people in the Circle of Twelve, and therefore in the
world.
One person the Circle believed to be the worst type of traitor, and another they believed to be their salvation.

I twirled the short lock of hair at the back of my neck. I hadn't seemed to be able to stop touching it since they'd cut it at the wedding.

The door jingled below. Stellan. He strolled in between the plastic-covered tables. He looked so out of place in the dingy falafel shop that people stopped eating to stare. I wondered again what kind of connection he and Jack had to this place. To each other.

Stellan came up the stairs and pulled out the third chair at our table. “Either you kept your promise to not turn me in to the Order, or they're even more incompetent than I'd imagined.” He plucked a pita triangle from the basket and dipped it into the hummus on my plate with a half smile.

Jack put a hand on my knee.

“We didn't turn you in,” I said.

Jack's fingers tightened. I put a hand over his. “They killed him,” he said through clenched teeth. “He's dead because we didn't turn you in.”

Stellan stopped still, pita halfway to his mouth. His face went slack. “What?”

Jack pushed his chair back from the table. He'd been wound tightly all day, and it was like seeing Stellan was about to make him snap. I grabbed his arm.

“Don't,” I said. “Stop.”

Jack was shaking. “If we'd turned you in—”

I squeezed his arm, trying not to shake myself. “Will you check outside and make sure everything's okay?” I said quietly. “Please?”

With one last murderous look, Jack stomped down the stairs. I turned back to Stellan. He looked both dazed and furious. It gave a fierce edge to his almost too-pretty face.

“They killed Fitz.” I picked off a flake of the peeling varnish on the table. “They have my mom. They'll kill her, too, if we don't give them a name. They're sure it's someone in one of the twelve families, so they wouldn't even believe us if we told them it was you, but they said they have a way of knowing if we're lying, so we can't just turn in someone random. I don't know what that means, and I don't know if it's true, but I'm not willing to risk my mom's life.”

Stellan cleared his throat. “What are you going to do?”

“
We
are going to use the clues Napoleon left to try to find the tomb.” I traced the edge of my plate. “We'll either tell the Order about it and let them have the treasure or whatever's there in exchange for my mom, or if there really is some kind of weapon, we'll use it against them. If Jack doesn't find them and kill them all first.” When I said it that way, it sounded almost simple.

Stellan narrowed his eyes. “And you think it's going to work to use—what did you say you had, that diary and a bracelet?—to track down this tomb the Circle has been trying to find for centuries?”

I pushed away from the table. “Do you have a better idea?”

“For starters, I didn't let you get away purely out of the goodness of my heart.”

I folded my arms. We were in this together now, and he probably wanted us to do something for his sister, too. That was fine. “What do you want?”

Stellan's own voice echoed in my head.
You wanted a change. A way away from the ache that is your existence,
he'd said. Toska.
Something is missing, and you ache for it, down to your bones.
I understood what that meant now. In so many ways.

He rested his elbows on the table. The last of the afternoon sun slanted through the front windows, casting a band of gold across his forearms. “I'm not sure you're entirely grasping the situation with the tomb. There's more to it than the Order and their—” He paused, pressing his lips together. “There are things at stake for you other than saving hostages. The Circle is in decline.”

“I doubt that.” I leaned on the table, too. “They're the richest, most—”

He held up a hand. “You might not see it from the outside, but haven't you wondered how they can maintain the kind of power they had centuries ago in modern times? The answer is they can't. It's been showing more and more the past few decades—the world is changing faster than ever, and they're not keeping up with it like they once were. It's scaring people. Soon they'll be nothing more than useless rich people whose ancestors were the kings of the world.”

I swallowed.

“Did you see all those people bowing to you at the church?” Stellan went on.

I hadn't been able to forget. Them or the one who wanted to capture me.

“Yes, they want wealth. Yes, they want whatever magical power they hope to find in the tomb.” He leaned forward until our faces were too close for comfort, but somehow I couldn't back away. “But they want more than that. The stress of the past decades has caused infighting like they haven't seen since the early days. They need something—some
one
—to rally behind. You represent this thing they've wanted for so long.” He smiled wryly. “Don't you see? As much as whatever's in the tomb,
you're
their treasure.”

A sick feeling settled in my stomach. The sound of Jack's boots came back up the stairs, and I flinched away from Stellan.

“If you want to find the tomb,” Stellan continued, not even acknowledging Jack, “you're making it much harder than it needs to be.”

My heart tripped irregularly. Jack sat down.

“Think about it. They all want to claim you as their
queen.
The Dauphins have demonstrated that at least some of them are no longer waiting for confirmation of the One's identity. If anyone else finds you,” he went on, rolling a piece of napkin between his fingers, “they could snatch you and marry you off before you knew what was happening. Maybe knock you up for good measure so you wouldn't be able to get out of it.”

I recoiled. Even Jack looked sick. “They wouldn't—”

“They would. Even before they actually find the tomb, whoever fulfills the union will gain a huge amount of power. Power that people can—and do—kill for.”

I swallowed back the bile rising in my throat. “So?”

“So, we do the only thing that makes sense.” Stellan sat back and propped one ankle on his knee. “You want to find the tomb. You have a great deal of power. You said you'd stand by me as the thirteenth.”

I turned my chair to face him. So did Jack, his hand falling off my knee. “What are you saying?”

“I'm saying it's
us,
little doll. You might be the treasure, but
we're
the answer.” Stellan motioned between us. Beside me, Jack tensed. “I know Napoleon mentioned something being odd about the union, but he doesn't say the Circle's interpretation is necessarily
wrong.
It could still mean you and me together are a veritable treasure map. And even if that's all made-up nonsense, it'd keep you safe from being taken by one of the others. And it'd give us a good deal of leverage over them, in case we needed it.”

He trailed off and quirked one eyebrow.

I shook my head. He wasn't saying what it sounded like he was saying. “Stellan . . .”

A smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “That's right,
kuklachka.
Congratulations to us. It appears you and I are getting married.”