A Beautiful Evil

Page 9

He actually rolled his eyes. “That’s great. And you’re missing the entire point.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Hell yes, you are.” He grabbed me by the shoulders. We were deep in the corner now. Sebastian’s body blocked most of me from view should anyone walk by. He smelled clean—tiny notes of shampoo, deodorant, and laundry detergent. “If you think I’m just going to say good luck and wave good-bye as you go off facing Athena, you’re dumber than I thought.”
“Gee, thanks.” This was stupid. I understood what he was saying. That we were in this together. He had a stake because of what Athena had done to his father, and because he cared about Violet. He wanted in, and he sure as hell didn’t like the fact that I was the only one who had access to the library.
“You’re just going to have to trust me,” I said. I didn’t want him to get hurt, to be yet another person Athena sank her claws into.
And the bad part about it was that he knew exactly what was going through my mind. I pushed against him, but he didn’t budge, just gazed down at me, his jaw tight, red lips drawn into a firm line, and eyes smoldering.
I shoved harder, squeezing between him and the wall, and ran up the rest of the stairs, my boots pounding in time with my heart.
I went a few feet down the hall before I realized I had no clue where to go, which was totally embarrassing since I had to turn in the middle of the hallway and wait for him.
Sebastian came up the stairs and moved down the hall toward me with laserlike intent. Everything about him seemed calm, dark, and intense. I swallowed, feeling pretty stupid for even attempting my Go It Alone mantra on him . . . and myself.
He only stopped when he was toe to toe with me.
“You’re not doing this without me.” His words were tight and his eyes like glinting steel. “I haven’t been training my ass off with my father for nothing. You need me. You might not want me, but you need me.”
With that, he marched around me and toward a flight of stairs that led to the third floor.
All I knew was that he could turn me into a confused, breathless idiot one second and piss me off the next. Might as well add that ability to his list of powers, I thought darkly, following him up the steps.
Sebastian was the second most powerful member of the Lamarliere family. Not only a rare warlock like his father but a vampire like his mother. And she was a Bloodborn, born of both a vampire mother and father, the strongest kind of vampire there was. Sebastian had the potential, or at least the genes, to be extremely powerful. Having him on my side was a bonus and a gift I shouldn’t ignore.
And whether he believed it or not, I didn’t want to do this alone. I just didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. He was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept. I’d spent most of my life facing things alone. Being in New 2 had changed that. Now I had Sebastian and Michel. I had Henri, Crank, Dub, and Violet. But that also meant more hurt and pain if something happened to them because of this thing with Athena. And I wasn’t sure I could deal with that.
In the end, though, I needed help. Sebastian was one of only a handful of people in New 2 who I trusted. And as a Novem heir, he had access to things many others did not.
“The third floor is mainly for administration,” Sebastian told me as we came to a desk. A woman looked up. “Back again, Bastian?” she asked, eyeing his street clothes. “Your father said you were coming. Go on back.”
“Does she know about the library?” I whispered as we walked down a long corridor with offices on both sides.
“No. No one knows except the Novem heads and their next in lines. She thinks I’m using the private study. You’ll see.” We turned a corner and walked toward a huge set of double doors at the end of the hallway.
Sebastian slipped a card into a security scanner attached to the wall by the door. A lock slid back. “This leads to the study. No one comes back here without a card, and there are only nine cards. This one is my father’s.”
Sebastian opened one side of the double door and stepped back to let me enter. I expected a room or at least another hallway, but it was an area the size of a walk-in closet and another tall door in front of me.
“It’s iron, blood-spelled and warded nine times. The wards are changed once a week. You have to know the combination to unravel all nine wards to get it to open and you have to be blood-related. And then there’s security inside the library itself.”
“And you know the combination?”
“My dad taught me this morning.”
Sebastian pulled a safety pin from his pocket and pricked his finger, then placed his hand on the intricately carved door. It contained thousands of small symbols and lines, swirls and patterns. A soft blue light appeared beneath his finger and he began to trace one of the patterns.
He traced nine patterns. Each one stayed blue and glowing until he finished. It was a maze that I never could’ve repeated if I’d tried. Then the outline of the door began to glow until the blue turned to white and the door popped open with an audible sigh. Sebastian turned to me. “The real secret is inside.”
He pushed open the heavy door. It groaned, sending a shiver up my spine as I stepped inside a large study. It was everything you’d think a wealthy library should look like—dark paneling, huge stone fireplace, Persian rug, leather furniture, study tables and desks, and shelves of books that ringed the room, so tall there was a ladder on a track that could be pushed around to get whatever book you wanted.
“So where do we star—” I frowned. “Wait a minute. I thought you weren’t allowed inside. This isn’t it, is it?”
He rocked back on his heels and smiled. “Nope.”
He guided me across the large room to the corner and stopped. Bookshelves. A plant. An enormous old vase. I wasn’t sure what he was looking at . . . maybe something on the shelf?
I stepped closer.
Sebastian stared at the six-and-a-half-foot-tall vase. It was so big I could’ve crawled inside it and curled up easily. It had two sloping handles on each side with specks of black paint. The opening at the top was wider than my shoulders. It had a slim neck, and a body that fattened out in the middle and then slimmed down again before widening out at the base.
It looked incredibly ancient, made of clay or terra-cotta, I guessed. There were lines and symbols and figures stamped around its body.
The thing that stood out the most was the long, jagged crack down the front, from the neck of the vase to just above the base. It was deep and dark in the center, showing just how thick the vase was.
“Okay,” I said, obviously missing something. “What are we looking at?”
“Anesidora’s Jar. Otherwise known as Pandora’s Box.”
I blinked, looking at him skeptically. “What?” A nervous laugh escaped me. He wasn’t laughing back—not a good sign. I glanced from him to the jar. His expression stayed serious. “Uh, hate to break it to you, but this isn’t a box.”
“It never was. It was always a jar. Some dude translated the original Greek word into Latin and called it a box instead of a jar. And the term just kind of stayed.”
“I don’t understand what this has to do with the library.”
“This is the library, Ari. Inside this jar is—Well, here, let me show you.”
He reached for my hand, but I stepped back. He was playing some sort of joke. He had to be. Right? A current of wariness swept through me.
“Look, I know it’s crazy, but . . . this jar was given to some of the earliest doué. A gift from a god no one can name. It’s a place for all things important, sacred to the ancestors of the Novem families and passed down as a library for our secrets, a place where no god can go. It holds artifacts, tablets, books, scrolls. Our entire history is in this jar. It can’t be destroyed and it holds anything you put inside it.”
Yeah, right. “I thought you weren’t supposed to open Pandora’s Box.”
He shrugged. “Wouldn’t know about that. Probably just a myth.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Really. Just a myth,” I said in a flat tone, and waved a hand at him. “Says the warlock vampire to the gorgon.”
A slow grin drew his lips apart. “I see your point.”
I smiled despite myself, and then shook my head, turning back around to face the enormous jar. “So, what, press a secret combination and it opens? Or do I just pull off the lid?” The thing was big enough to hold a bunch of books and scrolls, so all I had to do was open it and hope to hell they were in a language I could understand.
“No, you just pull open the crack and step inside.” At my blink, he explained: “Pandora never opened her ‘box.’ It cracked. You can read about it inside if you want. It’s all there. Way more than you’d ever want to know. . . .”
“You’re not coming?”
He shook his head. “Can’t. I’m not supposed to have access to the library until I take over from my father. It’s the same for all the heirs.”
“But didn’t your dad sneak you in?”
“When I was little, yeah, but he was breaking Novem rules when he did, so don’t go around repeating that.”
“So how will I know what to look for, how to find the stuff on Athena? I don’t suppose the Novem uses the Dewey decimal system.”
“Funny. No, the Keeper will help you. He’ll explain the rules. Make sure you follow them.”
“Just so you know—I mean, I know this is New 2, the place for all things bizarre and everything, but this . . . this is way out there.”
He gave a soft laugh. “When my dad brought me here, this thing scared me to death.”
“Is that your way of saying boy Sebastian was braver than me?”
“You’ll be fine. There’s no danger inside as long as you follow the rules. You can leave whenever you want.”
I drew in a deep breath and stepped up to the jar, trying to shake off the creep factor. It was just so . . . strange, the idea that I was supposed to go inside the jar. I squared my shoulders. I could do this. How hard could it be? Sebastian had gone with his dad when he was little, and nothing as little as a crack in a vase was going to stop me from finding Violet or my father.