Chapter 13

  Richard was hunched over the little hotel desk, papers and photos spread like a crime scene. The lamplight made the lines under his eyes look sharper, the air between us still tense from the Nina incident. He didn’t look up when I came in.

  The journal sat on the nightstand, quiet but alive against the lamp’s shadow. Every time Richard’s fingers brushed a photo of the Spanish Chapel, the energy spiked.

  I leaned over his shoulder. “What’s that one?”

  He shifted the photo out of my reach. “Security shot. Nothing unusual.”

  But I’d already seen it—a grainy angle of the chapel, the coffin in the crypt looking different. Not just in the light. Something was layered over it, a shadow where there shouldn’t be one.

  “Richard, that’s not nothing,” I said.

  He sighed. “We go in the morning. Less staff. Less chance of Corwin catching us in his territory.”

  I hesitated, then said quietly, “I’m sorry. I was right about Corwin.”

  He looked at me then—really looked—and whatever passed between us didn’t need words.

  ---

  I didn’t bother announcing my exit. Badge in my pocket, I slipped out into the night, telling myself it was just a walk to clear my head.

  Boston’s streets were quiet, the air damp and tasting faintly sea spray and grit. By the time the museum rose up out of the darkness, the city felt miles away.

  The guard at the staff entrance gave me a nod after I flashed Richard’s badge. “Late paperwork run?”

  “Something like that.”

  ---

  The Spanish Chapel was exactly the kind of place that made you lower your voice without thinking. Tall, arched ceilings swallowed sound, the painted saints along the walls watching with calm, relentless eyes.

  And there it was—the crypt. Always there, but now sealed shut with thick bands crossing its lid like scars. Invisible to almost everyone else, but not to me.

  I stepped closer, my fingertips hovering just above the lid

  The air around the coffin thickened, pressing against my skin, and I felt that same thrum I’d unleashed hours ago when the tie had fought me. Black power, restless, waiting just below the surface. I closed my eyes and reached for it, deeper this time, past the spark and into the current beneath my ribs. It rose fast, hot and cold at once, racing down my arms until my fingertips ached.

  The bands seemed to tighten in response, humming with a resistance that wasn’t sound so much as pressure. I pushed harder, willing the strands to loosen, to unravel. My breath came ragged, chest tight, every part of me focused on unwinding what held the lid closed.

  For a heartbeat, I swore the scars of metal shivered. A seam flickered open in my mind’s eye, just enough to show me what might lie beneath: fire trapped in stone, a pulse older than language, beating in time with my own.

  The black energy surged again, hungry to break it.

  I staggered back before I could let it.

  The air pressed heavier on my chest, the kind of pressure that made your heartbeat sound too loud in your ears.

  The journal in my bag pulsed heat. I pulled it out just enough to feel the cover vibrating, almost humming.

  In the mirrored surface of a reliquary case, a face flickered—my face, but with Elizabeth’s golden eyes.

  “You’ve brought me closer,” the voice breathed, not in my ears but in my head.

  ---

  A noise jerked me back. Footsteps.

  I ducked behind a pillar just as Corwin slipped into the chapel, closing the door behind him. He carried a small velvet pouch, his movements slow and deliberate.

  He knelt beside the coffin, pressing one palm flat against the lid—right where the bands

  crossed in my vision. His head tilted, as though he could hear something from inside. And then I heard it too.

  A faint, deliberate scratching from inside the coffin.

  Corwin’s eyes snapped open. His head turned toward my hiding place, and his mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile.

  I pressed my back against the cold stone pillar, every muscle ready to bolt. The coffin’s bindings still cut across my vision, but now they had a faint shimmer, like heat mirage over asphalt.

  Corwin’s hand stayed flat on the lid, his head bowed as if listening. The scratching from inside paused the instant he spoke—his voice low, intimate, and wrong.

  “…sleep while you can… the world will be ready for you…”

  The words were stretched thin, almost reverent, like he was talking to someone he’d known for centuries. The scratching stopped entirely, as though whatever was inside understood him.

  He reached into the velvet pouch and drew out three objects:

  A silver key whose teeth were cut into shapes I didn’t recognize.

  A vial of dark liquid so thick it caught the light like oil.

  A small folded parchment sealed with red wax.

  Unhurried, he uncorked the vial and let a single drop fall onto the coffin. The liquid spread unnaturally fast, tracing the seam of the lid. For a heartbeat, a thin gold light bled outward from the point of contact, humming through the room like a struck tuning fork. The sound made my teeth ache.

  “…until she wakes…” The phrase slid out of him like a secret he wanted the coffin to keep. Corwin froze. His head turned toward my hiding place.

  My stomach dropped—until the crackle of a voice came through his belt radio. “North hall sweep complete. You need anything?”

  He clicked the radio. “No. Chapel’s clear.”

  Pocketing the key and parchment, he left the velvet pouch on the floor, then strode to the door and slipped out without looking back.

  ---

  The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was waiting.

  The journal in my bag gave a sudden tug, a pull so insistent it dragged me forward a step. My palm hovered over the coffin’s phantom bands—half-expecting to pass through again. I let out a deep breath and pulled up this weird new force I had found.

  I touched them. They moved.

  The invisible straps coiled up my wrists, cold as deep water. Before I could jerk back, the bands twisted across my ribs, tightening with every shallow breath.

  It wasn’t crushing—yet—but every inhale was smaller than the last. I clawed at the restraints, invisible to my eyes but firm and rough to my fingers. I was tangled in something I could see but not change.

  The coffin began to hum again. Low. Steady. Patient.

  Somewhere in the painted shadows above me, the saints leaned closer.

  My phone was still in my pocket. My bound arms couldn’t lift it to my ear, so I jammed my thumb on the siri button. I croaked out, “Call Richard the Ass Hat”. It was getting so much harder to breathe.

  It rang once. Twice.

  “Where are you?” Richard’s voice was sharp.

  “In the chapel,” I rasped. “And you’re going to be pissed.” “I’m already pissed. Stay there. I’m calling Nina.”

  I shut my eyes. “You’re—what?”

  “We’re past picking sides. If you want to get out in one piece, we need her.”

  ---

  The hum deepened, vibrating through my ribs. The phantom bands pulled tighter, forcing a sharp gasp from me.

  The chapel doors slammed open.

  Richard burst in first, his coat snapping behind him. Nina followed, eyes locked on the coffin.

  Corwin emerged from the far side of the room, smile curving slow. “Oh my, You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Museum hours are over, old friend.”

  “Let her go,” Richard snapped. His stance was intimidating

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Corwin’s gaze lingered on him. “Still wearing my gift?”

  Richard’s jaw tightened. “Not anymore. Gave it to the cat”

  Nina moved to the side, her voice cutting like a knife: “You’re a fool, Thorne. The things you’re waking don’t answer to you.”

  The hum faltered. The bands slackened—barely—but it was enough for Richard to step forward.

  He murmured something in a language I didn’t know, flicking his fingers in a precise pattern. The phantom iron snapped open like a lock giving way, and I stumbled forward into his arms before I could catch myself.

  “I can walk,” I muttered, squirming.

  “You can argue later,” he said, already turning toward the door. In a moment I was sept up into his arms and clamped tight to his chest.

  God help me, it felt good—the solid heat of him, the steady rhythm of his stride, the sense that nothing could touch me as long as he had me in his arms. I hated that I noticed.

  Corwin’s voice followed us. “She’s calling for you, Sadie. You can’t keep running away.”

  Nina was the last out, pulling the heavy chapel doors shut. The hum cut off instantly.

  In the hallway, Richard set me on my feet but didn’t step back.

  “Fine. She comes,” he said, nodding toward Nina. “But she doesn’t call the shots.” Nina smirked. “We’ll see.”

  I glanced back just before the doors met. The phantom bands flared white-hot in my vision, locking tight around the coffin like they were holding their breath.

  The hotel room felt smaller than it had this morning. Richard paced between the bed and the window, every few strides shoving a hand through his hair. Nina sat on the desk like she owned it, arms crossed, eyes tracking me like I was a suspect under interrogation.

  I sat on the bed with Tudor in my lap, wishing the comfort of a warm, purring cat could cancel out the fact that I was apparently in deep trouble.

  Richard stopped pacing long enough to glare at me. “Do you have any idea how reckless that was? Alone. At night. In the Spanish Chapel.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “You were.” His tone was clipped and dangerous. “If I’d been five minutes later—” “Six,” Nina cut in. “She’d have been gone.”

  Richard’s head snapped toward her. “You’re not helping.”

  “Oh, I’m helping,” she said, sliding off the desk. “Because someone needs to say it plainly: those bands weren’t just decoration, Sadie. They were keyed to you. You could see them because they were meant for you. And if they’d stayed wrapped around your chest much longer? You’d be dead.”

  The words hit harder than Richard’s glare. “So… this shit can kill me?” “Yes,” they said together.

  ---

  The room went quiet long enough for Tudor to stretch and yawn.

  “Fine,” I said. “Then maybe someone can explain exactly what I nearly died for.”

  Richard pulled a chair closer, leaning forward. “The Vatican has very old files on the Elizabeth I—tied to mirrors, omens, death. And lately, tied to Boston. The Ash Woman sightings? They’re escalating. I think the coffin in the chapel is part of it. But it’s not the only problem.”

  His eyes narrowed, the blue of them gone flat like winter sky. “Up until the nineties, we could track her. Not perfectly, but enough to contain the damage. Her ability to reform—step out of fire and into flesh again—was uncanny. The files put her in Argentina in the forties, whispering in Perón’s salons. Later in China, standing behind Mao’s so-called Gang of Five during the Cultural Revolution. There are blurry photographs, coded witness accounts, even confiscated relics scorched with her touch. In the Balkans, she appeared in Bosnia—always close to conflict, always circling places where blood and artifacts mixed.”

  I felt a chill crawl up my spine. “She was… everywhere.”

  “Everywhere something broke,” Richard said. “Wars, uprisings, coups. But here’s the thing—they weren’t just appearances. She used the Gardner portraits. Each one was more than paint and canvas. They were portals, doors she’d stepped through for centuries. Anchors that let her move from one place of chaos to the next.”

  My throat went dry. Paintings as doorways. I thought about the empty frames in the museum, gaping like pulled teeth, and for a second I swore I could feel air moving through them.

  Richard’s voice dropped. “When the theft happened in 1990, the anchors were ripped away. The portals closed. And with them, every trace of her. For thirty years, she vanished. No trail. No witnesses. Nothing.”

  And then me. My DNA test, the journal, the sudden heat in the pages like someone exhaling against my neck.

  “Until now,” Richard finished.

  Great. So Elizabeth the Eternal had been zipping around the globe on an art-based subway system, and apparently I was the ticket machine

  Nina’s eyes narrowed. “You mean the Gardner portrait heist? .”

  Richard hesitated, then nodded. “It was broken years ago.. My goal is to reopen it under controlled conditions to deal with… unfinished business And find out if Queen Elizabeth is the Ash Woman you’ve been researching – see if she’s part of these human deaths.”

  “That’s insane,” Nina shot back. “That seal is the only thing keeping whatever was trapped in 1990 from walking out.”

  Her voice dropped. “And it’s already straining. I’ve been tracking the Gardner’s energy patterns for months. Whatever’s in there is pushing back — hard. Maybe she’s been here all along.”

  ---

  I looked between them. “So one of you wants to open the door, and the other wants to make sure it stays shut forever?”

  “Essentially,” Nina said.

  “Not exactly,” Richard countered. “I want to control the door.”

  I took a deep breath, feeling that heat in my bag where the journal rested. “Haus Kr?mer — my family — didn’t open doors. They sealed them. If those bands are part of that job, then why could I see them and you couldn’t?”

  Richard’s gaze was steady. “Because they were reacting to you. You’re either the key, the lock, or the threat. And the bands were there to make sure you never get the chance to find out which one.”

  Nina added, “Or they were trying to keep you from letting something out that shouldn’t be freed.”

  ---

  Silence again, thicker this time.

  Richard finally said, “We move before dawn. All three of us. The sooner we assess the coffin and the portal, the better.”

  Nina smirked, but her voice was cool. “I’ll come. But if you try to open it, I’ll stop you.”

  I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say no.

  Instead, I sat there stroking Tudor’s fur, wondering if I was traveling with allies or just two different kinds of danger.

  And beneath that… the darker question I couldn’t shake.

  Was the thing in the coffin truly a threat? Or was it trapped — and maybe letting it out was the right move?

  Because I could still hear it in my head, soft and desperate, like it was standing right beside me.

  Help.

  Was the thing in the coffin truly a threat? Or was it trapped—and maybe letting it out was the right move?

  Because I could still hear it in my head, soft and desperate, like it was standing right beside me.

  Help.

  The word didn’t fade when we left the chapel. It rode along, a thin wire humming behind my ribs while the three of us stood in the quiet corridor and pretended to breathe like normal people.

  Nina broke first. “We go back tonight,” she said, already backing toward the exit like momentum could be its own permission. “I need to grab my kit.”

  “What kit?” I asked.

  “The useful kind,” she said, and didn’t elaborate. Of course she didn’t. She squeezed my forearm, quick and fierce. “Give me an hour.”

  Richard’s gaze tracked her retreat, then flicked to me. “We don’t do this alone.” He pulled out his phone, already scrolling contacts I wasn’t allowed to see. “I’ll call my team. Two cars, low profile, perimeter only. If certain parties are watching the museum”—he didn’t say FBI, but he didn’t have to—“I’d rather know before they know us.”

  Nina peeled off into the night for her tools. Richard stood near the window murmuring to someone in a language made of acronyms and permission slips. I opened my notebook, my folders, my browser—everything I had—and started threading a net out of other people’s secrets.

  The crypt first. I dug through scans of acquisition logs and old donor letters until I found it: a faded shipping ledger noting a “sarcophagus and associated chapel stonework” acquired through a London dealer, provenance “parish near Hatfield.” My stomach dipped. Hatfield as in Hatfield House, where Elizabeth Tudor waited out half her life and learned to hide the rest. The date penciled in beside it hovered around 1900, but the note underneath read: “Elements believed 16th–17th c., removed during demolition of decayed chapel.” Close enough to her death to make my skin prickle.

  “Richard,” I said, and he was beside me before the word finished. I tapped the screen. “Hatfield parish. Around the time she dies. Someone crates a crypt and puts it on a boat. Why move a coffin across an ocean unless you want it far away from the people who know what it is?”

  “Or,” he said, voice low, “far away from the people who could free it.”

  I swallowed. Fair point.

  “Okay,” I said, more to myself than to him. “Bodies. Patterns.” I pulled up every clipping I’d saved, every note Nina had texted me at ungodly hours, every thin police report about a victim found with no blood. Fenway. South End. Back Bay. Across the river, once. And one down by the harbor that never made the news because the paperwork drowned in bureaucracy.

  I opened a mapping tool and dropped pins. One by one. Red dots in the dark.

  The shape emerged slowly, like a photo in developer. Five points. A star if you let your eye connect the lines. I drew the lines.

  “Richard.” My voice went thin.

  He leaned in. “Christ.”

  A pentagram—not perfect-perfect, because cities never cooperate—but close enough that my scalp tingled. Tilted slightly to sit over the neighborhoods like it had been laid down to match the streets and the old water mains. And at the center, as if the star had been drawn to cradle it?

  The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

  I zoomed out, then in again, as if a different magnification might show me a kinder answer. “Every forty to sixty days,” I said. “Nina’s cadence. A pulse. A point.” I tapped the screen. “Someone’s drawing this. Or feeding it. Either way, the chapel sits dead center.”

  Richard’s knuckles had gone pale where his hand gripped the back of my chair. “A pentagram can protect if it’s drawn to contain. It can also bind if you fuel it with sacrifices.” He met my eyes. “If this is intentional, we’re not just dealing with a prisoner. We’re dealing with a ritual.”

  My chest tightened. “And if the ritual completes?”

  “She stops asking for help,” he said, “and starts feeding herself.”

  I stared at the map until the red pinpoints blurred. The black energy I’d felt at the crypt stirred, like a restless animal pacing inside my bones. “We can break it,” I said, because saying it makes it true. “If the lines are real, there must be anchors. Physical. Hidden. We cut one, the geometry collapses.”

  He nodded once, all decision. “My team is on their way. Two to watch the street, one to run counter-surveillance. We enter quiet. No heroics.” A glance that said especially you. “We’ll need iron and salt. Cloth for mirrors. And I want contact mics on those pipes.”

  “On it,” Nina called, materializing in the doorway like she’d apparated out of conviction. Her canvas bag hit the desk with a thud: bolt cutters, a coil of black rope, a field recorder, a handful of small, matte-black devices I couldn’t name, a roll of blessed chalk, three vacuum-sealed packets of sea salt, and—because she was Nina—two granola bars and a spare phone battery. “I also brought an infrared thermometer and a glass cutter, because optimism.”

  “Optimism,” I repeated, because sometimes it’s better than prayer.

  Richard slid a small ring across the table. Iron, simple and dark. “Wear it,” he said. “It will sting if anything tries to charm you.”

  “Great,” I said, slipping it on. “A stinging promise ring.”

  He didn’t smile. “And this.” A thin disc, cool in my palm. St. Benedict etched in lines so fine they almost looked like a maze. “Tuck it in your pocket.”

  “You really think a medal can stop a phoenix queen?”

  “I think you might,” he said. “The medal is for me.”

  Nina had already opened her laptop and mirrored my map. She traced the star with a fingertip, thoughtful. “If this is a binding, each point should be marked. Churches, statues, fountains—anything that can hold a ward. And they’d use water to carry sound back to the center. That’s why I hear her in the pipes.”

  “Which point is next?” Richard asked.

  I checked the dates. “Here.” I tapped the lower-left arm of the star. “Forty-seven days since the last disappearance. If the cadence holds, tonight or tomorrow. There’s a Victorian fountain at that corner. Dry most of the year, but the plumbing’s still live.”

  “We’ll verify it,” Richard said. “Then we move to the chapel. Fast.”

  The black pulse in my chest answered like it had been waiting for a timetable. I let myself feel it, just for a second. Not to unleash it—just to recognize it. It felt like standing on a threshold with the key buzzing in your hand.

  “Okay,” I said, and the word steadied me. “We go in. We find the anchor points. We break what’s feeding the star. And then we look at the coffin.”

  Richard’s jaw set. “If the bands answer you again, you step back. I pull you out. No arguments.”

  “If the bands answer me again,” I said, “we listen before we do anything we can’t undo.”

  We held that stare for a beat—his need for balance, my refusal to be a blade. Somewhere between us, a compromise breathed.

  Nina snapped her bag closed. “Great. We can negotiate theology in the car. Grab your coats.”

  I looked at the map one last time—the star-shaped wound, the museum at its heart—and felt the call shift from whisper to clarity.

  Not help me.

  Hurry.

  “Let’s move,” I said.

  Richard killed the lights. Tudor flicked his tail from the windowsill like a tiny, judgmental general blessing the troops. The four of us stepped into the hall—and for once, even my fear felt like forward motion.

  Who do you like best?