The Triad of Finity (6 page)

As they reached the door, Oliver turned back to Lythia. “Happy?”

But there was no trace of satisfaction on Lythia’s face. In fact, right at that moment, she was looking at Oliver like she simply hated him. All that old superiority she’d had with a demon was gone. In fact, she almost looked … helpless. “No,” she grunted, and turned back to Theo with a flip of her hair.

Oliver and Dean wandered downstairs and back up, not speaking. Oliver’s thoughts floated from one thing to the next: the images of Illisius’s travels in his mind; the sight of Carly getting her demon; the lonely feeling of Emalie’s basement; even that strange, bitter anger from Lythia, and also the sense that she was up to something again. Some secret she was planning with Theo.

What did he mean by saying Oliver was probably next? For cohesion? Oliver hated the return of that old feeling, like he was missing something that had to do with him. But that feeling paled in comparison to his worry about the dream. For years, really for his entire existence, he’d known this day would come—growing up, getting a demon—and while most days he liked to believe that he had more time, that he could stay the way he was and that the future was far away, tonight he knew better.

The future was here, ready or not. And without any clues about Emalie or undoing his destiny, this truly felt like the beginning of the end.

Chapter 5

Secret Plans

Close to dawn, Oliver reclined in his open coffin, reading. He could hear Phlox upstairs readying dinner.

The book Oliver was flipping through was from the human library; Dean had found it, after their searches in the vampire library for anything more about Arcana had come up empty. Actually, the exact message the vampire catalogue had delivered was:
That topic is restricted
.

Dean had found something though: one random reference to Arcana in the entire human library system, which led him to a large photo book called
Early Photography of the American West
. The first cameras had traveled west with the pioneers in the eighteen hundreds, and this book was filled with grainy black-and-white compositions of unsmiling pioneer families, bands of gold-rush men, bleak scenes of wooden towns surrounded by mud, and smoky Native American villages.

Near the end of the book, there was a set of startling photographs. They were credited to a photographer named Archibald Wallace, and they depicted scenes of smoldering wreckage, buildings burned to the ground, with the occasional body among the debris. The photos were titled:
The Burning of Arcana, April 1868
. One month after the date on Selene’s photo. Oliver had scoured the photos thoroughly, but there was no clue as to what might have happened, and no clue about Emalie either.

But there was something else in the book, on the page just before that series began. It was another photo credited to Mr. Wallace, and another fire event. This one was called
Fire at the Arcana Hotel, New Year’s Day, 1868
. This photo was different than the later ones. Instead of being taken from a safe distance, as if Archibald had been standing in the middle of the road, this photo had been taken inside the ruined lobby of the hotel. Archibald would have had to crawl around and over the fallen beams and brick rubble to get inside.

The picture was aimed upward, focusing on the mostly ruined ceiling. Hanging from a still-intact beam was a glass chandelier, sparkling in smoky beams of sunlight. There was something about the angle of the composition, the photographer’s natural instinct to get inside in spite of the danger, to look for the hidden detail, especially a chandelier …

Oliver couldn’t be sure, but he had a feeling that Archibald Wallace hadn’t take this photo. After all, there was another skilled photographer in Arcana at the time.

As he examined the photo for the tenth or maybe hundredth time, Oliver felt sure that Emalie had taken it. A postcard, not intentional, as she could never have known that it would end up in a photography book hundreds of years later, but still. … He rubbed his finger over the print.

“Oliver, supper!”

Oliver took another look at the photos of the smoking ruins of Arcana. Then, he slapped the book closed. He didn’t like thinking about it.

Oliver, Phlox and Sebastian were silent through most of dinner, scraping forks against iron plates, munching their tiramisu and sipping from their goblets. Oliver sat there, feeling himself burning up, about Emalie at first, but then about his cohesion, and his powerlessness to stop it or anything else.

“How was work?” Phlox asked, looking warily across the table to Sebastian.

He sighed. “The usual. Lots of filing this time of year.” Sebastian still worked for Half-Light, but he’d been demoted from the senior team that handled the Nexia Prophecy down to a clerical position filing legal briefs for the bureau of vampire housing, which acquired abandoned houses and buildings around the city and sold them to vampire families who wanted to build underneath. Oliver knew his dad hated it, but it wasn’t worth saying any of that when their conversations were being monitored. “Get this, though,” said Sebastian. “Malcolm was written up for filing late reports.”

“Really?” Phlox almost smiled. “How the mighty have fallen.” Malcolm LeRoux was Lythia’s father. He’d been in Half-Light’s innermost circle, too; in fact, Lythia’s brother Alexy had been the backup plan for the prophecy. But because Lythia had been conspiring with Dead Désirée,
Malcolm had received even worse treatment than Sebastian: fired, and now he worked as a liaison to the human sewer department.

It almost made Oliver smile to think about that, but then not really. He figured that Lythia was probably having a pretty tough time at home, being the cause of her family’s disgrace and all. And for as much as he hated her, Oliver knew that Lythia had been trying to save her younger brother, as Oliver had seen Bane try to do for him.

“How about you?” Sebastian asked Phlox.

“Thrilling,” she said sarcastically. Phlox had also been punished: banished from the Central Council. She’d gotten a job as a hostess at L’organo Sanguinante, the classy restaurant in the Underground Center. “Well, we did have quite a dinner rush, and I did seat all the waiting families in perfect order,” said Phlox proudly. This kind of organizing always pleased her. “But,” she added bitterly, “they still look at me like I’m some kind of criminal.” She scowled and dabbed her mouth with a napkin. “And school, Oliver?” she asked.

“Mmm,” Oliver mumbled.

The only thing that made their nights bearable was that they were miserable together, wanting to stop the prophecy, yet making no progress.

Which made what Oliver had to report next difficult: “Carly got her demon tonight.”

“Really?” said Phlox. “I didn’t realize she’d started cohesion.”

“She hadn’t, until like, last week.”

Sebastian shook his head. “That’s not right. These cohesions are happening too fast.”

“Some people say it’s the media and today’s culture,” said Phlox. “Kids are growing up faster than they used to. …”

“I don’t know,” said Sebastian, “There’s got to be more to it than—”

“There’s something else,” said Oliver.

Phlox and Sebastian both turned to him. Their faces went blank, almost like they knew what was coming next.

Oliver swallowed hard, feeling a twist of nerves in his gut. “I had a cohesion dream.”

“Your first …” Phlox began, but trailed off, glancing up at the ceiling.

“It’s okay, Mom, just say it. Yes!” Oliver shouted toward the ceiling, “I had my first real demon dream! Illisius is on his way. Happy?”

Sebastian reached over and patted Oliver’s arm. “It could be some time yet.”

“Years, even,” added Phlox.

“Or any day now,” muttered Oliver, “considering how fast it’s happening to everyone else.”

They each took another bite. Not so long ago, Oliver had lied about having had his first demon dream, and his parents had been thrilled. Things had certainly changed.

“Well then,” said Phlox in that high-pitched tone that indicated that she’d made up her mind about something, “I’ll have to let your grandmother know. She’d slay me for not keeping her in the loop about such a big event in her grandson’s life, even one like … this. Besides, they’ll need to start preparing.”

“For the end of the world,” said Sebastian, sharing a serious gaze with Phlox.

They both turned to Oliver, their terse expressions focused on him. Oliver looked back. Here they were, and there was nothing that could be done.

“Let us know as the dreams progress,” said Phlox.

“Okay,” said Oliver. He felt his guts knot further.
The end of the world …

They finished dinner in silence.

Friday night began uneventfully at school. Oliver found the same view out his window during cohesion: fog and starry water, a railing of some kind of steamship. It stayed that way through most of the cohesion session, but then, near the end, it changed.

The water began to solidify into true liquid, the stars vanishing. The fog started to lift. In the far distance, a land mass took shape. Oliver could make out a lighthouse, high bluffs behind it. Other lights on the hills to the south. Illisius’s ship was arriving at a port, but the session ended before the ship docked.

Cohesion was exhausting, and Mr. VanWick took care to keep the sessions short. Still, Oliver wanted to stay longer. His insides were knotted with stress. He needed to know what he was seeing through the window, when it was, how close Illisius was to now.

No one else reported any change in their progress. Lythia, Theo and Maggots maintained their usual distance and animosity all through class.

At midnight, they went to Force Awareness and Manipulation with Ms. Nikkolai. They were working on floor-to-ceiling leaps, pushing against the forces in a move that looked somewhat like scaling a ladder made of thin air. It was levitation at a sprinter’s pace. Oliver was getting better at it. The student having the hardest time was Lythia, who had once been able to do far more advanced skills with ease. Near the end of class, she vented her frustration by ordering Dean to break into the human’s equipment closet, get a bag of baseballs, and hurl them at Oliver and Berthold, who were still on the ceiling at the time.

“Nice job avoiding my throws,” said Dean as they headed back upstairs after class.

“Whatever,” said Oliver, rubbing his shoulder; one of the baseballs had broken his collarbone, but it was healing up quickly, as vampire injuries did.

“I really hate being her minion,” Dean muttered.

“At least she can’t reach you over long distances anymore,” said Oliver. This was another benefit of Lythia no longer having her demon: she could only control Dean when she was within sight of him. For this reason, they’d changed out of their uniforms slowly so that they’d be last heading back upstairs.

They reached the first floor and passed the cafeteria, where the younger students were having lunch. In ninth Pentath, you could spend lunch anywhere on the school property. Lythia and the boys could usually be found out atop the basketball hoops in the back, so Oliver and Dean headed toward the front steps.

They were coming up a flight of stairs awash in grotesqua—here, the luminous, neon forms were a leering pack of hellhounds that lunged out at passersby—just as a group of eighth Pentath students was descending the flight above. The group reached the front doors ahead of Oliver and Dean. Three girls and a boy, all huddled tight, their heads close, whispering importantly.

Oliver didn’t really mean to listen in on their conversation, but then he heard the words “the Legion” as the group headed outside. The last boy looked warily over his shoulder, as if making sure that they were alone. Oliver leaned against the wall, pushing Dean back, so that they were lost in the grotesqua.

“What’s up?” Dean whispered.

“The Legion. That’s what Lythia and Theo were talking about. Come on.”

They crept to the front door. Dean caught the door just before it closed and pushed it slightly ajar. Oliver spectralized and climbed up the door frame, sliding out onto the brick wall outside.

The kids were huddled just around the corner from the stairs, hidden from any teachers’ view. Oliver scurried across the wall and then crept down until he was about ten feet above their heads.

They stood in a tight circle, each holding an identical object: A thin glass vial with a clear bulb at the top the size of a tennis ball. The glass was shaped to perfectly surround a single flower. Oliver recognized it: a moonflower, ghostly white with a pale purple center. Its stem was immersed in a pale pink liquid. They only bloomed at night, and were fairly common as vampire decorations, but these glass vessels were usually enchanted so that the flower could be made to bloom on command.

“So, this means tomorrow night, right?” one of the girls said.

“Yeah, remember what Lythia said? The meeting is the night after the blooming.”

“Where? Cal Anderson again?”

“No, at the end of the last meeting they said it would be at Pele’s Lair.”

“What time?”

“At four, same as always.”

“Okay, let’s meet at the west entrance to the clubs at three-thirty. Plan?”

“Plan.”

One of the girls spoke quietly: “Do you think this is it?”

“I don’t know,” replied one of the boys. “You heard about Carly. …”

“Theo said that Nocturne is next. And if he is, then yeah, it might be time to—”

“Sshh! We shouldn’t talk about it here. Come on, we should get back before Ms. Estreylla notices we’re gone.”

Oliver watched them go, then dropped down to the ground and headed inside to relay the information to Dean.

Later that night, they discussed it while riding atop a bus to Dean’s house. “So,” said Dean, “Lythia has organized some kind of secret club?”

“A Legion,” said Oliver somewhat sarcastically. “Theo and Maggots must be in it, too.”

“And it has something to do with the cohesions. And you. Like with your destiny.”

Oliver shrugged. “Knowing Lythia, it’s some kind of scheme. Maybe she and Theo are trying to get their demons sooner. I could totally see them manipulating the younger kids somehow, like for some spell or something. She’d do anything to get another demon.”