The Dark Vault Read online

  Space changes, suddenly, and instead of falling down we fall forward, sprawling onto the cold marble of the Archive’s antechamber floor.

  I can see the front desk in the corner of my eye, a QUIET PLEASE sign and a stack of papers and a green-eyed girl looking over it.

  “This is not the Returns room,” she says, her voice edged with amusement. She has hair the color of sun and sand.

  “I realize that,” I growl as I try to pin a hissing, cussing, clawing Jackson to the floor. “A little help?”

  I’ve got him down for all of two seconds before he somehow gets his knee and then his shoe between our bodies.

  The young Librarian stands up as Jackson uses his boot to pry me off, sending me backward to the hard floor. I’m still on the ground, but Jackson is halfway to his feet when the Librarian rounds the desk and cheerfully plunges something thin and sharp and shining into his back. His eyes widen, and when she twists the weapon there’s a noise, like a lock turning or a bone breaking, and all the life goes out of Jackson Lerner’s eyes. She withdraws, and he crumples to the floor with the sickening thud of dead weight. I can see now that what she holds is not a weapon exactly, but a kind of key. It’s gleaming gold and has a handle and a stem, but no teeth.

  “That was fun,” she says.

  There’s something like a giggle in the corners of her voice. I’ve seen her around the stacks. She always catches my eye because she is so young. Girlish. Librarian is top rank, so the vast majority are older, seasoned. But this girl looks like she’s twenty.

  I drag myself to my feet. “I need a key like that.”

  She laughs. “You couldn’t handle it. Literally.” She holds it out, but the moment my fingers touch the metal, they go pins-and-needles numb. I pull back, and her laugh trails off as the key vanishes into the pocket of her coat.

  “Stumble through the wrong door?” she asks just before the large doors behind the desk fly open.

  “What is going on?” comes a very different voice. Patrick storms in, the eyes behind his black glasses flicking from the Librarian to Jackson’s body on the floor to me.

  “Carmen,” he says, his attention still leveled on me. “Please take care of that.”

  The girl smiles and, despite her size, hauls the body up and through a pair of doors built right into the curving walls of the antechamber. I blink. I never noticed those before. And the moment they’ve closed behind her, I can’t seem to focus on them. My eyes roll off.

  “Miss Bishop,” Patrick says tersely. The room is quiet except for my heavy breathing. “You’re bleeding on my floor.”

  I look down and realize he’s right. Pain rolls up my arm as my eyes slide over the place where Jackson’s knife cut through fabric and grazed skin. My sleeve is stained red, a narrow line running down my hand and over my key before dripping to the floor. Patrick is gazing distastefully at the drops as they hit the granite.

  “Did you have a problem with the doors?” asks Patrick.

  “No,” I say, aiming for a joke. “The doors were fine. I had a problem with the History.”

  Not even a smile.

  “Do you need medical attention?” he asks.

  I feel dazed, but I know better than to show it. Certainly not in front of him.

  Every branch staffs a medically trained Librarian in the interest of keeping work-related injuries quiet, and Patrick is the man for this branch. If I say yes, then he’ll treat me; but he’ll also have an excuse to report the incident, and there won’t be anything Roland can do to keep it off the books. I don’t have a clean record, so I shake my head.

  “I’ll live.” A swatch of yellow catches my eye, and I recover my bandana from the floor and wrap it around the cut. “But I really liked this shirt,” I add as lightly as possible.

  He frowns and I think he’s going to chew me out or report me, but when he speaks it’s only to say, “Go clean up.”

  I nod and turn back to the Narrows, leaving a trail of red behind.

  EIGHT

  I AM A MESS.

  I scoured the Narrows, but Jackson’s knife was nowhere to be found. As for the strange shadow I saw during the fight, the one with the silvery crown…maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me. That happens, now and then, with the ring off. Press against a surface wrong and you can see the present and past at once. Things can get tangled.

  I wince, focusing on the task at hand.

  The cut on my arm is deeper than I thought, and it bleeds through the gauze before I can get the bandage on. I toss another ruined wrap into the plastic bag currently serving as the bathroom trash bin and run the cut under cool water, digging through the extensive first-aid kit I’ve assembled over the years. My shirt is sitting in a heap on the floor, and I take in my reflection, the web of fine scars across my stomach and arms, and the bruise blossoming on my shoulder. I am never without the marks of my job.

  Pulling my forearm from the water, I dab the cut, finally getting it gauzed and wrapped. Red drops have made a trail along the counter and into the sink.

  “I christen thee,” I mutter to the sink as I finish bandaging the cut. I take the trash bag and add it to the larger one in the kitchen, making sure all evidence of my first aid is buried, just as Mom appears, a slightly smooshed but still cellophaned muffin in one hand, and the basket in the other. The muffins inside have cooled, a film of condensation fogging up the wrappers. Damn. I knew I forgot something.

  “Mackenzie Bishop,” she says, dropping her purse on the din-ing room table, which is the only fully assembled piece of furniture. “What is this?”

  “A Welcome muffin?”

  She drops the basket with a thud.

  “You said you would deliver them. Not drop them on people’s doormats and leave the basket in the stairwell. And where have you been?” she snaps. “This couldn’t have taken you all morning. You can’t just disappear….” She’s an open book: anger and worry too thinly veiled behind a tight-lipped smile. “I asked for your help.”

  “I knocked, but nobody was home,” I snap back, pain and fatigue tightening around me. “Most people have jobs, Mom. Normal jobs. Ones where they get up and go to the office and come home.”

  She rubs her eyes, which means that she’s been rehearsing whatever she’s about to say. “Mackenzie. Look. I was talking to Colleen, and she said that you’d need to grieve in your own way—”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “—and when you add that to your age, and the natural desire for rebellion—”

  “Stop.” My head is starting to hurt.

  “—I know you need space. But you also need to learn discipline. Bishop’s is a family business.”

  “But it wasn’t a family dream.”

  She flinches.

  I want to be oblivious to the hurt written on her face. I want to be selfish and young and normal. M would be that way. She would need space to grieve. She would rebel because her parents were simply uncool, not because one was wearing a horrifying happy mask and the other was a living ghost. She’d be distant because she was preoccupied with boys or school, not because she’s tired from hunting down the Histories of the dead, or distracted by her new hotel-turned-apartment, where the walls are filled with crimes.

  “Sorry,” I say, adding, “Colleen’s right, I guess.” The words try to crawl back down my throat. “Maybe I just need a little time to adjust. It’s a lot of change. But I didn’t mean to bail.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Talking to a neighbor,” I say. “Ms. Angelli. She invited me in, and I didn’t want to be rude. She seemed kind of lonely, and she had this amazing place full of old stuff, and so I just stayed with her for a while. We had tea, and she showed me her collections.”

  Da would call that an extrapolation. It’s easier than a straight lie because it contains seeds of truth. Not that Mom would be able to tell if I told her a blatant lie, but it makes me feel a fraction less guilty.

  “Oh. That was…sweet of you,” she says, looking wou
nded because I’d rather have tea with a stranger than talk to her.

  “I should have kept better track of time”—and then, feeling guiltier—“I’m sorry.” I rub my eyes and begin to lean toward the bedroom. “I’m going to go unpack a little.”

  “This will be good for us,” she promises. “This will be an adventure.” But while it sounded cheerful coming from Dad, it leaves her lips like a breath being knocked out of her. Desperate. “I promise, Mac. An adventure.”

  “I believe you,” I say. And because I can tell she wants more, I manage a smile and add, “I love you.”

  The words taste strange, and as I make my way to my room and then to my waiting bed, I can’t figure out why. When I pull the sheet over my head, it hits me.

  It’s the only thing I said that wasn’t a lie.

  I’m twelve, six months shy of becoming a Keeper, and Mom is mad at you because you’re bleeding. She accuses you of fighting, of drinking, of refusing to age gracefully. You light a cigarette and run your fingers through your shock of peppered hair and let her believe it was a bar fight, let her believe you were looking for trouble.

  “Is it hard?” I ask when she storms out of the room. “Lying so much?”

  You take a long drag and flick ash into the sink, where you know she’ll see it. You’re not supposed to smoke anymore.

  “Not hard, no. Lying is easy. But it’s lonely.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you lie to everyone about everything, what’s left? What’s true?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “Exactly.”

  The phone wakes me.

  “Hey, hey,” says Lyndsey. “Daily check-in!”

  “Hey, Lynds.” I yawn.

  “Were you sleeping?”

  “I’m trying to fulfill your mother’s image of me.”

  “Don’t mind her. So, hotel update? Found me any ghosts yet?”

  I sit up, swing my legs off the bed. I’ve got the bloodstained boy in my walls, but I don’t think that’s really shareable. “No ghosts yet, but I’ll keep looking.”

  “Look harder! A place like that? It’s got to be full of creepy things. It’s been around for, like, a hundred years.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I looked it up! You don’t think I’d let you move into some haunted mansion without scoping out the history.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “Weirdly, nothing. Like, suspiciously nothing. It was a hotel, and the hotel was converted into apartments after World War Two, a big boom time moneywise. The conversion was in a ton of newspapers, but then a few years later the place just falls off the map…no articles, nothing.”

  I frown, getting up from the bed. Ms. Angelli admitted that this place was full of history. So where is it? Assuming she can’t read walls, how did she learn the Coronado’s secrets? And why was she so defensive about sharing them?

  “I bet it’s like a government conspiracy,” Lynds is saying. “Or a witness protection program. Or one of those horror reality films. Have you checked for cameras?”

  I laugh, but silently wonder—glancing at the blood-spotted floor—if the truth is worse.

  “Have you at least got tenants who look like they belong in a Hitchcock film?”

  “Well, so far I’ve met a morbidly obese antiques hoarder, and a boy who wears eyeliner.”

  “They call that guyliner,” she says.

  “Yes. Well.” I stretch and head for the bedroom door. “I’d call it stupid, but he’s rather nice to look at. I can’t tell if the eyeliner makes him attractive, or if he’s good-looking in spite of it.”

  “At least you’ve got nice things to look at.”

  I step around the ghostly drops on the floor and venture out into the apartment. It’s dusk, and none of the lights are on.

  “How are you doing?” I ask. Lyndsey possesses the gift of normalcy. I bathe in it. “Summer courses? College prep? Learning new languages? New instruments? Single-handedly saving countries?”

  Lyndsey laughs. It’s so easy for her. “You make me sound like an overachiever.”

  I feel the scratch of letters and pull the list from my jeans.

  “That’s because you are an overachiever,” I say.

  “I just like to stay busy.”

  Come over here, then, I think, pocketing the list. This place would keep you busy.

  I distinctly hear the thrum of guitar strings. “What’s that noise?” I ask.

  “I’m tuning, that’s all.”

  “Lyndsey Newman, do you actually have me on speaker just so you can talk and tune a guitar at the same time? You’re jeopardizing the sanctity of our conversations.”

  “Relax. The parents have vacated. Some kind of gala. They left in fancy dress an hour ago. What about yours?”

  I find two notes on the kitchen counter.

  My mother’s reads: Store! Love, Mom.

  My father’s reads: Checking in at work. –D

  “Similarly out,” I say, “but minus the fancy dress and the togetherness.”

  I retreat to the bedroom.

  “The place to yourself?” she says. “I hope you’re having a party.”

  “I can barely hear over the music and drinking games. I better tell them to quiet down before someone calls the cops.”

  “Talk soon, okay?” she says. “I miss you.” She really means it.

  “I miss you, Lynds.” I mean it too.

  The phone goes dead. I toss it onto the bed and stare down at the faded spots on my floor.

  Questions eat at me. What happened in this room? Who was the boy? And whose blood was he covered in? Maybe it’s not my job, maybe it’s an infraction to find out, a misuse of power, but every member of the Archive takes the same oath.

  We protect the past. And the way I see it, that means we need to understand it.

  And if neither Lyndsey’s search engines nor Ms. Angelli are going to tell me anything, I’ll have to see for myself. I tug the ring from my finger, and before I can chicken out, I kneel, press my hands to the floor, and reach.

  NINE

  THERE IS A GIRL sitting on a bed, knees pulled up beneath her chin.

  I run the memories back until I find the small calendar by the bed that reads MARCH, the blue dress on the corner chair, the black book on the table by the bed. Da was right. Bread crumbs and bookmarks. My fingers found their way.

  The girl on the bed is thin in a delicate way, with light blond hair that falls in waves around her narrow face. She is younger than I am, and talking to the boy with the bloodstained hands, only right now his hands are still clean. Her words are a murmur, nothing more than static, and the boy won’t stand still. I can tell by the girl’s eyes that she’s talking slowly, insistently, but the boy’s replies are urgent, punctuated by his hands, which move through the air in sweeping gestures. He can’t be much older than she is, but judging by his feverish face and the way he sways, he’s been drinking. He looks like he’s about to be sick. Or scream.

  The girl sees it too, because she slides from the bed and offers him a glass of water from the top of the dresser. He knocks the glass away hard and it shatters, the sound little more than a crackle. His fingers dig into her arm. She pushes him away a few times before he loses his grip and stumbles back into the bed frame. She turns, runs. He’s up, swiping a large shard of glass from the floor. It cuts into his hand as he lunges for her. She’s at the door when he reaches her, and they tumble into the hall.

  I drag my hand along the floor until I can see them through the doorway, and then I wish I couldn’t. He’s on top of her, and they are a tangle of glass and blood and fighting limbs, her slender bare feet kicking under him as he pins her down.

  And then the struggle slows. And stops.

  He drops the shard beside her body and staggers to his feet, and I can see her, the lines carved across her arms, the far deeper cut across her throat. The shard pressed into her own palm. He stands over her a moment before tu
rning back toward the bedroom. Toward me. He is covered in blood. Her blood. My stomach turns, and I have to resist the urge to scramble away. He is not here. I am not there.

  You killed her, I whisper. Who are you? Who is she?

  He staggers into the room, and for a moment he breaks, slides into a crouch, rocking. But then he gets back up. He looks down at himself, the glitter of broken glass at his feet, and over at the body, and begins to wipe his bloody hands slowly and then frantically on his bloody shirt. He scrambles over to the closet and yanks a black coat from a hook, forcing it on and pulling it closed. And then he runs, and I’m left staring at the girl’s body in the hall.

  The blood is soaking into her pale blond hair. Her eyes are open, and in that moment, all I want is to cross to her and close them.

  I pull my hands from the floor and open my eyes, and the memory shatters into the now, taking the body with it. The room is my room again, but I still see her in that horrible light-echo way, like she’s burned into my vision. I shove my ring on, tripping over half the boxes as I focus on the simple need to get the hell out of this apartment.

  I slam the door to 3F behind me and sag against it, sliding to the floor and pressing my palms to my eyes, breathing into the space between my chest and knees.

  Revulsion claws up my throat and I swallow hard and picture Da taking one look at me and laughing through smoke, telling me how silly I look. I picture the council who inducted me seeing straight through the worlds and declaring me unfit. I am not M, I think. Not some silly squeamish girl. I am more. I am a Keeper. I am Da’s replacement.

  It’s not the blood, or even the murder, though both turn my stomach. It’s the fact that he ran. All I can think is, did he get away? Did he get away with that?

  Suddenly I need to move, to hunt, to do something, and I get up, steadying myself against the door, and pull the list from my pocket, thankful to have a name.