Evangeline shook her head as she stared up at all the countless leather spines, some of the words flickering before her eyes just for daring to glance at them.
She didn’t even know where to begin. “Perhaps we could pull the luck stone back out just—”
“No,” Chaos and Jacks both replied at once.
“What if we just use it to find the right book?”
Jacks seemed to consider it, but Chaos shook his head. “The last key wore the luck stone after she found it. She believed it would give her good fortune, and it did. But it also made her far too reckless and ultimately led to her death.”
“What if Jacks were to use the stone?” She turned to him. “You said it didn’t affect you.”
“It didn’t. But it’s also not going to help me. Only the prophesied key can find and reunite all four missing stones.”
Evangeline wanted to think Jacks was exaggerating—or that perhaps he just wanted to get out of spending time in a library. But then she remembered their trip to the Fortuna Vault, how he’d watched her as they’d walked through all that treasure, observing her reactions. She also supposed, given Chaos’s rather compelling reason for wanting to open the arch, he must have spent time searching for the missing stones—and given how long he’d been alive, he had a lot of time. Yet he only possessed one, which had been found by the previous key.
Now, Evangeline needed to locate the other three. She wondered if they really thought she could do it … or if they were just willing to see how many she could collect before she died as well.
* * *
The following day, when Evangeline woke up inside her borrowed room, she half expected to find Jacks at the edge of her bed, ready to toss a gown at her face as he told her it was time to get to work and find the stones.
Instead, there was just a note tucked next to the teapot on her breakfast tray.
“Try not to die,” she muttered. She didn’t know why she was surprised, either by Jacks’s callous words or the fact that he’d disappeared almost as soon as she’d agreed to do the one thing he wanted. But she was surprised—and maybe just a little hurt.
What could he have to do that was so important? She knew he couldn’t help her find the missing stones, but she also knew how desperately he wanted them. And how badly he’d wanted her alive, yet he’d just left her, alone, in a castle of vampires.
Maybe she’d been right yesterday: Jacks and Chaos just wanted her to get as many of the stones as she could before the quest took her life.
After dressing in one of the many gowns that had been delivered to her room from Wolf Hall, Evangeline made her way through the hidden tunnels back to Chaos’s secret library. Despite Jacks’s note, she kept expecting him to softly walk up beside her or to saunter through a secret door in the wall. But Jacks did not appear.
The library was quiet without his teasing, or his laughter, or his tossing of apples. The only sounds were the occasional flickers of the glowing lanterns that filled the hidden library with warm, syrupy light.
She tried to take comfort in the books. Stories had always felt as if they were her friends. But all these stories felt like distant relations to the tales that she knew.
Chaos had been right about the way the stories inside the books would change. In almost every book she read, words shifted before her eyes. Usually, they were minor things. She saw accounts of Honora Valor alter the color of her eyes from hazel to brown. Stories of Wolfric shifted his hair from golden to red.
But a few things never seemed to change, such as the names of the Valor children and a few of their defining characteristics. Aurora was sweet and was always described as the most beautiful girl who’d ever lived, followed by her twin, Castor, who was said to be quite noble. Vesper could see the future. Tempest and Romulus—another set of twins—were great inventors, responsible for the magical arches. Dane was some sort of shifter, and Lysander had a gift that involved memories. Every story said they were handsome and kind and generous. The family was close, protective of one another, and beloved until …
Something horrible happened.
But Evangeline couldn’t seem to uncover what this tragic event was. She knew the outcome—the Valors built the Valory, sealed something inside of it, and then their heads were all chopped off, ending the Age of the Valors and ushering in the Age of Great Houses.
It was in between these ages that the stones had been created and hidden away. Unfortunately, Evangeline could find little about that mysterious time in between.