back. “I didn’t expect to find anything inside! I didn’t even expect to find the cave, not really.”
She glanced down the cobbled street again, wondering how long it would take that man to find the tunnel entrance. They’d propped the heavy grate back up in front of it, but that could be moved in moments. When he reached the end of the tunnel and discovered the athame missing, what would happen? What was he prepared to do?
“Catherine—Mont Saint-Michel ‘came into’ your head. You thought it was important to come here now.”
“I looked at the crest and figured it out.”
“No, you didn’t ‘figure it out’!” cried Mariko. “Cat-chan, don’t you see? You looked inside someone else’s mind. You heard someone else’s thoughts. Someone else’s urgent thoughts. You were eavesdropping on the mind of whatever person—whatever Seeker—put the athame here. Or whoever is coming to fetch it.” She gestured to where the mystery Seeker had walked.
“Come on. Are you being serious?” Catherine scoffed. “You don’t believe in that, do you?”
They’d been taught that Seekers often developed, as a by-product of their mental training, the ability to read others’ thoughts. But Catherine had always been of the opinion that there were lots of other explanations for what Seekers took to be telepathy.
“You don’t have to believe in it to do it,” Mariko pointed out. “We got to that hidden chamber moments before someone else came. I was in the middle of telling you that it was an impossible coincidence, when we saw a person following in our precise footsteps. How else can that be explained?”
Reluctantly Catherine saw her point. She recalled again the cold fear that had accompanied her initial vision of Mont Saint-Michel, as though the thought had come from someone dangerous. Perhaps it had come from the very man who had just passed by, and if so, he wasn’t someone they wanted to confront without preparation. “Maybe,” she admitted.
“And he’s about to discover that it’s already been taken,” Mariko whispered.
Catherine looked at her friend. “We need to go,” she said.
“Yes,” Mariko agreed. “Quickly.”
The remains of Traveler were a six-story broken mass that had once been a beautiful airship. The ship’s reflective metal hide was bent and crushed in places, showing the park’s trees and the city’s buildings in the warped manner of a carnival mirror. Traveler was surrounded by security lights all night, and during the day, emergency crews crawled over every part of it, methodically disconnecting every source of power, in preparation for moving the ship outside the city, where it would be put back together. And one day soon, if John prevailed over the other branches of his family, it would be flown again.
It was nighttime now, and he and the Young Dread were inside Traveler. She’d brought them there with the athame, blindfolding John as she always did.
Though the salvage workers were gone at this hour, the blinding exterior lights remained, glaring through every window. All around was the drip and trickle of broken pipes and the smell of burned electrical wiring. Water leaked from the ceilings of the crooked corridors, hissing into steam as it came into contact with surfaces that were still hot. Misshapen shadows lay everywhere.
John’s grandfather Gavin, already weak and close to death, had nearly been killed in the crash. He remained unconscious at a London hospital, where John’s relatives were gathered day and night, waiting to see if Gavin would live and, regardless of what happened, ready to start a fight over control of his wealth.
That wealth was John’s by right. He should be there with those relatives, laying a claim to everything that was his—his because his mother had amassed the fortune for him, so that he might be protected from enemies as she had never been. But legal battles would have to wait. The Young Dread might have agreed to this nighttime visit to Traveler, but she would never agree to him returning to London for something so mundane as fighting his cousins in court. Until his training was complete, he must step away from the ordinary world and ignore his relatives as long as he could.
John understood that his absence might be a death sentence to his grandfather. Years ago Catherine had poisoned Gavin as a way to keep him under her control. The poison lived in his body permanently, and he required a daily antidote to stay alive. Now Maggie was gone and John was with Maud. There was no one in London to give Gavin his antidote. Without