Paul doesn’t finish that sentence. He doesn’t have to. He just saw one Marguerite lying dead in front of him. Now he’s willing to kill another with his bare hands.
My Paul would never do that—ever—or he wouldn’t have.
But the splintering has damaged him, left rough edges and paranoia where love used to be. To my horror I realize that I may not even know Paul anymore.
And if he doesn’t know me . . . would he hurt me?
Oh, God. He would.
7
“PAUL—” I CAN’T TALK. FOR A MOMENT I CAN HARDLY breathe. His gaze burns into me with the cold blaze of ice, and he steps closer, as if preparing to do his worst.
I remember Lieutenant Markov shooting the traitorous guard who would’ve murdered the grand duchess, and, from another world, the Russian mafia lord’s son who blew away Theo’s knees in cold blood. The potential for violence, whether for good or for evil, lies within every Paul—including the one I love.
My own Paul had overcome that, long before his splintering. Before I even met him. He’d struggled through the darkness in his past to become a good person, and a strong man. But the cracks in his soul remain, and at any moment the good man I love could fall apart. Become someone else, someone dangerous.
So I’d better defend myself.
“Okay,” I begin shakily. “I just got hijacked for the first time in my own body, because Wicked—”
“Wicked?” Paul squints, as if assessing a suspicious stranger.
“Oh, right! That’s what I’m calling her, the one from the Home Office, because—well, it’s easier, for one, and I don’t even think she deserves to be called Marguerite. But she knows about Nightthief, doesn’t she? Then—then I bet she doesn’t know about that terrible spring break you and Theo had in Vegas—”
“Stop.” Paul takes a deep breath, and then he looks like himself again. My nauseating dread fades. Of course I didn’t have to be afraid of Paul. Splintered or not, he’s still himself. He has to be. “I knew it was you as soon as you told me you nicknamed the other one Wicked.”
I don’t want to ask this next, but I have to. “What happened in the Londonverse?”
“What do you think happened? Do you need me to say it out loud?”
I nod like the hypocrite I am, demanding that Paul speak when I lack the courage to even ask the question.“She’s dead,” Paul says heavily. “I watched her die.”
The knowledge crashes into me, nearly as hard and cold as the water of the Thames must have been for her. I would give so much to have stayed in one second longer, to have spared her the awareness of her fall until the very last instant, when she might not even have had time to understand what was happening.
You can’t cut it that close, I remind myself. It wouldn’t save her, and it would only endanger you. True. Doesn’t make me feel any better.
Paul and I remain silent for a few moments. The ancient gods surrounding us stare with their identical, arched eyes, and now this passageway feels like the tomb it used to be. Did you think death was a game you could cheat? The painted figures seem to say. The people buried here thought that too. Now you’re digging up their bones.
“I waited for them to find the body.” Paul stares at the wall behind me, looking past my face as if I were just another hieroglyph—no. That’s not it. He sees the dead Marguerite in his memory more clearly than he can focus on the real me, here and now. “I realized seeing her wouldn’t tell me anything—even if it had been you, and the Firebird had been around your neck when you hit the water, surely the impact would’ve broken it. Or the current could’ve snatched it away. But I still thought I needed to see her for myself.” He closes his eyes. “I wish I hadn’t.”
They say that hitting water from that high up is just like hitting concrete. My Londonverse self might have been in pieces. Nausea ripples through me, and I have to swallow hard. “Did—did Aunt Susannah have to—”
“I identified the body for her.”
“Thank you.” Aunt Susannah wouldn’t have been able to bear that, I don’t think. Then I realize the full meaning of what Paul has just told me. “Wait. Aunt Susannah knew you? Well enough for you to—well, to do that?”
Paul nods. “After you left the Londonverse the first time, your other self remembered who you were. Everything she’d done. So apparently she looked for Paul Markov at Cambridge, hoping he had some explanation. Then they began . . . spending time together.”
It breaks my heart all over again. Another world where Paul and I might have been together, maybe forever—and Londonverse Marguerite finally had some kind of shot at happiness—ended in one fatal plunge.
“Aunt Susannah explained some of it to me, while we were waiting for—while we were waiting,” Paul continues. “The rest I put together for myself.”
“See? We really do have a destiny. Because if there was any world where you’d think we didn’t have a chance, that had to be the one.” I feel shallow, talking about my love life at a time like this. But I’m not doing it for me—I’m doing this for Paul. He needs something to hold on to. Otherwise, the grief and guilt he feels from all these universes will continue to drag him down. The cracks left within him from when his soul was splintered could deepen and weaken until he truly falls apart.
My distraction works, at least a little. Paul takes another deep breath and straightens. “Did you say Egypt?”
I hold out my hands to gesture at the hieroglyphics. “No, actually, this is Wisconsin.”
He almost smiles. “Egypt. My accent is stronger here—”
“You’re the tsar’s own Egyptologist, working with Mom and Dad on the expedition. We have these huge tents, and this crazy strong coffee, and real live camels. Mom’s even wearing a turban.”
Paul’s dismay brings me closer to laughing than I’ve been in a long time. “Do we have to ride the camels?”
“I don’t know. Hasn’t come up yet.”
“I hope not.” Just when I feel like we might be getting past the worst of it, he tenses again. “Wait. The other one—Wicked—she came here to kill you? Just like the last Marguerite?”
“She’s slamming doors—shutting me out of more and more universes.” The twisted plan has become clearer to me after a night to mull things over. “Triad is trying to make sure that I can’t save the universes in question. I can’t save a universe I can’t reach. I can’t reach a universe where I’m already dead. So they’re going to kill all these Marguerites—one after another—unless I follow Wicked and put things right. I have to keep after her, Paul. I have to save the other Marguerites. Not only because it lets me reach those dimensions and protect them, but because . . . I can’t just let the other versions of me be slaughtered. Not if I have the power to stop it.”