Serena wasn’t in it.
“What is this place?” Emrys asked, moving beside her. He, too, cast no reflection. He waved a hand over the surface of the mirror, where no one waved back.
Emrys glanced to Hazel, who gave him a wide grin; he felt himself beaming back at her.
It was real. All of it. The ghost stories and urban legends they’d been chasing since camp, cataloging every haunted bread crumb, were real. And had led them here. It was as if this gallery of haunted objects had been made just for them.
This place—this eerie, improbable place—was theirs.
Emrys approached a nearby plinth, on which a small dried hand was laid beneath a glass bell jar. As he got closer, he realized it was actually a paw—a monkey’s paw—with four tiny digits curled into the palm and one outstretched. Emrys reached toward the glass, his own fingers fluttering.
“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” a new voice intoned. It was steady and aged, the voice of a grown-up. “You’ll find it’s terrifically cursed.”
Emrys yelped. He spun around, searching for the stranger. But all he saw were his friends.
“Down here,” the voice said.
Emrys looked to where the strange book lay on the marble floor, abandoned in all the excitement. The eye at the center was still open. It turned in its leathery socket, settling on Emrys.
“So you’ve found the reliquary,” the voice said, echoing from the tome. “Then I suppose it can’t be helped. Welcome to the Order of the Azure Eye.”
The room was deathly silent as Emrys and his friends stared at the talking book.
“Did anyone else hear that?” Emrys asked in a high, nervous voice. “Please tell me someone else heard that.”
“S-speakers …” Serena declared weakly. “Speakers in the floor.”
“One speaker, actually,” the book said. “In the Atlas. My name is Alyx Van Stavern. I live in apartment #701. And you, I take it, must be the children from the lower floors—the ones who have been spying on me.”
Emrys let out a little gasp. Van Stavern had known they were watching him?
“You’re Van Stavern?” Hazel asked. She crouched to get a better look at the book, which swiveled its blue eye toward her. “What happened to you? Your apartment’s been destroyed.”
A weary sigh emanated from the tome, as clearly as if the man were standing right there.
“I should start at the beginning,” it muttered. “Or as close as I can get to it. I’m a member of an organization of … well, I suppose you’d call us occult investigators. We are scholars and mystics, adventurers and legionnaires. We come from diverse disciplines and nationalities, each bringing our expertise to a common, crucial aim: protecting our world from the dark forces that threaten it. Or at least we did. As far as I can tell, I’m the last remaining member of the Order. Until today.”
“You really are a sorcerer,” Emrys said.
“One of the best,” Van Stavern puffed. “Or I was. But like my fellow members, I was being hunted. An assassin tracked us down, murdering my friends and colleagues one by one. And tonight, cloaked in the storm, that killer finally found me.”
“The Whistler …” Hazel supplied.
“We heard them coming up the stairs,” Emrys said gravely. “I’m sorry, we … we didn’t know.”
“No, you couldn’t have,” Van Stavern’s voice said sadly. “And if you had interfered, you’d be dead. This ‘Whistler,’ as you call them, is part of a very dangerous organization. By the time I sensed the threat, it was already at my doorstep. In my desperation, I cast a rash but fruitful spell, fleeing into the pages of this grimoire. It is the Atlas of the End: a spell book, index, and my Order’s guiding text. Now, I appear to be … stuck.”
“Stuck?” Hazel repeated, squinting at the book. “Like, you’re possessing it? But where’s your body?”
“Weren’t you listening?” Van Stavern snapped. “I’m in here. All of me. And if there’s a way to extricate myself, then even I haven’t discovered it. Yet.”
“This is not happening,” Serena said. “You all realize this is impossible, right?”
“It is happening,” Van Stavern answered darkly. “And your disbelief will not protect you from the powers at work. You’re a part of this now—all of you.”
“Are you saying we’re in danger?” Hazel asked.
Van Stavern sighed again, a weary sound that rang a bit sadly to Emrys. “I wish I could tell you no,” the book said. “But living in New Rotterdam, you must have guessed by now that danger always lurks close at hand. The young are especially vulnerable.”
The eyelid at the center of the book hooded thoughtfully. “Beside our world there are … other places. Dimensions so unlike our own that they contort the very laws of nature where they press close, defying physics and biology. And there are places where the barriers that separate us from these forces are especially delicate. Places like New Rotterdam. Very ancient, very powerful beings are pushing against the other side of the door, hoping to break into your town. To call them monsters is an understatement. These are the gods monsters worship.”
The eye rose, gazing at each of the three in turn. When it settled on him, Emrys felt the hairs rising along his arms.
“The proximity of these beings means that tendrils of their influence can leak into our world, imbuing even mundane items with supernatural qualities. These objects become what the Order calls relics. On their own, the relics are dangerous enough, but it’s in the hands of people that they become truly potent—and potentially catastrophic. And so, the Order of the Azure Eye was created to hunt the relics down, keeping them safely contained within this reliquary.”
“The Doomsday Archives …” Emrys breathed.
“The what?” Serena asked, at the same moment the Atlas said, “Pardon me?”
“It’s an article from the New Rotterdam Wiki,” Emrys continued. “One of the oldest, actually. Every year, some new admin threatens to delete it, because there’s not a shred of evidence to back it up. But it always survives. No one knows who the original author was, but they claimed mysterious figures sometimes appear around the sites where weird stuff happens in town. Supposedly these figures take objects from the sites and disappear. It’s the name they gave you—or gave this place.”
“Not entirely inaccurate,” Van Stavern murmured thoughtfully. “Any number of relics could result in a doomsday scenario if left in the wrong hands. But it’s possible that this wiki”—Van Stavern pronounced the word like we key—“refers to the group who sent my rather musical assassin after me. They are a dark counterpart to the Order: the Yellow Court.”
Emrys frowned. He tried to remember if he’d ever encountered that name on the wiki, but nothing sprang to mind. It was amazing how even the combined knowledge of hundreds amounted to so little.
“Who are they?” he asked. “Another secret society? The cult of an evil god? Ooh—are they relic hunters, too?”
