Val and I held ourselves rigid, waiting for her to finish her story. I wanted to put my arms around her and offer consolation, but the stiffness of her shoulders seemed to rebuff sympathy.
Skyla cleared her throat and continued. “Anyway, I had carried her outside and was on my way back in when this… this glow… this apparition appeared in front of me. It freaked me out at first, but it took form and spoke my name. Then she disappeared. I knew it was her, but how could it be?”
Skyla raised her eyes and looked into mine, pleading for me to believe her. I offered what I hoped looked like an encouraging smile.
She let out a breath and squared her shoulders. “I’m going to try to speak to her again. Ask her if she knows anything.”
“Why would she know anything the living don’t?” Val asked. “If Tori was behind this attack, then those who died must have been ignorant of her intentions, or else they would have been better prepared to defend themselves.”
“Maybe she saw who started the fire,” Skyla said. “Maybe she saw someone else or overheard something in her final moments. She would have been a lot closer to the action than the women who survived. Besides, I’ve talked to every sister here, and either they don’t know what happened, or they are refusing to talk to me because they think I’m an outsider.”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s no crazier than anything else that has happened lately. How does contacting the dead work?”
“I’m not sure,” Skyla said. “I want you to help me search the library. I’m hoping one of those books has something helpful.”
Val shook his head and shrugged. “Sorry, but why don’t you just ask one of the sisters?”
Skyla snorted. “I already told you they won’t talk to me, especially not about proprietary things like communing with the dead.”
A door slammed somewhere in the house, and the mutterings of distant voices carried into the kitchen. Moments later, the Valkyries filed in through the kitchen, filling the room with chatter and their plates with lasagna. Their sudden arrival interrupted our conversation, so Skyla, Val, and I used the distraction to slip away to the library, located in the basement of the main house. The stone foundation and ceiling had protected it from the fire, and a heavy wooden door with an old-fashioned lock protected it from intruders—like us.
“Damn.” Skyla worked the handle as if it might give in if she antagonized it enough.
“Val,” I said. “Can’t you blip in there and open it from the other side?”
“I’ve never seen inside the library before. I have to have seen a place, be able to hold a vision of it in my mind, or I have to follow someone else’s path. Why don’t you just go ask for the key?”
“Who even has it?” said Skyla.
“The librarian would be my guess,” I said.
“Well, duh. But who is the librarian?”
“Tori?” Val asked.
The mention of her name inspired a memory from my previous visit, when Tori had told me my lack of knowledge about my ancestry was appalling. “No. Tori mentioned her to me once. Her name is…” The weight of the name pressed on my tongue, but my brain didn’t want to cough it up. “Elaine… Emily… Emma?”
“Embla?” Skyla asked. “There’s a woman here named Embla.”
“Yes. I think that’s it.”
“How do we get the key from her?”
Val’s face screwed into a sardonic expression. “Uh, what if you just asked her for it?”
“What if she wants to know why?” Skyla asked.
“I could tell her I want to research Sol’s lineage,” I said. “Tori suggested I should do that last time I was here.”
“What if Embla insists on coming with us?” Skyla asked. “What if she wants to supervise your research and help you find things? We can’t have her looking over our shoulder. We can’t risk letting anyone find out what we’re up to until we know who we can trust.”
“I still don’t understand why you changed your mind about Tori being Helen’s agent,” Val said.
“First,” Skyla said, “we asked Inyoni, as she was dying, if Tori was the one she had been talking to. It was hard to tell, but it seemed she was trying to tell us it was someone else. Also, Tori could have easily had Solina killed here at the Aerie rather than having Skoll follow her out to some remote location on the other side of the country, but she didn’t. I think Tori ran for other reasons. Maybe she’s running from Helen’s spies inside the Aerie.” Skyla narrowed her eyes. “I’m trying to stay open to all possibilities.”
“So, we’re back to figuring out how we get the key,” I said. “If Embla even has it in the first place.”
“We need to search her room,” Skyla said.
“If you were the librarian, wouldn’t you keep the key with you most of the time?”
“So we’re going to mug her?” Val asked.
“You got any better ideas?”
“She usually trains in the barn in the mornings,” Skyla said. “If she keeps the key on her, she probably doesn’t wear it then. I can go ask her to fence with me in the morning—my sword work needs the practice anyway.”
“So we find the key while she’s training. I’ll unlock the door, let Val get a good look at the inside. We’ll get the key back to her before she notices it’s missing.”
“Then,” Skyla said, “we can come back later, when no one will notice. Val can jump into the room and let us in.”
With our plan in place, Skyla left to go find Embla and make a date for a morning workout. I went upstairs to seek out what remained of my lasagna dinner and found a few noodles and cheese crumbs left in the pan. I sighed and started cleaning the kitchen mess.
“Sit down,” said Val, who tugged me to the kitchen table and pulled out a chair. He pushed me into it, and I didn’t resist. “I’ll get the dishes. I don’t know what it is with you and your fondness for pulling all-nighters, but you’re going to make yourself sick.” Val turned to the sink and filled it with water. He crumpled the aluminum pan that had once held my lasagna and tossed it into the trash can. “In fact, you should go to bed. There’s nothing more that can be done tonight.”
I rubbed my eyes and rested my hand in my chin. “Sleeping’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Lately, it’s all bad dreams. I wake up more tired than I was when I started.”
Val squirted a healthy dose of dish soap in the sink before making neat piles of pots and pans for hand washing. He bent and loaded plates and glasses into the dishwasher.
