Despite our attempts, though, we hadn't been able to put off the initiation any longer. And it turned out it was a good thing we hadn't. We needed something from the Circle, and this initiation was the way we were going to get it.
From across the courtyard, I saw Laila Emir and her little brother staring at us. Stellan saw, too. He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and grinned. I leaned into his palm with a coquettish laugh.
Beyond the Emirs, I glimpsed Daniel Melech in the crowd. He gave us a dirty look. The Melechs, though they'd organized this lavish party since the initiation site was here in Jerusalem, were the Saxons' most loyal allies. Their son Daniel was especially close with Lydia.
I wanted nothing more than to hold the knife I had strapped to my leg to Daniel's throat and force him to reveal where my sister was. Tell him about how I'd dreamed of putting a bullet in my brother's head every night for weeks, and that by helping them hide, anything they did was his fault, too.
I knew vaguely that I should be appalled at myself for thinking those things, but all I felt was empty. Ever since that night, it was like I was a robot with only one command programmed: Stop them. Kill them. I could lie and say it was only because I wanted to prevent them from hurting anyone else. Though I did want that, the truth was, the only real emotion that broke through the emptiness was the drive to ruin the Saxons like they'd ruined me.
A violet firework exploded, gold tendrils arcing from its center and cascading over the city like a weeping willow. An oooooh rose from the crowd.
I turned us a little more toward Daniel Melech and ran my fingers up and down Stellan's arm, glancing around at the crowd. Most of the Circle families we'd been waiting for were here now.
When we'd learned about the virus, we'd also learned something more: there was a remedy. Napoleon had left the remedy buried. I fear it will only make matters worse, he'd written.
He was right.
With the virus, the Saxons could manipulate their way into control of the Circle-or take it by force. The ideal, of course, would be to destroy the virus, but that was impossible-we were the virus. And any attempts by the team of scientists we'd hired to try to deactivate it in our blood had been unsuccessful. There was just one safeguard.
Lydia had called me every day for weeks after my mom had been killed. So had my father. When I finally answered, Lydia had promised that they'd never meant for my mother to be caught in the cross fire. All they'd wanted was to use what we'd found for the good of the family. The virus in Paris was entirely Cole's doing, and not sanctioned, she'd said. I knew it was true-Lydia and my father were too cautious to release something so deadly without a way to stop it.
So the Saxons were looking for this remedy. We had to find it before them. And since we couldn't destroy the virus, we had to destroy the cure instead.
There were more explosions in the sky, set to music only we at this party could hear. Tendrils of multicolored light twisted through the clouds, and I smiled blandly at something Stellan was saying.
We'd been following a virtual treasure map of Napoleon Bonaparte's since I'd come to the Circle. The final clue pointed to Alexandria, Egypt, as the location of Alexander the Great's tomb, where the cure was hidden. But even though we had the benefit of nearly unlimited Circle resources, we'd found nothing there. Nothing at various excavation sites. Nothing by ground-penetrating radar.
It was almost accidental how we came across the clue that finally pointed us in the right direction. I'd been reading Napoleon's diaries over again, combing through story after story that had nothing to do with our quest-battles and strategy and marriages and affairs. And I'd come across something that caught my eye-an entry that referred to returning an unnamed body to its rightful rest. The entry just before it had been torn out. Through some research, we'd discovered that Napoleon had been in Venice at that time.
Jack, with his seemingly endless memory for random facts, was the one who made the connection. There was a theory that linked Venice with Alexander's body. An archaeological rumor, started by a researcher who had never been able to prove it. Most of the community of historians scoffed at it. The theory said that in the ninth century AD, Alexander's bones had been mistaken for those of St. Mark, and had been taken to Venice, where they rested for centuries in San Marco Basilica. That Alexander's body had never been in his own tomb at all.
It was a ridiculous, desperate idea, but we were desperate people. We traveled to San Marco Basilica and, after some tests, found that "St. Mark's" bones weren't his at all-but they also weren't Alexander's. They dated from the early 1800s. "That's right when Napoleon wrote that diary entry," Elodie had said, finally excited about the idea. "He could have moved Alexander's body back to his real tomb and left some other body in Venice to cover it up."