The Ends of the World (The Conspiracy of Us #3)(3)

But if Alexander's body wasn't there, it didn't help us. We would have been at the end of the road if Elodie hadn't remembered that the Catholic Church preserved relics of some of their most important saints at the Vatican.

Being Circle did come with some useful privileges, and one of those was that we were able to get into the Vatican and check. It turned out they did have a relic of "St. Mark's." A femur. We took it. We tested it.

Despite the evidence we'd seen, we were still shocked when the bone dated to somewhere around 350 BC. Alexander's time.

"There was a prophecy just after Alexander died that said whoever possessed his body would never be defeated. That was a major cause of the early Diadochi wars," Jack had remembered. "Is it possible that this bone could be the cure somehow?" But that hope was put on the back burner when our team of scientists discovered something else: a message, etched into a crevice in the bone.

From whence our queen made the twelve, our king's bone unlocks a map to the place of eternal rest.

Our king, we surmised, was Alexander, and the bone the one in our hands. Our queen appeared to refer to Olympias, Alexander's mother. She was the one who had created the virus as a way to bring her own line back to power. She'd done the modifications on the Diadochi-Alexander's twelve generals, who had split his kingdom between them to become the twelve families of the Circle-that both made them susceptible to the virus and gave them the violet eye gene. The ceremony when she'd done this had been the first and only initiation ritual the Circle had done.

Tomorrow, our initiation would be the second.

Ironic that I'd been pushing back against my "fate" with the Circle for so long, and now it was exactly where we needed to be. That didn't mean we weren't going to make a last-ditch effort to find whatever it was the bone unlocked before we had to go through with the ceremony itself.

Once we'd realized the clue had to do with the initiation ceremony, we'd gathered as much intel as we could. Jack and Stellan and Elodie knew a little about the original ceremony from the Circle history they'd been taught. Our friends Luc and Colette knew more as members of the Dauphin family, and Luc was able to snag some old texts from the Dauphins' library to fill in some gaps. There would probably be fire, we found. There would probably be chanting and invocations and some form of accepting us in. But we needed specifics. We assumed we were looking for an object. Something concrete that could be unlocked.



       
         
       
        

So tonight, we needed two things: to find out what this object that contained the next clue was, and to get hold of it before the initiation tomorrow, without the Circle knowing.

Stellan cleared his throat. I brought my attention back from scanning the crowd to find his hand extended to me. "Dance?" he said.

"Why?" I said through my forced smile.

"Because we appear to be on a dance floor, and it would look strange not to."

He was right. While I hadn't been paying attention, we'd ended up in the middle of a group of dancing couples.

I glanced behind him, saw Jack's eyes on us. With what I hoped wasn't too obvious a sigh, I put my hand in Stellan's.

"Have you seen Lucien?" he said, looping one arm around my waist. So that's why he'd had us wandering the party. Even though Stellan was technically the head of his own Circle family now, I wasn't sure he'd ever stop protecting Luc. "He was going to take Colette and see if they could find anything, but they've disappeared."

Stellan's usually light accent was a little thicker these days, his ths softening almost to zs. Zey've disappeared. It was because he'd been spending more time in Russia than he usually did. His little sister, Anya, was part of the thirteenth bloodline, too, which meant plenty of people might like to get their hands on her. He had her stashed somewhere safe, and went back every few days to move her to a new town in case anyone was looking for her.

"Luc's fine," I murmured, still watching the rest of the party. "This is a harmless way to let him feel like he's involved."

Stellan sighed and pulled me tighter against him. Some of the Circle didn't believe our relationship was real. That mattered because they still thought our "union  " was what fulfilled the mandate, and to them, union   meant marriage. There were whispers that we'd lied about having completed the marriage ceremony already-since we were so young, and I was an outsider, would I really have agreed to it like that? It was part of the plan tonight to show them just how very in love we were and put those doubts to rest, because they were completely right about the objections I'd have. Even if we had to be initiated, there was no way I'd go through with the marriage ritual, so we needed them to accept that it was already done.