a cross in the void // christopher lightwood {4}

nine // ben nighe

Ultimately, Brigitte's search for Ariadne proved unsuccessful. She was not at Anna's (Anna also happened to be throwing some kind of party) and she was not at the Institute either. She went home to find Christopher gone, the telephone off the hook. She slept fitfully, dreamed of Bryn in an old Egyptian coffin with her arms crossed over her chest and Pluto knee-deep in water and Alan asleep in what looked like a coat closet and Christopher standing triumphant at the top of a set of stairs, his face a mask of violent fury she'd never seen on him in the waking world.

She shuddered into waking and found herself turning almost compulsively to the writing desk to put everything down. These dreams were new. She was a banshee, she was meant to see only the dead. But Pluto saw more, and now she did, too. She debated calling Pluto, but decided against it. She'd stop by Anna's again and see if she'd heard from Ariadne, and see where to go from there.

< & >

Come daylight, Brigitte couldn't tell if the lights were on in Anna's flat or not. She found the door to the building open and took the stairs up to No. 30B on the second floor. She knocked, and to her surprise, it was actually Ariadne who opened the door.

"Brigitte," she said. "What are you doing here?"

"Actually," said Brigitte, "I was looking for you. I was told you might be here."

Ariadne's dark eyes narrowed. "Why?"

"Ariadne, dear," said Anna, from somewhere in the bowels of the flat, "just what is going on?"

"Brigitte's here," said Ariadne. "She's saying she wants to see me."

"Alan is missing," said Brigitte.

Ariadne blinked. She stepped back and swung the door open to allow Brigitte into the flat. "Say more."

"The Consul was by my house yesterday," said Brigitte. "Apparently nobody's heard from him or from Elsie Stoneberg in days. I called Pluto and they haven't heard from him. I think I was likely the last, he reached me by telephone from Isafjordur before he left for the Citadel. But I wanted to hear from you."

Ariadne shook her head. "I haven't heard from him either. He called me in, remember, to talk about what we were going to do while he was gone, since he didn't trust me to fill in anymore. I convinced him to let me, if I ran decisions past you and Pluto before I made them. I haven't heard from him since then." She frowned. "Did he say anything, in his call from Isafjordur, that might give us any clue?"

Brigitte shook her head. "Just complaining about Greta Stoneberg being a bit of a stuffy know-it-all and wanting to know if I'd heard from Pluto, that was all. They'd gone to France and he was worried."

"We should get ahold of Pluto. Bring them back from Scotland."

"I talked to them about that already. They said they were waiting on some things of Matthew's, but . . . I don't know. It felt almost like they were stalling."

"Stalling," said Anna. "I don't like that."

"Why not?" said Ariadne.

"They send everyone home, including my brother—who seems to also be their love, mind you, and therefore someone you'd think they'd want with them—and hole themselves up in that old castle and the last time Christopher saw them they'd been running around madly down in the tunnels beneath it. They're up to something and I don't know what and I don't like it."

Brigitte shook her head. "I don't either. I'll talk to them. Tell them they need to come back to London. Though I don't know how I'll go about dragging them back if they won't return on their own."