Regent

XXXII

The ambulance roared past her. Eve had to shake herself back to the present to follow it back up towards Mavenhelm. She took the bumpy, dirt road slower than Noor had. She pulled up outside the church just as the EMTs were loading Ally into the ambulance on a gurney. Noor followed behind them; something about that look of horror in her eyes made one of the EMTs usher her into the ambulance. That person—a woman who wore a hijab with her uniform—took Noor's hand to comfort her.

"I'll follow you," Eve mouthed to Noor in the second they had to make eye contact. She intended on saying it, but no sound came out. If she had nodded in response, Eve didn't know.

Except that she did not throw herself back into Noor's car and follow the ambulance. Something made her stop. It made her walk up to Mavenhelm's front doors and let herself in. It led her back down the steps and back into the library. What that thing had been was the singular thought that nagged at the back of her mind: this doesn't make sense. It hadn't occurred to her before that nothing that any of them were doing made sense. This thought began with a headcount: here, they were supposed to have Ally, Isla, Noor, and herself. It was true that Ally had stepped back from taking on the role of assassin, rather she had delved into academics and rounded up her own portion of the alphabet to trail behind her name. But still, Ally was lethal. Isla too was well-schooled—she had to be as a medical examiner. Then there was Noor: the kind one, the one among them who would not accept the fact that she couldn't save everyone. And Eve herself: High Priestess, maybe a little rusty but perfectly capable of fighting her way in and out.

What got her was that Raz knew this about all of them. He was a strategist, and he knew that each of them could be useful in some way. It made no sense for him to sideline the four of them with no explanation. Noor had said that she was trying to keep Eve safe, yet she was perfectly capable of holding her own, and had proven that multiple times.

Eve stepped around the puddle of blood on the floor to get a better look at the room. The first thing she noticed was the familiar journals that she herself had taken out of the library's basement. It seemed that Ally had indeed been using her academic prowess, even while hauled up here, out of the fight. She paced closer to the journals and papers that were spread across the table; scattered around the journals were colorful pens in more shades than she knew even existed in pen form. A pad of lined paper sat central in the mess of journals and pens. There it was: modern art, made even more so by the different colors that graced the page. That was certainly the very specific brand of bad handwriting shared by Dr. Greenbaum, Shiloh, and Nathaniel, yet none of the three of them would ever use that many colors for taking notes. This was someone else. Eve flipped through the pages of the pad that had been filled and pushed backwards with so much force that many of them were nearly torn out. She couldn't read any part of the notes; it was all too messy and there were too many Greek letters that she wasn't familiar enough with to try to figure it out.

She approached the couch where two muddy boot prints remained the only indication that someone had been there at all. Eve slipped off one of her heels and placed her bare foot over the boot print to confirm how large of a size it was. Definitely a man's.

"Who are you?" She asked the empty room.

In a shocking turn of events, the empty room gave her no response.

"What am I missing?" She asked herself this time.

Okay: two other people were here and they were reading through Greenbaum's journals. So far, the only person who had any hope at deciphering those journals had been Shiloh; however, she had already done it. If Eve remembered right, she had read through them and added little sticky notes with translation to make them more readable for everyone else. Sure, Shiloh had already gotten to all of them—already unearthed all the secrets. Yet, if Ally was going back through them, there must have been something specific that she was looking for. It was something that was important enough to keep Ally out of the game. Something that would have required Isla's medical knowledge. And something that tangled Eve herself up within it.