Read Chapter 24: Betrayal in the Gallery

The stone door’s shriek had softened to a low, rhythmic groan, like something breathing in its sleep. Eamon leaned against the base of the Roman altar, the rose petals crushed in his fist, the golden scales pressed cool against his chest where the dragon had allowed them to rest. His ribs ached. His lungs tasted of dust and old magic.

Maggie was at his side before he could speak, her torch beam sweeping the gallery. “You look like death warmed over,” she said, but her voice was thinner than her words. She crouched, checking his pupils with two fingers, then his pulse at the wrist.

“The dragon—” he started.

“Saw the light show from the corridor,” she cut him off. “Jade cage, then a burst of gold, then you stumbling out looking like you’d run a marathon through a coal mine.” She helped him to his feet. “Did it work? The bargain?”

Eamon touched the scales through his shirt. They hummed—not the cold, alien vibration of before, but something warmer. Settled. Like a heartbeat that had finally found its rhythm. “The debt’s cleared,” he said. “The dragon’s part, at least. I’m still breathing.”

“Small mercies.” Maggie’s eyes flicked to the shattered display case behind him, where the jade dragon now sat inert, its carved eyes dull as stone. “We need to move. That howl under the east wing is getting worse by the minute, and if the door’s opening, we’re running on a clock I don’t like.”

Eamon nodded, pushing off the altar. His legs held. Barely.

They moved through the Egyptian gallery in silence, past the mummified cats and the towering statues of gods whose names he’d never learned. The air was colder here, heavier, and the shadows between the display cases seemed to lean in as they passed. Maggie kept one hand on her radio, the other on her torch, her footsteps quick and measured.

They were halfway across the vast hall when the lights snapped off.

Not a flicker. Not a dim. A full, absolute kill-switch plunge into black so complete that Eamon’s eyes had nothing to anchor on. Maggie’s torch died with a pop, sparks cascading down her arm.

“Eamon,” she whispered.

“I’m here.” He reached for her in the dark, found her shoulder, squeezed. “Stay close.”

A voice came from ahead of them, amplified by the gallery’s stone acoustics. Calm. Familiar. Almost kind.

“Maggie. I did hope you’d have left by now.”

The emergency lighting kicked in—a thin, red emergency glow that painted the hall in arterial hues. And there, twenty feet ahead, standing on the raised platform before the Rosetta Stone’s case, was Vance.

The curator had shed her usual cardigan and sensible shoes. She wore a long black coat that brushed the floor, and in her hands, cradled like a sacrament, were the golden scales.

Eamon’s stomach dropped. He hadn’t even felt them taken.

“How—” he started, his hand going to his chest where the scales had rested. The chain was cut. Cleanly. A single surgical slice through the leather cord.

Maggie’s voice was ice. “Vance. You’re the one.”

“The one what? The one who catalogued your shifts so you could sneak around after hours? The one who made sure the museum’s insurance would cover tonight’s inevitable ‘electrical failure’?” Vance smiled, and in the red light it looked like a crack in her face. “I’m many things, Maggie. Tonight, I’m the one who finishes what the cult started a hundred years ago.”

Eamon’s mind raced. Wainwright’s words came back to him—*the curator was compromised*—and he’d assumed it meant someone above her. Someone pulling strings. But it was her. It had always been her.

“You’ve been feeding us to the door,” he said slowly. “Every guard who vanished on the night shift. Every ‘transfer’ that never came through. You picked people with debts—soldiers, criminals, the broken—and you fed them to the stone.”

Vance tilted her head, amused. “Not fed. *Settled*. Their debts became the door’s fuel. A transaction. The cult spent decades collecting the right kind of souls—those who owed the world something and never paid. The door doesn’t need the innocent. It needs the *guilty*.”

Maggie’s torch clattered to the floor. “You killed them.”

“I repurposed them,” Vance corrected, her voice still soft, still pleasant. “But you’re right to be upset. It was never my favorite part of the work. Ritual, however, requires precision. And tonight, we have a perfect alignment: the door nearly open, the scales in my possession, and every mythological being in this building about to offer me their power.”

The scales in her hands pulsed, a low gold throb that matched the emergency light.

Eamon stepped forward. “You can’t. The Codex meant for the crescent blade to be the vessel. You don’t have it.”

Vance laughed—a genuine, musical sound that was somehow worse than her coldness. “The blade? Oh, Eamon. That was always a decoy. A lovely, distracting fiction for the men who thought they could play this game. Wainwright believed it. The cult believed it. I *made* sure the Codex said what I wanted it to say.”

She turned the scales in her hand, watching the light catch their surface. “The blade was never the vessel. The dome is. From the Great Court’s glass ceiling, I can draw on every myth in this building—all at once. Athena’s wisdom. Thor’s storm. Anubis’s judgment. Every single god, goddess, and minor spirit who’s ever had a piece of themselves on display here. They’ll have no choice. They’ll pour themselves into me.”

“And then what?” Maggie’s voice cracked. “You become a god? You rule London?”

“I become the *first*,” Vance said, and for a moment her composure slipped, something hungry and ancient flickering behind her eyes. “The first true immortal in two thousand years. The cult’s purpose wasn’t to open a door to *some* power, Maggie. It was to open a door to *all* of it. And I am the lock that fits.”

She stepped off the platform, the scales held tight against her chest. Eamon moved to intercept her, but his legs buckled—the dragon’s cage had taken more out of him than he’d thought, and his body was still paying the debt of the vision.

Vance walked past him, unhurried, and paused just before the gallery’s exit. She looked back over her shoulder, and in the red light her face was almost gentle.

“You did well, Eamon. More than the cult could have hoped for. You cleared the dragon’s debt, earned the scales’ trust, brought them to the surface exactly when I needed them.” She smiled. “Your service is appreciated.”

“I’m not done,” he forced out.

“You’re not even close.” Vance’s smile thinned. “But you’re also not my problem anymore. The door will open in forty minutes, whether you’re here to greet it or not. And when it does, everything in this building—every myth, every monster, every story—will answer to me.”

She stepped through the door, and the darkness swallowed her.

Maggie was at Eamon’s side in an instant, hauling him upright. “She has the scales. She has *everything*.”

“Not yet.” He forced the words through gritted teeth. “She needs the dome. The ritual needs da—dawn. She said it herself—perfect alignment. We still have time.”

“Time for what? She took your weapon, your artifact, and your legs are about to give out.” Maggie’s voice was desperate, but her grip was steady. “We need Wainwright. He knew she was compromised. Maybe he knows something else.”

Eamon shook his head. “Wainwright gave me the whistle and vanished. We don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

“Then we need a plan,” Maggie said. “A stupid one. One she won’t see coming.”

Eamon’s hand went to his pocket, where the bone whistle still rested—fragile, cool, its half-minute of calm still unspent. And beside it, the gold fragment from the blade’s casing, small and sharp, waiting for a purpose.

He didn’t know how to use them. He didn’t know if they’d be enough.

But he also didn’t have a choice.

“The Great Court,” he said. “She’ll need to climb to the glass dome. That takes time—there’s no elevator to the rafters. We go up the service stairs, cut her off before she starts.”

“And if she’s already started?”

Eamon met her eyes in the red dark. “Then we settle the debt we owe.”

He hadn’t meant it as a double meaning, but Maggie caught it. Her hand tightened on his arm, and for a moment, she looked like she wanted to argue. Instead, she just nodded.

They moved through the dark together, two shadows in a museum of sleeping gods, racing toward the light of a dawn neither of them was sure they’d live to see.