Read Chapter 27: Dome of Power

The service stairs were never meant for combat. Eamon learned that in the first ten seconds, when the possessed guard came at him from above with a gladius that hissed through the air where his throat had been. He threw himself sideways, felt the cold iron rail bite into his spine, and kicked out blindly. His boot connected with a knee. The guard grunted but didn't fall—these weren't men anymore, they were flesh puppets with two thousand years of battlefield instinct wired into their limbs.

"The stairwell's a funnel," Maggie shouted from below, already clambering past a crumpled body they'd put down two floors earlier. "We can't go up this way."

"We don't have another way." Eamon caught the next thrust on his forearm—the Keeper's Mark flared silver-hot, and the blade skittered off like it had struck marble. The guard paused, head tilting with something that might have been confusion. The scarab's mark was making Eamon's arm harder than bone, but each deflection cost him. The buzzing under his skin was louder now, hungrier, like it was drinking the energy from every blow.

He drove forward. Headbutt to the bridge of the guard's nose. The man—the cultist inside him, whoever he'd been before this—went down in a tangle of limbs and polished armor. Eamon stepped over him and kept climbing.

"Check the knife wound on your thigh," Maggie said, appearing at his side. Her hand was already pressed against his leg, coming away dark. "When did that happen?"

"Somewhere between the Roman gallery and my third near-death experience." Eamon pulled her up the next flight. "It'll hold."

The stairs ended at a steel fire door marked with a faded crown insignia. Beyond it, the glass and steel cathedral of the Great Court waited, turned night-dark and humming with a frequency that made Eamon's teeth ache. The building groaned around them, a low tectonic sound that vibrated through the concrete floor.

"Thirty minutes," Maggie said, checking her watch. "Maybe less. The door under the east wing—"

"I know." Eamon pushed the door open a crack.

The Great Court was transformed. The reading room at its center, normally a quiet ivory drum, now glowed like a furnace heart. Vance stood on its circular roof, silhouetted by a column of light that rose from the floor below—the Codex open at her feet, pages whipping in a wind that existed only inside the court's dome. Above her, the glass panels of the roof were alive with crawling shadows. Greek dracones. Egyptian serpents. Norse wyrm shapes, long and coiling. They pressed against the glass from outside, mouths open, desperate to enter.

Between Eamon and Vance's platform, the floor was a battlefield. Twenty, thirty guards arranged in loose rings, some holding ancient weapons, some holding nothing but their own naked fanaticism. And scattered among them, the artifacts she'd already corrupted. A samurai katana that floated at waist height, turning slowly. An Aztec obsidian club. Three Roman pila standing in a bundle like a farmer's sheaf, each one crackling with stolen lightning.

The scale in Eamon's pocket—his last physical link to the dragon's bargain—grew hot. The gold fragment pressed against his ribs, still wrapped in its cloth, waiting for its single perfect moment.

"Distraction," Maggie whispered. "You need chaos to cross that floor. I can give you thirty seconds."

"Not enough."

"Forty-five, if I'm generous." She was already moving, pulling something from her belt—a fire extinguisher she'd grabbed from the stairwell wall. "I watched the guards' formation. They're synced to her energy. If I break the pattern—"

A scream cut through the court, and both of them froze.

Vance had stopped chanting. She stood at the edge of the roof platform, looking down at them with a smile that was too wide, too knowing. And beside her, held by two guards, was Wainwright. The old curator's face was swollen, glasses gone, but his eyes found Eamon with a desperate clarity.

"You're too late," Vance called down, her voice amplified by the Codex's energy so it seemed to come from the glass itself. "The dome is keyed. I don't need the sacrifice anymore—only the alignment."

"Then why's he still alive?" Eamon shouted back.

"Insurance." She laughed, and the sound shattered against the walls. "You have something of mine, guard. The scales. I can feel them calling to you. Bring them up, or I'll let the storm take him first."

Eamon looked at Maggie. She shook her head once, sharply. The scales were the only anchor they had—without them, the binding tools were useless.

"Give me the whistle," he said quietly.

Maggie's eyes went wide. "That's for the blade. One use, Eamon. One—"

"The blade's gone. Vance was right; it was never under the Tower. It was always going to be here, in the one place she needed it most." He pulled the gold fragment from his pocket, watching it catch the unholy light above. "She thinks she's got the scales. She doesn't know what they do when they're separated from the Codex. She doesn't know what they're *for*."

He didn't say the rest. That the scarab's mark was burning brighter now, a slow spreading fire under his skin that promised payment was due. That the howl beneath the museum had reached a pitch that seemed to shake his bones. That Danny's lock of hair, now woven into the mark itself, was pulling him toward the dome's apex like a compass needle to true north.

Maggie pressed the bone whistle into his palm. Her fingers lingered. "Come back from this."

"That's the plan."

The wind inside the court rose, lifting loose papers and scraps of cloth into a cyclone. Vance raised her arms, and the shadows on the glass above her began to take form—great winged silhouettes that beat against the pane. The storm of mythologies was almost here. The door beneath the museum was almost open. Everything was converging on this single glass room at the heart of London, and Eamon Cole—former soldier, debt-carrier, unwanted guardian of things that should have stayed buried—had exactly one breath to decide how to end it.

He thought of Danny, who had died chasing a warning. Of Wainwright, who had hidden the Codex for decades. Of the general's rose, still blooming on an altar in the dark below.

Then he put the whistle to his lips.

The sound that came out wasn't a whistle. It was a raw, ragged note that went through Eamon like a wire—and past him, into the glass, into the steel, into the foundations of the museum. It didn't stop at the Great Court. It traveled down, through the floors, through the galleries, through the sealed door in the east wing, all the way to the shrieking, furious thing that had been clawing its way up from beneath London for thousands of years.

The door went silent.

For one endless fraction of a second, the world held its breath. The shadows on the glass stopped moving. The guards swayed, their puppeteer's concentration broken. Vance's eyes went wide and white, her hands flying to her ears as the note found her—

And then the whistle reached its limit and cracked in Eamon's palm. The halves fell away, and he was already moving.

He crossed the floor at a sprint, through stunned guards who tried to reform ranks. The samurai katana swooped toward his head; he ducked under it, and the blade sliced through the Aztec club instead. The Roman pila lashed out with a whip-crack of electricity that missed his shoulder by inches and hit the glass dome above, spider-webbing a crack across the paneling.

Behind him, Maggie had reached Wainwright—pulling him free, dragging him toward cover.

Vance was screaming something. Eamon couldn't hear it over the roar in his ears. He reached the base of the reading room's curved wall, found the handholds that centuries of maintenance workers had worn into the stone, and climbed.

The light from the Codex was blinding. The gold fragment was so hot in his grip that his palm had begun to smoke, and the Keeper's Mark screamed through his arm, through his chest, through his eyes.

He crested the platform and lunged.

Vance turned, and suddenly the Codex was in his reach—open, ancient, screaming with the power of every civilization that had ever raised a stone or carved a name. Eamon's hand closed on the binding fragment.

The scales in his pocket flared white.

And the world turned upside down.