Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls by Mark Teppo

credit for stopping Bernard. In your True Record, you were the one who destroyed the Key."
    His gaze was hooded, the glint of magick in his eyes nearly invisible. That inscrutable exterior. That marble façade. I was starting to realize how much it revealed about him.
    "I take it you're not going to disagree with him?" I asked as I stood up. I wasn't wearing socks or shoes. They were neatly piled on the dresser, along with my ruined coat and the contents of my pockets.
    He shook his head. "I was protecting your anonymity," he said. "We had to discern the Hierarch's vision of the Weave. A global manhunt for you wasn't going to help us figure out what was going on."
    "Of course not," I said, wandering toward the dresser. I was a little unsteady. Some lingering muscle twinges from Charles' magick wand. "That would have been distracting. And who knows how long it would have taken for them to track me down?"
    "Yes," he said. "Exactly." A little too eager to agree with me.
    "Though, with you being the True Witness to the event, and reaping the reward of being the badass who stopped their plan, you certainly got back in the Old Man's favor. All sins forgiven, perhaps?"
    "Perhaps."
    I tried to be casual about my inventory of the items on the dresser. New passport for Michael Dupont, my ready-made alias for this trip. Nearly empty wallet with one credit card, some business cards, and a couple hundred Euros. Velvet bag of tarot cards. A pack of spearmint gum I had bought in Heathrow, along with a page torn out of a magazine: a mention of the Archimedes Palimpsest. The conservation team had finished disbinding the manuscript a while back, and the news was finally getting out in the journals. I had a client who'd be disappointed; he had wanted access to it before they tore it apart.
    What was missing from my personal effects was the key and the ring.
    The key was old and made of iron. The ornamental bow had been smashed into an ugly lump, and the teeth had been slippery, wavering in and out of focus. A piece of paper had been previously attached with a loop of thin string, the word "Abbadon" written on the scrap, but I had ditched both the paper and the envelope the key had come in during my layover in England.
    The ring was a platinum band, set with three opals. On the inside of the ring were fine lines of arcane script, old magick I hadn't had a chance to decipher. The ring of a king, the circular seal of a thousand-plus years of history. It had gone on my finger quite easily and I had only taken it off and put it in my coat so as to not get comfortable wearing it.
    "We had a deal," I said, picking up my coat and checking the pockets. Just in case. "We were going to work together."
    "We are," Antoine said. There was nothing in his face but that placid serenity that challenged me to be the one to say otherwise.
    Could I trust him? I wondered. All history between us aside, did we really have enough of a common enemy to work together? Or was everything he said on the riverbank in Portland just what I had wanted to hear? Was he manipulating me to his own end?
    Ask him, the Chorus challenged. Ask him for the ring and key back. Ask him as his liege. Ask him as is your right.
    "Is there something else?" Antoine asked, prodding me in my hesitation.
    I wanted to know why. From Antoine as well as the Chorus. Why was it important that I force this issue? If he had the missing items—and I didn't see any reason why he hadn't taken them; they had been in my pocket when we had left the train—why would he give them back because I asked? He knew I couldn't take them from him. So why wouldn't he just deny having them?
    "You're not telling me everything," I said, and I wasn't sure if I was talking exclusively to Antoine.
    "Neither are you." He smiled. "But at least we're being honest about it. I'd call that progress."
     
    Antoine and I have, at best, a tempestuous relationship. We were brothers in the Weave, fellow Watchers who came up through the