Page 7 of Shadows of the Lost Relic (Vanguard of the Ancients #1)

Chapter 7

Kane

T he morning after our first mission together, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. The mission had gone smoothly. Well, as smoothly as any mission could when we were dealing with cursed artifacts and shadowy cults. But there was a nagging at the back of my mind, like an itch I couldn’t scratch.

It wasn’t the mission itself that bothered me, although it had been way too easy. It was everything that had happened since Lyra showed up. She’d thrown our world into a tailspin, and the more time I spent around her, the more I realized how much she was affecting all of us. Me, Theo, Evan, and even Caspian, though he’d never admit it. It wasn’t just her skills, or the fact that she seemed to be the key to unlocking the mysteries we’d been chasing for years. It was deeper, more emotional, and none of us were ready to face it.

All of that had to take a backseat to the situation at hand. After we’d brought the Mirror of Shadows back to headquarters, Theo had insisted on locking it away in the Vault until we could figure out what to do with it. We all agreed it was the safest place for an artifact that dangerous. But the way Lyra looked at the Mirror before we sealed it away kept bothering me. It was like she could see something in it that the rest of us couldn’t.

After breakfast, I made my way to the Vault, finding Theo and Evan already there. The Vault was one of the most secure places in the headquarters—a fortified room deep underground, filled with shelves upon shelves of artifacts the Vanguard had collected over the years. We’d contributed a few shelves on our own. Most of the artifacts were dormant, their powers contained by the wards and seals we’d placed around them, but some of them—like the Mirror—were different. It was as if they were alive, still pulsing with the energy they’d been imbued with centuries ago.

From the middle of the room, Theo’s glare sharpened as he scrutinized the newly added artefact, which we had placed in a glass case for safety purposes. His expression was as intense as I had ever seen it, his brow furrowed in concentration as he stared at the artifact, as if it would somehow give up all of its secrets to him just because he willed it. Evan’s shadow engulfed the glass case. Still as a statue, arms crossed, his face difficult to read. He was either worried about Theo or angry with him. Sometimes it was hard to tell with Evan.

“Did I miss anything?” I asked, stepping up beside them. I had been up early, but not as early as them.

Evan rarely slept. He said the threads kept him awake, and I had to imagine it was difficult seeing them all the time. At least I only saw them when I called on them. And Theo would never admit it out loud, but he was the most competitive of all of us. If we had to get up early, he wanted to be up the earliest. He wasn’t the eldest, but he wanted everyone to think of him as the leader. It was a competition between him and Evan, one that Evan had never taken part in.

Theo shook his head. “It’s quiet now, but that won’t last long.”

Evan turned to me, his green eyes dark with concern. “We need to keep an eye on the Mirror. The mission isn’t sitting right with me.”

“No kidding. I got a front row seat last night, remember?” I muttered, staring at the Mirror. Its surface was dark, almost black, but I could swear I saw movement just beneath the surface. A shadow maybe, or a flicker of light? The thing was alive, watching us, waiting for the right moment to strike. And what better moment than when Lyra wasn’t with us?

“I’ve told Lyra to come down. She needs to be part of working out why this thing reacted the way it did,” Theo said, his voice calm but with an edge that told me he was just as bothered about what happened last night as the rest of us.

The skin of my bottom lip pulled tight as I frowned, worried that he was putting her in needless danger. Not to mention he had been against showing her where the Vault was. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? We don’t know what this thing is capable of.”

“She’s connected to it. We need to understand why, so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again. She was able to hold it in her hand without anything happening to her. When I reached out for it, darkness spilled everywhere.” Theo’s tone left no room for argument.

Although I didn’t like it, I trusted Theo’s instincts. He was rarely wrong about these things, and if he thought Lyra was the key to understanding the Mirror, then I had to go with it. That didn’t mean I had to like it. It worried me that Caspian wasn’t here, though. He knew more about warding and ancient artifacts than the three of us combined.

A few tense minutes later, Lyra stepped in through the Vault door.

Theo must have had one of the senior techs show her down here, because I knew she wouldn’t have been able to get here on her own. We may all like having her around, but she was still a thief. She looked tired—hell, we all did—but there was a sharpness in her eyes, a determination that I had seen a few times. In the museum, during her testing, and now. She’d been through a lot in the past few days, and she was handling it better than I expected. She was tougher than she looked. I could respect that.

“What’s going on?” she asked, her gaze flicking between the three of us before settling on the Mirror.

Theo gestured to the artifact. “We need you to take a look at it. See if you can sense anything.”

Lyra frowned, clearly uneasy as she took a step back. I didn’t want to get close to it either. “Why me?”

“Because you’ve got a connection to it. You’re a Scion of the Tooth Fairy, remember? That gives you certain abilities that we don’t fully understand. Some of those abilities might help us figure out what’s going on.” Evan was the one who piped up to calm her down. I looked between them, curious about what was going on. He usually took a long time to warm up to people. He wasn’t the one of us who was reassuring, but here he was, encouraging her.

She hesitated, and I could see the doubt in her eyes. She wasn’t used to taking orders, and I couldn’t blame her for that. I chafed under it sometimes, especially when they were coming from Theo. But this was different. This was bigger than any of us. We needed her to understand that.

“We won’t let anything happen to you. Just try.” And there Evan was with the comforting thing again. Oh, we were definitely going to be talking about this over a beer tonight. If I had competition for Lyra’s affection, I wanted to know it. I had been working on charming her since she arrived, and she was starting to warm up to me.

After looking at Evan for a long moment, Lyra nodded and stepped closer to the Mirror. I watched her carefully, my heart pounding in my chest as she reached out to touch the glass. Each of us held our breath, waiting. My instincts screamed at me to act, to stop her from touching it, but I kept a tight lid on them, my fists clenching in my pockets as I did my best to hide what I was feeling from everyone around me.

The moment her fingers brushed against the glass, the air in the room shifted. It was a subtle change in pressure, the atmosphere thickening around us. Lyra’s eyes widened, and though she flinched, she didn’t pull back. Instead, she pressed her palm flat against the glass, her brow furrowing in concentration.

At least there wasn’t darkness trying to attack us again. If I never felt the sensation of being consumed by nothingness again, it would be too soon. I had to suppress a shudder just thinking about it.

“What do you feel?” Theo asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

Trust him to lean into the creepiness of everything going on.

Lyra didn’t answer right away. She stood there, her hand on the glass, her eyes locked on the Mirror’s surface. Given what we knew of the Mirror, having her look at it that intensely had my anxiety skyrocketing. Her breaths were slow and measured, but I could see the tension in her body, the way her muscles coiled like a spring, ready to snap.

This needed to stop. She was clearly trapped. One of us needed to move, to act. I looked at Theo, but he was still as a statue, his focus on Lyra. Evan looked concerned, but he wasn’t doing anything.

Just as I was about to step forward, finally, she spoke. “It’s… alive. I can feel it. Like it’s trying to reach out to me.”

“What does it want?” I asked, my voice rougher than I intended. My hands opened and closed into fists at my sides. I had to force myself not to snatch her away from the glass, to bundle her into my arms and run out of here and far away from the cursed mirror.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head slightly. “It’s confused. Angry, maybe. But that’s not everything. It’s searching, but it doesn’t know what it’s looking for. I don’t think it’s searching for me. Maybe it wants me to help it find whatever it’s looking for?”

Theo exchanged a glance with Evan, who nodded. It was a look that spoke volumes; a silent communication that usually only came from years of working together. But we were triplets. We shared a womb; our connection went deeper than most people could comprehend.

“There’s more,” Lyra continued, her voice softer now, hesitant. “I can sense other artifacts, like this one is connected to them somehow. Like they’re all part of the same web.”

“A web of artifacts? Like a network? What does that mean?” I tried to wrap my head around what she was saying as I looked at the others. We really should have asked Caspian to come down here. I knew the others didn’t like to take him from his workshop unnecessarily, but this was important.

“I’m not sure,” Lyra admitted, finally pulling her hand away from the glass. She looked down at her hand, as if expecting to see some kind of mark left behind, but there was nothing. I was glad the darkness didn’t have hold of her. “But I can feel them. They’re out there, scattered, but they’re linked. The mirror is at the center.” She moved her fingers through the air as she spoke, tracing invisible lines.

A chill ran down my spine at her words. The idea of a network of powerful, cursed artifacts out there, all connected and potentially working together… it was the stuff of nightmares. If this Mirror was at the center, that meant we were dealing with events much bigger, and much more dangerous than we’d realized. Possibly more than we had ever dealt with before.

“We need to find out more,” Theo said, his tone grim. “If there are other artifacts out there, we need to locate them before anyone else does. If they’re connected, that could mean big trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer.

Evan’s soft voice interrupted, and it was only then that I realized he had moved in close to Lyra, gently running his hand up and down her spine. “A larger plan. Someone is trying to gather these artifacts for a reason. And if they succeed…”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence. We all knew what it could mean. A network of cursed artifacts in the wrong hands could spell disaster on a global scale. It was the kind of thing we were supposed to prevent, but if we were already behind the curve, if someone else had already started collecting them… we could be in serious trouble.

Lyra looked at us, her expression a mix of fear and determination. “What do we do? I mean, isn’t this what the Vanguard is for, what you’ve all been preaching to me this whole time?”

“We will track them down,” Theo said firmly. “We find the other artifacts and secure them before anyone else can, and we figure out what this Mirror is really after.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, looking over at him. “And how do we do that? It’s not like these things come with a manual.”

Theo gave me a look, one of those ‘don’t be an idiot’ looks he was so good at. He had perfected them before he was a pre- teen. “We start with the Mirror. Evan can figure out what it’s connected to, and we follow the trail.”

I glanced at Lyra, who looked just as uncertain as I felt. She’d handled herself well so far, but this was a whole new level of responsibility. I wasn’t sure how she was going to handle it.

There was a growing thought gnawing at me. I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it, but I couldn’t keep ignoring it, especially with the way she and Evan were looking at each other. It wasn’t just the mission that was making things complicated, it was Lyra herself. The way she had looked when she touched the Mirror, the way she understood things instinctively that the rest of us couldn’t even begin to grasp… it was as if she belonged here, as if she had always been part of this. If there was a connection between the Mirror and the other artifacts, Evan should have seen it straight away, but he hadn’t said anything.

That scared the hell out of me. Sure, we had seen Lyra coming, but had the others seen how important she was and not told me? Because the more time I spent around her, the more I realized I was starting to care. Not just about her safety, but about her. And I wasn’t the only one.

I could see it in the way Theo looked at her, the way Evan’s eyes softened whenever she was around. It was happening fast. Way too fast. We’d barely known her a few days, and already she was becoming more important to us than any artifact, any mission. Emotions like that were dangerous. They could get you killed. They could make you hesitate when you should act, make you second-guess yourself at the worst possible moment. In our line of work, hesitation was a death sentence.

The danger wasn’t the worst of it. It was the way she made me feel like there was more out there beyond the constant grind of missions and danger. Like there was a reason to fight beyond just doing the right thing. And that was a feeling I had been missing for a long time. She made me feel like we were here for more than just fate, like we were here for her.

I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to admit my feelings for her were getting stronger by the day. Stronger than just flirting and a little lust. It was there, simmering beneath the surface, and I knew it was only a matter of time before it came to a head. We all felt it. We all knew it. But none of us were willing to be the first to say it. Not yet, anyway.

For now, we had bigger things to worry about. The Mirror of Shadows was just the beginning. If there really was a network of artifacts out there, connected and waiting to be unleashed, then we had our work cut out for us.

As I watched Lyra leave the Vault, her expression still tinged with uncertainty, I couldn’t help but wonder what was going to happen when all this was over. Would she stay with us, or would she move on, leaving us behind? Would we even all survive this? We could see death, all three of us. Theo saw how people died, Evan’s threads told him when people died, and I knew where people were going to die. It was just a feeling, but we could never sense our own deaths. Would we sense Lyra’s if it was coming? I didn’t have the answers. All I knew was that I wasn’t ready to let her go. Not yet.