Page 5 of Heartsong
“How long has he been like this?” asked June quietly without turning around.
“I believe the Gwyneths acquired him like that. They’ve done a lot of restoration to try and make sure nothing else happens, but no one knows where his arm or horn are.”
June made a sad noise in her throat, and Anna decided to leave her to it. She was really only here to chaperone, after all. June was already an expert.
She meandered slowly, liking the new perspective of the pieces at night. There were recessed lights in the walls, and some light from the city outside filtered in from the peaked skylight, but the room was still much dimmer than during the day, bathed in a soft blue. Anna liked the shadows that played across the statues’ stone faces. It made them look all the fiercer.
Twenty minutes must have passed as June and Anna slowly made their own ways down opposite sides of the gallery, June murmuring to herself or the statues and Anna pretending like she wasn’t itching to get to her statue.
It was only because she’d looked down at her wrist watch to check the time that she noticed the mist curling around her ankles.
Anna yelped, thinking at first it was smoke, but it didn’t burn the back of her throat like smoke. Looking around, she realized the mist billowed along the ground, about a foot tall. She took another breath but couldn’t smell anything.
Heart racing, she called out to June.
“I think something’s wrong,” she said, striding across the gallery.
The fact that her heels didn’t seem to make any noise along the hardwood made her breath quicken into a panicked staccato.
June blinked at her and then looked around, her brows shooting up her forehead.
“What—?”
The unzipping of nylon rope echoed across the gallery, and as if from nowhere, thick coils, like vines hanging from invisible trees, fell from the skylights above. Booted feet followed, and Anna watched in shock as a dozen men in black tactical gear slid down the ropes into the gallery.
There were shouts, men calling out to them, to one another.
Anna reached for June, but her hand was sluggish. She wobbled in her heels and felt her brain slosh against her skull when she turned too fast.
June stumbled nearby, hands out to keep her balance. She caught Anna’s gaze and blinked slowly. “Mist,” she said.
There was something in the mist.
Of course there’s something in the mist! Mist doesn’t happen in a museum gallery!
But Anna’s mind wasn’t working fast enough to register that. All she knew was that those dark figures were coming for them now, some with hands out, some with weapons already in their hands. She gulped at theclickof a gun’s safety being taken off.
“Run!” she cried to June and pushed her toward the nearest doorway. It led deeper into the museum, but there was no going the way they’d come with so many men and guns in the way.
June stumbled and clawed at the wall for support before disappearing into the next corridor. Anna followed, vision swimming, her limbs loose and wobbly like Jell-O left out at a barbeque. Her right heel caught on a chink in the floor, and it was enough to bring her down.
She hit the floor with athudshe heard but didn’t feel, the clipboard and papers disappearing in the thickening mist. She choked and coughed, the coolness of it slipping like fingers into her nostrils.
Anna scrabbled along the ground, feeling the vibrations of all those boots hitting the wood floor. There were so many, coming closer.
Heart pounding, her desperate fingers found the corner of something. She crawled closer, ducking behind one of the statue pedestals. Holding her breath, she reached up and grabbed the solid stone and hauled herself onto her knees, just out of the worst of the mist.
Gasping for breath, eyes watering, the room churned and blurred. In the back of her mind, she knew she needed to get up, follow June, call Carrie, call the cops, and most important, get the fuck outta here, but her legs didn’t want to move and her fingers didn’t want to unclench from the stone.
She looked up at the statue hiding her, the mist leaving her dazed rather than panicked.
Anna realized she hid behind her statue, the gray warrior. He loomed above the room, body angled and ready to deal with whoever the hell had just broken into the museum.
She grasped the thick curve of his calf to pull herself upright.
Something rent through the world—she wasn’t sure how or what, an invisible strike of lighting, potent and electric, that knocked her world on a new axis. The room crackled and shimmered with pinpoints of white light, and for a moment, Anna thought she was passing out.
The hard calf clutched in her hand grew warm.
