Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

Author:Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl [GARCIA, KAMI]
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: JUV026000
ISBN: 9780316071284
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2009-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

The steps were cold and mossy, the air dank. Wet things, scurrying things, burrowing things—it wasn’t hard to imagine them making themselves comfortable down here.

I tried not to think about Marian’s last words. I couldn’t imagine my mother coming down these stairs. I couldn’t imagine her knowing anything about this world I’d just stumbled onto, more like, this world that had stumbled onto me. But she had, and I couldn’t stop wondering how. Had she stumbled onto it too, or had someone invited her in? Somehow, it made it all seem more real, that my mother and I shared this secret, even if she wasn’t here to share it with me.

But I was the one here now, walking down the stone steps, carved and flat like the floor of an old church. Along either side of the stairs I could see rough stone boulders, the foundations of an ancient room that had existed on the site of the DAR building, long before the structure itself had been built. I looked down the stairs, but all I could see were rough outlines, shapes in the dark. It didn’t look like a library. It looked like what it probably was, what it had always been. A crypt.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the shadows of the crypt, countless tiny domes curved overhead where the columns jutted up into the vaulted ceiling, forty or fifty in all. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see that each column was different, and some of them were tilted, like crooked old oaks. Their shadows made the circular chamber seem like some kind of quiet, dark forest. It was a terrifying room to be in. There was no way of knowing how far back it went, since every direction dissolved into darkness.

Marian inserted her key into the first column, marked with a moon. The torches along the walls lit themselves, illuminating the room with flickering light.

“They’re beautiful,” Lena breathed. I could see her hair still twisting, and wondered how this place must feel to her, in ways I could never know.

Alive. Powerful. Like the truth, every truth, is here, somewhere.

“Collected from all over the world, long before my time. Istanbul.” Marian pointed to the tops of the columns, the decorated parts, the capitals. “Taken from Babylon.” She pointed to another one, with four hawk heads poking out from each side. “Egypt, the Eye of God.” She patted another, dramatically carved with a lion’s head. “Assyria.”

I felt along the wall with my hand. Even the stones of the walls were carved. Some were cut with faces, of men, creatures, birds, staring from between the forest of columns, like predators. Other stones were carved with symbols I didn’t recognize, hieroglyphs of Casters and cultures I’d never know.

We moved farther into the chamber, out of the crypt, which seemed to serve as some sort of lobby, and again torches burst into flame, one after another, as if they were following us. I could see that the columns curved around a stone table in the middle of the room.

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