Emily Carter hates Old Things.
The yellowing pages, the dusty antiques, the stones engraved with ghostly runes, were just dumb dead things in her eyes.
Their only value was to be tagged and locked away in the Library's temperature-controlled storage room as a cold footnote to her doctoral thesis.
What she is after is logic, chain of evidence, history that can be clearly categorized, not the ethereal"Soul".
Her brother Jonathan is different. He was a hopeless romantic archaeologist who always said that every antique had a soul, if only you learned to listen.
As a child, he would drag Emily around the museum all day, pointing at a broken piece of pottery and describing the mood of the craftsmen as they fired it. Emily always thought there was something wrong with him.
A week ago, Jonathan disappeared.
The policeman's reply was polite and formulaic, saying he was probably just going to a remote site for a"Secret dig" and would pop up on his own in a few days.
But Emily knew it wasn't.
Jonathan was a hyper-presenter, a near-obsessive planner who would text her the estimated round-trip time to buy milk on the corner. This kind of disappearing act was something he would never do.
The last message he left before he disappeared was a photo sent at 3:17 a.m. with no location. The picture shows an odd-looking ring, a silver snake, its scales carved to life, and the heads of the two snakes biting together to form an irregular ring.
The snake's eye is set in the position of two dark red, almost black gems that, in the flash of a cell phone, look like two black holes sucking out light. Beneath the photo was Jonathan's usual dramatic voice: "Snake with two heads. Amy, I found the key."
Keys? To what?
Emily ransacked the photo and all the notes her brother had left. His apartment was in a state of disrepair, not as if it had been looted, but as if it had been disturbed by its owner in a state of extreme excitement or panic.
The notes were filled with symbols and horoscopes she couldn't read, and a word that kept repeating itself: "Guardian.". On the inside cover of one of the notebooks, she found a barely legible line, scribbled over and over: "Van Helsing's eyes are watching."
Her gut told her the answer was in the ring.
Using her access to the library, Emily pulled up all the library records about the Ouroboros. She kept herself in the library for two days, surviving on coffee. Among the reams of data, she found the only record that almost exactly matched the ring in the photograph.
It was a 17th-century private catalogue, the paper crisp as autumn leaves. The item, known as the ring of Dracula, was last seen at Raven and Key, an antique shop in London.
It has no phone, no website, just an address, tucked away in one of London's oldest alleys where even google maps gives only a vague outline. The alley is called Cinder Alley, a name long forgotten in modern cities.
As Emily stood at the door of Raven and the key, it was raining in London in that trademark endless drizzle. The rain wetted the shoulders of her trench coat and made it cool.
The air smelled of wet slate and the nearby Thames. The door was made of heavy oak, so dark it was black, and on it hung a rusty brass knocker, carved into the shape of a crow with a key in its mouth, and the Crow's eyes polished like two cold eyes, watching her motionlessly.
She hesitated for a moment, then finally pushed open the door. The door hinge let out a long groan, like some ancient creature whose sleep had been disturbed. The smell of old wood, dried herbs, and cold metal filled her nose and made her frown.
The shop was dark, the only light coming from a yellow lamp behind the counter. The light is cut into beams by the dust in the air, illuminating the outlines of thousands of grotesque antiques.
Rusted armor hangs on the walls, a faded globe stands in a corner, and a glass case holds specimens of weirdly colored butterflies. It was more like a private collector's mausoleum than a shop.
A man, with his back to her, was slowly wiping a medieval sword with a colorless cloth. He moved intently, as if he and the sword were the only thing left in the world.
"We're closed." The Man's voice was low, echoing in the silence of the store with an implacable coolness.
"I'm not here to buy anything," Emily said as she approached the cold wooden counter, which gave her goose bumps. She pushed her phone over and there was a picture of the ring on the screen. "I'm looking for it."
The man stopped wiping his sword. He turned, and Emily saw his face.
He was young, about twenty-seven or twenty-eight at most, with dark hair and a pallor of skin that had not seen the sun for years. But his eyes were gray, a color that precipitated too much, like the sea before a storm, so calm it did not stir.
He glanced at the picture, held his gaze for less than a second, then looked up at Emily. The look was like a scalpel, slicing through her disguise with such precision that she felt all her anxieties and fears were palpable.
"Didn't your brother tell you that there are some things you should never touch?"
Emily's heart jerked, the blood rushing to her head and a ringing in her ears. He knew Jonathan. He knew everything.
"Where is he?" Her voice tightened, her nails digging into her palms.
The Man didn't answer. Instead, he took a black velvet box from under the counter, opened it, and shoved it in front of her. Inside lay the two-headed snake ring.
It was older than it looked in the pictures, its scales glowed darkly in the light, and its two black jeweled eyes seemed to be watching her.
"Jonathan left it here," the man said. "You can have it."
It was an understatement, but it made Emily's hair stand on end. Would Jonathan"Drop" what he called"The key"?
Not a chance. It was more like a trap, a decoy in front of her.
She held out her hand, fingertips touching the ring, and the man spoke.
"Think before you put it on. Once you put it on, you become a target for them."
"Who are they?" Emily pressed, her heart pounding in her chest.
"You don't want to know." The man picked up his sword and cloth again and resumed his movements, every detail of which was meticulous. He never looked at her again, as if she didn't exist.
Emily's finger paused over the ring for a few seconds. Fear and reason were screaming for her to leave, but the thought of Jonathan's smirking face made her break her heart, pick up the ring, and slip it over her index finger.
The ring was cold, the right size, the right fit, as if it had been made for her.
As soon as she put the ring on, all the clocks in the antique shop, whose hands were set to different times, stopped at twelve o'clock. The mixed taste, a lot of silk if there is no blood gas, very light, but really let her stomach a fan stir.
Emily's scalp was tingling. She grabbed the velvet box, turned around and hurried out of the antique shop, even forgetting to ask the man his name. All she wanted to do was get out of this hellhole as soon as possible and return to the world of light and sound.
She did not see, behind her, the man looked up, gray eyes through the shop's dusty glass, watching her disappear into the rain behind. He lowered his sword, unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt, and on the inside of his pale wrist was a faint two-headed snake brand, darker than the surrounding skin, like an old scar that had long since healed.