Trust: Book One: Between Lions Series

By Jodi Baker

TRUST is a young adult, mythological, urban fantasy thrill ride about the darkly fantastical, supernatural Libraries that have secretly protected humanity’s greatest treasures for millennia, and Anna, the sixteen-year-old New York girl who is the unknowing Heir to it all.

Author Jodi Baker’s breathtakingly unique brand of storytelling weaves magical mysticism, forbidden romance, and shocking plot twists into this electrifying first installment of her critically acclaimed Between Lions Series that USA Today called, "Must-Read YA"!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780986431708

Book preview

ending.

PROLOGUE

MARCH 13, 413 AD

They burst through the gates at sunset, ready to destroy what had taken centuries to collect: all of my father’s work and each Head Librarian’s before him… all the way back to Ptolemy.

Halls that had existed for millennia, whose walls had survived Caesar and his invading armies, were now being ravaged by the city’s own inhabitants. In every room I passed, scrolls were being seized, torn, and hurled into the pyres, but I did not dare to stop. I put my head down and kept running, knowing I needed to make it to the Stairs.

Until one of them recognized me.

"That’s her! That is Hypatia!"

Hypatia? But she is dead!

"I swear - it is her!"

"Get Cyril! Get him in here! Tell him: Hypatia is still alive!"

Every exit was blocked and I had been found.

But they did not know about the Key.

I twisted out of reach and rushed down the stone steps that led to my father’s study. Once inside, I climbed over the Anubis statue that was now lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. That statue had been hiding the Door for millennia. I said a silent thank you to the Ushabti for doing its job so well. I fought the desperate urge to escape now, before they caught me here, alone, defenseless, but-

The Door had rules.

A human cannot survive beyond the Door alone, I recalled my father’s warning, even as my fingers fumbled at my neck for the Key.

I must wait for my Guardian, I told myself, sliding around the room to extinguish all candles and torches. As I blew out the last of them, the gold-tipped ears and eyes of the statue gleamed up at me, right before the windowless room went black.

Styx swore she would come back for me. She does not lie.

Smoke curled up from the crack beneath the office door making it hard to breathe, but I still waited. Shelves collapsed, statues crashed, and I heard screams from familiar voices being silenced by the slicing of throats, but I did not waver.

The day will come when their descendants will weep for what was done here.

There was a chorus of voices moving closer until I could hear them above and around me, like a childhood nightmare of monsters.

Any minute my Guardian will burst through the door and save me.

But she didn’t. Instead, Cyril and his men stepped into the office and I locked eyes with the man who had ordered my death.

Is it her?

Oh yes, Cyril’s face lit up as if the fires of the mob were now burning him from within. That is Hypatia.

If I go through the Door without a Guardian, I will die. But I have no other choice.

I took my last breath of earthly air, yanked the Key from around my neck and lunged. The jackal-headed Knob yawned to accept it.

What is the witch doing?

I pulled the Door open and stepped through, saying the ancient word that would release the lock so that no one could follow me. When they managed to pry the Door back open, they would find it led straight into the wall.

Right before I closed the Door, I saw Cyril smile. I understood better than he did that this moment was going to prove that everything he had ever accused me of was true. Reading those ancient scrolls had, in fact, put pagan magic at my disposal.

But no matter what lies they told about me, I had won.

I had fulfilled my destiny.

I had saved the Great Library.

-From Hypatia’s Book of Truth

CHAPTER ONE

My mother was telling the truth when she told me that the ordinary is much safer than the extraordinary. 

Inside this house, you are very important, Anna, she had said, holding me close. But when you are out there, don’t ever be extraordinary. Outside our house you must pretend to be middle of the pack.

Middle of the pack was our mantra. It was the rule we lived by outside of the supposed safety of our brownstone. By the age of three, I had already learned not to talk enough to be remembered, but not to be so silent as to be noticed. 

Don’t trust strangers, she told me.

Back then I had imagined they would try to lead me off the path like a wicked wolf. 

No, she said sternly. This isn’t a fairy tale, Anna. This isn’t a story. This is your life. I am the only one you can count on. Stay in the middle!

Riding the subway, I sat in the middle of the train. 

Standing people don’t stare at sitting people unless they, or the people they are looking at, are crazy. Sitting people watch standing people, look out the window, or read, but they don’t stare at other sitting people. 

When I went out in the city, I always walked in the middle of the sidewalk. 

Busy New Yorkers weave through and past the middle too quickly to notice anything particular about you. Standing on the outside or the inside allows you to be seen, my mother warned and I obeyed.

Back then I always obeyed. 

Getting seen at school wasn’t an issue, since I never went. My mother taught me herself, at home. I was reading by the time I was two-and-a-half, but she didn’t have me at an advanced level as far as New York State was concerned. She sat with me as I filled out the tests, making sure I got just enough right and just enough wrong. 

Instead of learning to draw circles and sing the alphabet song, I traced hieroglyphs and danced around the apartment acting out all of the parts of the fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Every day we’d sit on our comfy, tattered, red velvet couch and discuss something amazing like the disappearance of the Mayans or how many mitochondria could be in a tiny cell. We’d compare the ancient Roman and modern American systems of government against Hammurabi’s Eye-for-an-Eye code, take turns listing the next number in the Fibonacci Series, or giggle together at the idea of pigs with wings. The more I learned, the more my mother pushed me like an academic centurion, hurling a daily stream of never-ending, no-wrong-answers-allowed quiz questions at me on every conceivable subject, expecting me to answer not just in English, but Greek, Egyptian, and Latin as well. 

I loved every second of it.

There was only one thing I ever thought was missing: a friend my own age. Before I was a teenager, I’d only actually talked to another kid once. Even though I didn’t know his name, he was my first and only friend.

My mother would take me downtown with her twice a year to sell or barter for books. The bookshop wasn’t the kind of store you’d find at a mall; it was a labyrinth of bookshelves, full of what looked like priceless antiques, but whose titles were no longer legible, interspersed with huge glass cabinets showcasing first editions on well-lit pedestals. The floors and walls were covered in dust, but the treasures on the shelves were always pristine and the space in between the stacks was always empty.

Except one day, when tiptoeing through the maze of shelves, I came upon a boy a year or two older than me, sprawled out on the floor. 

I panicked, the way you would if you came across a lion lounging in a store aisle. 

My initial instinct was to back away quietly, but then our eyes met and I froze.

He smiled.

I didn’t.

His fingers were tangled up in a mess of colorful strings. A deeper look revealed that it was some kind of intricate circle of cords. Extending out from that inner sphere, like rays of the sun, were ornate, frayed strands that had been twisted into different sized and shaped knots.

It’s a Kee-poo, he said.

I wanted to laugh at the name, but the fact that he was acting as if I had asked, as if we were having a conversation - which, I had never really had with anyone besides my mother - was too gigantic. I took a few steps back.

You don’t want to see?

Disappointment was threaded through his words. The urge to please was apparently stronger than my need to flee because I moved towards him. He flashed a grin my way as a reward and then lifted the cords up to his face. The elaborate fringe framed his head like a mane. As the boy rose to stand beside me the sunlight hit, making the dust mites that floated between the multi-colored strings look like fairy dust. 

The knots talk, he whispered to me, making the other-worldliness of the moment even more potent. 

My eyes widened.

Not out loud; the knots talk the way lines and swirls on paper talk.

I knew, instantly, that he meant, like letters on a page.

Most people can’t read them, he said. Most people can only read the alphabet, but I like to read other things too, like glyphs.

To this day, I have no idea how the words managed to exit my well-trained-in-the-art-of-not-talking-to-strangers-mouth, but somehow, I found myself telling him: 

I love glyphs. 

Me too!

I felt the invisible magic strands that stretched between us quadruple and then entwine, binding us together. 

You must read a lot, he commented.

How do you know that?

The grin came again. Because you smell like books.

I stared at him.

Want me to show you how to read the Kee-poo?

Before I could answer, my mother’s hand closed around my arm. She pulled me backwards, my heels dragging as I watched the only friend I had ever made get smaller and further away.

When we got into the cab outside of the store, my mother didn’t say a word. It wasn’t until after we were uptown and safely locked behind the brownstone door that she grabbed and shook me. I was shocked. My mother had never spoken harshly to me until that moment, at least as far as I can remember. I’ll never forget how her eyes sparked like a blue-gold gas flame, or the way the normally tan skin on her face turned sickly pale. 

She was afraid. I know that now. 

"You cannot talk to strangers. Once you open your mouth, they will know how smart you are. If anyone finds out you’re smart, they’ll take you from me," she told me hoarsely and I felt myself start to tremble. 

I looked at my beautiful mother and saw the most extraordinary woman in the world, my heart, my home, and my safety blanket. She was everything I knew. My lower lip quivered and tears blurred her from my sight. When she hugged me, I breathed deeply, inhaling her lavender and laundry scent, but her comfort made me more hysterical. 

I hadn’t known until that moment that I could lose her. 

She smoothed my un-smooth-able hair and kissed my tears away.

I know it’s hard. But we don’t want anyone asking questions. The only way to stay together is for them to think you are like everyone else. Just stick to the middle of the pack, she preached and I swallowed that sermon into my heart and bones. 

But later that night when my mother wasn’t looking, I looked up Kee-poo knots. I told myself that it wasn’t disobedience… it was just research.

I used to convince myself of a lot of things like that.

The search engine informed me that Kee-poo was actually Quipu, an ancient Incan Writing System. They had used cord color, length, knot type, knot location, and the way the cords were twisted to record their stories the way Egyptians used glyphs on papyrus. 

I also found out that Spanish invaders did their best to destroy all of the Quipu they could find centuries ago. Scholars were still struggling to translate the few that remained. 

I wanted more than anything to see the boy again, find out how he had learned a secret language no one else understood and get him to teach me to read his magic knots. But my mother never took me there again and I knew better than to ask. Back then, when I had been a little kid, I would have never dared to do anything that might cause me to lose us.

After her freak out, I thought I understood why we needed to stay in the middle. Middle people were invisible. We had made a pact to be invisible to everyone on the island of Manhattan except each other, so that neither of us got taken away.

It wasn’t until my mom gave me a book called Canines of the Wild, that I found out what a pack actually was: a group of dogs with strict rules that had to be followed by every member or they would be punished - without exception.

Punished how? 

They get bitten. Food is withheld. They could be banished from the pack. It depends what they did wrong, my mother shrugged. The Alpha decides.

Alpha, like the first letter in the Greek alphabet?

Exactly. Alpha is first so they get the best of everything, but they get those rights because they have the most responsibilities. They’re responsible for protecting the pack, finding food for everyone, finding safe places to sleep. The others follow her rules because it keeps them alive.

Do they all have Greek letter names? 

Alpha does always have a Beta, or a second in command, to help them enforce their laws, but the rest are just referred to as the pack.

What if the Beta gets tired of second best?

She frowned. Betas are usually prized for their loyalty.

But what if? 

Betas usually become Alphas when the Alpha has passed away. Most of them wait their turn, Anna.

But what if they don’t want to wait? I persisted.

I remember how she sighed.

If a Beta disagrees with the way the pack is being led, or feels that the Alpha is no longer able to do her job, then the Beta can challenge the pack leader to a fight.

I was hooked. Like a duel?

Yes. But, as I said, all dogs instinctively understand that the key to their survival is to follow the rules. Alphas do not tolerate disloyalty. One broken rule can put the other dogs into danger, she reminded me. That’s why a Beta who loses a duel or shows disloyalty would be banished.

Then what happens? The Beta finds a new pack?

"Sometimes they make a new pack. Hopefully, they make a new pack. If they don’t… well, dogs are pack animals. They can’t make it on their own. Now, if you can manage to finish the book in the next hour and pick one canine species to report to me on, I’ll take you to the park."

I’ve wondered many times what ‘Would Not Have Been’ if I hadn’t managed to read that chapter in that hour, if I’d taken longer to decide which species was interesting enough to study, or if I had spent five minutes looking out the window instead of reading.

I’ve also thought about what ‘Would Have Been’ if she had allowed my life in New York to be normal. If she had let me think I was a regular teenager, I might have had friends or even a boyfriend, like other people my age, who would have been texting me that it was insane to be excited about hanging out with your mom after you did homework on a freaking Saturday afternoon.

But I wasn’t normal and nothing about my life would ever be. It happened the way it happened because she was what she was, and back then, I was who I was: her faithful and obedient Beta-child.

What species did you pick? she asked me after I had run down the stairs forty-five minutes later. 

I decided that jackals are my favorite.

Jackals? she looked shocked. "Why do you prefer them?"

They’re wild, I said first and she groaned. I like wild things. ‘I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself…’

Anna! 

We had quote battles as practice. My mother would quote someone from something she read and I would have to find a quote that fit, as though we were having a conversation with other people’s words. I used any and every excuse to insert my favorite line: I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself. It was from a poem by D.H. Lawrence and my mother insisted that poems did not count as quotations. She felt I was missing the point of the lesson and the opportunity to expand myself whenever I referred to it.

"Coyotes are wild. Wolves are wild. Gods, why jackals?" 

My mother rarely swore, but when she did, she always said Gods, never God. I asked her once, why the plural when everyone else said God. She said she didn’t want to leave anyone out.

They’re scavengers, I answered and my mother gave me a look. I think that’s respectable. They take care of the leftovers, so that nothing is wasted. Also, they aren’t always in a big pack. They hunt in pairs. I like that.

That’s not completely true. They hunt alone when there are children to protect, my mother corrected, playing with her necklace. It was the only jewelry she ever wore: a two-inch, strangely-shaped, looped Egyptian cross that she called an ankh, silver on one side and gold on the other. It was always hidden beneath her shirts, unless she fiddled with it, which only happened when she got nervous. I prefer grey wolves. They mate for life.

I rolled my eyes. So do foxes, coyotes, gibbon apes, termites, swans, and pigeons.

Rats with wings, my mother shuddered and then focused on me, all business. What else, Anna? How many animals can you name that mate for life? In alphabetical order, please. 

I remember rolling my eyes before closing them to organize the list in my head. She always made me give her more.

Let’s switch to hunting habits, she said when I finished.

I told you, jackals are scavengers-

Enough with jackals! she snapped and my head dropped like a puppy. Anxious to win back her approval, I thought back to yesterday’s lesson.

I could tell you about my favorite feline…?

She nodded stiffly and I pounced back into good daughter mode.

Jaguars are the best hunters because they can kill anything with a swipe of a paw. But because they can’t run as fast as other cats, they usually wait for prey up in the trees and then drop down, fangs at the ready. They can open their jaws further than any other animal so they just bite through the prey’s skull.

Classifications please.

Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Class Mammalia, Order Carnivora, Family Felidae, Genus Panthera, Species Onca, I listed them quickly. Common name, jaguar.

She gave me a slow, beautiful smile. Excellent darling. Now get your coat and we’ll go out. 

My mom announced that she believed a hot dog suited the theme of the day’s canine lesson. That may not sound like much to you, but she normally wouldn’t let me touch any kind of meat. In New York City there was a food stand on every corner ready to torture my salivary glands. Every time I’d beg she’d tell me, Only eat creatures with two legs or less.

As we approached, there was a gaggle of teenagers clustered around the stand. I hung back, waiting for the kids to move on, the way someone who knew how to stay invisible would do. But in truth, I was desperately attempting to overhear their conversation and record in my memory the type of clothes they were wearing, so I could observe and classify them the way I would with any mammal we studied. I told myself it was all research so I could do a better job of staying in the middle… 

Just another lie. 

I was still watching them all swoop away when the vendor snatched the money out of my hand and asked me how I wanted it. I was confused until he explained further.

Mustard, kid. Do you want mustard, onions…?

I ordered mustard, most of which was on my shirt by the time I turned around to offer a bite to my mother, who was talking to a stranger. 

In that moment, my life changed. 

His name was Patrick and he knew my mother was extraordinary. It might have been her eyes, so unexpectedly blue-as pen-ink, or her perfect olive skin and gloriously long, wavy hair that never ever frizzed, even in the rain. We didn’t look related at all. My eyes were a dull green and as big as a cow’s, my permanently tanned skin was darker than hers, and I had an odd smattering of freckles across my nose. Older Latino women occasionally asked me for directions in Spanish, thinking I must be Puerto Rican, and my mother had to wave them away since neither of us spoke it. Once, an African-American girl on the subway offered to relax my kinky hair for cheap, thinking I was half-black. We ignored her and slid into the next car to avoid the attention, even though I secretly would have loved to be able to make my hair look like my mother’s. Mine goes every which way but the way I wish. 

Inside, I think we were similar. Both of us were fiercely intelligent and we were equally insatiable readers. Along with science, philosophy, literature, art, and language - neither of us were good with mathematics - I know she taught me what she thought was most important. I believed when I was younger that she knew everything.

Until Patrick came and changed all the rules.

He was a ruddy-faced, slightly overweight, Irish, balding, professor of Music at Columbia University. I hated it when he spoke bad Italian in his horrible Irish accent and called my mother ‘Bella’. I reminded him her name was Kali, which only made him laugh and my mother blush like an idiot. 

Kalista means most beautiful in Greek. In Italian, Bella also means beautiful, Anna! So it is all the same thing!

It wasn’t. It wasn’t the same thing at all. 

He took her to concerts, leaving me with his fifteen-year-old son. Before I met Clayton,