The horses leapt, a black tide of heavy bodies and blue flame, and Dawes hurled the trumpet into the abyss. The horses dove after it, arcing impossibly in the air, less like horses than tumbling sea foam. They flowed like water and dissolved into darkness.

“Close it!” Alex shouted.

Dawes held up her empty palms and swiped them together, as if washing her hands of it all. “Ghalaqa al-baab! Al-tariiq muharram lakum! ”

Then a voice echoed through the room—from somewhere below or somewhere above, it was impossible to tell. But Alex knew that voice, and the word he spoke was clear and pleading.

Wait.

“No!” Dawes screamed. But it was too late. There was an enormous boom, like the sound of a heavy door slamming shut. Alex was thrown off her feet.

6

Alex didn’t remember much of what happened next. Her ears were ringing, her eyes watering, and the stink of sulfur was so sharp, she barely had time to roll onto her hands and knees before she vomited. She heard Dawes retching too and she wanted to weep with happiness. If Dawes was puking, she wasn’t dead.

Robbie ran into the room, waving away the smoke and shouting, “What the fuck? What the fuck?” Then he was vomiting too.

The room was covered in black soot. Alex and Dawes were coated in it.

And the table—the table King Arthur’s knights had supposedly gathered around—was cracked down the middle.

Wait.

She couldn’t even pretend she hadn’t heard it because Dawes had too.

Alex had seen the anguish in her eyes as the portal slammed shut.

Alex crawled over to Dawes. She was curled up against the wall shaking.

“Don’t say a goddamn word,” Alex whispered. “It was an inspection, that’s all.”

“I heard him—” Tears filled her eyes.

“I know, but right now we’ve got to cover our asses. Say it with me. It was an inspection.”

“It was an inspec—inspection.”

The rest was a blur—shouting from the Scroll and Key delegates; calls from their board and alumni; more shouting from Michael Anselm, who arrived on the Metro-North and offered the use of Hiram’s Crucible to restore the table and make it whole. Dawes and Alex did their best to wipe the soot off themselves and then faced Anselm in the entry hall of the Scroll and Key tomb.

“This isn’t on us,” Alex said. Best to come out swinging. “We wanted to make sure they hadn’t been opening portals or performing unsanctioned rituals, so I constructed a revelation casting.”

She’d prepared a cover story. She hadn’t anticipated she’d have to cover a massive explosion, but it was all she had.

Anselm was pacing back and forth, his cell in one hand, and a Scroll and Key alumnus could be heard screaming on the other end. He covered the phone with his palm. “You knew the nexus was unstable. Someone could have been killed.”

“The table is in two pieces!” shrieked the alum on the phone. “The entire temple room is ruined!”

“We’ll arrange for cleaning.” Again Anselm covered the phone and whispered furiously, “Il Bastone.”

“Don’t worry,” Alex said to Dawes as they passed a wrathful group of Locksmiths and headed down the stairs to the sidewalk. Robbie Kendall looked like he’d fallen down a chimney, and he’d lost one of his loafers.

“Anselm is going to blame me, not you. Dawes?”

She wasn’t listening. She had a startled, faraway look in her eyes.

It was that word. Wait.

“Dawes, you have to keep it together. We can’t tell them what happened, no matter how shell-shocked you are.”

“Okay.”

But Dawes was silent all the way to Il Bastone.

A single word. Darlington’s voice. Desperate, demanding. Wait. They’d almost done it, almost reached him. They’d been so close. He would have gotten it right. He always did.

It took the better part of an hour washing with parsley and almond oil to get the stink off of them. Dawes had gone to the Dante bathroom, and Alex had stripped down in the beautiful Virgil suite with its big claw-foot tub.

Her clothes were ruined.

“This damn job should have a stipend for replacements,” she grumbled to the house as she pulled on a pair of Lethe sweats and went down to the parlor.

Anselm was still on his phone. He was younger than she’d thought at first, early thirties, and not bad-looking in a corporate kind of way. He held up a finger when he saw her, and she went to find Dawes in the kitchen. She had laid out plates of smoked salmon and cucumber salad, tucked a bottle of white wine into a bucket of ice. Alex was tempted to roll her eyes, but she was hungry and this was the Lethe way. Maybe they should just invite the hellbeast to a cold supper.

Dawes was standing in front of a sink full of dishes and soap suds, staring out the window, the water running, her freshly washed hair hanging loose.

Alex had never seen it down before.

Alex reached out and shut off the water. “You okay?”

Dawes kept her eyes on the window. There wasn’t much to see—the alley, the side of a neatly upkept Victorian.

“Dawes? Anselm isn’t done with us. I—”

“Lethe set up a security system at Black Elm when … when we knew it might be empty for a while. Just a couple of cameras.”

Alex felt an unpleasant flutter in her stomach. “I know. Front door, back door.” Sandow had made sure the windows were boarded up, and the old Mercedes had been repaired on Lethe’s dime. Dawes occasionally used it to run errands, just to keep it from sitting idle.

Dawes tucked her chin into her neck. “I put one in the ballroom.” In the ballroom. Where they’d attempted the new moon ritual.

“And?” Alex could hear Anselm talking in the parlor, the crackle of soap bubbles in the sink.

“Something … I got a notification.” She bobbed her head at her phone resting on the counter.

Alex made herself pick it up, swipe the screen. Nothing but a dark blur was visible, a faint light dancing at the edges.

“That’s all the camera is picking up,” said Dawes.