doorway, a passage to anywhere you wanted to go. And some places you didn’t.
Alex smoothed her hand over the inscription on its edge. Have power on this dark land to lighten it, and power on this dead world to make it live. Tara had stood at this table before she’d been murdered. She’d been an intruder here, just like Alex.
“Is this going to work?” Alex asked. “The nexus has a wobble.” It was why the Locksmiths had resorted to psychedelics, why they’d had to rely on a town girl and her drug dealer boyfriend to mix up a special concoction that would help open portals and ease their passage to other lands. “We don’t have any of Tara’s special sauce.”
“I don’t know,” Dawes said, chewing on her lip. “I … I don’t know what else to try. We could wait. We should.”
Their eyes met over the big round table, supposedly made from planks of the same table where King Arthur’s knights had once gathered.
“We should,” Alex agreed.
“But we’re not going to, are we?”
Alex shook her head. More than three months had passed since Sandow’s funeral, since Alex had shared her theory that Darlington wasn’t dead but trapped somewhere in hell, the gentleman demon who had so terrified the dead and whatever monsters gathered beyond the Veil. Nothing Alex and Dawes had learned in the time since had given them cause to believe that it was anything more than wishful thinking. But that hadn’t stopped them from trying to piece together a way to reach him. Galaxias. Galaxy. A cry from the other side of the Veil. What would it mean to be an apprentice once more?
To be Dante again? Months of seeking clues to the Gauntlet had added up to nothing, and this might too, but they at least had to try. Anselm had been an absentee parent, checking in dutifully from New York but leaving them to their own devices. They couldn’t count on the new Praetor doing the same.
“Let’s set the protections,” Alex said.
She and Dawes worked together, pouring out salt in a Solomon’s Knot formation—an ordinary circle wouldn’t do. They were, in theory, opening a portal to hell, or at least a corner of it, and if Darlington was more demon
than man these days, they didn’t want him cavorting all over campus with his demon buddies.
Every line of the knot touched another line, making it impossible to tell where the design began. Alex consulted the image she’d copied from a book on spiritual containment. Apparently demons loved puzzles and games and the knot would keep them occupied until they could be banished, or, in Darlington’s case, clapped into chains of pure silver. At least Alex hoped they were pure silver. She’d found them in a drawer in the armory, and she sure hoped Lethe hadn’t scrimped. And if the hellbeast tried to come through again? They placed gems at each compass point: amethyst, carnelian, opal, tourmaline. Little glittering trinkets to bind a monster.
“They don’t look like much, do they?” asked Alex.
All Dawes did was chew her lip harder.
“It’s going to be fine,” Alex said, not believing a word of it. “What’s next?”
They set lines of salt every few feet down the hall, more safeguards in case something got past the knot. The final line they poured out was pale brown. It had been mixed with their own blood, a last line of defense.
Dawes pulled a tiny toy trumpet out of her satchel.
Alex couldn’t hide her disbelief. “You’re going to call Darlington out of hell with that?”
“We don’t have the bells from Aurelian, and the ritual just calls for ‘an instrument of action or alarm.’ You have the note?”
They’d used the deed to Black Elm during the failed new moon ritual, a contract Darlington had signed with full hope and intent. They didn’t have anything like that this time around, but they did have a note, written by Michelle Alameddine, that they’d found in the desk of the Virgil bedroom at Lethe, just a few lines of a poem and a note:
There was a monastery that produced Armagnac so refined, its monkswere forced to flee to Italy when Louis XIV joked about killing themto protect their secrets. This is the last bottle. Don’t drink it on anempty stomach, and don’t call unless you’re dead. Good luck, Virgil!
It wasn’t much, but they had the bottle of Armagnac too. It was far less grand than Alex had imagined, murkily green, the old label illegible.
“He hasn’t opened it,” Dawes observed as Alex set the bottle on the floor at the center of the knot, her expression disapproving.
“We’re not looking through his underwear drawer. It’s just alcohol.”
“It isn’t meant for us.”
“And we’re not drinking it,” Alex snapped. Because Dawes was right.
They had no business stealing things that had been meant for Darlington, that were precious to him.
We’ll bring him back and he’ll forgive us, she told herself as she drew a small glass from her bag and filled it, the liquid warm and orange as late sun.
He’ll forgive me. For all of it.
“We should really have four people for this,” said Dawes. “One for each compass point.”
They should have four people. They should have found the Gauntlet.
They should have taken the time to put together something other than this patchwork mess of a ritual.
But here they were at the edge of the cliff, and Alex knew Dawes wasn’t looking to be talked off the ledge. She wanted someone to drag her over.
“Come on,” Alex said. “He’s waiting on the other side.”
Dawes drew in a deep breath, her brown eyes too bright. “Okay.” She drew a small bottle full of sesame oil from her pocket and began to anoint the table with it, tracing the rim with her finger as she walked first clockwise, then counterclockwise, chanting in stilted Arabic.
When she caught up to her starting point, she met Alex’s gaze, then drew her finger through the oil, closing the circle.
The table seemed to drop away to nothing. Alex felt like she was looking down into forever. She looked up and saw a circle of darkness above where there had been a glass skylight a moment before. The night was thick with stars, but it was the middle of the day. She had to shut her eyes as a wave of vertigo washed over her.
“Burn it,” said Dawes. “Call him.”
Alex struck a match and held it to the note, then tossed the flaming paper into the nothingness where the table had been. It seemed to float there, edges
