“Something like that. I think our best bet is to just let him believe we’re dim and incompetent.”
Dawes folded her arms. “Do you know how hard I’ve had to work to be taken seriously? To have my dissertation taken seriously? Playing dumb doesn’t just hurt us, it hurts every woman he comes into contact with. It—”
“Dawes, I know. But it’s also really good cover. So let’s just dance for him until we figure this out, and then I will happily stand aside while you crush his ego with your dazzling intellect, okay?”
Dawes considered. “Okay.”
“Not to sound like Turner, but do we have a plan?”
“Sort of?” Dawes spread out a series of neatly typed pages that she’d highlighted with different colors. “If we can figure out how to finish the
Gauntlet, we begin the walk at midnight. Once we find the four doorways, each threshold will need to be marked with blood.”
“On Halloween.”
“I know,” Dawes said. “But we don’t have a choice. If we get it right …
something will happen. I’m not sure what. But the door to hell will open and four graves will appear. Again, the language isn’t totally clear.”
“Four graves for four murderers.”
“Assuming we have four murderers.”
“We will,” Alex said, though Turner still hadn’t given them a yes. If they had to go back to that hideous map, they would. But they’d have to do it fast.
And finding someone who’d agree to be buried alive to rescue someone they’d never met wasn’t going to be easy. “Do we need to … I don’t know, bring weapons or something?”
“We can try, though I don’t know what we’ll be fighting. I have no idea what might be waiting on the other side. All I can tell you is that our bodies don’t make the descent, our souls do.”
But Alex remembered what she’d witnessed in the basement of Rosenfeld Hall. “Darlington vanished, I saw it happen. Not just his soul, his body too.”
One moment he’d been there with her, a scream on his lips, and then he was gone, along with the sound of his cry. There’d been no echo, no fade, just sudden silence.
“Because he was eaten,” Dawes said, as if it were obvious. “It’s the only way he was able to become … well, whatever he is.”
“So none of us are going to turn into demons?”
Dawes renewed her grip on her headphones. “I don’t think so.”
“For fuck’s sake, Dawes.”
“I can’t be sure,” she said brusquely, as if the idea of losing her humanity was less concerning than the prospect of losing her job at Lethe. “There haven’t been enough well-documented attempts to say what will happen. But just sending our souls is a kind of protection. Bodies are permeable, changeable. It’s why we need someone watching over us, to serve as a connection to the living world. I just wish we weren’t doing this on Halloween. We’re going to draw a lot of Grays.”
Alex felt a headache coming on. They had a little over a week to put all of this together, and she had that same feeling she’d had before they’d thrown themselves into the ritual at Scroll and Key. They weren’t ready. They weren’t equipped. They sure as hell weren’t the right team for this job. What had Walsh-Whiteley said? I expect you to know your own limitations. It made her think of Len. For all his greed and misplaced ambition, he had practiced a strange kind of caution. He’d been stupid enough to think he could earn Eitan’s trust and move up in the ranks, but he’d never tried so much as a smash-and-grab when they were short on cash because he knew they’d get caught. He wasn’t a thief. He definitely wasn’t a planner. It was why he’d loved using Alex to deal on campuses when she still looked like a kid, before desperation and disappointment had hollowed her out. Low risk, high reward.
At least for Len.
Now Dawes was talking about trusting someone to fight off a bunch of Grays while they lay there helpless in the ground. For the first time Alex felt unsure.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “I don’t want to bring a stranger into this. And are you going to tell them they have to drink Hiram’s elixir so they can see Grays? That can be fatal.”
“Michelle—”
“Michelle Alameddine isn’t going to help us.”
“But she was his Virgil.”
Alex stared at Dawes. Pamela Dawes, who had saved her life more than once and who was prepared to walk side by side with her straight through the gates of hell. Pamela Dawes, who came from a nice family with a nice house in Westport, who had a kind sister to come pick her up at the hospital and pay her to watch the kids. Pamela Dawes, who had no idea what it meant to hurt so much to live you might wake up one morning ready to die. And Alex was glad of that. People shouldn’t have to march through the world fighting all the time. But there was no way Alex was going to pressure Michelle Alameddine to do a job like this, not after she’d seen that tattoo on her wrist.
“We’ll find someone else,” Alex said. But she didn’t know who. They couldn’t just grab somebody off the street and offer to pay them, and they
couldn’t ask someone from the societies without risking that person going straight to the Lethe board.
“We could use magic,” Dawes said tentatively. She was making slow spirals with her pen in the margin of her notes. “Bring someone on and then compel them so they can’t remember—”
“Don’t do that.”
Alex and Dawes nearly jumped out of their seats. Mercy was sitting on a couch just behind their table.
“How long have you been there?” Alex demanded.
“I followed you from the courtyard. If you need someone to help, I can do it, but not if you’re going to mess with my mind.”
“No way are you getting involved.” Alex said. “Absolutely not.”
Dawes looked horrified. “Wait, who … what does she know?”
“Most of it.”
