Slowly, Dawes shook her head. “From what I can tell, we’ll be buried alive.”
“Shit,” said Turner.
“The verb is unclear,” Dawes offered. “It might mean buried or submerged.”
Tripp pushed back from the table. “Are we sure … Is this a good idea?”
“We’re out of good ideas,” said Alex. “This is what we have left.”
But Turner wasn’t interested in Tripp’s nerves. “So we die,” he said as if he were asking for directions to the bank. “Then what?”
Dawes had bit so deeply into her lip a thin line of blood had appeared.
“At some point, we should encounter Darlington—or the part of him still stuck in hell. We secure his soul in a vessel, then we return to this plane and take it to Black Elm. That’s when we’ll be at our most vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable how?” Alex asked.
Turner tapped the open book in front of him. “If we don’t close off the Gauntlet, something can follow us.”
“Something?” Mercy finally sounded scared, and Alex was almost grateful for that. She needed to take this seriously.
“What we’re doing is considered theft,” said Dawes. “We have no reason to think hell will give up a soul easily.”
Tripp gave another nervous laugh. “Like a hell heist.”
“Well…” Dawes mused. “Yes, that’s accurate.”
“If it’s a heist, we should all have jobs,” said Tripp. “The thief, the hacker, the spy.”
“Your job is to survive,” Turner bit out. “And to make sure you don’t do anything stupid that gets the rest of us killed.”
Tripp held up his hands, agreeable as always. “No doubt.”
“We do need to move fast and stay on our guard,” said Dawes. “Until the two parts of Darlington’s soul are brought together, we’ll be targets.”
For any demons that pursued them. For creatures like Linus Reiter. What if he was watching? What if he knew what they meant to do? Again Alex felt that crawling paranoia, that sense of their enemies multiplying.
“Are you so sure we’re going to find his soul?” Turner asked.
Dawes dabbed at her lip with her sleeve. “His soul should want to find union with its other half, but that’s all about the vessel we choose. It needs to be something that will call to him. Like the deed to Black Elm or the Armagnac Michelle Alameddine left him.”
Except the deed had burned to ash months ago and the Armagnac had been blown to bits at Scroll and Key.
“Like a grail,” said Tripp. “That would be good.”
“Maybe a book?” suggested Mercy. “A first edition?”
“I know what it should be,” said Alex. “If I can find it.”
Dawes had somehow reopened the cut on her lip. “It has to be precious.
It has to have power over him.”
Alex’s memory was not her own—it belonged to the dead Daniel Tabor Arlington III watching his grandson mix an elixir over the sink in Black Elm, knowing the poison could kill him, unable to make him stop. She remembered what Danny—Darlington—had chosen to use as his cup in that moment of reckless desire: the little keepsake box from some long-ago, better time, the box he had once believed was magic and was determined to make magic again.
“It’s precious,” Alex said.
The dream of a world beyond ours, of magic made real. The way through the wardrobe, and maybe back again.
25
Halloween on campus was mild during the day, almost as if the students were embarrassed by their desire to play—a few people in capes or silly hats, a professor in a jack-o’-lantern sweater, an a cappella group singing “Time Warp” on the steps of Dwight Hall. Celebrations were even more subdued in the wake of Dean Beekman’s murder. But even that quiet excitement was enough to rile up the Grays. They sensed the anticipation, the feeling of a holiday that buzzed through classrooms and libraries and dorm rooms. Alex tried not to let it get to her, but the noise of the dead— their sighs and exclamations and chatter—was difficult to ignore. Only Morse was quiet, the place where Beeky had been killed. There the living didn’t feel free to celebrate, and the dead wanted to stay far from the killing ground.
Alex and Mercy went all out decorating the common room as a kind of penance for abandoning Lauren, hanging chains of paper flowers over the ceiling and walls so that it looked like a goth garden. When they’d told her they were helping to work a candy exchange for parents at Mercy’s church, Lauren just said, “You guys are the worst,” and continued taping up skeins of crepe paper. She had a group of her field hockey friends to go out with later that night.
Liquor Treat got going around eight. Alex poured tequila shots and Mercy filled cups with chocolate soil and gummy worms while Lauren put on records in her sexy-gardener short-shorts. But Alex and Mercy didn’t touch the alcohol, and Alex made herself avoid the candy too. She was taking Dawes’s instructions seriously, and that meant she was dizzy with hunger and grumpy about it.
Early that morning, Alex had gone to Black Elm. She’d picked up the mail, put out fresh food and water for Cosmo, and then walked the length of the first floor to the office that looked out over the back garden. She knew Darlington had worked in there sometimes; she had even gone through the
drawers of the mahogany desk when she was searching for his notes on the Bridegroom’s murder case.
But the office felt different than the rest of the house. Because it had belonged to the old man. It was a big, gloomy room, heavily paneled in dark wood, a long-dormant fireplace taking up the bulk of one wall. The only photos were black-and-white shots of the Arlington Rubber Boots factory, a man in a dark suit holding the hand of an unsmiling child in front of an old-fashioned motorcar, and a framed wedding picture that, judging by the bride’s dress, had to be from the turn of the century. The Arlingtons before the curse had come upon them and their shining prosperity had gone to rot.
The box was on the desk, a palm-sized porcelain thing with a scene of children playing in the snow printed on the top. On the inside of the hinged lid, Merry Christmas from Your Arlington Rubber Boots Family! had been inscribed in blue script framed by snowflakes. But the well of the box was stained reddish brown. From the elixir. Darlington’s attempt to see to the other side, the dream that had almost killed him, and that had led him to Lethe.
“That thing upstairs isn’t Danny.”
The old man was standing next to Alex. She could feel him inching closer, hoping to climb inside her, eager to be in a body again. Alex had been shaken by her run-in with Linus Reiter, the dream of Darlington in the circle, the unpleasant task of kissing Michael Anselm’s ass, the constant fear of another command coming down from Eitan before she found a way to clear the books. But she wasn’t about to become a carnival ride for some bitter old bastard who had cared more about his legacy than the little boy he’d trapped in this castle.
“That so?” She turned on Daniel Tabor Arlington III in his blue bathrobe.
“Darlington deserved better than you or your crap son, and this isn’t your house anymore. Death is the mother of beauty,” she snarled. All that Wallace Stevens ought to be good for something.
The old man vanished, his expression indignant.
Alex glanced up at the ceiling, and the next thing she knew she was climbing the stairs, moving down the hall. She hadn’t meant to go to the second floor. She was just supposed to retrieve the box and get out of Black
Elm fast. Or was she lying to herself? Had she wanted to see Darlington before they attempted the Gauntlet? She didn’t try to fight whatever force took hold of her this time. She let herself be carried into the heat and golden light of the ballroom.
He was standing close to the circle’s edge, gaze locked on her. He was the demon she remembered, naked, monstrous, beautiful. Not the young man she’d spoken to her in her dream. Heat seemed to eddy around them, something stranger than a mere change in temperature, a crackle of power that she could feel against her skin. The circle of protection flickered. Was it growing fainter? Dissolving as it had in her dream?
“We’re coming to get you,” she said. “You need to be ready.”
“I can’t hold on much longer.”
“You have to. If … if it doesn’t work, we’ll come back to strengthen the protections.”
“You can certainly try.”
