He didn’t stop moving, didn’t alter his gaze.

“Can he hear us?” Tripp asked.

“Daniel Arlington,” Turner boomed as if he was about to read Darlington his rights.

Darlington didn’t break his stride, but Alex could see his chest rising and falling as if he were fighting for air. “Please,” he gritted out. “Can’t … stop.”

Alex drew in a sharp breath. When Darlington spoke, she’d seen the whole scene waver—the ruin of Black Elm, the bruised sky, Darlington himself. She saw dark night and a well of yellow flame, heard people crying out and saw a great golden demon with curling horns towering over all of it.

She heard it speak. Alagnoth grorroneth. Nothing but a growl but she could sense the words in it: None go free.

“How do we help him?” Dawes asked.

Alex stared at her. Dawes hadn’t seen it. None of them had. Tripp looked scared. Turner had one eye on the wolves. Neither of them had reacted to what Alex had seen when Darlington spoke. Had she imagined it?

“Keep an eye on the wolves,” she murmured to Turner and stepped into the rubble.

Darlington didn’t look up, but he spoke that word again: “Please.”

The world wavered, and she saw the demon, felt the heat from that well of flame. Darlington wanted to break free, just as he’d wanted to point them to the Gauntlet, but he didn’t have control.

She drew the Arlington Rubber Boots box from her pocket and opened the lid. Some part of her had hoped that would be enough, but still Darlington trudged back and forth, hefting rock after rock, placing them with infinite care. Was this object not precious enough? Had she gotten it wrong?

Alex gripped the lid and remembered all she’d seen in the old man’s memories. Darlington when he’d still just been Danny, alone in the cold shelter of Black Elm, trying to stay warm beneath coats he’d found in the attic, eating canned beans from the pantry. Danny, who had dreamed of other worlds, of magic made real and monsters to be bested. She remembered him with his cobbled-together recipe for the elixir, standing at the kitchen counter, ready to tempt death for a chance to see the world beyond.

“Danny,” she said, and it was not just her voice that emerged, but the old man’s as well, a gruff harmony. “Danny, come home.”

Darlington’s shoulders slumped. His head bowed. The rock slid from his hands. When he looked up, his eyes met hers, and in them she saw the anguish of ten thousand hours, of a year lost to suffering. She saw guilt in them too, and shame, and she understood: That golden demon was Darlington too. He was both prisoner and guard here in hell, tortured and torturer.

“I knew you’d come,” he said.

Darlington burst into blue flame. Alex gasped, heard Tripp shout and Dawes cry out. The flame licked over the rubble like a river flowing through the shattered ruin of Black Elm, and leapt into the box.

Alex slammed the lid down. The box rattled in her hands. She could feel him in there, feel the vibration in her palms. His soul. She was holding his soul in her hands, and the power of it coursed through her, too bright to contain. It had a sound, the ring of steel on steel.

“I’ve got you,” she whispered.

“Your armor!” Dawes cried. Alex looked down. She was back in her street clothes. So were the others.

“Why did it disappear?” Tripp asked. “What’s happening?”

Dawes shook her head as if she was trying to drive the fear out of it. “I don’t know.”

Alex tucked the box against her chest. “We have to get back to Sterling.

To the orchard.”

But when she turned to the road, nothing was where it should be. The driveway was gone, the stumps of trees, the fence, the houses beyond. She was looking at a long stretch of blacktop highway, a motel in the distance, a horizon of low foothills studded with Joshua trees. None of it made sense.

The wolves were still there and they were drawing closer.

“There’s someone with Mercy,” said Tripp.

Alex whirled. Tripp was gazing into the puddle. She could see a man’s silhouette in the doorway of the library courtyard. He was arguing with Mercy.

“There’s something wrong with the ritual,” Dawes said, “with the Gauntlet. I don’t hear the metronome anymore.” “Alex,”

Turner said, his voice low.

“We have to—” She had meant to say something about Sterling, about completing the ritual. But she was staring into the yellow eyes of four wolves.

They were blocking the path between Black Elm and the highway.

“What do they want?” Dawes quavered.

Turner squared his shoulders. “What do wolves ever want?” He drew his gun, then yelped. He held a bloody rabbit in his hand.

The wolves lunged.

Alex screamed as jaws closed around her forearm, the wolf’s teeth sinking deep. She heard the bone snap, felt bile rise in her throat. She fell backward, the creature on top of her. She could see its filthy muzzle, the blood and drool matted around its teeth, the crust of yellow pus around its wild golden eyes. But she still had hold of the box. The wolf shook her as the flames on her body caught on its oily coat. She could smell its fur burning. It growled low in its throat. It wasn’t letting go. She could see black spots in her vision. She couldn’t pass out. She had to get free. She had to get to Sterling. She had to get to Mercy.

“I’m not letting go either,” she snarled.

She turned her head to the side and saw the others wrestling with the rest of the pack, and the rabbit, white fur spotted with blood, nibbling at a beige blade of grass, bloody handprints on its sides, ignored by the wolves.

She gripped the box harder, but she could feel herself starting to fade out of consciousness. Could she outlast this monster? The wolf was on fire now,

its flesh roasting. It was whimpering, but its jaws remained clamped on her broken arm. The pain was overwhelming.

What did it mean if they died in hell? Would their bodies rest easy above, unbattered and whole? What would happen to Mercy?

She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know who to save or how. She couldn’t even save herself. She’d promised Darlington she would get him out. She’d believed she could keep them all alive, that this was one more thing she could bluff and bare-knuckle her way through.

“I’m not letting go.” But her voice sounded distant. And she thought she heard someone, maybe some thing, laughing. It wanted her here. It wanted her broken. What would hell look like for her? She knew damn well. She’d wake up back in their old apartment, back with Len, as if none of this had ever happened, as if it had all been some wild dream. There would be no Yale, no Lethe, no Darlington, no Dawes. There would be no secret stories, no libraries full of books, no poetry. Alex would be alone all over again, staring into the deep black crater of her future.

Suddenly the wolf’s jaws released and Alex screamed louder as the blood rushed back to her arm. It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. Darlington was fighting the wolves, and he was neither demon nor man but both. His horns blazed golden as he wrenched one of the beasts off Turner and hurled it into the rubble. It yelped and fell in a heap, its back broken.

The box. It was still in her hands, but it was empty now, that bright, victorious vibration gone. He’d slipped free. To save them.

He tore another monster off Dawes and his eyes met Alex’s as he snapped the wolf’s neck. “Go,” he said, voice deep and commanding. “I’ll keep them at bay.”

“I won’t leave you.”

He tossed the wolf that had been tormenting Tripp into the desert sand, and it ran, whimpering, tail between its legs. But there were more coming, shadows slinking between the crooked silhouettes of the Joshua trees.

“Go,” Darlington insisted.

But Alex couldn’t. Not when they were this close, not when she’d held his soul in her hands. “Please,” she begged. “Come with us. We can—”