It felt like a cold hand shoving her away. Like a warning. She wasn’t stupid enough to ignore it.
“Maybe,” Alex whispered.
She made herself turn, leave the ballroom, walk down that dark hall. She forced herself not to run.
Maybe they were just two killers, cursed to endure each other’s company, two doomed spirits trying to find their way home. Maybe they were monsters who liked the feeling of another monster looking back at them. But enough people had abandoned them both. She wasn’t going to be the next.
Matching luminaries
Provenance: Aquitaine, France; 11th century
Donor: Manuscript, 1959
Believed to have been invented by heretical monks to hide forbiddentexts. The glamour will remain strong for as long as the lanterns are lit.
Those outside of the light’s reach will find their fear increasing as theydraw closer. Ordinary candles may be used and refreshed accordingly.
Donation made after storage above the Manuscript nexus created somekind of disturbance in the enchantment and two members of the 1957
delegation were lost for over a week in shadow.
—from the Lethe Armory Catalogue as revised and edited by Pamela Dawes,
Oculus
Halloween is an evangelical holiday. If you don’t celebrate, you’re forcedto hide from those who do lest they slap a mask on your face and demandyou caper about in the name of fun.
—Lethe Days Diary of Raymond Walsh-Whiteley(Silliman
College ’78)
26
They met at the library at eleven o’clock and holed up in one of the niches in the Linonia and Brothers reading room. Dawes had somehow chosen the exact spot where Alex loved to sit and read and fall asleep with her boots on the grate of the heater. How many times had she looked out at the courtyard through the wavy glass of the windows without knowing she was looking at the gateway to hell?
They set the pair of luminaries they’d procured from the armory at opposing corners of the entry to the reading nook. What they created when lit wasn’t precisely a glamour, but a swarm of thick shadow that repelled any curious gaze.
Fifteen minutes before midnight, a voice came over the loudspeaker reminding students that the library was closing. People laden with backpacks and satchels trudged out to make the walk home to dorms or apartments in a forced march past Halloween partiers. Security guards came through next, passing their flashlights over the shelves and reading tables.
Alex and the others waited, watching the flicker of the luminaries in the corners, pressed against the walls for no good reason, trying to be as quiet as possible. Tripp had worn the same polo, blazer, and backward cap he’d had on at their planning dinner. Turner was in what looked like expensive gym clothes and a puffer jacket. Dawes was in her sweats. Mercy had chosen fatigues paired with a black sweater and looked like the chicest member of a special forces unit. Alex was in Lethe sweats. She didn’t know what this night would bring, but she was tired of losing perfectly good clothing to the arcane.
Shortly after midnight and without warning, the lights clicked off. All that remained were dim security lights along the floors. The library had gone silent. Dawes took out a thermos. To disrupt the alarm systems, she had brewed the same tempest in a teapot they’d used to break into the Peabody, but she’d steeped the tea longer and acquired a better-insulated container.
“Hurry,” she said. “I don’t know how long it will last.”
They got Mercy settled in the courtyard, and Alex and Dawes helped her into the salt armor—gauntlets, bracers, a helm that was far too big for her head. She even had a salt sword. It was all very impressive, but Alex had to wonder if it would stop a monster like Linus Reiter. When Mercy pulled a vial of Hiram’s elixir from her pocket, Alex wanted to swat it out of her hand.
But the time for warnings and worry had past. Mercy had made her choice and they needed her here, their sentinel. Alex watched her pop the cork and down the contents, her eyes squeezed shut as if she were swallowing medicine. She shuddered and coughed, then blinked and laughed.
At least the first dose hadn’t killed her.
When Mercy was positioned by the basin with the ticking metronome set on the ground beside her, they crowded around the security desk at the front of the library, checked the Rose Walk for students passing by, then slipped outside.
“Quick,” said Dawes as one by one they made incisions on their arms.
“We should have done it across our palms,” said Tripp. “The way they do in movies.”
“No one gets infections in movies,” Turner shot back. “And I actually need the use of my hands.”
Alex hadn’t realized he had a holster and gun beneath his jacket. “I don’t think that’s going to do you much good in hell.” “Couldn’t hurt,” he replied.
Dawes took a small bottle from her pocket and dribbled oil onto her thumb. She smeared it across each of their foreheads. This had to be the datura.
“Are we ready?” Dawes asked.
“Hell yeah!” said Tripp.
“Keep your voice down,” snapped Turner. But Alex appreciated Tripp’s enthusiasm.
Dawes took a deep breath. “Let’s begin.”
They each touched their fingers to the blood welling from their arms.
“Soldier first,” Dawes said. Alex daubed her blood onto each of the four columns marking the entrance. Dawes followed, placing her blood over Alex’s, then Turner, and finally Tripp.
He looked at the smudge of their mingled blood and stood back. “How will we know if—”
Tripp was interrupted by a sound like a sigh, a whoosh of air as if a window had been thrown open.
