“Alex,” Turner said quietly. “Look back. Slowly.”
Alex glanced over her shoulder and had to fight to keep her walk steady.
They were being followed. A big black wolf was stalking them from about one hundred yards away. When she glanced back again, there were two, and she saw a third slinking through the trees to join them.
They didn’t look right. Their legs were too long, their spines humped, the long curve of their snouts too crowded with teeth. Their muzzles were wet
with drool and crusted with something brown that might have been dirt or blood.
Alex and the others passed a big puddle that had formed in front of what had once been the front door, and in the murky water, Alex saw Mercy pacing around the library courtyard. She’s okay. That has to count for something.
“There!” Dawes cried.
She was pointing at the ruins of Black Elm and there was Darlington—
Darlington as she remembered him, as he’d been in her dream, handsome and human in his long, dark coat. No horns. No glowing tattoos. He had a rock in his hands, and as they watched, he lugged it over to what might have been the beginning or end of a wall, and laid it carefully atop the other stones.
“Darlington!” Dawes shouted.
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.
