But I am less confused. In fact, I have a pretty good idea exactly what, or should I saywho, happened. She was sending me a message when she didn’t find me here. One she knew I wouldn’t overlook.
“Worst luck I ever seen on a person,” he says, eyeing me.
I give Kerry a pat on the shoulder. “Well then, you’ll be glad to know I’m selling after this.”
Relief floods my veins when I see the storefront come into view. After hours speaking to the plumbers and then the insurance estimator, I was glad to get a text from Levi saying he’d be swinging by the shop to check on a couple of things before returning to the hospital, and I could meet him there. But a fresh wave of anxiety rises in my chest when I find the door unlocked, Levi nowhere to be seen.
I call his name over and over, check between the bookshelves and in his grandfather’s office before I try the antiquities room, which is unlocked but empty. That’s when I see the black envelope waiting for me on one of the tables, the symbol I know so well.
My heart hammers out a jagged staccato as I reach for it and lift the flap, sliding the note card out. There are no pithy riddles or verse to ease the blow, no wild-goose chase to go on. She is blunt, at the end of her rope, and quickly unraveling.
I’ll trade you.
Beneath this, a single dark fingerprint. I worry it’s been made with blood.
She has the journal if she has Levi. But it’s not the journal she wants. It’s the key.
I rush through the store and launch myself into my car, speeding toward an end I cannot see but must contain. I don’t know how Arla overcame a man twice her size, especially without the full spectrum of the circle’s power at her disposal. But I wouldn’t put anything past her—ether, Taser, gunpoint, blow dart—and she always has Rock, who easily dwarfs most men I’ve met, including Levi.
A thousand scenarios race through my mind on the way to the club, but I’m not stupid enough to pull up in front of it when I get close. Instead, I park a couple of blocks away and enter the pub Levi, Cadence, and I burst through when we fled last night. Inside, I head for the kitchen, moving with such speed and determination that by the time someone realizes what’s happening, I’m already slipping through the back door, lowering myself down the dark stairs, giving over to the stink and the grime and the pull of a monster I have come to defeat and another I have come to save.
I look for the axe we left here before, but it’s gone now, either taken by the pub employees after we charged into their kitchen, or found by Arla. Of course, I want to save Levi, but I’m not Arla’s fool. I don’t believe for a second that if I return and place the key in her hand, she’ll let her captive go, see us off into the sunset to live our lives, free of her sick imaginings. Whatever any of us are now, we are food for her pet, fuel for her ego-crazed desires. And that’s not something she’s likely to waste. If I walk in by the front door, she’ll have two for the price of one, and no one goes home, least of all the Fathom. My only hope,Levi’sonly hope, is tied now to whether I can get in without Arla knowing, free the creature before she realizes, and watch her power drain with thatwell. Then, and only then, do I have a chance in hell of getting to Levi, of getting us both out of here alive.
Finding my way is easy now that I’ve been this way twice before, the pull of the Fathom dragging me forward, her eerie murmurs in my ear, as if she’s slowly bleeding into this place, leaking from the chamber like bad wine, an overgrown snake in a very long hole.
I think of the animals I’ve seen along the way—the raven on the bridge and the rat in the cathedral, the snake in the grass and the dove here in the tunnels that first time. The moth in the window. I think of the seeping bricks and the glowing words in the mortar, the fissures running through them. I think of the slime mold circling the well and crawling from the stones, and the call Arla spoke of. The dreams my grandmother had. The revelers in Medusa night after night. The ways we were each lured. The way I died and came back.
The Fathom was always working behind the scenes, always freeing herself, always reaching her long, tentacle arms into our lives to stir them to a frenzy. She’s been weakening the chamber all these years, her magic a force that exists beyond spells and incantations, even those written in blood.
Yes, you may cage the dragon. But the fire defies keeping.
My mother was right.You can never stop the burning.
But she was also wrong. You can never control it either. The best you can do is surrender, before it eats you alive.
I slither through the iron gate into the back of Arla’s basement, the broken padlock not yet replaced. A weak film of light is filtering down over the chamber from a single fixture at the center of the room, but the walls are ringed in shadow. The chamber is pulsing before me, the words I’d read in the mortar the brightest I’ve ever seen them, the cracks wider. Water beads along the bricks in anticipation of my arrival. It runs between them like tears. It gathers on the floor, a moat around her keep. The slime mold, I see now, has crept its way across the outside of the chamber, glistening along the walls like violet fingers, an alien presence. A terrible stench rolls through the room.
I move around to the front of the chamber, eyes swinging side to side, looking for lurkers in the dark. Until I see the iron door, rust crusting it like burn on toast, an unearthly light spilling from beneath.
I quickly approach and pull the key from where it rests next to my body, sliding it into the lock, hearing the mechanism sound. The bolt slides sideways, the hinges grating out a tired song. A blast of humidity meets me, salt water and fir trees like I could smell along the cliffs. Behind it, something sick and foul, turning my stomach. I am about to step inside when I hear her.
“Where do you think you’re going, kitten?”
When I spin around, the sight of her as she steps into the paltry light nearly knocks me off my feet. Her hair hangs long and tattered; her eyes are pits at the center of red-and-purple craters. Her lips are peeling and cracked at the corners. Her dress is ragged, filthy, the lace torn in more than one place. Beneath its uneven hem, her bare legs and feet are smeared with red. Her hands and arms too. It’s only been twenty-four hours since I last saw her, but she looks as if she’s been down here for weeks.
“Arla, what the fuck? What’s happened to you?”
She leers before me, rocking on her heels, nothing about her quite steady, not even her stance. “Shouldn’t you be asking about your lover, Jude? Your precious bookslinger? Don’t you want to know what’s happened to him?”
I wrap the key in my palm, put my other hand up to try to reassure her. “Of course, Arla. That’s why I’m here. I got your note. Now where’s Levi?”
She grins, and her gums are a livid red. “He’s in costume, waiting for you. Give me the key and he’s all yours, but you better hurry up. Those ropes won’t hold forever, and once they slip…” She yanks behind her head, pretends she’s being strangled.
My heart lurches. I don’t know what she’s talking about, but it can’t be good. “Let me see him,” I tell her. “Then you can have the key.”
“No,” she growls. “I hold the power here. If you want to see him, you have to hand over the key first.”
I figure the chamber is already unlocked, so I do as she asks, tossing it at her feet.
