She grins as she retrieves it. “You know, I thought you’d come this way, so I took it upon myself to set up our opening act where you could watch.”
She snaps her fingers, and a spotlight comes on to my right, illuminating Levi, bound in an elaborate network of ropes and knots, his mouth gagged. But it only takes a moment to see what she’s talking about. His arms and feet have been strung up to the ceiling with rope. So has his neck, but it’s looped in chain, fastened to a copper pipe above him. If something happens to those other ties, if his legs or torso fall, he’ll hang.
A sob catches at the back of my throat, a strangled moan of fear.
She grins, clearly happy with my reaction, and points a finger. A tiny spark ignites on one of the ropes holding his right arm, and it sizzles and smokes, a trickle of fire running along it. “I really should thank you for the idea.”
“Please,” I say, my arm still out. “Please, don’t hurt him. You don’t need to do this.”
Her smile widens and she dashes over, glares up at him as he blinks in the light. “Look, puppet, your lady love has come to save you after all. I told you she would!” She claps her hands, then narrows her eyes deceptively. “Or is she trying to steal what’s mine like all the rest?”
That’s when I see the bodies lying beneath Levi. One long and unusually large, the other a dainty spread of limbs. Twig and Rock. They don’t move, even with the light spilling over them. They don’t speak. Their chests don’t rise and fall with breath. Angry red burns have eaten away at their skin in blotches.
Arla, annoyed, kicks at Twig’s foot. “Nothing I can’t fix later. She has power over death, you know, our mutual friend. Oh… but youdoknow, don’t you?”
“I don’t think it works like that,” I tell her. “They’ve been dead too long.” It’s possible they died from their burns, but I saw the fire trucks heading to the club as we left. They should have gottenhelp fast enough, at least to have made it to a hospital. Something else happened here, something more sinister. Arla prevented or discouraged them from leaving, made them hide down here when the paramedics showed up, maybe even finished the job I started herself, killing them some other way. I’m not close enough to tell.
She shrugs. “Doesn’t matter,” she spits. “I needed them. But they were useless in the end, like they always were. It’s your fault, really.”
“What do you mean?”
She wipes an arm across her mouth. “Well, I couldn’t feed them toher, could I? Not with you gallivanting along the coast with my key. It was a bold move, that. Smart of you. I was stupid to have mentioned that detail. But it doesn’t matter because you’re back now.
“Anyway, I did try my best with what was left to me, but I was short two members, wasn’t I?”
“I don’t understand.”
She sighs, exasperated. “You were always thick, kitten.” She points over my shoulder.
I look back and see what I’d missed when I first entered. Glistening streaks I’d taken for water in the poor light—some were, but others were blood. It’s smeared across the walls and door of the chamber, even the floor and around the basement walls, a haphazard mockery of Rudzitin’s rite, made up of the bits and pieces she could remember, written in the blood of Brennan, Twig, and Rock.
“It seemed like such a waste to just let them rot. After everything it took to find each of you, bring you together, so different but so tragic. I needed your magic and your blood to create a pigment that would hold. Only blood taken can bind. And only magical blood can bind something as vast as the Fathom. But once you left and took my carefully laid plans with you, it seemed my only choice was to improvise. I used less of the other ingredients, more of the good stuff to make up for it.” She nudges Twig’s foot one more time. “Sadly, I don’t think it worked.”
Gagging, I turn away from the sight of their lifeless bodies on the floor, Arla’s feet and hands crusted in their blood.
“Oh, don’t worry, kitten,” she reassures me. “I’ve still got more power than you.”
I take a step back.
She tsks, shakes her head, and points a finger. Another of Levi’s ropes begins to smolder, tiny tongues of flame licking around it. His right arm drops where the first rope she lit has burned through. His body lurches forward on one side, eyes wild with shock.
Whimpering, I take another step back.
“Don’t,” she says, dropping the act. “Do not fuck with me, Jude. I don’t bluff.”
“I know,” I tell her, sliding back yet again, crouching to be able to glide through the door once I’m close enough. “I know about your dad, what you did.”
Her eyes shine with anger and the ropes holding Levi’s legs both catch. But my only hope is the Fathom. I spin into the room and grab at one of the dogs on the well lid, begin turning it feverishly. By the time Arla joins me, I’m on the second one, nearly finished, but she beats me to the third.
“No!” she screams, slapping her hands over it. “She’s mine!”
“Arla, listen to me.” I try to reason with her. “You cannot own a life. You cannot hold her. Look at yourself, she’s tearing you apart. Do you know what happened to Edward Rudzitin, huh?Do you?He fed himself to her when he couldn’t stand it any longer. She will consume you, one way or another. Think about it! She’s been working her way out of this cage for decades. You’ve seen the cracks in the bricks, the water seeping, the slime mold creeping outward. You said so yourself. If you free her now, you stand a chance. But if you try to hold on, shewillget out. And when she does, she will destroy you for your transgression.”
I see the truth lighting in her eyes behind the greed and the anger, but it cannot take hold in such shifting sands. Her mindis gone, cracked, beyond logic. She will fight this battle to her grave.
She lunges for me, her fingers clawing the air, tearing at my face and skin, yanking out hair. I back away, screaming. But I can’t shake her from me. Before she is done she will peel the flesh from my bones, tear me to pieces in this suffocating room, draw my blood with her own nails. Summoning all the energy I can muster under assault, I send fire into my hands, let it radiate beneath my fingers as I grab her. She shrieks and jerks away, giving me a temporary reprieve and dropping the key, but I know it won’t last. She’ll never stop. Not until I’m dead.
“If you want it so fucking bad,” I grind out, snatching up the key, her link to the power of the others, her way to lock the Fathom in here, to lock everyone else out, “then go get it!” I hurl it through the open doorway, watch it hit the concrete floor and slide into one of the dank, sightless corners of the basement.
