Three sets of eyes found his as he fished in his pocket for his keys. He wasn’t sure where Whitehall might have taken her. He wasn’t sure, but he had a pretty good clue. “There’s nothing demonic inside of Delaney,” he said, pushing past them and heading for his car. “But you’re not far from the truth.”
“What else could it be?” Dawoud tailed him along the salted sidewalk, hugging her arms to herself in an effort to stave off the cold. Several spaces away, Colton’s BMW chirped awake, headlights shelled in ice.
Behind him, he heard Beckett say, “Your car doesn’t look like it’s been in an accident, either.”
“Price.” Dawoud was jogging to keep up now, her boots unwieldy against the cemented sleet. “What is it, if not a demon?”
He didn’t look at her as he pulled open the driver’s door. It gave with a protest, hinges frozen. Overhead, the sky was a flat November gray. His chest was a hollow.
“It doesn’t have a name.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he was faintly aware of a car turning the corner. He caught the flash of headlights, heard the careen of tires. Rubber on asphalt. Rubber on sleet. A black car, with blacked-out windows. Losing traction. Beckett’s eyes met his over the glass-sheeted roof of his car.
“Oh,” she said. “I had the time wrong.”
And then he felt the impact.
Wake up, Delaney Meyers-Petrov. It is time to die.
Delaney woke to a splitting headache. She woke to the smell of decay. She was on the floor, her wrists and ankles bound in sleek, ceremonial rope. The room around her was dim, flooded with shadows that fussed and preened, worrying at her in cool fingers of dark.
Wake, they said.
Wake, wake, wake.
Miraculously, her implant hadn’t run low on battery. Sound came to her in snatches, some more easily identifiable than others. Somewhere nearby, water drip, drip, dripped from a pipe. Distant trees rubbed their leathery branches. Color ran back into the room around her as her eyes adjusted to the low, low light.
She was in the Sanctum. In front of her was the wall of names, rising up in a formidable monolith of mottled blue black. The dead pool—the broad calligraphy of Nate’s name visible from where she lay, her knees rammed into her stomach in a forced fetal position.
Several feet away, there lay a figure in the dark.
“Hello?” Her voice cast out of her. It shuddered the shadows. Sent them reeling. The figure on the ground didn’t move. Again, she cried out, “Hello?”
All that rose up to meet her was the cold, cold dark and that chilly, irreducible voice inside her head.There is no one home inside that one. All that lived there has gone away.
The smell of rot mushroomed through the room in fermented, fruity notes. Rolling onto her knees, she propped her elbows on the floor. The door had been left open some time, and sticky yellow pine needles adhered to her forearms as she dragged herself inch by inch through the silver spill of coins.
The ambiguous form of the body took shape, solidifying into the slouching black of a hoodie, the coiled white wire of earbuds.
“Nate.” His name rang through the room in a voice she didn’t recognize. Her lungs ached. “Nate,” she said again. “Nate, get up.”
He didn’t obey. He didn’t move. A cloud of silvered motes hung suspended in the light over his frame, the air undisturbed. A sour taste crept up the back of her throat. Digging her elbows into his side, she dragged his considerable heft toward her until he rolled, arms sprawled, onto a bed of scattered pennies. The fetid smell of decomposition washed over her and she was very nearly ill. His face was bloated with several days’ worth of decay. His mouth hung slack. His eyes were the same clean, clear blue as his mother’s.
“This is in my head,” she said, though she knew it wasn’t. “It’s happening in my head.”
It is not,said that unwelcome voice.I have already told you.
She ignored it, staring down at Nate like she might catch his eye. Like he might suddenly shift and blink up at her, the way Colton did that day at the pond.
Her voice tumbled out of her in a whisper. “Where are you, really?”
“He’s right here,” came a voice. “Same as you or I.”
A light flickered to life—a candle lit by an unseen hand. Another followed, setting the room and its contents ablaze. She blinked like a vole, drawing back from the stark shift in the room as if she, too, were made of shadow. Fleeing to the underneaths and the in-betweens, clawing up the walls. Only Nate stayed still, his skin waxen in the glow.
Run, whispered the dark, banished from her by flickering beads of fire.Run away.
Richard Whitehall appeared in her field of vision, dragging a chair behind him. The legs stuttered over stone in a brittletut-tut-tut. Propping it a few feet from her, he lowered himself gingerly onto the edge of the seat.
