For a long time, there was silence. Silence, save for the distantplinkof water and the unsteady wheeze of Delaney’s breathing. Expelling a huff, Whitehall pulled his glasses down to clean them, the way she’d watched him do all semester. Her mentor. Her teacher. Her captor. Everything he’d done had always seemed performative. This was no different.
“Remarkable” was all he said. He took his time polishing the lenses, holding the spectacles up for careful scrutiny before replacing them along the wide bridge of his nose. “You don’t look any different. Right under my nose, seated in my lecture hall, and I didn’t even see it. How do you feel? Strange, I’d imagine.”
Her eyes pinched. Her throat was all sour. “What did you do to Nate?”
“I did nothing. I merely gave him the tools he needed to seek eternal life. He sought it, as did the others. He failed, as did the others.”
“You killed him.” The accusation spat out of her like poison.
The look Whitehall gave her was clinically sad. As though he were witnessing a tragedy from afar. As though she were a spectacle, and he the observer. Softly, he said, “Nathaniel Schiller went up against the gods and was deemed unworthy. But you? My god, look at you.”
Delaney didn’t answer. The shadows moaned, displeased. She could feel their fear. They wanted to leave this place. They wanted to stay wherever she was. The surety of it was so strong that she wasn’t sure how she’d ignored it for so many years. She flexed her fingers, testing out the tightness of the rope. Too tight, too tight to wriggle free.
“I’d like to go home,” she said when Whitehall continued to stare.
He let out a breath. “Spectacular. Your motor functions seem to be your own. Your speech patterns have remained the same. Home, you say. Home is—where? Can you confirm? Do you know a Mia Petrova and a Jace Meyers? Do you recognize those names?”
Her parents.Her parents.“My parents will be worried if I don’t call to check in.”
“Ah.” He smiled a beatific smile. “Beautiful. Your cognitive functioning looks to be perfectly operative. We’ll have to do a complete workup of course, but this—this is incredible. Beyond anything we’ve seen in past trials.” He leaned forward, padded elbows resting on his knees. “How did you do it?”
She pulled at her binds again, a useless endeavor. Next to her, Nate stared and stared. “Do what?”
“How did you invite it inside you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
You do, crooned the voice. The being that was not her own.We’re fast friends, aren’t we, Delaney Meyers-Petrov? Thick as thieves, you and me and we.
Whitehall’s smile flickered. He rose to his feet, circling around his chair to grip the spine between knuckles gone white.
“The others died,” he said. “All of them. Schiller, Peretti, Guzman, Kostopoulos. I sent subject after subject into purgatory. Subject after subject was spat out on the mouth of Hell, babbling and strange, their skin coming loose. The plan was for them to look the depths of the underworld in the eye and carry a piece of it back out with them. A sliver of immortality. A slice of the afterlife. It never worked. The being inside them didn’t need a soul, only a body. It ate away at the spirit until all that remained was a husk. And then it played mad puppeteer with the corpse.”
Not us, said the voice.Not we. I’m curled up along your bones like a happy cat.
“Devan Godbole was the first,” Whitehall continued. “He was my associate, my partner—the only man I’d ever met who could peel back the doors between worlds. In his case, it was an accident. We had no idea something else was living inside of him until he died. The greatest of scientific discoveries are often accidental. Do you know that?”
He glanced sidelong at her, waiting for an answer. When none came, he continued. “Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin when he left petri dishes of staphylococcus stacked on a bench while he went on holiday. Charles Goodyear spilled rubber and sulfur on a hot stove and, in doing so, revolutionized the way tires were made. Men of legend. Men of change.” His smile was rapturous. “Like them, I discovered immortality quite by chance. I hadn’t meant to do it. But I did. I stumbled upon poor Devan dying on the side of a winding backroad and found, living within him, a malfeasance which could be neither killed nor exorcised.”
The old man is a fool, sang the voice.Tell him so.
But Delaney didn’t. She couldn’t. She was thinking only of the terrible thing in Whitehall’s upstairs bedroom, his head bashed in, his eyes wild, empty gulfs. She was thinking only of Nate, smiling that strange, inhuman smile, whispering secrets deep inside her head.
That was me, corrected the thing within her. It sounded annoyed.Not the boy. The boy did nothing but cry. He was weak. He was small. He died almost instantly. They always do.
“Why?” Delaney asked, because she wanted the voice in her head to go silent.
“Why do men seek immortality?” Whitehall boomed out a laugh. “Mankind has been seeking the elixir of life since the dawn of time. I’m merely the first to bottle it.”
“If what you’re saying is true, then you’ve knowingly killed multiple students.”
“They knew the risks.” He leaned over the back of his chair. “Every single one of them had someone they’d do anything to save. Every single one of them was terrified by the prospect of loss. It’s a terrible thing, to say goodbye. I gave them an opportunity to circumvent death, and they took it. They, like me, saw the vast potential of a life without end. They were sworn into the Priory and branded loyal. They consented to share themselves with something immortal in order to live forever. The hope was, once perfected, they might share their discovery with their loved ones. Both on the edge of the grave and beyond. Most unfortunately, none of them succeeded.”
The thing inside her giggled.
“Until me.”
“Until you.” His smile widened.
