“She’s gone, isn’t she?” Price asked now, his breath fogging the front passenger window. They were on Storrow. They were racing through traffic. “Your grandmother.”
Eric choked down the lump in his throat, taking the indicated turn-off. Something on the front of his car was rattling—the bumper, maybe—dragging along the road in sparks and hops. Flint against stone. “Yes,” he said.
“When?”
“Yesterday morning.”
Price stared into the middle distance, the blood draining out of his face. “We were so close.”
“That’s the thing,” Eric said, changing lanes. “I don’t think we were.”
Between the seats, a flash of red curls appeared. “What’s going to happen?” Mackenzie Beckett asked. “With Lane?”
“You should sit down, Mackenzie,” Adya Dawoud chimed in from the back. “This car has been in one accident already today. It’s barely road safe at this point.”
“I don’t die in a car accident.” Mackenzie’s bright eyes met Eric’s in the rearview mirror. “Lane,” she said, all emphasis. “Talk.”
“Godbole is a cover,” Eric explained. “All of it. The note-taking. The observations. All the work you’ve done and will do. It’s just a straw man. A front.”
“For what?” Adya asked. The row of trees outside ran past in cold, crystalline strips of dark. It reminded Eric of noisy Christmas mornings, falling over his sister to be the first down the stairs. Of sleepy car rides to church, the rear windows of the minivan still pebbled in ice.
The tattoo on his arm stung for weeks after he’d pledged. His grandmother hadn’t been quiet about her disapproval. They’d moved her to the nursing home by then, and her memory was mostly in pieces. But she still remembered the foremost tenets of the faith she’d worked so hard to instill in her grandkids. She’d taken him by the ear, the calluses on her fingers hewn from decades of dish soaps and detergents. The force of her little frame bent him clean in half.
“That’s the devil’s Latin, Eric Carson Hayes. What did I tell you about the devil?”
“Whitehall is chasing immortality,” Price said when Eric stayed quiet.
Mackenzie remained crushed between the two front seats, nails embedded in Eric’s headrest. “What does he want with Lane?”
“Lane has managed to do what everyone else couldn’t,” Eric explained when Price seemed determined to say nothing. He’d tipped his head back against the headrest of his seat, his eyes squeezed shut. The wound along the edge of his mouth had pinked over in the days since Eric saw him last. Meeker had done that—pushing just a little bit too far. Hitting just a little bit too hard. Price had taken it without flinching, his eyes cold and black and other. Eric’s stomach swam.
He tightened his grip on the wheel and said, “She’s given Whitehall his cure.”
“A cure?”
“Yeah, you know,” he said. “For death.”
“It’s not a common cold.” Adya sounded disgusted.
Price didn’t open his eyes. “?‘And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Hell.’?” Silence followed. Eric took the nearest exit, the blinker clicking through the car in a too-loud staccato. Flatly, Price added, “New Testament, Matthew, chapter ten, verse twenty-eight. Whitehall’s fixation. He’s been calling himself the Apostle for years.”
“This is giving me the creeps,” Adya said. “In case anyone was curious. What will Dr. Whitehall do with Lane?”
Eric braked, drawing to a stop as the light ahead clicked from yellow to red. The nurse on the phone told him his grandmother went in her sleep. Eyes closed, a smile on her face. His classmates went screaming. Ripped limb to limb by whatever beast they’d clung to in the dark. He didn’t see how that could possibly be the better alternative.
Voice cracking, he said, “He wants to find out how Lane has managed to successfully adapt to immortality when everyone else failed.”
“Price,” Mackenzie said suddenly, “roll down your window.”
“You look like you’re about to hurl,” Adya added.
Price sat as if carved from stone, his jaw clenched, his stare dead ahead. When he didn’t move, Eric did it for him, lowering the glass until the wind bit through the crack in a fanning chuff of bitter cold. It was the wrong thing to do.
The smell of smoke hit them first. It slipped into the car in spirals. It burned the air, fringed in still-smoldering strips of crumbling paper. Up ahead, the campus quad was thronged with people. Fire trucks lined the walkway, sirens flashing in orbs of red and blue, red and blue, red and blue.
“What the hell?” The question came from the back seat, from Mackenzie, but the sentiment was echoed in all of them. Price flung open the door, already halfway into a run. On the far side of the quad, smoke rose into the air in great columns of gray.
Deep within the woods, the Sanctum was on fire.
