Softly, she said, “I need you to do something for me first.”
They stood face-to-face. Whitehall and Lane. Lane and Whitehall. The rift in the ether hovered just behind them, a flat mirror opening thin enough to be invisible to the untrained eye. All around them was smoke, thick and bitter. Flames licked at the wall of names. Engulfed the salmon-colored couch in a fiery roar. Devoured the books, pages burning up into crisps that danced on the air.
And in the midst of it all, Whitehall and Lane were speaking in tongues.
In the doorway, Colton Price stood as still as Perseus and listened to the words spill out of Lane. Old words. Dead words. He could feel her fingerprints along the bend in his ribs. The soft prod of her touch. The delicate press of her thumb. Her hand was in her pocket, turning, turning, turning a piece of him like a talisman. The feel of it shuddered through him—a salve upon his soul, where in the wrong hands it had been a shame. A poultice, in place of a perversion.
In front of her, Whitehall looked halfway in the grave already. Colton had seen the dull pall of those eyes before. He recognized it at once. It was the same deathless thing that had burrowed a hole in Nate Schiller. In the others. Brothers of the Priory who thought Whitehall was going to teach them how to live forever.
Boys who’d died for a broken cause.
He wanted to run to Lane. To shake her awake. To summon every word and turn of phrase he knew. To banish the thing inside her and send it back where it belonged. Where he belonged. Among the dead. Away from the living.
Death had tried to claim him, once before. Maybe, if he’d let it, things would have been set right. Maybe, if he hadn’t cheated Hell, Lane would have been left well enough alone.
Lane.
She looked like a saint, her hair spilling around her in spools of white, her face transcendent, her hands upturned. Weightless, as if she might levitate off the ground at any moment. A holy, hopeless thing. Everything that had happened to her was his fault, his doing.
All because he couldn’t keep away.
“Lane,” he said. He hadn’t meant to. He couldn’t help it. Once, he’d promised himself he would never say her name aloud again. Now it was the only shred of coherence he had remaining. “Lane,” he called again, loud enough to be a shout. The sound came out muffled. Wind-snatched, though there was no wind.
Her head picked up.
Her eyes met his. Her stare was blown black and otherworldly.
“Demon,” she said, and her voice was not hers, but something cold and slithering. Something he’d spent countless hours beseeching in the night. “She has already made her bargain.”
“I don’t care,” he spat. “Unmake it.”
The thing inside her blinked. A slow, inhuman shuttering of the eyes that chilled his blood. Tucked out of sight, the bone shard spun and spun against her palm. “She has left you a message.”
“What message?” The room around him burned. His lungs were stuffed with smoke. His skin was lit was cinders. He didn’t care. “What message?”
The air thinned. The door drew closed. Half swallowed up in it, Delaney Meyers-Petrov glanced back at him. The voice that rang out of her was low and deep. “Find her where the asphodels grow.”
It was time. Time for goodbyes. Time for endings.
It would hate to leave the girl. It saw, after so many man-made weeks nestled in the ridges of her bones, why the dead followed her. Why the demon-boy clung to her. There was a warmth in her. A kindness that was overly sweet. The sort that soured the jaw to taste.
There was a quiet in her, too. Still as the mirror hush of a lake. Peaceful and strange. It was not used to such silence. To such repose. It looked to the man across the way—the man with eyes of the brethren. The man whose dead heart was held up only now by string. Still warm, but slowly fraying.
“You have remained too long among men, brother,” it said.
“I had something to do. A lesson to teach.”
“And have you seen it to its end?”
A smile spread, slowly unfurling. “I have. This man sought to yoke us for his purposes. I showed him that he could not.”
“Then it is done. It is time to come home.”
They kept the dominion of the dead, not the living. This girl would eventually tear beneath the strain of holding something infinite inside her. She’d rip like paper. It didn’t want that.
It didn’t want to make it slow. To prolong the inevitable.
It would, it had come to realize, feel something when Delaney Meyers-Petrov died.
