“Because you think they’ve both died.”
Nate shrugged. “Theyarein the dead pool.”
“So are you,” she pointed out.
“So am I.” He sounded wistful as he sat back against the couch and pushed an earbud into his left ear. “And now so are you. Didn’t your parents tell you you should never sign anything without knowing what it is you’re signing?”
A shout flooded the hollow nave, reverberating between them. Delaney nearly dropped her phone a second time.
Nate frowned in the direction of the narthex. “What was that?”
“My roommate,” Delaney said. “I think. I’m going to go make sure she’s okay. Are you heading out? It’s getting pretty dark.”
He popped in his other earbud. His features were murky beneath the twilit haze, shadows swimming in place of his smile. From this distance, she couldn’t quite make out the color of his eyes. “I’ll probably hang out here a while longer. I’m not much of a people person.”
“I get that,” she said, because neither was she. She felt a funny sort of kinship with him—this boy who didn’t mind a little bit of solitude. For the first time since the semester began, she felt as if she’d finally bumped into someone on equal footing. “See you around campus, then?”
His eyes flashed in the waning light. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll see you around.”
She hurried off without him, the smell of marker vapors following her out.
She found Adya and Mackenzie where she’d left them, the latter passing the former a bottle of water, one hand rubbing circles into her back. The tarot cards were scattered about the floor as though they’d been pitched in a strong wind.
“What happened?” Delaney asked, drawing up short.
Adya didn’t reply right away. Shutting her eyes, she rubbed at them with the heels of her hands. The pendant sat shattered on the ground in front of her, broken bits of crystal catching the light. Drawing a single, shaky breath, she said, “I saw him.”
“The same boy as before?” Delaney bent down and began gathering up Mackenzie’s cards, stomach curdling.
“I think so,” Adya said after she’d capped her water. Her stare was black in the paltry light, the dark fringe of her lashes dewed with tears. “I couldn’t see his face.”
Delaney thought of the wall of names, Nate Schiller lit red by the drowning sun. “Everyone up on that wall has either died or is going to die.” Suddenly, it didn’t seem so far-fetched.
“You’re okay,” Mackenzie said as Adya let out a shuddering exhale. “You’re fine, just keep sipping your water.”
Delaney reached for another card and drew her hand back, quick. A tear of blood welled on the tip of her finger. Sucking the paper cut clean, she glanced down at the card. The devil smiled up at her, tongue forked and tail lashing.
“Did he say anything to you?” she asked, still sucking at the sting in her finger.
Adya’s eyes were big and round as they met hers. “No,” she said. “He’d been ripped apart.”
The Apostle made the call at night, as he always did. He stood in his office on the second floor of his sprawling Newton town house, backlit by the silver-plate moon in the great bay window. As he always did. In the corner, the darkness convalesced. It grew arms, thin and reaching. It watched, waiting, its smile cut with moonlight.
As it always did.
He did his level best to ignore it.
He wore his bathrobe, the fine pima cotton emblazoned with his initials. His slippers, one size too small, had been a Christmas gift from his wife. The memory foam sweated against the soles of his feet. His phone was a burner. Tonight, it felt heavier than usual.
The phone rang once. Two times. Three. He didn’t like to be ignored. He pressed his thumb to the polished glass casing to his left. It sat atop a heavy plinth, the bleached white of a bone shard nestled in a beveled snuffbox within. The curve of it caught ivory in the moonlight, its edges dagger sharp where it had been filed away. Material proof of the vast extent of the Priory’s reach. Proof that initiating a boy who could rip open the sky between worlds had been a worthwhile investment indeed.
A fourth ring shivered in his ear.
He was getting annoyed.
He paced, circling the display, his eyes never leaving the necrotic shard. It was his genie’s lamp, his Charon’s coin. His bit of Koschei’s soul, squirreled away inside a needle, inside an egg, inside a little wooden chest in a little glass case on the second story of a Newton town house.
A voice picked up on the other end. “I just absolutely beasted this level.”
