She tried to push up, but Dawes’s fingers were claws on the back of Alex’s skull. It was impossible to break her grip in this position. Dawes’s knee pressed into her back. Her fingers felt like spikes digging into Alex’s scalp.
The pressure in Alex’s chest was unbearable. Panic came at her like a dog slipped free of its leash, and she knew she’d made a very bad mistake. Dawes had been working with Book and Snake. Or Skull and Bones. Or Sandow. Or whoever wanted her gone. Dawes was finishing what the gluma had started. Dawes was punishing her for what had happened to Darlington. She’d known the truth of what had gone down that night at Rosenfeld all along, and this was her revenge on Alex for stealing away her golden boy.
Alex bucked and thrashed in silence. She had to breathe. Don’t. But her body wouldn’t listen. Her mouth opened on a gasp. Water rushed into her nose, her mouth, filled her lungs. Her mind was screaming in terror, but there was no way out. She thought of her mother, the silver bangles stacked on her forearms like gauntlets. Her grandmother whispered, Somos almicas sin pecado. Her gnarled hands gripped the skin of a pomegranate, spilling the seeds into a bowl. We are little souls without sin.
Then the pressure on the back of her neck was gone. Alex hurled herself backward, chest heaving. A rush of gritty water spewed from her mouth as her body convulsed. She realized her wrists were free and pushed up to her hands and knees. Deep, rattling coughs shook her body. Her lungs burned as she gulped at the air. Screw Dawes. Screw everyone. She was sobbing, unable to stop. Her arms gave way and she fell to the floor, flopped onto her back, sucking in breath, and wiped a wet sleeve over her face, trailing snot and tears—and blood. She’d bitten her tongue.
She squinted up at the painted ceiling. There were clouds moving across it, gray against the indigo sky. Stars glinted above her in strange formations. They were not her constellations.
Alex forced herself to sit up. She touched her hand to her chest, rubbing it gently, still coughing, trying to get her bearings. Dawes was gone. Everything was gone—the walls, the altar, the stone floors. She sat on the banks of a great river that flowed black beneath the stars, the sound of the water a long exhalation. A warm wind moved through the reeds. Death is cold, thought Alex. Shouldn’t it be cold here?
Far across the water, she could see a man’s shape moving toward her from the opposite shore. The water parted around the Bridegroom’s body. So he had true physical form here. Had she stepped behind the Veil, then? Was she truly dead? Despite the balmy air, Alex felt a chill creep through her as the figure drew closer. He had no reason to harm her; he’d saved her. But he’s a killer, she reminded herself. Maybe he just misses murdering women.
Alex didn’t want to go back into the water, not when her chest still rattled with the memory of that violent pressure and her throat was raw from coughing. But she had come here with a purpose. She rose, scrubbed the sand from her palms, and waded into the shallows, her boots squelching in the mud. The river rose, warm against her calves, the current pulling gently at her knees, then her thighs, then her waist. She drifted past the spiky bowls of lotus flowers resting gently on the surface, still as a table setting. The water tugged at her hips, the current strong. She could feel the silt shift beneath her feet.
Something brushed against her in the water and she glimpsed starlight glinting off a shiny, ridged back. She flinched backward as the crocodile passed, a single golden eye rolling toward her as it submerged. To her left, another black tail flicked through the water.
“They cannot harm you.” The Bridegroom stood only a few yards away. “But you must come to me, Miss Stern.” To the center of the river. Where the dead and the living might meet.
She didn’t like that he knew her name. His voice was low and pleasant, the accent almost English but broader in the vowels, a little like someone imitating a Kennedy.
Alex waded in farther, until she stood directly in front of the Bridegroom. He looked just as he had in the living world, silver light clinging to the sharp lines of his elegant face, caught in his dark mussed hair—except here she was close enough to see the creases of the knot in his necktie, the sheen of his coat. The bits of bone and gore that had splattered the white fabric of his shirt were gone. He was clean here, free of blood or wound. A boat slid past, a slim craft topped by a pavilion of billowing silks. Shadows moved behind the fabric, dim shapes that were men one moment and jackals the next. A great cat lay at the edge of the boat, its paw playing with the water. It looked at her with huge diamond eyes, then yawned, revealing a long pink tongue.
“Where are we?” she asked the Bridegroom.
“At the center of the river, the place of Ma’at, divine order. In Egypt all gods are the gods of death and life as well. We don’t have much time, Miss Stern. Unless you wish to join us here permanently. The current is strong and inevitably we all succumb.”
Alex looked over his shoulder to the shore beyond, west to the setting sun, to the dark lands, and the next world.
Not yet.
“I need you to look for someone on the other side of the Veil,” she said.
“The murdered girl.”
“That’s right. Her name is Tara Hutchins.”
“No small feat. This is a crowded place.”
“But I’m betting you’re up to the task. And I’m guessing that you want something in return. That’s why you came to my rescue, isn’t it?”
The Bridegroom didn’t answer. His face remained very still, as if waiting for an audience to quiet. In the starlight, his eyes looked almost purple. “If I’m to find the girl, I’ll need something personal of hers, a beloved possession. Preferably something that retains her effluvia.”
“Her what?”
“Saliva, blood, perspiration.”
“I’ll get it,” Alex said, though she had no idea how she was going to manage that. No chance was she going to be able to talk her way back into the morgue, and she was all out of coins of compulsion. Besides, Tara might be underground or ashes by now for all she knew.
“You’ll need to bring it to the borderlands.”
“I doubt I can come back here. Salome and I aren’t exactly on friendly terms.”
“I can’t imagine why.” The Bridegroom’s lips pursed slightly, and in that moment, he reminded her so much of Darlington, she felt a tremor pass through her. On the western shore, she could see dark shapes moving, some human, some less so. A murmur rose from them, but she couldn’t tell if there was reason in the noise, if it was language or just sounds.
“I need to know who murdered Tara,” she said. “A name.”
“And if she doesn’t know her attacker?”
“Then find out what she was doing with Tripp Helmuth. He’s in Skull and Bones. And if she knew anyone in Book and Snake. I need to know how she’s connected to the societies.” If she was connected at all, if it wasn’t just coincidence. “Find out why the hell—” A bolt of lightning flashed overhead. Thunder cracked and the river suddenly seemed alive with restless reptilian bodies.
The Bridegroom raised a brow. “They don’t like that word here.”
Who? Alex wanted to ask. The dead? The gods? Alex dug her boots into the sand as the current tugged at her knees, urging her west into darkness. She could ponder the mechanics of the afterlife later.
“Just find out why someone wanted Tara dead. She has to know something.”
“Then let us come to terms,” said the Bridegroom. “You shall have your information, and in return I wish to know who murdered my fiancée.”