“North!” she shouted.
But North did not break his stride. “The current claims us all in the end,” he called without turning. “If you want to live, you have to fight.”
Alex gave up trying to find the bottom. She wrenched her body toward the east and swam, kicking hard, fighting the current as she plunged her arms into the water. She turned her head to gasp for breath, the weight of her shoes drawing her down, her shoulders aching. Something heavy and muscular bumped her, driving her back; a tail lashed her leg. Maybe the crocodiles couldn’t harm her, but they could do the river’s work. Fatigue sat leaden in her muscles. She felt her pace slow.
The sky had gone dark. She couldn’t see the shore any longer, wasn’t even sure she was swimming in the right direction. If you want to live.
And wasn’t that the worst of it? She did. She did want to live and always had.
“Hell!” she shouted. “Goddamn hell!” The sky exploded with forked lightning. A little blasphemy to light the way. For a long, horrible moment, there was only black water, and then she spotted the eastern shore.
She drove forward, plowing her hands through the water, until at last she let her legs drop. The bottom was there, closer than she’d thought. She crawled through the shallows, crushing lotus blossoms beneath her sodden body, and slumped down on the sand. She could hear the crocodiles behind her, the low engine rumble of their open mouths. Would they nudge her back to the river’s grasp? She dragged herself a few more feet, but she was too heavy. Her body was sinking into the sand, the grains weighing her down, filling her mouth, her nose, drifting beneath her eyelids.
Something hard struck Alex’s head again, then again. She forced her eyes open. She was on her back on the floor of the temple room, choking up mud and staring at Dawes’s frightened face framed by the painted sky—mercifully static and free of clouds. Her body was shaking so hard she could hear the thump of her own skull on the stone floor.
Dawes seized her, wrapped her up tight, and, slowly, Alex’s muscles stopped spasming. Her breathing returned to normal, though she could still taste silt and the bitter remnants of carob in her mouth. “You’re all right,” said Dawes. “You’re all right.”
And Alex had to laugh, because the last thing she would ever be was all right.
“Let’s get out of here,” she managed.
Dawes slung Alex’s arm around her shoulders with surprising strength and pulled her to her feet. Alex’s clothes were bone dry, but her legs and arms felt wobbly, as if she’d tried to swim a mile. She could still smell the river, and her throat had the raw, fish-slick feel of water going up her nose.
“Where do I leave the key?” asked Dawes.
“By the door,” said Alex. “I’ll text Salome.”
“That seems so civil.”
“Never mind. Let’s break a window and pee on the pool table.”
Dawes released a breathy giggle.
“It’s okay, Dawes. I didn’t die. Much. I went to the borderlands. I made a deal.”
“Oh, Alex. What did you do?”
“What I set out to do.” But she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. “The Bridegroom is going to find Tara for us. That’s the easiest way to figure out who hurt her.”
“And what does he want?”
“He wants me to clear his name.” She hesitated. “He claims Darlington was looking into the murder-suicide.”
Dawes’s brows shot up. “That doesn’t sound right. Darlington hated popular cases like that. He thought they were… ghoulish.”
“Tawdry,” said Alex.
A faint smile touched Dawes’s lips. “Exactly. Wait… then the Bridegroom didn’t kill his fiancée?”
“He says he didn’t. That’s not quite the same thing.”
Maybe he was innocent, maybe he wanted to make peace with Daisy, maybe he just wanted to find his way back to the girl he had murdered. It didn’t matter. Alex would hold up her end of the bargain. Whether you made a deal with the living or the dead, best not to come up short.
-
We may wish to pass more quickly over Book and Snake, and who could blame us? There is an element of the unsavory to the art of necromancy, and this natural revulsion can be nothing but increased by the way the Lettermen have chosen to present themselves. When entering their giant mausoleum, one can hardly forget one is entering a house of the dead. But it is perhaps best to put aside fear and superstition and instead contemplate a certain beauty in their motto: Everything changes; nothing perishes. In truth, the dead are rarely raised beneath their showy pediments. No, the bread and butter of the Lettermen is intelligence, gathered from a network of dead informants, who traffic in all manner of gossip and who needn’t listen at keyholes when they can simply walk unseen through walls.
Tonight Bobbie Woodward coaxed the location of an abandoned speakeasy from what looked like little more than the remnants of a spine, a broken jawbone, and a hunk of hair. There is no amount of Jazz Age bourbon that can make me forget that sight.
13
Last Fall
Darlington had woken from the Manuscript party with the worst shame hangover of his life. Alex showed him a copy of the report she’d sent. She’d kept the details murky, and though he wanted to be the kind of person who demanded a strict adherence to the truth, he really wasn’t sure he could look Dean Sandow in the eye if the specifics of his humiliation were known.
He’d showered, made Alex breakfast, then called a car to take them both back to the Hutch so he could pick up the Mercedes. He returned to Black Elm in the old car, the images of the previous night a blur in his head. He collected the pumpkins along the drive and put them in the compost pile, raked the leaves from the back lawn. It felt good to work. The house suddenly seemed very empty, in a way it hadn’t in a long time.
He’d brought few people to Black Elm. When he’d invited Michelle Alameddine to see the place his freshman year, she’d said, “This place is crazy. How much do you think it’s worth?” He hadn’t known how to answer.
Black Elm was an old dream, its romantic towers raised by a fortune made on the soles of vulcanized rubber boots. The first Daniel Tabor Arlington, Darlington’s great-great-great-grandfather, had employed thirty thousand people in his New Haven plant. He’d bought up art and iffy antiquities, purchased a six-thousand-square-foot vacation “cabin” on a New Hampshire lake, given out turkeys at Thanksgiving.
The hard times had begun with a series of factory fires and ended with the discovery of a process to successfully waterproof leather. Arlington rubber boots were sturdy and easy to mass-manufacture but miserably uncomfortable. When Danny was ten, he’d found a heap of them in the Black Elm attic, shoved into a corner as if they’d misbehaved. He’d dug through until he found a matched pair and used his T-shirt to wipe the dust off them. Years later, when he took his first hit of Hiram’s elixir and saw his first Gray, pale and leached of color as if still shrouded in the Veil, he would remember the look of those boots covered in dust.
He’d intended to wear the boots all day, stomping around Black Elm and mucking about in the gardens, but he only lasted an hour before he pulled them off and shoved them back into their pile. They’d given him a keen understanding of why, as soon as people had been offered another option for keeping the wet off their feet, they’d taken it. The boot factory had closed and stood empty for years, like the Smoothie Girdle factory, the Winchester and Remington plants, the Blake Brothers and Rooster Carriages before them. As he grew older, Darlington learned that this was always the way with New Haven. It bled industry but stumbled on, bleary and anemic, through corrupt mayors and daft city planners, through misguided government programs and hopeful but brief infusions of capital.