The Devil Makes Three

by Tori Bovalino

  Eliot shrugged. “I’ll come back.”

  Tess’s eyebrows shot into her hairline. “I did you a favor! I won’t bring you down here again. It’s now or never.”

  At the far end of the room, Tess heard footsteps coming down the metal stairs. If Mathilde was back, and she stumbled upon Tess and Eliot in the cage, holding a book that shouldn’t have been in the cage where Eliot was not permitted to go …

  “There’s a back staircase,” Tess hissed, pushing Eliot out of the cage. She locked the door as quietly as she could. “Around the corner. The door next to the dumbwaiter.”

  Eliot kept to the wall and Tess slid behind him. Down the line, she could see one frail, sweater-clad shoulder sticking out from an aisle.

  She pulled open the door and shoved Eliot inside. The small, square room was there for electrical purposes. The closet-sized space held the workings of both the building’s elevator and the dumbwaiter in the stacks.

  Eliot moved to ascend the stairs—which was more of a spiraling metal ladder, with landings both to the hallway and stacks on each floor, and would be very loud under his weight—but Tess grabbed him by the tie and put a hand over his mouth. She pushed him back against the wall, pressing a hip into his thigh so he wouldn’t move, wouldn’t make a sound. Eliot’s eyes flew wide.

  Tess peeked out the grated vent set into the middle of the door. Mathilde came around the corner of the stacks, mouth twisted up at the corner. She frowned at the special collections cage, coming close and running her fingers against the lock. Tess said a quick prayer that she’d locked it properly.

  Her aunt’s shoulders relaxed. Mathilde darted another glance around the stacks and moved back towards the main stairs.

  Tess let out a breath. Except, suddenly, she was very aware that one hand was still pressed firmly against Eliot Birch’s mouth, and the other was wrapped around his tie.

  The silk of it was very, very soft.

  Eliot raised an eyebrow. “Comfortable?” he asked, voiced muffled as his lips brushed against her hand.

  “Go,” Tess whispered, pushing him away. Tess started up the ladder, scampering breathlessly all the way up to the third floor. She didn’t bother to check if he followed, but she could feel him shaking the metal behind her.

  Tess grabbed his hand and dragged him up the last few stairs, through a row of shelves, and out of the stacks to his office. Floors away from Mathilde, she let herself relax.

  “Well, that’s a good thing to know about,” Eliot said.

  “No,” Tess said, shutting Eliot’s door behind her. “No, no, no. You are not going down there again.”

  Bewildered, Eliot blinked back at her. “But why not?”

  He was insufferable. She shouldn’t have to explain this to him, considering he knew how Mathilde was, but apparently this Birch thought he was above everyone else here too. Besides, the door they went through was always locked in the reading room and only opened from the stacks.

  “I have to get back to work,” Tess said.

  Eliot didn’t move for a moment. He looked at her, and she hated the way he did it, like he was stripping away each layer of her to find the center until she wasn’t even sure what was left behind.

  “Why do you hate me?” Eliot asked.

  As if he didn’t know. As if it wasn’t obvious. Because she had done something impulsive—again—and put both her and Nat’s scholarships at risk. “You literally blackmailed me. I could’ve lost my job. I still can. And you’re just standing there in your fancy tie with your fancy book, looking at me like I’m the one who’s being unreasonable.”

  “I would never actually go to Mathilde or try to get you in trouble, even if you didn’t want to help me,” Eliot said, immediately defensive. “I asked for a favor, and you agreed.”

  Tess wanted to scream. It didn’t matter what he intended to do. “You have power here, whether you want to admit it or not,” she said, struggling to keep her voice level. “You had the notes. Information that could get me fired.”

  Eliot threw his hands up. “You couldn’t have actually expected me to turn you in. I’m not cruel.”

  What else was she supposed to assume?

  He was like every other rich boy at Falk. And like the rest of them, he didn’t understand what it meant to work so hard for something and end up a failure anyways. After all, there was too much of her father in her. No matter how much she pushed, how much she tried, she would amount to nothing.

  The silence stretched uncomfortably. Tess watched him, angry and unflinching, as Eliot stared back. Gradually, the resolution in his eyes turned to realization, and then to sadness. Perhaps she’d actually gotten through to him.

  Eliot closed his eyes. “But it seems I’ve acted cruelly,” he admitted, as if he read her mind. “I made a mistake. You’re right. I do have power, and it’s something I should be more aware of. I’m sorry. Truly.”

  “You can be as sorry as you want,” Tess snapped. “You were still a dick.”

  She wouldn’t have been surprised if he ordered her out of his office right then and there. But Eliot studied her face for a moment. She had that feeling again, like he was searching for something below the layers and was left wanting. Finally he sighed, and it released all of the tension he’d been holding in his shoulders.

  “Alright,” Eliot said. He picked up the book and looked down at the cover. “I was a dick. And in the future, I’ll work on that. But I want you to know that if you said no, if you told me you wouldn’t take me into the collections, I wouldn’t have questioned you or pressed. That’s not who I am. And I’m sorry. I see now I gave off the impression that I am that person.”

  If only she knew who Eliot really was.

  Not that it mattered. After today, after this moment, Tess would return to her desk and Eliot would stay in his office and they would probably never speak to one another again.

  There was something odd about Eliot Birch. Something that didn’t quite fit in with his scholarly persona. She’d never sensed it in another person; it was as if a shimmer clung to his skin.

  “Let me see that book,” Tess said. If it really was important, she figured she’d be able to tell.

  Somewhat reluctantly, Eliot handed it over. It was heavier than it looked, but these old books usually were. The fabric cover was black with gilded edges, and the pages were also gold when the book was closed. Tess balanced it on one arm and flipped through. Just like before, they were blank—or, no. No, they weren’t.

  There, in the middle, Tess could only just make out words written in gold ink.

  “Hey, did you see this?”

  Eliot moved behind her, looking over her shoulder. “No,” he said. “What does it say?”

  Tess squinted down at the words. They were faded, barely there against the eggshell-white page. “May the Earth belong to the damned and forsaken. Let the righteous burn in the burden of their ignorance. For he who looks inward for guidance trusts only himself, but he who seeks knowledge trusts all ink that has come before him.”

  The words felt hostile as they left Tess’s lips and poured into the room.

  She looked up just in time to see Eliot’s clothing ignite.

  Tess gasped, stumbling backwards. She hadn’t seen the source of the blaze; she could only watch in horror as flames licked over Eliot’s tie and sweater, as his skin blistered and blackened. His mouth opened wider, wider, cracking and bleeding. Tess reached out to do something only to see that her own hands were aflame.

  Time stopped. Adrenaline spiked in her veins.

  The pain came in one furious blast, sharp and devastating.

  She shrieked, falling to her knees and beating her hands against the carpet. The flames would not go out, nor would they catch on anything else. She tucked against herself, trying to smother it, but her whole body burned and ached and cracked and this would never end, it would never end, and she was meant to die here in this moment, in Eliot Birch’s office, probably because of his fucking candles and Nat,
and Nat, and Nat—

  Let the righteous burn.

  “Tess!”

  Tess?

  Her heartbeat echoed in her ears. She opened her eyes. The room rolled and spun but, deliriously, she realized she was no longer burning.

  Eliot was curled up on the floor next to her, one hand poised next to her cheek as if reaching out to touch her.

  He was not on fire. In fact, he looked as if he’d never been on fire. Aftershocks of phantom pain roiled through Tess’s body, but as she looked down at herself, she bore no evidence of the flames either.

  Eliot moved away. He stood up, breathing hard. “Jesus,” he muttered, examining his hands. Probably searching for burn marks. “Jesus.”

  The office stopped spinning and righted itself, and across the room, she heard Eliot sigh. A light sheen of sweat glistened on his face. He rested his hands on his desk and leaned over it, trying to gain control of his breathing, watching Tess as carefully, she suspected, as she was watching him.

  “Are you okay?” Tess asked, once she could find her voice again. She expected her throat to feel raspy and smoke-burned, but it was normal as ever.

  “I think so,” Eliot said, rubbing his stomach. “Are you?”

  No, Tess thought. No, I’m not okay. But she was not going to tell Eliot that, so she nodded. She wanted out of this room, out of this library. And she wanted out now.

  Something here was changing. Shifting. Waking up.

  Let me show you, it crooned in the back of her mind. What you are. What you can be.

  She ignored it. Tess Matheson was what she was, and no grimoire was going to tell her otherwise. No fear-driven invasive thoughts were going to force her into a panic attack, and she was not going to reveal yet another vulnerability to Eliot.

  Eliot was moving, going to the shelf. He grabbed a bundle of herbs, and with a self-conscious glance in Tess’s direction, lit them on fire. Fragrant smoke curled from his hands and he whispered something under his breath.

  Already, Tess’s head felt clearer. She couldn’t be sure … couldn’t be certain … that quickly, the whole thing seemed like it had been entirely imagined.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  Eliot shook his head, blowing out the smallest bit of flame and setting the herbs aside. “Sage. Smudging. It’s meant to clear the air. Whatever happened just then … It needs to be cleansed.”

  “I … We have to go,” Tess said. She was done with this whole thing. “Tomorrow morning, you and I are taking that book back where it belongs.”

  Eliot frowned. “We can discuss that tomorrow. When we’ve had time to think.”

  They had just been on fire. This was not a negotiation, no matter what Eliot Birch thought he was entitled to. There would be no time to think. She did not understand what had happened, what they’d been through, and she refused to believe in magic, except she could not deny the feeling the grimoire had something to do with the imagined flames.

  That book was going back as soon as possible. But she wasn’t going to argue with Eliot right now, while they were still in the library, at risk of being discovered.

  Tess led the way out to the reading room and down the stairs.

  “Theresa?” Mathilde called from the offices. Half of the lights were off, casting her skeletal body in shadow, making her look even more jarring. “Where were you?”

  Tess stopped, and Eliot bumped into her back. He cleared his throat and stepped away, pretending to examine a shelf nearby.

  She swallowed hard. “I was in here, on the fourth-floor balcony, shelving. Didn’t you hear me say hi when you came in?”

  Mathilde squinted at her, not quite believing, but almost convinced all the same. “You didn’t leave the reading room while I was gone? You weren’t in the stacks?”

  “No,” Tess said quickly. “I went as far as the office, but that’s it.” Mathilde still seemed to be thinking through this, and more thought could lead to more doubt, so Tess said, “Well, I’m going to close up out here. Do you need anything else?”

  “Actually …” Mathilde looked at Eliot over Tess’s shoulder. She raised an eyebrow. “The library is closed, Mr. Birch.”

  Eliot opened his mouth, and Tess was certain that he was going to say something infuriating, but he just pursed his lips, nodded once, and said, “Right. Thank you for your help, Tess.”

  Tess winced. It was too much.

  She was relieved when he went, but maybe it was because his absence made it easier to forget the strange book and all it did or didn’t contain, or the feelings of illness in his office—or maybe, because she could forget the feelings that were more surprising, the ones related to Eliot Birch himself and the way his mouth looked when he smiled.

  Mathilde watched Eliot go, waiting until the door shut behind him before she turned back to Tess. Her eyes were softer now, almost like Tess’s father’s, and that horrible tenderness made her feel even worse about what she’d done.

  “What did you help him with?” Mathilde asked.

  Tess shook her head. She couldn’t bear to lie outright, so she settled for a half-truth. “I helped him organize his books by call number so I can return them easier. There were a lot. That’s all.”

  Mathilde nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. She set a hand on Tess’s shoulder and the motion was uncomfortable, unprecedented, until Tess realized her great aunt was just swiping a cobwebby bit of dust off her sleeve. Mathilde’s hand fell, and Tess’s guilt rushed right back again.

  “Boys like that scare me,” Mathilde confessed, and Tess was unsettled by the statement. Mathilde rarely had anything nice to say about the students, it was true, but she was never so forward about her dislike.

  “Why?”

  Her frown deepened, darkening the creases around her eyes. Mathilde’s hands cupped her elbows as if she was chilled. “Because,” she said, “they want to know everything.”

  Tess felt oddly unmoored, lost in time. For the first time since moving to Falk, Tess longed to know more about Mathilde and how she’d become … this.

  “Is that a problem?” Tess asked.

  Mathilde frowned, shuffling back towards her office, back towards the stacks. “Only when they go too far.”

  twelve

  Eliot

  During his seventeen years of life, Eliot had had more than enough time to practice avoiding his father. But there was his phone, most of yesterday and all day today until he’d turned it off, buzzing away in his pocket.

  Finally, it was too much to bear. Eliot’s breaking point came at almost seven-thirty, a few hours after he’d left Tess behind at the library. Eliot would’ve still had his phone off, but there was always the chance of his mother calling, and he couldn’t risk missing that.

  “What?” Eliot nearly snarled into the phone. He stopped before saying more. He had to keep control of himself, had to keep his voice steady, had to keep his tone in check. There was too much at risk to upset his father.

  “Eliot,” his father said on the other end of the line. “Why haven’t you answered my calls?”

  “I’ve been busy,” Eliot said. It was a lie, but not a difficult one. It was the kind of lie that slid out easily, naturally—a half fib, if anything.

  “Doing what?” he asked, voice dripping with derision.

  For anyone else, it would’ve been a polite inquiry and nothing more—a check-in, maybe, or a checkup. But this was his father asking. Eliot would not answer that he was doing something athletic or mathematic or scholarly, so the answer would not be worthy.

  “Working,” he said shortly. It was enough of an answer to fulfill the demands necessitated by the question, but not too much of an answer to give his father any idea of what he was doing.

  “As if you know what that word means,” Birch said, a touch icier now. “It implies that you’re actually accomplishing something.”

  Eliot hated talking to his father. He sat back and stared at the ceiling, waiting for it to be over.

 
“And thank you for calling to tell me you’re back,” Birch said. “I love knowing when my son is gallivanting between continents on my money.”

  Soon. It would be over soon.

  “Did you receive my invitation to dinner?”

  Eliot hadn’t, because he hadn’t checked his voicemail, but he could only imagine what a dinner with his father would entail. “I won’t be able to join you, I’m afraid.” He wasn’t afraid, he wasn’t sorry—but he definitely was not going.

  “Now, Eliot,” his father started, and there was that blade of warning Eliot recognized all too well. It was the tone he’d used with his wife regarding their separation and medical bills, the one he’d used with Eliot about Falk, the one he’d used when they’d boarded a plane to America together three years before. It was a tone that left no room for negotiation. “You know what we discussed.”

  Eliot did know what they discussed. He wished there was a way to un-know what they’d discussed. It was like this: Eliot’s father traipsed around America while his wife withered away from advanced brain cancer that took away more of her every day. But without his father’s money, his mother could not pay for the experimental treatment that kept her alive, and a divorce would force her out of the country home she’d haunted in her illness. Birch denied her comfort and dignity. And now, he denied her her only son and put an ocean between them.

  He closed his eyes. He had to keep control of himself, for his mother’s sake. Eliot was the only reason his father paid for her treatments in the first place.

  “I remember,” Eliot said, running his pointer finger along a frayed bit of the couch. Maybe, if he made the hole wide enough, it would swallow him whole.

  “Sunday night,” his father said. “You will be there.”

  Eliot didn’t answer. He didn’t want to go to dinner, and he didn’t want to be beholden to his father. But he had to go, and they both knew it. He couldn’t say no if he cared about his mother at all.

  “What time?” Eliot asked.

  “Eight. Lucille will be so happy to see you.”

  Eliot hated the fact his father could feign flippancy, that he could turn the switch to that cordiality he used so easily. It was not an ability Eliot himself had inherited, and he almost hated himself for it. Only almost, though, because he couldn’t be truly mad for finding himself unlike his father in any way.