The line went dead. There were no parting words, no “Goodnight, son,” no “I love you,” or anything of that sort. But he had never been that sort of father. Most times, Eliot wasn’t sure his father even liked him. Eliot the son was a forgotten trophy from his younger years, there to pull from the shelf and polish when company was over, only to be a reminder that he was awarded for second place, a consolation prize of a child.
Eliot preferred to stay on the shelf, covered in dust. It was safer there.
He stared at his phone for a moment, certain it would begin ringing again and there would be even more demands on the other line. But instead, there was just his home screen: a picture of his mother as he saw her last week, sitting together on the porch swing in the garden, taken by josie in a moment of clarity. Those moments were getting rarer and rarer, and he didn’t know if he’d see another one from her before the end.
He couldn’t bear the thought of it, even though they all knew it was coming. For a moment, Eliot considered calling her. But no, it was nearly 8:00 here, so it would be almost 1:00 her time, and she would be sleeping.
Eliot got up and grabbed his car keys.
He had to get out, away. He couldn’t stay here, in this room. Maybe he could go to the library, but the thought of it curled horror in his stomach like sour milk after the events of earlier. The book was in his office, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near it right now. He wanted to talk to Tess, but there was no way to contact her, and she wasn’t the sort of person he could just casually speak to.
After all, Tess and Eliot weren’t friends. They were accomplices, maybe, complicit in the same crimes. And besides, Tess was not a viable candidate for his first true friend: she was prickly and hot-headed. She did not seem like the type who wanted to be confided in. And she hated him, which seemed like an important fact to weigh against any potential for friendship.
So he grabbed his keys and drove off into the darkness of the night. Far above, the stars glimmered in a clear sky. There was all that bullshit about them being the same stars he could see from England, the same stars that watched over his mother, but that was not the way he felt now. He couldn’t get to his mother any easier than he could get to another planet. For all intents and purposes, they were in separate solar systems.
He drove.
Back in the UK, where he didn’t have his license, he didn’t understand how people could think that it was relaxing. Relaxing was the sway of the Tube or the rickety speed of the train. Here, with the night air screaming through the open windows and the radio blasting, he got it. It was getting out of his own head. It was existing only in the black spaces between the headlights of other cars. Here in the city, it was so hard to be alone, so he drove until the buildings became cornfields and he was surrounded by darkness. Pennsylvania was good this way: isolation was so close, so present. He could be nobody from nowhere in less than half an hour.
Eliot drove until he was nothing but the pounding of his heart, the leather of the wheel between his hands, a disturbance in the wind. He drove until he didn’t know where he was and had no clue how to get back, and then he drove even farther. He drove until his jaw hurt from clenching his teeth too tightly and he didn’t recognize the names of the places on the exit signs.
Originally, he wasn’t meant to move to the States with his father. When Birch got the job at Falk, Eliot was starting his second year at Harrow, a posh boarding school in North London. He was meant to stay at the school during the week and escape to the country house in Hertfordshire when he could, to visit his mother.
His father had been home for break, trying to muddle something through with Eliot’s mother, even though there was no love left between them and even Eliot knew it. They were in London. His mother had an appointment with a specialist and an overnight stay, so Eliot and his father returned to the flat without her. Eliot muttered something about a shower and went into the bathroom, then crawled out the window to sit on top of one of the dormers outside.
In the cool springtime air, he’d emptied his pockets: the foot of a rabbit, a book of matches, a vial of his own blood, some chalk, a crumpled piece of paper, and a crystal from his mother’s stash. He’d set his treasures in a line and started working.
The blood, spilled into the shape of a circle with dots in four places. A streak of blood on the hare’s foot, then a lit match to set it on fire. The fur smelled awful as it caught.
He’d found the spell in a grimoire in the British Library. Intended for growths and cysts, but possibly, it could be used for tumors.
Eliot set the foot in the middle of the circle, watching it smolder. He unfolded the spell he’d scrawled onto the paper. “Itaska mulitae, matskna—”
“Eliot Julian Edward Birch, what do you think you’re doing?” A firm hand had clasped onto his shoulder, and Eliot was dragged firmly back into the bathroom, smelling of burnt fur.
“I—”
But it was too late. His father had seen what he was doing, seen the things on the dormer, and his face filled with vicious rage. He slammed Eliot into the wall so hard that Eliot’s teeth went through his cheek. He tasted blood.
“What did I tell you?” his father seethed. “What did I strictly forbid you from doing?”
How much you must hate me, Eliot thought, because of my magic.
Eliot did not answer. His father shook him firmly by the shoulders. “Do you think this is a game?”
“No,” Eliot said, looking at the place over his father’s left shoulder, focusing on a chipped porcelain tile.
“No more of this foolishness,” Birch snarled. His eyes were still furious, blazing with anger. He pulled his hands away, and without meaning to, Eliot rubbed one of his shoulders. He was certain it would be bruised tomorrow.
His father stalked away, and Eliot thought the argument was over. Except, it wasn’t. The next week he was pulled out of Harrow and his father made some grandiose claim about his mother being unfit, too sick to care for their son. When he when back to America, he took Eliot with him.
And there he lived ever since.
Eliot stopped at a gas station and bought a bag of crisps and a soda. He wished that he could walk out of the gas station and see a glowing Tube sign or a double-decker night bus instead of a barren parking lot in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, but it was just another impossibility.
He pulled out his phone. Thought about calling his mother. Thought about looking up Tess in the student directory. Remembered she hated him. Slipped the phone back in his pocket.
Eliot drove slower on the way back, wishing he could ignore the GPS directions back to the city and just keep going. The night wasn’t screaming so loudly in his ears, and he turned the music down so it was more melodic and less thumping. He ate his crisps and drank his soda and hated every single second of the land that rolled past his windows.
When he parked in front of his flat, the city was exhausted familiarity, and Eliot’s mouth tasted of all the magic he’d tried for and ruined.
thirteen
INSIDE OF JESSOP, YOU WERE COMING TO LIFE.
You were in a book in a crypt, a book forgotten by time and religion and history itself. A book that pooled dark liquid, dripped down a desk. Beads of ink split off and dripped onto carts, onto bindings and pages, spilling and congealing and growing.
Inside the boy’s office, you pulled the ink of yourself into a body and stood. You gazed at your hands, every color and none all at once.
You traced your fingers across the bindings of a book. Your hand pooled on the surface, the meniscus of your body too fragile, too insubstantial, to feel the leather cover.
You looked around. This was not the burning crypt of your last memory, nor was it the damp stone enclosure of the death before. This place was warm, smelling of dust, unguarded. This place thrilled with unfamiliar magic. This place was perfect.
There was a photograph on the desk, facing the window. You went around to consider it, footsteps tracking ink, transforming
to dust, blowing away to nothing. Your solid black eyes focused on the photograph. In it, there was a woman and a boy: the woman thin and frail but laughing, the boy fighting a smile, looking somewhere past the camera. Handsome. Approachable. The perfect vessel.
You trailed your finger over the woman’s arm, slung casually over the boy’s shoulders. Beads of your ink clung to the surface like morning dew. You tried to remember the warmth of human flesh, but you could not.
You were a boy once; you were—
No.
There was no boy; there was nothing of what you once were. You were the universe. You were history itself—nothing more and nothing less.
You cocked your head, considering the shape of the boy’s face, how his muscles would play under his flesh as he moved. Held a hand in front of your body. The noncolor shifted to paleness, a smooth hand, tidy fingernails. Up your arm tracked the color. You looked at the photograph again, cloaking your newly formed skin with a black sweater. It dripped unappealingly on the floor.
Well, you can only hide so much of your nature at once. The drips became dust. The dust vanished soon enough.
Ex Libris Infernorum.
You straightened. Closed your eyes. You could sense the girl who’d freed you from your tomb, the shape of her lips reading the words that contained you, the beauty of her terror.
Tess.
A revision: Ex Libris Tess Matheson.
You were free. Now, it was her time to burn.
fourteen
Tess
TESS WAS INSIDE OF A PAINTING.
Maybe it wasn’t a painting, but the trees were dripping sickly, dark sap that reminded her of a color of ink her father sent as free samples to buyers he didn’t like. After looking closer, Tess realized the trees weren’t the only things dripping. Everything was.
She was in a forest of some kind, with tall trees and overgrown paths and heavy mist floating through the branches. It looked like a scene from a ridiculous horror film she’d watched with her parents one night when they’d finally started letting her see R-rated movies.
She reached for a drooping branch. It looked watery, hazy, unreal. The leaves were wet when she ran a hand over them. Tess tilted her hand back, examining her palm. Dark blood was streaked across it.
“Tess.”
The whispered name came from behind her. When she turned, there was no one there. She couldn’t identify exactly who the voice belonged to, but she knew it was familiar. It was a male voice: a family friend’s, maybe, or a teacher she’d had last year. She turned in a slow circle, searching for a body the voice belonged to.
There was nobody there. Tess was alone in the forest.
“Tess.”
Her thoughts were hazy and uncertain. She rubbed her palms on her thighs, trying to rid them of the blood.
Something snapped—a branch or twig, leaves displaced. Tess turned towards the sound and squinted into the darkness. She wasn’t afraid; maybe, if she thought she’d be hurt, she would be. But here, in this dream of blood and madness, she was calm. Neutral.
She could only just make out a shape in the mist ahead. A person, maybe. A figure. A haunt, even, tall and dark. The figure moved closer, towards the place Tess stood, and something deep within her knew the figure was Eliot Birch.
Until he stepped into the light.
He had dark hair like Eliot, and beautiful eyes like Eliot, but he was thinner and stronger and older. The differences were imperceptible but present, like looking at a picture of Eliot through filtered glass or a memory. He flickered or shifted or changed, out of Eliot and back in, and it was clear he was something different and inhuman.
And then, just as quickly as she’d seen him, she came to understand him. He was the universe. His dark hair glittered with the impression of gems, of onyx and obsidian and diamond, and his skin was pale and luminous as a pearl under the liquid dripping over him. He was a boy. He was a monster. He was the most beautiful creature Tess had ever seen.
Tess’s religion believed in the devil, and therefore, so did Tess. But nowhere in the Bible was the devil described like this. Not tall and handsome and grinning and drenched in blood—or no, Tess realized. It wasn’t blood at all. Drenched in ink.
And yet.
Tess wasn’t afraid.
The devil reached his hand forward. “Will you do what I need?”
Tess swallowed hard. There was something there, in the distance, flickering between the trees. It kept catching her eye, drawing her gaze away from the devil. Heady black smoke crept through the trees.
“What are you asking of me?” Tess asked.
He nodded, coming closer. “Let me in,” not-Eliot whispered.
“Where?” Tess asked. Her breath felt caught and fluttery, and the word came out as a suggestion rather than sound. There, behind him, she caught a flash of orange. The sickly scent of burning sap filled the air. Flames crackled and one of the sap-trees split off in a shower of sparks.
“Everywhere,” he said. He edged closer. “In here,” the devil whispered, tapping a hand against her temple. “Into your mind.” With two fingers, he shut her eyelids gently. “In here,” the devil murmured, and with her eyes closed, Tess could see her own room, her own dorm. “Wherever you go, wherever you belong. I will belong there too.”
“I—” Tess started, but smoke invaded her lungs. She coughed, choking on the words. “And if I don’t?” she managed.
The devil stepped away from her, eyes strangely depthless as his lips curled into a smile. Flames licked into the clearing at an alarming rate. Tess backed away from them, from the blistering heat, but she was surrounded.
The flames avoided the devil.
She watched, horrified, as the devil stood in a clear circle amidst the flames. He did not catch; he did not burn.
The devil lifted a hand. The fire circled around it, forming an orb that flickered just over his palm. “You will regret it, Tess Matheson. The devil knows your name.”
Smiling ever wider, he drew his hand back, and launched the flames at Tess.
Tess jerked awake, breathing hard. Sweat soaked her skin and the sheets. For a moment longer, she felt the burning impact of the fire hitting her squarely in the chest.
It was just a dream. It had to be a dream.
She tucked her knees to her chest and put her head in her hands. When she rubbed her eyes, Tess realized that her hands were damp.
Tess examined her palms. They were stained with blood.
No, she thought, just on the edge of panic. No, she was familiar with the way that this liquid stained the crease of her palms and smeared when she ran her thumb across her open hand. This was not blood, drying on both of her palms.
There were smudges of it on her thighs, past the hem of her shorts. Fingerprints across her ribs. Splotches on her gray sheets.
Tess slid out of bed and dashed to the mirror. Her face was macabre and twisted: streaks of dark ink on her cheekbones and nose, down her chin.
She had to shower before work. She barely had time, but she had to. There wasn’t even enough time to figure out how she’d ended up covered in ink or where it had come from.
Tess grabbed her towel and started to the bathroom. But there was Anna on the couch, typing on her laptop, and there was no way for Tess to cover everything at once.
“Whoa there,” Anna said. “Is that blood?”
“No, it’s ink,” Tess said, realizing how ridiculous it sounded. But Anna already knew Tess was a peculiar person with strange habits. Still, she hesitated, looking for some normal sort of explanation. “I spilled a bottle. Changing out a pen color.”
“Oh,” Anna said. “Totally normal.”
Tess rolled her eyes. “You know, fountain pens are finicky. This is a somewhat normal thing.”
“If you say so.”
Tess didn’t have time to respond. She ducked into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her, and turned on the shower. She could not be late for work again.
fifteen
Eliot
ELIOT SAT IN HIS STUFFY, OVERCROWDED, BELOVED OFFICE with the horrifyingly bad tea and biscuits he’d bought from the market a few days before. They were stale from sitting out on his desk but he ate them anyway. Everything in the room seemed dusty and staler than usual, but he didn’t care. He was comfortable with dust.
The book was on one side of his desk. He’d cleared the rest of the grimoires and borrowed another cart from downstairs to house them. Strange as it was, it felt unnatural to keep the book from the basement among the others. As if it was poisoning them.
Tess was not downstairs when he’d come in that morning. It was the other girl—R-name-what’s-her-face—behind the desk, staring down at her phone. Eliot wasn’t disappointed that Tess wasn’t there. He didn’t let himself be disappointed.
After all, she wasn’t willing to help him into the stacks. Technically that was a rule, but he’d gotten around many rules stronger than hers before. She didn’t like him, but he’d been disliked before, and it had never quite fazed him this much. And she wanted to return the book to the basement, which he was mostly certain he didn’t want to do.
But then, there was the other side of the coin. His wild-eyed drive the night before had left him no room for doubt: something about her had infiltrated, had spread under his skin. He could not let her burrow any further.
Eliot sat back in his chair and pulled the book to the center of his desk. Earlier, he’d thought it might be another grimoire, but how could it be if it didn’t have words? There was only the bookplate and the passage Tess had read last night.
He opened the book and flipped through, page by page. Ex Libris Infernorum remained, but the writing Tess had read was gone. This did not surprise Eliot. After all, timing was key, and that was true of books as well as opportunities.
The Devil Makes Three Page 9
