The Devil Makes Three

by Tori Bovalino

  “You have a tattoo,” Tess said after an extended moment of silence. “What is it?”

  Instinctively, Eliot’s hand went to his upper arm, where his tattoo went from his shoulder to the middle of his bicep. “That,” he said, like he was embarrassed, but really, he wasn’t. It was personal. Nobody had ever asked about it before, because very few people had seen it in the months since he’d had it done. “My mother has the same one.”

  It wasn’t an answer, not really, and the curious look from Tess was enough to let him know she wasn’t going to let that slide.

  “My mother was an English professor,” Eliot said. “That’s why my name is Eliot. Both for T.S. and George, her favorite poet and her favorite author.”

  “‘Let us go then, you and I, where the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table,’” Tess quoted immediately.

  Eliot cracked a smile. “Right. Exactly. Mine is in her handwriting, and hers is in mine. It’s a teapot with a George Eliot quote: ‘Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.’”

  “And the teapot?” Tess asked. “I don’t see how that fits.”

  “It’s a joke, between my mother and me. There’s that line, about measuring life in coffee spoons, and she used to say that she measured her life in pots of tea instead.”

  His voice was choked, soft, fragile. Like his heart. Eliot sat up and lifted his sleeve to show her. Sure enough, there it was: the quote, written in elegant script too perfect to be human, that instantly made him homesick. Surrounding the quote was the teapot, simply outlined and delicately shaded on his arm, decorated with scrolls and flowers on his mother’s.

  Tess shifted forward and pulled her hand free from his. She traced the edge of the teapot. Eliot watched her, mesmerized, as her mouth turned up into a smile and her eyes sparkled into a laugh.

  “What?”

  That giggle, that perfect sound, escaped once more. “I just realized that you literally have a teapot tattoo. You’re the most British person I know.”

  He couldn’t look at her and not smile. She was so close, so warm, when she ducked her head and bit her lip. And God, above all, he wanted to kiss her. But he didn’t, and even still, he was happy.

  When blood flooded Tess’s cheeks and he felt the answering warmth on his own face, he felt magic singing through his veins.

  forty five

  Tess

  TESS DIDN‘T GO INTO THE LIBRARY WITH HIM. SHE WAITED for him to emerge, grim-faced and laden with grimoires. Back at her dorm, he set the books across the bare box spring of the bed like an offering. Her mattress was still in Anna’s room.

  “Okay,” Eliot said, voice pitched low. Tess curled up in a carpeted corner and watched him, seeing the scholarly tilt of him slipping back into place. “These are the closest things I could find. I marked the pages that might be useful, but I haven’t actually read much.”

  He passed her a book. “Can you hand me a pen?” Tess asked. “They’re behind you. On the desk.”

  She didn’t miss Eliot’s frown as he passed her a clear demonstrator pen from her desk. “Fancy,” he said, but his voice sounded uncertain.

  “Something wrong?”

  He shook his head. “It makes me nervous. Ink. Like it could attack me at any moment.” He said it all quickly, as if waiting for her to judge him.

  Tess took the pen, twisting it in her hands, considering. “I mean, our track record over the last few weeks has not been good.”

  Eliot shrugged.

  She turned back to the book he’d handed her. The issue with working at a library and having a good memory was that she could remember pulling almost every single one of them, could glance at the spine and place them on the shelves in her memory. This one was from a grouping of astronomical books, and she could guess before opening it that it would be useless.

  “We should organize them by call numbers,” Tess said. Eliot looked up at her, confused. “Listen. The system the library uses groups stuff with similar topics. So if we have a lot of books about astrology, they won’t be helpful, but the folklore and witchcraft ones would.”

  Eliot frowned.

  “Or you could use magic to find what we need,” Tess said. The words tasted odd on her tongue. No, it did not surprise her to find that Eliot was some sort of … something. Maybe she was just desensitized to magic. She’d grown up with ghosts, she now courted the devil. Eliot’s witchcraft felt strangely right.

  “That’s not how it works,” Eliot said, rolling his eyes. But a small smile teased at his lips, and Tess had the impression her casual mention of it was welcome. Like, for the first time, Eliot didn’t have to hide anymore.

  She took the books and examined their spines, grouping them. Once she found two piles that looked satisfying, focusing mainly on dark, forbidden magic and a history of it, she divided those books between her and Eliot.

  While they read, she couldn’t help sneaking glances at him. Eliot was clearly in scholar mode, small frown permanently etched onto his face, brows wrinkled, eyes a little squinted. She thought of the devil in the dream before she’d woken up covered in blood. Of the caress of his hands on her skin.

  Would that be how Eliot felt, if he touched her the same way?

  “I think I found something,” he said, halfway through his third book. Tess was still on her first, too easily distracted. She got up and sat next to him, reading over his shoulder.

  “There’s a grouping of folklore about a book. It’s called the Höllenzwang. In the lore I’ve come across, it contains a demon. The reader of the book releases him. To put him back, the reader has to read the text backwards.”

  Tess thought it over. She recalled reading the book, the slipperiness of the words on her tongue. “It sounds plausible,” she said. “What do you think?”

  He frowned. “It doesn’t say anything about ink devils or hauntings or dreams. I don’t really know, to be honest.”

  Tess nodded, considering. “I feel like it’s the only option we have. I mean, I think I ended Regina …”

  “About that,” Eliot said, voice a little higher. He turned and pulled another book onto his lap. “I don’t think this fits exactly, but it’s about demonic possession. But Tess … It’s not an elegant solution.”

  Tess could tell from his tone she was not going to like this. “What is it?”

  Eliot’s eyes were flat, focused on the closet doors. “Decapitation.”

  “Decapitation,” Tess repeated. Just the word made her feel sick. She looked down at her hands and tried to imagine removing someone’s head.

  You have to do this, she thought. You have to do this and you have to read the book backwards and you have to set yourself free.

  She felt the resolve forming inside her. It was terrifying and sickening and awful, but if this was what it took to survive …

  How far could she go? Far enough to end it. Far enough to take her own life back.

  “Okay,” Tess said. “Okay.”

  forty six

  Tess

  TESS TOOK EXTRA CARE DRESSING IN THE MORNING. SHE braided her hair into two tight plaits and dressed in a pair of army green shorts that she felt good running in, a loose black tunic shirt, and tennis shoes. After a moment of thought, she tucked a knife and a flashlight into her bag before dashing out the door.

  Eliot wasn’t in the library yet so Tess would have to occupy herself with work until he arrived. It was strange to Tess that he was still so comfortable coming into the library, even after everything that had happened to them. She certainly was not. Didn’t he feel the press of sinister evil on his heart when he walked through the door?

  It was nearing 10:00 and she was staring off into space when she realized that someone was pressed up against the far window of the library, smiling ghoulishly inside.

  Regina.

  The knife still stuck out from her ribcage. She was caked in blood, speckled with mud. Leaves and sticks tangled in her hair. She looked greenish a
nd dead, decaying.

  Tess froze in the middle of the floor. As she watched, Regina raised one hand and waved at her, like a small child.

  How had no one seen Regina? Now, she was in a thicket of trees that bordered one edge of the building, but she’d had to walk there to find them … Unless she could just appear and disappear, but that felt more impossible than Eliot’s magic.

  She grabbed a cart and wheeled it back into the office. Her heart was pounding. Tess didn’t think Regina would attack Mathilde. No, it was Tess herself who was the devil’s target. “Do you mind if I shelve some books?” Tess called, willing her voice not to shake. If she could get into the stacks, where Mathilde could not hear her, she could call Eliot. Maybe. If there was reception.

  “I’ll watch the reading room,” Mathilde said, taking her cup of tea with her. Tess had a moment of fear that Mathilde would walk out into the reading room and see Regina at the window, but when she turned to look, Regina was gone.

  Fear blossomed like a dark orchid in the pit of her belly. She had to reach Eliot. She had no doubt she was emotionally strong enough to decapitate Regina herself, but it was also a matter of being physically strong enough.

  Tess unloaded the cart of books into the dumbwaiter and pressed the button. Her hands were shaking and she wanted to run, but if Mathilde looked back right now, she needed to seem productive. Once the elevator was on its way, she dashed up the stairs into the stacks.

  She fumbled for her phone to call him. The line rang once, beeped sadly, went silent. Tess pulled the phone away. Call dropped, the phone mocked. She tried again. Same result. But there would be service higher, in Eliot’s office. And maybe she could wait for him there.

  The floors in the stacks were shorter than those in the library, so the third floor of the library, where Eliot’s office was, was really the fourth floor of the stacks. Tess hit the second floor and quickly turned up to the third. She was just reaching it when she splashed through a puddle on the stairs.

  There shouldn’t have been a puddle.

  There was no reason for there to be a puddle.

  The puddle was ink.

  She couldn’t stop. Tess carefully proceeded up the last two steps and stood on the third-floor landing, listening. There was a steady drip, drip, drip somewhere, but she couldn’t find the source of it. Slowly, slowly, she rounded the corner into the main area of the stacks.

  From what she could tell, the floor was empty.

  The stacks were a monstrous creature all on their own. Floor-to-ceiling shelves full of books, spaced with four feet between them. No way to see into the aisles unless you were already rounding the corner. It was not hard to hide in here.

  She knew she should keep going—dart around the shelf to the stairs, run up to the fourth floor, get to Eliot’s office now—but if there was something here on this floor, the worst thing would be to let it get behind her.

  Tess wished she’d had the foresight to bring her knife with her into the stacks, but here she was. Alone and defenseless, without service to call Eliot.

  She grabbed a heavy book from the closest shelf to use as a shield. Somewhere farther down, the floor creaked. That feeling of not being alone was confirmed by that simple shift, that tiny sound. The hair on her arms stood on end.

  And still, somewhere, there was that drip, drip, drip.

  She crept down the narrow aisle, peeking around each corner before she passed a new shelf. One aisle. Empty. Two. Empty. Three. Empty.

  Tess glanced over her shoulder, just to be sure. Nothing.

  As Tess began to round the corner to peek around the fourth shelf, she heard a thud. Maybe not a thud—maybe a shuffle. A shuffle and a drip, and it was enough to make Tess’s heart seize up in her chest.

  Regina was in this aisle. She had to prepare to round the corner and see Regina’s dead eyes looking back.

  But it wasn’t really Regina, Tess reminded herself.

  As she counted away seconds, steeling her nerves, she wondered if people ever got used to dead bodies. After all, there were people who did this for a living. Stumbled across them, half-decayed. Cleaned away whatever remained when a person became a collection of unsavory biological matter.

  Tess did not know how to be the kind of person who turned the corner, saw Regina’s animated corpse, and didn’t recoil.

  But she had to get it over with, sooner rather than later. Tess rounded the corner.

  Now that there was no glass separating them, Regina’s body looked even worse. Her eyes were milky and looked soft, like they were going to liquidize and run down her cheeks. The thought was enough to make Tess gag. Her skin was mottled, cast in greenish and purpling hues. Dried blood flaked away from her hands. Her skin looked both too tight and too loose, and under her tank top, her stomach was bulging. Tess recalled some awful episode of a police procedural she watched with Nat once, an episode in which the gases from decay had caused the corpse’s midsection to erupt. A maggot wriggled out of Regina’s pierced button nose and fell squirming onto the library floor. Tess stepped back.

  “Tess,” Regina said, and there was a guttural edge, like her vocal cords had been slashed. Her voice didn’t sound anything like her. “Why did you have to make things difficult?”

  It took Tess a moment to recognize the voice that not-Regina was slipping into, but the hazy, dreamy quality of it snapped the similarities into place. Regina was speaking with the devil’s voice.

  The smell of rot filled the aisle, and Tess had no idea how she hadn’t smelled it before.

  “I didn’t make things difficult,” Tess said, wishing for a weapon. She could turn and run, but there was no running away from this. The devil would only follow her, and there would be nothing guarding her back.

  Regina reached out with her broken, bone-tipped fingers. Tess hadn’t seen the full extent of the ruin of them after the devil had spent so long scratching at her door the night before. Now, the flesh flayed away from her bones in blackened strips.

  “I could’ve given you everything.”

  Tess didn’t know what the devil was offering, but it wasn’t safety. She held the book tighter, protecting her chest.

  “I’m not yours,” Tess said. Maybe if she did what Eliot had told her to last night, she could drive the devil away. “You are not welcome in this place. You are forbidden.”

  Regina’s mouth trembled, then twisted into a smile. Wider, wider, wider it went, too high at the corners, too open, and dried blood stained the cracks between her teeth as if there was no moisture in her mouth and hadn’t been for days. As if she was already just a skull.

  “Oh, you silly child,” the devil said. “Don’t you understand? You’re in my realm now.”

  Tess didn’t have time to wonder what that meant. The devil turned Regina’s hands and lightly touched her ruined fingertips to the shelves on either side. To Tess’s horror, something brackish and black trickled from the books, pooled on the shelves, poured down to the floor. It corrupted the other books it touched until the whole section of shelf was bleeding dark, heavy liquid. The liquid collected in the middle of the floor, just in front of not-Regina’s feet. And then, Tess heard the drips, the flowing of the liquid, from the other shelves up and down the floor.

  Ink.

  All the ink was running out of the books and collecting on the floor. Already, it was edging towards her, moving like a sentient creature. Not spreading, like it had before. And it wasn’t just flat black—it was every color at once. Shimmering and vivid, changing. It was not the harmless ink her father bottled and sold. This ink was real and alive, containing some part of the devil within it, controlled and ready for more blood.

  Tess shuddered, realizing what the difference was. This ink was the same universe as Truth’s eyes in all the dreams she’d had before. Everything and nothing all at once; terrible and beautiful and coming for her soul.

  None of the folklore said anything about this.

  “No, no, no.” She couldn’t let it touch her. A
nd as the ink collected, she knew she had to get rid of not-Regina, once and for all.

  Her only weapon was embedded deep within the corpse’s side.

  Tess had to think quickly. The knife was there—all she had to do was claim it. It was now or never. And in her head, she heard Eliot’s instruction: cut off her head. Decapitate the body, and it would be over.

  Tess lurched forward while Regina’s hands were still pressed against the shelves and her head was tossed back in that horrifying laugh.

  The knife came out easier than Tess had expected, sliding out of the body with a horrible schlick noise, and Tess almost fell backwards.

  The laughter cut off abruptly, and the devil’s head snapped upright, then cocked at a horrible angle. Around them, the ink continued to drip.

  “And what are you going to—”

  The devil was cut off by the knife as Tess regained her balance, lurched forward, and cut Regina’s throat. Forcing through her own revulsion, she grabbed a fistful of Regina’s hair and forced her head back against the stacks.

  Just do it and it’ll be over, just do it just do it just do it.

  Regina’s flesh was soft with decay. Tess used all her might, sawing through the muscles of her neck. Blood poured from the wound—not a spurt, as Tess expected, because the heart was not beating. Had not been beating for days.

  The devil let out a cry of rage, one hand grabbing for Tess’s as the other clawed for her eyes. But Tess squeezed her eyes shut and kept sawing. As the devil thrashed, the gore splashed onto her, room temperature blood that tasted of rot and horror.

  She hit bone and the devil sagged against the shelves. The attempts to pry her hands off were weaker. Though the devil’s spirit tried to keep after her, Regina’s dead body was too weak.

  Tess dragged the body down onto the ground and knelt next to it. Her hands were slick, covered with tepid blood and bits of rotten flesh. Blood sluiced from the wound, great black tides of it rushing over Tess’s fingers, thick and sticky and slick. She found the notch between two vertebrae and cut there, then through the last bit of skin. It made a horrible cracking sound as her knife hit bone.