The Devil Makes Three

by Tori Bovalino

  Want.

  “Oh,” Tess breathed, as reality swirled around her.

  It echoed every human desire she’d held in her heart, every wish to be better and more and flawless. She saw her hands, rife with calluses but practiced. Perfect. She saw his brushstrokes. She saw him, a boy, a devil.

  They were the same. Too late, Tess understood. She was not looking at someone who’d failed or fallen. She was looking at herself, her own story. She saw the devil looking back, and in his gaze, she saw her own image.

  fifty eight

  Eliot

  ELIOT WAS IN HELL. THERE WAS NO OTHER EXPLANATION.

  The moment Tess touched the book, the room had flooded with ink, sweeping him up and slamming him against the wall. The viscous fluid burned as it solidified into a webby prison, keeping him secured against the wall.

  But when it all settled, Tess was there. Unharmed. Her face was utterly, impossibly blank.

  Ink spun around the room, forming a man. Fear choked in Eliot’s throat. He knew this devil. It was him. It was a fallen god, a debauched angel.

  It had Eliot’s own face and eyes like the universe.

  And then it wasn’t Eliot at all. The figure shifted, reformed, and he was looking at his father. He raised a hand and slapped Eliot across the face. Eliot tasted blood in his mouth.

  “Do you think your magic is enough to save you from this?” he sneered. “You are weak. You have always been weak.”

  Another reformation, and his mother stood before him, whole and healthy. She took his chin, fingernails digging into Eliot’s skin.

  “Mum,” Eliot gasped, pulling against his restraints.

  But her smile was twisted, a mockery of the mother he remembered. “You thought I loved you. You are a fool, Eliot. Just like your father.” Her nails dug in deeper, and Eliot felt the wetness of blood trickling down his chin.

  “Don’t leave me,” Eliot begged. “Don’t leave me here.”

  His mother only looked at him. “No one can save you.” She turned and left the room. Eliot knew, in some part of him, that it wasn’t truly his mother, that it was the devil—but she was right all the same. No one could save him.

  He strained against the ink that bound him, screamed everything he could think at Tess. But none of it was enough. None of it would ever be enough.

  He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the devil took Tess in his arms.

  He screamed and strained and bled. His throat was hoarse and painful. And through it all, he thought of his mother.

  If he died before her, she would know, somehow. She would wake up in her gauzy bedroom, in her mind or out of it, and she would know deep within herself that Eliot was not in this world anymore. Just as Eliot was certain he would know the minute her soul released, the moment she left him.

  She could not save him.

  But worse: he could not save her. Over and over, it echoed, cutting off his screams and leaving him gasping as the ink burned trails into his skin.

  He could not save her, he could not save her, he could not save her.

  Eliot could not save himself.

  Magic or not, witch or not, he was absolutely useless. He was going to die; Tess was going to die; his mother was going to die. He had power filling his veins and no way at all to use it.

  He would hang on this wall for the rest of eternity, and someday, someone would come down to this godforsaken tunnel and find his bones.

  “Tess,” he pleaded, but there was no use. He could barely see her through the ink dripping into his eyes. He could only barely make out the shape of her, a fallen angel, tucked into the devil’s arms.

  There had been no one there to protect her, either. No, Tess had to protect everyone else.

  Tess had to protect everyone else.

  Realization flooded through Eliot. He fought his bonds, scraping his bare skin on the rough stone behind him. “Tess!” he shouted. He didn’t know how to get through to her, how to make her hear. But he had to. “Natalie!” he shouted. “You have to do it for Natalie, Tess!”

  He had no way to know if it was enough. For a moment, just a moment, he thought she might see him. And then the ink crawled inside of his mouth, choked his voice, turning his words to garbled cries of nothing.

  Eliot Birch had always been a failure. He could not save anyone, and now he could not even save himself.

  fifty nine

  Tess

  SHE SAW HIM THERE, IN HER DREAMS, WATCHING HER SLEEP. She saw him in her nightmares. She saw the hell that was his past, all of it at once: the waiting and the torture and the wanting to be more, more, more, and never quite getting there. The apple and his mother’s braid and pigment and ink; fear and loathing and desire and wanting, more than anything, the wanting.

  She could not forgive him. She could not excuse what he’d done, what he’d become. But she could accept that this devil was not mindless. He was not full of violence.

  He was human, once. And he was terrified.

  Tess pulled her non-knife hand loose and trailed it up his arm, rested her hand on his shoulder. “I see you,” she said, and it was a realization.

  The boy in front of her—because that’s what he was, after all—did not look like Eliot. Pale skin, hair the color of a raven’s wing, green eyes, and a sharp nose. Broader in the shoulder than Eliot but shorter. Maybe her age, maybe older or younger, maybe timeless.

  “I see you,” she said again.

  “You can’t,” the boy said, and his hand was shaking on hers, shaking on the knife, and the silver of it glimmered with ink.

  She shifted her hand down, flat-palmed against his chest. Everything was coming clearer now: his shirt, open to the middle of his chest, stained with paint, ragged; the ends of his hair, falling over his shoulders; a scar across his chin.

  He had no heartbeat.

  He was trying to kill everyone she loved. He’d killed Mathilde and Regina, was going after Nat and Anna and Eliot, and he had nearly killed her. She welcomed the pulse of dark magic across her fingertips, prickling like a jellyfish sting. Tess pressed her fingers in harder, watching as the boy winced. He shifted, tucking the book under one arm. Ink congealed on its surface, staining his shirt.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked, even though she didn’t need to. The deal came clearly now, through the magic between them: twenty-four years, endless talent, the adoration of the entire world. And the panic of being trapped, the terrible reality of losing your own body and becoming nothing, of being reduced only to ink and magic and nightmares.

  It was a tempting offer. Twenty-four years of perfection was enough to become unforgettable.

  The boy lifted his hand to his chest, covering hers. He almost felt real. Solid.

  And this: Tess realized with an odd sense of wonder that, all along, she had the strange magic to turn the devil back into a boy.

  “I never wanted to,” he said. His eyes slipped shut as his fingers slotted between hers, hand getting warmer, squeezing tight. “I only wanted to be free.”

  Magic swelled between them, not through the boy-devil, not through her, but like a thousand voices shouting and demanding and fighting. Reality swirled around, too close and too loud.

  Nat.

  She didn’t know how she’d forgotten her in the deluge of ink, or if she really existed in the first place, but she remembered her now and she was certain that Nat was being pursued by the magic and her sister needed her.

  She could hear Eliot now, too, shouting from somewhere far away, almost louder than death itself.

  “Stop the magic,” Tess pleaded. “Save them. Stop the ink. You have to. You have to be able to.”

  The panic settled, terror close and hot through the deluge of ink that threatened to swallow them both. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t control it.”

  Her fingers tightened as she realized the truth of it. If he couldn’t do it, then she couldn’t either. “I’ll do whatever you need,” Tess said, growing desperate. She readjusted her gri
p on the knife and an edge cut into her palm. There was the book between them, ink flowing from its pages, and Eliot screaming, and Nat dying, and she could not slip from this nightmare into reality if they ceased to exist.

  The boy-devil leaned close, close enough that she could smell the blood on him. “Free me from this torment,” he begged.

  Tess met his gaze and absorbed the terror, the desire, the exhaustion. Possession, she realized, was not the only freedom.

  The magic was thick in her ears, pounding like a second heartbeat. Ink poured between the boy-devil’s fingers, over her hands, prickling her skin. She tasted the metallic bite of it on her tongue.

  His eyes were turning black, going dark. This was the devil: all human emotion covered, swallowed, smothered. “Free me,” he pleaded, a terrified boy.

  She could not let the humanity leave. To want was human; to possess was unnatural.

  Tess arched up, rolled onto her tiptoes, and knotted her knife hand in the devil’s hair. He gasped in surprise, some clarity returning to his eyes, flashing for the briefest moment through the magic.

  She kissed the devil. It was nothing like kissing Eliot. It was like praying to a false god.

  His surprise lasted only a moment, but that was all Tess needed. She seized the book, gripped it, and turned away from him.

  Tess was alone in the room.

  Nat.

  She opened the book and began to read.

  “Him before comes that ink all trusts knowledge seeks who he but, himself only trusts guidance for inward looks who he For. Ignorance their of burden the in burn good the Let. Forsaken and damned the to belong Earth the May.” And then, slower, for good measure, “Mih erofeb semoc taht kni lla stsurt egdelwonk skees ohw eh tub, flesmih ylno stsurt ecnadiug rof drawni skool ohw eh rof. Ecnarongi rieht fo nedrub eht ni nrub doog eht tel. Nekasrof dna denmad eht ot gnoleb htrae eht yam.”

  A great whooshing sound echoed in Tess’s ears, as if she were in the middle of a tsunami, and then a release of everything.

  Silence.

  sixty

  Tess

  WHEN TESS WOKE UP, SHE WAS LYING IN DUST.

  A piercing light shone behind her closed eyes. Her body shook violently. Tess did not want to see what she had wrought, did not want to take in the death around her, did not want to open her eyes to find Eliot’s body. But the shaking would not stop, as if a great earthquake was tearing through Jessop and would swallow her with it.

  And if she’d failed, maybe that was best for everyone.

  When she opened her eyes, she found Eliot looking back. The shaking stopped abruptly but his hands remained on her shoulders, fingers digging into her flesh. He was pale from blood loss and still smeared with an impossible amount of ink, but he was there. Alive.

  “Hell,” he breathed, as if he’d been expecting her to be dead too. And then, softer, rawer, “Tess, you beautiful creature, what took you so long?” He couldn’t say anything more, because she grabbed the back of his head and covered her mouth with his.

  Something was pressing into her back, though. Tess broke away and sat up, dully noting the inky flood had mysteriously disappeared and realizing she’d been laying on the knife. She picked it up. The blade was still dark with gore.

  “What is that?” Eliot asked.

  “I think …” Her brain was still foggy, but she remembered the way the devil had held it so reverently, and looked down to see that her own knife was still secure in her belt. “I think it’s his. The devil’s.”

  Eliot grabbed the knife and examined it for a moment. Standing slowly, unsteadily, he walked to the alcove where the book rested. Without any further thought, he raised the knife high.

  “Wait,” Tess said, holding out a hand. Eliot stopped, looking over at her. He began to say something, but she wrapped her hand around the hilt of the knife. She felt the bite of steel on her wrists, felt the splash of Regina’s blood, saw the awful deadness in Mathilde’s eyes. “Let me,” she said.

  Eliot watched her for a moment, then nodded.

  Tess took the knife, handle warm and slick with Eliot’s blood. She ran one finger over the black leather cover, a reverent thing.

  She remembered how the devil’s lips felt against hers, and the fear in his eyes just before. When she closed her eyes, she saw the red flesh of an apple, cradled in a child’s hand.

  Tess brought the knife down.

  It seemed like an indecent act, stabbing the book. It bled as if it was a living thing, spurting blood and ink against Tess’s hands, and Eliot watched with one hand pressed against his mouth.

  A breath, and a boy, there inside her head like a dream: a flash of green eyes, and a deep sigh, like some great energy within her had been released. She saw a boy and a book, a boy and a devil. A boy with magic he didn’t understand, who was never meant to die.

  Nobody was there, but she sensed the brush of fingertips on her cheek and—

  Thank you.

  The knife clattered out of her hands.

  Eliot took the candle and passed. It wanted.

  You’re my master now.

  Tess clenched her hands into fists at her side. The ink flexed oddly against the book and receded.

  When she turned back to Eliot, he was breathing hard. “Shall we get out of here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Tess gasped.

  The stacks looked as if the horrors of the night had never occurred. There was a faint smell of darkness, but no stains of ink where the books had flooded. Everything looked … normal. Horrifyingly, world-shatteringly normal.

  As if Mathilde and Regina had never died, or had never existed at all.

  “I thought I killed you,” Tess confessed.

  His smile was sad and soft in the dim glow of the emergency lights. “Not yet. But I’m sure there will be time for that later.”

  She waited in Mathilde’s office while he went upstairs to cleanse the stacks of their blood and fingerprints—in case this became a crime scene. When he skittered back down the stairs, his face was grim.

  “The bones are … They look burned,” he said. “Both Mathilde’s and Regina’s.” He ran a hand through his hair, looked over at the wall, where a framed picture of Mathilde and Tess’s father hung. “I thought there was something we could do.”

  “She’s gone,” Tess said. The truth of it was hollow in her stomach.

  Tess’s phone didn’t start ringing until they’d cleared the reading room, where service returned. Eliot dashed up the stairs to get another shirt from his office while Tess answered.

  On the other line, Anna was sobbing.

  “Anna? Anna, what’s wrong?”

  Anna’s breathing was ragged and frantic, and for a horrifying moment, Tess wondered again if they had failed. “We tried to get out,” she managed. “But … I don’t know how it happened, Tess. I don’t— Nat didn’t— Oh God, Oh fuck.”

  Emotions left her. She could only stare straight ahead. “What happened?”

  “She’s dead, Tess. Nat is dead.”

  It was the end of everything. The end of the world.

  sixty one

  Eliot

  NAT‘S BODY WAS CURLED AT THE BASE OF A TREE, IN A COPSE near Tess’s dorm. The yellow glow of a streetlight only barely illuminated her calf. From this distance, as Eliot threw the car into park and dashed out after Tess, she looked like she was sleeping.

  Anna sat next to her, shaking.

  “What happened?” Eliot asked. Tess froze a few feet away, staring.

  “I don’t know,” Anna muttered, swiping her nose. “We need to call an ambulance. The police. Someone.”

  Eliot glanced back at Tess. She hadn’t moved. Her face was empty. She was in denial or shock, unable to deal with this. Unable to process.

  Eliot did not blame her.

  “How long has she been gone?”

  Anna looked up at him. She had not faced the terror that plagued both Tess and Eliot for weeks, but her expression reflected everything Eliot was feeling. �
�I don’t know. I called as soon as … When I couldn’t detect a heartbeat.”

  And it had taken four minutes for Eliot to speed from Jessop to here. Maybe it was enough.

  “Go to her,” he instructed. “Tess can’t be alone.” Anna nodded, probably relieved to have something to do. Or still in shock.

  He couldn’t look at Tess. Behind him, he heard a wretched sob. If she hadn’t fully broken before, she would now.

  He had a small kit with him, always. Eliot unpacked his herbs and candle and knife. He could not save his mother.

  But maybe, he could save Nat. And to save Nat was to save Tess too.

  Eliot did not allow his hands to shake as he straightened Nat’s body. She was still warm, nearly feverish. A thin sheen of sweat cooled on her arms. He searched for a pulse. As Anna said, there was none.

  Eliot opened Nat’s eyes. Ink ran from her tear ducts and the whites of her eyes were stained black. When Eliot shifted Nat’s jaw, more ink poured from between her lips.

  This was not a job for CPR or medical intervention. Medicine could not replace what the devil had claimed.

  There were no spells for this. No cures written or recorded.

  Once, someone had told him that magic was about conviction. Once, Eliot had believed he could save anyone if he tried.

  It was the summer his mother was going to die.

  Eliot took a deep breath, flicked his thumb, and lit the candle. He drew his blade across both of his palms, drawing blood. He rolled salt in his hands until the fine grains were sticky with blood, and ignoring the sting, smeared it on Nat’s cheeks.

  Purity. Safety. He hummed under his breath, willing the ink out of her body. Willing the devil’s magic purged.

  More ink ran down her face, down her cheeks. Vaguely, he could hear Tess’s sobs increasing behind him.

  Conviction.

  I will not let you remain dead, Natalie Matheson.

  Eliot took the candle and passed the flame over Nat’s lips three times. I recall you back here. Return to me. Conviction.