I awoke on a mattress on the floor to the rumble and muffled cheers of a distant crowd. I did not appear to be in the hands of the enemy. In fact, by the spherical, rust-covered walls, it appeared I hadn’t left the mizzen. My cell—which was not a cell, but rather a pressure equilibration chamber repurposed as such—was one of several such rooms connected by a grate-covered tube, like beads on a string. When in use, the chambers collected scalding water at their base while letting the more volatile steam pass through the tube. The grates had originally been held in place with cotter pins, but since those could be easily removed, the mizzen had run a heavy wire through the pinholes and twisted it shut inside the tube, out of reach of my fingers. In any normal situation, that would’ve doomed me. But it is simply a fact that people are, by habit, much less worried about the dead than the living. In the violent struggle of my last execution, I had managed to remove the long spring that held the cross-bar of the industrial hook that dangled me. With some effort, I managed to straighten the spring and use it to slowly untwist the heavy wire that held the grate. The tube was cramped, but I had been in tighter spaces. The secret is to stay calm. Of course, that’s easier said than done.
Peering through the next grate, I could see the adjacent chamber was empty. Alas, the portal door was locked, and after uttering a string of curses, I was forced to repeat the difficult process a second time. Luckily, the subsequent chamber was open, and I stepped—cautiously—into the full majesty of the Dunvluddich furnace.
It was named for its creator, Abraham Dunvluddich, a Lithuanian-American magician and scientist who was convinced there was a way to marry the “estranged sisters” as he called them: science and magic. Certainly, he spent his life in search of the means—perpetual energy machines, incandescent orbs of healing, crystal transmitters to communicate with the other side, or across the globe. His designs were legion. As far as I know, none of them ever worked. After he moved to America, where heresy was no more tolerated, only more weakly prosecuted, Dunvluddich began conducting experiments, of which I only heard tell later, when the two of us were neighbors in Everthorn Prison. His furnace, in which the mizzen were ensconced, had been built to contain a hellion, a being of fire, which Abraham had acquired, subdued inside a glass-and-ceramic vase, from an Arab sheik in Tangiers. The beast tried to escape as soon as it was loosed but was held in check by the iron sphere’s hermetic seal. I could still see the major constellations carved into the interior, along with the circle of the ecliptic. It was a mini universe. It kept magic in. But it also kept magic out, which made it a useful fortress.
Being made of hellfire, the hellion expanded to fill the furnace and so boiled a quantity of water carried in its pipes, the most massive of which ran through the very center. This was meant to produce steam for a turbine, but alas, hellions are not only beings of fire but of rage, and as the creature beat itself continuously against the walls, the turbine sputtered violently to a stop, its intakes choked by porous and crumbly brimstone—a sulfurous foam charcoal—which the injured hellion excreted like clotting blood. All of Abraham’s experiments suffered such infirmities, or so I learned through his ramblings. No matter his effort, it seemed there was always some peculiarity of the magic that made it impossible to harness industrially. While seeking a solution to the brimstone problem, and for reasons unknown, the enormous furnace ruptured. The damage was still visible in the upper corner, where the thick metal turned outward like shark’s teeth. That hole was now the primary ingress to the cavernous space, which had since been filled with makeshift structures: trailer siding, construction scaffolding, reclaimed wood, rope, and wire. It was a hanging city lit by strings of Christmas lights.
In the conflagration that followed the explosion, the true nature of Dunvluddich’s experiments was revealed and he was sanctioned by The Masters upon threat of dispossession. He didn’t stop, of course. He moved instead to Chicago, where the hellion ultimately escaped from a less magnificent chamber and so triggered the Great Fire of 1871. Abraham Dunvluddich was captured, tried, and convicted by a tribunal magique and subsequently imprisoned for life. By the time I met him, he’d been locked in a cell so long that he was both quite aged and quite mad. He had never stopped designing, however. The stone walls of his cell were covered in arcane engineering diagrams, one on top of the other: ghost antenna, magical dynamos, gears inscribed with pentagrams that were activated and inactivated as they ticked and turned inside concentric circles of runes, like an orrery. I observed his cell being cleaned on two occasions. Both times, the walls were scrubbed clean, but not before every design was meticulously recorded by agents of the Winter Bureau.
The furnace that he had built and which was buried under the Brooklyn Bridge was now home to refugees, all of whom were dangling from makeshift catwalks and scaffolding, cheering a fight on a round wood platform at the bottom of the sphere, called the Obolus. Every mizzen confederation had one. It was where all great matters were decided, usually by blood. Since the fight was to the death, it captured the full attention of the inhabitants, who dangled their feet over catwalks to watch the event and to cheer. Dropping under a railing, I laid flat against the spherical wall of the furnace and used the makeshift structures to pull myself slowly upward, out of sight. More than once, I was forced to stop as people walked overhead. More than once, I thought I would be captured. Holding myself that way proved too difficult, and after traversing less than a quarter-arc of the sphere, my arms were too tired to pull anymore. I stepped gingerly onto a catwalk that appeared to be made from banisters and balustrades reclaimed from a Victorian mansion. Luckily, I was by then above most of the crowd, who were watching the contest.
They roared suddenly in unison, and my eyes drifted to the Obolus. One of the combatants, a lithe woman no more than five-foot-two, had been knocked to her back. She had a tape-wrapped baseball bat in one hand and was beating away her attacker with it. A white fox mask covered face—not that it mattered.
I recognized her instantly.
“Oh, no . . .”
I jumped from the catwalk to the roof of an RV trailer lashed to the side somewhat lower on the sphere. I was noticed almost instantly. Shouts went up from the far side, but they were lost amid the calls and jeers, giving me time to leapfrog from one roof or walkway to the next and land on the Obolus with two feet.
The crowd hushed. Many stood.
I walked slowly to the middle of the round platform.
“Arrest her!” came the calls. “Take her!”
“You can’t!”
I turned to the speaker, who was high behind me. With the most of the light directed at the stage, I couldn’t see him at first.
“Anson.”
The old goblin was still alive, but only barely, or so it seemed. His head was bandaged and he was supported by a heavy crutch.
“You can’t arrest her, you cretins,” he growled. “Not without parlay. She’s one of you!”
“Lies!”
“Take her!”
“It’s true,” I called. “Check the codex. I am Milette of la bande L'Argentière, part of Confédération Illuminée of the Paris concord.”
“Illuminée died in the war,” an old woman called. She appeared to be French African. “Along with most of our Parisian brethren.”
“Yes,” I said, realizing Anson’s ploy. He was a clever old goblin who had been doing business with the mizzen for more than a century. “As the last of my clan, I am by right its head. The only person among you who can challenge me is another of my station. This woman is unbanded.” I pointed to her. “I claim her as my own. Any of my station who wish to object may approach the Obolus now.” I looked around slowly. “To the death, is it?”
There were more than a dozen gangs, large and small, on the American East Coast, each seeking to outdo their rivals in a constantly shifting web of alliances and pacts. I didn’t know these people. I couldn’t be sure one of the clan heads wouldn’t take me up on my offer.
After a moment, a tall man in a long red robe stood to face me.
“We will check the codex of records,” he said in a stout voice. “If what you say is true, then the woman is yours. She was fighting for you anyway.”
That was why I hadn’t yet been handed to the enemy. There was a pending challenge.
I turned to the young woman in fox mask, my friend, but found no clan signs.
“She is not mizzen,” I said, confused.
She shouldn’t have had the right of parlay.
“She’s the seer,” the African woman explained. “She saved many of us. A dispensation was granted.”
The politics of the mizzen were notoriously complicated, and I got the sense there was a great deal more going on than I understood, that in their desperation, deals had been struck.
The man in the robe went on. “You will both remain under guard until this matter is resolved. Take them.”
Several guards stepped onto the Obolus. The young woman jumped to her feet to fight, but I stopped her.
“It’s okay,” I said.
She took off her fox mask then, and I finally saw her face.
“Cerise . . .”
We hugged.
I first joined the mizzen after being hung for witchcraft. At my trial, I watched my own adopted son, Jakub, testify against me. I was broken in heart and soul and didn’t fight as the gendarme led me away. They wasted little time, and my body was recovered, along with two others, by the agents of the Dispossessed, which is to say those blighted of magic and unable to cast it—a sentence that, like the original sin, passes to all their descendants, who can neither curse nor be cursed. Each bloodline, when it appeared, was allowed to organize a clan, which included many people who were not dispossessed, merely outlaws: the mizzen.
The name was meant to be pejorative. It came not from the nautical but from an Arabic word meaning sick or diseased, for that is how they were seen by the magically elect, as untouchables. Through the centuries, pogroms were periodically directed against them with brutal result. They survived, as the hardy and resourceful do, by hiding—and by assiduously preserving their rich tradition in great tomes. Indeed, for the mizzen, nothing existed except what was written. Whatever was not could be invented on the spot. The mizzen did not see these inventions as lies, not any more than a castaway, stumbling upon a virgin and vacant island, would consider it stealing to claim enough of it to ensure his survival. It was mere providence. This meant, of course, that anything not marked with ownership was free to be taken and claimed as an heirloom, as ancient to one’s possession as the family name. One’s mark, then, became as sacred as the texts that assiduously recorded every detail of the mizzen’s history. Clan markings, including tattoos, were both signet seals and gang signs, and they were etched onto everything and everyone like cattle brands.
To the mages and clerics, such behavior was simple deceit and the men who practiced it beneath contempt. To conduct business with a mizzen was to bring not just disgrace but serious censure. They all did it anyway of course, albeit in secret and usually through an intermediary, such as Anson, which is how the clan leaders made their money. In the old days, part of the earnings collected from the mages were turned against them. The mizzen took it upon themselves to collect and bury the bodies of witches and hermits hung unceremoniously by The Masters or their proxies. At some risk to themselves, the mizzen rescued these corpses from the oft-unsanctified communal plots where they were discarded. I would come to learn that had at least as much to do with scavenging as honor. The recently dead have value—the eyes, the pineal gland, and the foreskin were all meagerly valuable in trade with gypsies and night maidens, to whom the mizzen were closely allied. But all the same, the bodies were buried properly after they were raided, and always with attending rites.
After waking in their care, I fell through the cracks of society and into their ranks. I became an outlaw, which satisfied me deeply. Twice I had tried to make my way honestly in the world and neither effort had worked to my favor or liking. I had been driven from two homes, impaled, raped, betrayed, abandoned, and hung, and with each death, the patent terror of a life without end—which is a life without meaning—became ever clearer. There were many days among the mizzen when I would not eat, as if to bear witness that I could not die. I simply stared out at the world in a coma of existential dread, occasionally opening my hands to feel the passing of moments, as if time itself were a steady rain dribbling over my fingers, and I would whisper “This is it. This is how it will be.”
After a series of misadventures in which I tempted depravity with greater and greater abandon, I came to meet a man called Durance Reynard l'Argentière. I doubted it was genuine, although I suspect he was indeed from the mountain town of Argentière, near Mont Blanc in the French Alps. He had the rugged constitution of a man raised in the high country. He wasn’t especially tall or muscular. In fact, he was quite lean. But he seemed carved from alpine stone. By the time I knew him, Durance had been flogged, shot, hung (briefly), poisoned, pilloried, and stabbed more times than I had. And he had the scars to prove it. After lying together, I would select a scar and trace it gently with my finger and he would tell me the story of its acquisition. The tales were never the same, although occasionally some detail would be repeated.
Durance was mizzen only by practice and association. He was not Dispossessed. But he did steal the magic he used. He carried a spyglass that allowed him to see through solid objects, including clothing. I caught him examining me with it at our first encounter, although at the time I didn’t know its purpose—nor was I the exclusive object of his gaze. But that spyglass was the secret of his success and the reason why the small crew that followed him remained so intensely loyal, even among the constantly competing mizzen clans. Durance delivered the goods, and at far less risk than most burglars of his time. By knowing in advance what was in a man’s pocket, or his home, Durance avoided the petty job as well as men who were armed or who bore papers in their back pocket revealing them to be gendarme in disguise.
Late in our career, by which time it wasn’t as easy for him to charm the young ladies as it had once been, Durance and I were forced to flee Paris for London, where we began to haunt the city’s innumerable opium dens. The stuff was then everywhere—and cheaper than the whiskey into which it was frequently mixed to make a tincture called laudanum. Druggists sold single draughts for a halfpenny, and new mothers would often purchase it for their infants to quiet them. For me, the languor of the poppy was the perfect salve to the anomie of years, and my habit, more than Durance’s, became a serious liability. It not only drained the cash he and I had saved; it also began to take its toll on my physical appearance.
I awoke one morning to find I had been taken from the opium den to which I’d retreated. I suspect I had overdosed, and in dying, had created a great deal of trouble for my companions, who no longer had use for Durance and me. I was tied to a chair in the bare A-frame attic of a dilapidated house in Whitechapel. His corpse was at my feet. I screamed for help for hours through my gag until my throat was hoarse and my every swallow stung. I went unconscious and died and rose on the third day. Shivering from withdrawals, I threw up, and the milky vomitus seeped from my gag and covered my chest. Somehow it still tasted of opium. Flies followed the stench and found the body. They buzzed in the room. They landed on the vomit. On my face. In my hair. I screamed for help. My skin began to feel like it was crawling with creepy, slimy things. Wriggling maggots ate out Durance’s eyes and I screamed more. Flies were born and danced around the room. I talked to them and imagined myself their queen and that each time they alighted my skin it was in supplication, and I thanked them. I died again, came back, and died a third time. And each time I rose, the corpse looked more and more like a ghoul. It stared at me, hollow, with a lopsided grin. Hours and hours turned to days and days and I died a fourth time. And then a fifth. I began to earnestly believe the corpse would rise. I swear I saw it move. It was getting ready, I was certain, and very soon it would struggle to its feet and hobble over to me, mouth agape. I was not the queen of the flies, but it was true that they loved me, for I was their offering to the god that had birthed them, and he was to eat me and so complete the cycle. I imagined him starting with my feet. With my toes, which wriggled like maggots. Or perhaps he would bite into my head like an apple. In some of my visions, old traumas flared and the thing on the floor rose to rape me with a rotting—
I was saved from madness by Anya, whose son had condemned me. She appeared to me just as she had before. She looked so sad. Even in my memory, it seems as if she came for just a moment, but honestly, she could’ve been standing there for days, holding my rapt attention, staving off madness. All I know is that finally I blinked and she was gone. In her place, a pair of young urchins slipped cautiously around Durance’s shriveled corpse to untie me. I was aware then just how emaciated I was, for my dress—the one I had chosen to accentuate the curves of my body—hung loose from my shoulders. I had lost most of my hair as well. My scalp looked like the underside of a wig. When I finally saw my own reflection, I realized I was as much the ghoul as Durance. My eyes had sunk shockingly deep into my skull, and my skin hugged my skeleton.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Cerise.
The two of us had been imprisoned, but not before being thoroughly searched. This time, there would be no escape. We sat facing each other in the small spherical chamber.
“You’re supposed to be safe at home. With your husband. Please tell me you didn’t bring him.”
Our words echoed off the metal walls.
“No.” She looked away. “He didn’t much like me running off again. But he didn’t try to stop me. It’s not his way.”
“You should’ve stayed.”
“I had to. You don’t understand. I can’t live like this anymore. What did he do to me?”
“What are you talking about?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a sheet of curled and folded paper. She handed it to me in lieu of an answer.
“What’s this?” I started unfolding it.
“It started a few months after you guys left.”
“What did?”
It was a photocopy of an X-ray. I was looking at someone’s chest. I could see the opaque white of a rib cage and the fuzzy lungs behind.
“Seeing things,” she said. “Things other people can’t. Things that aren’t there.”
Embedded in the heart was a foreign inclusion, a sharp geometric shape—solid white.
“Oh my God, you know what it is,” she said, seeing my face.
“The jewel of many colors,” I answered.
Etude had made her swallow it so that it would glint in the dark of the underworld and he could find her shade and drag it back to the light. After the ritual, her body was burned and placed with the earth of her birthplace inside the giant urn.
“It would’ve been in your ashes,” I explained.
“It’s inside my heart.”
I shook my head. “Your body must’ve reconstituted around—”
“What’s it doing to me?”
“The jewel refracts light from that which can’t be seen. It must be nudging you somehow, making you aware of what is otherwise obscured.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“I—I don’t know. I don’t think—”
“How do we know I’m not gonna go all Pet Sematary or something and kill my family? Do you know how many times I tried calling? You guys said you would help me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She looked down at her fidgeting hands. “Look . . . I don’t wanna be ungrateful or whatever, but . . . It got so bad. Eventually, I just got on a plane. I didn’t know what else to do. When I couldn’t find you guys at the bistro, I went to The Barrows. But it was ruined, too. The only other people I knew were Bastien’s friends.”
She looked away. I saw a tear.
“You tried to help them,” I suggested.
“They were being hunted.”
“And you can see them? These hunters?”
She nodded.
“What are they?”
“The same things that chased us at the construction site, only . . . different.”
“Different how?”
“See for yourself,” Anson said through the door.
It squeaked loudly, and he hobbled on his crutch out of the way.
“It seems the codex of records supports your claims,” he said. He was alone. “Your belongings have been returned.”
He handed me my handbag.
“Where is everyone?” I asked, slinging it over my shoulder. It was still damp.
“Preparing to leave.”
“Leave?” Cerise asked. “That’s insane. They know they’re not safe out there.”
“They wanted to use you as bait,” Anson said to me. “Now, they’re just running.”
“Running from what?”
“I’ll show you. It’s this way.”
As you might expect, casting darkness became the subject of intense study at the Winter Bureau, but without an amulet of their own and without the ability to cast darkness themselves, my colleagues’ efforts were largely confined to the theoretical, which left ample gaps for pure speculation. Someone supposed, for example, that if you spun suddenly in front of a mirror, you could catch a glimpse of a shrouded person or object in the reflection. Innumerable such tricks were passed from agent to agent, like old wives’ tales. I can’t remember most of them, nor do I expect any of them were true. When tested, looking glasses and scrying orbs all seemed to succumb equally to the effect. There was only one thing, in fact, that was able to penetrate the spell: cats’ eyes, perhaps because their owners were themselves ever half in darkness. But then, without an amulet, training the animals proved difficult, and although the Bureau made feline familiars available to every agent who wanted them, most hardly seemed to care what happened to their owners. Indeed, there were many who suggested they were in league with our enemies from the start.
Anson led us back into the main chamber of the furnace, which was quiet.
“Where is everyone?” Cerise asked.
“Gone,” he explained. “Without revenge to unite them, the confederation has splintered. Each has been left to go his own way.”
“They won’t last very long on their own,” I whispered.
“You and your ward have been given exile,” he told me.
In all other circumstances, it would’ve been a serious punishment.
“They left the beast in the triage room.”
Anson led us to the cut remains of a modular home, where a humanoid monstrosity had been dissected on a table.
“It’s awful,” I said.
It wore a hooded black robe, thin like a veil. Its body was wrapped tight in dark, woven straps, like a nylon mummy. Its face was covered in a white metal mask, etched with a swirling design, with eye holes and no mouth. It was much larger than an average person with a pair of insect-like, hinged appendages erupted from behind its shoulders. They were capped in flashy pads, like large oval suckers. Its chest had been sawed open, and it oozed. It was nothing like a normal corpse. There was little color, for one. Everything inside it was black or a red so dark it was closer to charcoal. I saw organs I didn’t recognize.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A slych,” Anson answered. “There is mention of them in Probin’s Bestiary. First created in the time of bondage, if the text is to be believed. Part shock trooper, part secret police. Permanently cast in darkness.”
“What do you mean secret police?”
He pointed. “The fleshy pads erupting from its back read the thoughts of anyone they touch, which of course you will never notice them doing.”
I walked around the table. “From where were they summoned?”
If we knew the realm, we would know how to send them back.
“It wasn’t,” Anson explained. “It didn’t come from the dark realms.”
“Okay . . .” Cerise raised her hand. “I realize I’m the only person here who doesn’t know this . . . but what do you mean by realms?”
“Other places,” Anson snapped. “That’s all it means. The realms of the cosmos are connected, like the pages of a book.” He picked one up an old clothbound hardback from a nearby workbench. The corners were curled from use. “When you’re reading it, you only see the open page. And that’s how our world seems. We see just what is going on now. But when the book is closed, all the pages are touching. You can get from page 30 to page 40 by reading all the lines between, but that’s the long way around. But it’s also only four very thin sheets apart. In absolute terms, there’s very little that separates any of the pages from any of the other pages.”
I pointed to the creature. “If this wasn’t summoned, where did it come from?”
“Nowhere,” Anson mocked. “It’s human. Or was.”
“Human?”
“Yes. Slychs are . . . modified.” He walked around the corpse and pointed. “The bone structure is different. They’ve changed things. Besides the additional limbs on the back, some of the long bones have been extended. Others have been shortened.” He pointed to the exposed central cavity. “You see that dark mass there, under the liver? It appears to be cancerous. It’s riddled with cancers, in fact.”
He walked to the head and removed the mask, which was attached to a helmet. It trailed strings of mucus. What was inside looked like rot. It was bulbous and uneven, as if growths were sprouting from everywhere. Some were soft. Other appeared bony. I covered my mouth.
“Inside the skull, or what’s left of it, as you can see, there appear to be nervous ganglia from three different species, including what looks an awful lot like a bat’s proprioception center. It sees by a kind of psychic echolocation.”
“That would explain how they can move in total dark,” I said. “And they wouldn’t be photosensitive. They can travel even in daylight.”
“Exactly.” He nodded.
With all the tumors in and around the skull, the bone was too porous to support anything, hence the need for the metal carapace. A buckled leather strap was bound to it. A long, sharp metal spike protruded perpendicular to the leather. Inserted under the jaw, it kept everything shut. But that meant the monster couldn’t speak. It couldn’t shout in pain or ask for help. The spike entered under the chin and penetrated all the way to the brain, like a persistent lobotomy.
I turned and walked to the door.
“Where are the eyes and ears?” Cerise asked, leaning closer to the face, or what was left of it.
“We buried them,” I heard him answer, “to be sure no one was watching or listening.”
We all looked at the corpse.
“How can we fight something like this,” Cerise asked, “if I’m the only one who can see it?”
I looked to Anson. “Where’s Etude? You saw him. Didn’t you? He came to you after the bistro burned.”
“He did. He knew my connections to the mizzen. The best people to smuggle him out of the city are those who smuggle everything in.”
“Where did they take him?”
“They didn’t. A meeting was arranged, but he never showed. I assumed the warlocks had gotten to him, same as everyone.”
“You mean he was betrayed.”
Anson didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.
I had been chasing a phantom, following a dead end. I was no closer to finding him than I had been at the start.
I sighed and walked out of the room. I looked up at the roof of the massive furnace.
Anson came up behind.
“That’s why they destroyed the Barrows, isn’t it? You warned him it was a trap.”
“Oh, I think he expected it. He was quite clever, that chef of yours.”
I smiled at the old goblin, who only scowled.
“Dangerous for you to hang around,” I said.
“Well, I didn’t go back, if that’s what you mean. I knew what they would think.”
“I meant the mizzen.”
“Ah. Well. You’re the spy. You know how it goes. Have to maintain the ruse. If I run, then they know it was me, and I would be looking over my shoulder the rest of my life—which, as it happens, won’t be that long anyway.”
He held up a crutch.
“How?”
He nodded back to the slych. And to Cerise.
She had saved him.
I looked down at his wounds. “I’m sorry,” I said softly.
“Don’t be. Everything dies. Even the mountains and the seas. That is the way of things.”
“Except me,” I said.
“Nonsense. You’re just having a little more difficulty with it than most folks. That’s all. You’ll get the hang eventually.” With a heavy groan, he leaned to the side and reached into a vest pocket. “But that reminds me. I have something for you.”
“Me?”
He nodded. “He paid for passage with it.”
I stared. It was the Moirai penny.
He pushed it forward, but I refused. “If he gave it to you, then it’s yours.”
“Hardly! Taking this coin as payment for services never rendered is bad luck. I’ve had enough already, thank you very much.”
He pressed it into my palm and I ran my thumb over its smooth, faded surface.
Cerise joined us on the catwalk. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”
“We were attacked,” I said. “We were watching our enemies so closely we didn’t keep an eye on our friends.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” Anson snapped, “that the seal on the sanctum was broken by an ally, not an adversary.”
“But . . . why?”
“A trick!” he said.
“What about Mr. Dench?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. After we set the bistro on fire, we split up. I’m afraid I didn’t get there in time.”
“But . . .” Cerise’s eyes welled. “He saved me,” she said finally. “He didn’t even know me. He just showed up and pulled me away.”
“It was his way.”
She walked away, and I watched her go.
I took a long, deep breath and followed. I sat down next to her. Our feet dangled over the side. Underneath us was a mini-universe.
“We were sleeping together,” I admitted.
Cerise turned to me.
“Benjamin and I,” I clarified. “The men in my life . . .” I paused. “I thought a man without a heart would be safe. I thought someone incapable of emotion, incapable of ever returning . . . anything, was a gift. A harbor in a sea of loss. Silly, really. Not that I was in love with him. Not as such. But it turns out I’m not nearly as heartless as he.”
“How did it happen? His heart, I mean.”
“How do such things usually happen? He bargained it away so he wouldn’t have to carry the burden it held. He asked a Santeria priestess, a woman named Josephine. Vile creature. Benjamin penetrated a swamp and circumambulated a knotted tree six and six and six times and spoke thrice a name. But we should all be careful what we wish for. A trade is a trade. Benjamin learned that Josephine intended to bargain in turn with a hellion, very much like the one once imprisoned here. For hellspawn, a human heart is like an infinite well of ink with which to write the suffering of men. With a heart, it could take human form. It could walk amongst us dripping evil. So it was, in shedding one tragedy, Benjamin found he had forged another.
“Eventually, he found Etude. I didn’t think he would take Benjamin’s case. Some wayward soldier. He turned so many away. But to my surprise, he did. And he found it, of course. The heart. The three of us came as the deal was being transacted. It was our first adventure together. The priestess Josephine had the organ sealed inside a baked-closed pot, but rather than face the great shaman, who’d come like lightning, she smashed it and leapt into a pyre with the heart in her hands. I remember she was laughing as she was engulfed in flame, like she knew it wasn’t over.
“Benjamin took it well, considering. I remember he just stood and looked at the blaze before turning and walking away. But then, he had no heart to break over the loss. Without it, he couldn’t feel, and without feelings of his own, his bereft body turned its machinery outward. He became hypersensitive to emotion, like the compensations of the blind. Before long, he could smell them. They all vexed him. Every kind. But it was love that bothered him most.” I smiled. “He said you reeked of it.”
“What does it smell like?”
“Everyone expects it to be floral scented, but Benjamin said no. He could never articulate it exactly, but I got the impression it was equal parts honey and bile. Knowing that by its scent my body might betray me to him turned me that much more cautious. I’m sure I seemed a horrible tease at times. Benjamin had no heart, but the rest of him was fully male, which was, I suspect, the worst part of his curse and yet another reason why we were so terribly needy of each other. What other woman would choose a lover who carries a cold stone in his chest in place of a heart?”
“Stone?”
“Etude put it there. To weigh him down. A heavy, round rock stolen from a river bed. A burden in place of a burden. Without it, he said, Benjamin would one day float out of the world, like a leaf on the breeze.”
“Burden?”
“The death of a child. Not his. Benjamin neither married nor had children. It was from his time as a soldier. In that way, he and I carried the same pain, which is what brought us together, I suppose.”
Cerise squinted in confusion.
“We’re both child-killers,” I whispered. “We both hoped Etude could save us. And here we are.”
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“I . . . I don’t know.” I looked at the coin in my hand. I ran my finger over it.
“So this is it?” she asked. “We’re done?”
But I didn’t have an answer for her.
She stood. She was agitated. “There has to be something we can do!”
“The only way to stop them is to destroy the book.”
“So, let’s do it.”
“What do you think Etude and I have been trying to do these last thirty years? We don’t even know where it is.”
“Well, someone has to!”
“There was one. Etude was sure he could figure it out, but—” I stopped.
I looked at the coin in my hand.
“Oh my God.”
“What?” she asked.
I stood. “Oh my God,” I repeated.
“WHAT?”
I ran to my bag. They were all there.
I laid all three items on the catwalk.
The coin.
The amulet.
The key.
“I hadn’t even considered it,” I said.
“Considered what?”
“I thought it was impossible. I hadn’t even considered it.” I looked at her. “I know what we’re going to do.”