“I shared what I’d done with Thoth, because I believed him to be a friend. But he never was. He’d been born weak, and he wanted the power I was fated with. He saw what I’d done, and instead of helping me try to fix my errors, as he’d promised, he took the power for his own. He made a devil’s bargain, trading everything we could have been for everything he wanted to be.
“When I realized, I made the stones. I broke magic apart to protect the last pure bit of it. To form a barrier against any who would try to take it.
“But Thoth was never an ibis. He was always a snake, stealing other people’s eggs.”
Esta saw then everything that happened—the way Thoth had trapped Seshat and then destroyed the stones. He took the Book, but he was a vain and fearful man, so he never stopped running. He never ceased collecting more and more power. More souls and more secrets.
“I put myself in the pages he wanted so badly, but I was trapped by the parchment and vellum I’d written upon in my attempt to preserve magic’s true power. Once, I was almost freed again. A man . . . a great magician tried. But he was a coward, unable to contain my power. Now . . . Now I walk in a new body. Now you have come for me, and together we will end him.”
How? Esta wanted to ask, but her mouth would not form the words.
“With you, my dear child. With the power inside you, we will end everything.”
No . . . Frozen though she was, the word echoed in her mind. No. No. No.
But Seshat only laughed, the rich rolling sound echoing around the chamber. “What did you think you were, child?
“They hunted your kind—our kind—across eons. Across continents and centuries. They tried to wipe us from the world because they feared us. They were right to. You can touch the strands of time—the very material that carves order from chaos—just as I once could. And like I once could, you can tear them apart.
“Come—” The woman at the altar held out her hand. “Join me. Release me.”
Looking into the woman’s eyes as she pleaded, Esta realized that Harte had been wrong. Seshat wasn’t a monster. She wasn’t a demon, either. She was just a woman. A woman, like Esta, who had power. A woman who had believed in the possibility of the world and had been betrayed by it . . . And now she wanted revenge for that betrayal. The hurt inside of her, the pain of it was like the same flint that sparked inside Esta. She understood. It burned inside of her, how deeply she understood.
Why not burn it all down and begin again?
Because innocent people would die. She knew it as well as she knew that Seshat had started just as innocent. She knew too, because she herself had been taken in by the anger and vengeance of the Antistasi. It wasn’t a mistake she would make again. Esta recoiled at the idea of accepting, even as she felt herself stepping toward the woman.
“Thoth cannot be allowed to continue,” the woman said.
Seshat would unmake the world to destroy Thoth. She would sacrifice everyone—everything—to ensure that Thoth, the true Devil’s Thief, would die.
“Don’t act as though you’re so righteous,” Seshat chided her. “You forget that I have already seen the truth of your heart. I have already seen the yearning for retribution. The desire for revenge. The hate that burns brightly inside you can remake the world, my child.”
Yes, Esta had wanted revenge. She’d wanted to make so many pay. But she’d been wrong.
It was too late. Seshat was already pulling her forward, and Esta felt her affinity drawn toward the ancient priestess. She felt Seshat’s power vining around her, but this time it was purer than it had been in the station or in the hotel. This time there was no fighting.
The world felt like it would fly apart. The darkness, Esta realized, wasn’t something that had appeared in the world. It was the world. It was the spaces between, opening and flooding. It was the unmaking of reality.
And there was nothing Esta could do to stop it.
THE NIGHTMARE COME TO LIFE
1902—New York
The moment that Jack had planned for weeks had finally arrived. The first three tableaux had captivated the audience, enraptured them with the demonstrations of his and the Book’s power—not that they realized that was what they were seeing. He was well aware that they thought the feats he’d accomplished were nothing more than parlor tricks. They were, compared to what was coming.
As the third set of curtains closed, Jack slipped two more cubes of morphine into his mouth before he stepped in front of the final set of curtains. He looked out at the audience as he waited for the room to grow silent. There were the men of the Inner Circle, the High Princept, and the rest of society. Men from Tammany were there as well, and another face, a particular friend he’d invited himself—Paul Kelly, who had turned out to be another disappointment. But Kelly would get his soon enough.
He waited until every pair of eyes was looking only at him—seeing him for what he truly was. And then he waited a moment longer, just because he could.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we come to our final tableau. Tonight the Order has presented a veritable bounty of beauty and wonder. You have been transported to the alchemist’s laboratory and witnessed the moment when man began to take control of the dangerous powers that surround us. You have seen art come to life, revealing the long and tortured history of feral magic, of those unwilling to control the dangerous power inside themselves for the good of a just and enlightened society. But now our evening is nearly at an end.”
He paused, let the anticipation grow in the room until he could practically feel their desperation for the curtain to be pulled back . . . until he had them in the palm of his hand.
“I present to you Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare. . . .” With another flourish of his hands, the curtains opened and the final tableau of the night was revealed.
Evelyn, clad in a blond wig and a wisp of a gown, was splayed out on a low couch, just as the woman in Fuseli’s famed painting. Her arms arched gracefully to the floor and her eyes were closed in a semblance of sleep. Just as in the painting, sitting on her chest was a creature meant to represent the embodiment of nightmares. Jack had created the figure himself, a gargoyle-like incubus that looked like the image of the one in the painting.
The audience rustled in wonder and in fear. He could tell it was fear from the way the air seemed to go out of the room. It was the most exquisite of the tableaux, the most horrible and beautiful all at once, and it was about to be more so.
“Those who cling to the old ways, who lurk in the shadows of our streets, are a mark upon the perfection of our union. They represent a danger. Like the darkness that creeps into our dreams, those with feral magic lie in wait until we are at our weakest. Like nightmares come to life.”
At his words, the incubus began to move, turning its head to stare out at the crowded ballroom, and Jack was more than gratified to hear the audience gasp. The incubus was, of course, no ordinary carving. It was a sort of golem, an impressive piece of magic that had been revealed to Jack during one of the long, morphine-filled nights when he woke with no memory of parsing the Book’s secrets. That he’d been given this particular secret was a gift, and he considered it nothing less than a divine sign of what he was meant to do. Evelyn’s feral power might affect the flesh and blood, but he doubted it would do much to the misshapen creature he’d fashioned out of clay.