hands out like he was pleading with Alex. “I told her. I told her to just leave it alone, just keep taking Colin’s cash.”
“But it wasn’t enough,” Alex said. Rather die than doubt. Tara had sensed something big at play and she’d wanted to be part of it. “So what happened?”
“Colin caved.” Alex couldn’t tell if he sounded more smug or regretful. “One weekend,
he and his buddies come get us at the apartment. We all take the tabs Tara made and then
they blindfold us and take us into this building, this room. It was real pretty, with these screens with, like, Jewish stars on them, and the roof was open so you could see the skies.” Alex had been in that room the night of the failed Locksmith ritual, when they’d
tried to get to Budapest. Had they staged the whole thing knowing it wouldn’t work without Tara’s tabs? “We stand in a circle at this round table and they start chanting in, like, I don’t know, Arabic maybe and the table just … opens up.”
“Like a passage?” asked Turner.
Lance was shaking his head. “No, no. You don’t understand: There was no bottom. It
was night down there—some other night—and night up top, our night. It was all stars.”
There was real awe in his voice. “We walked through and we were standing on a
mountaintop. You could see for miles. It was so clear you could see the bend in the horizon. It was incredible. I was sick as shit the next day, though. And, God, we smelled.
It didn’t wash off for days.” Lance sighed and said, “I guess it just went on from there.
Colin and that whole crew wanted Tara to keep cooking up her stuff for them. We wanted
to keep tripping. Tara wanted to see the world. I only wanted to fuck around. We went to
the Amazon, Morocco, those hot pools in Iceland. We went to New Orleans for New Year’s. It was like the best video game ever.” Lance released a little laugh. “Colin couldn’t figure out how Tara was mixing the shit. He acted like he thought it was funny, but I could
tell it pissed him off.”
Alex tried to reconcile this Colin—greedy, jealous, tripping with drug dealers—with the ambitious, perfectly groomed boy she’d seen at Belbalm’s house. Where had he
thought this would end?
“How did Blake and Colin know each other?” Alex asked. She couldn’t imagine them
hanging out.
Lance shrugged. “Lacrosse or some shit?”
Lacrosse. Colin seemed so distinctly un-jocklike it was hard to picture. Had he seen one of Blake’s nasty little videos and recognized Merity the way Alex had? The
Locksmiths’ magic had started to fail. The nexus beneath their tomb wasn’t working anymore and they were desperate for ways to open portals. And Colin—bright, friendly, polished Colin—hadn’t reported what Blake had been doing with the Merity. He hadn’t stopped him from hurting girls. Instead, he’d seized an opportunity for himself and his society.
“What about Tripp Helmuth?” said Turner. It felt strange to ask about rosy-cheeked, good-vibes-only Tripp, but Alex was glad he wasn’t ruling anyone out.
“Who?”
“Rich kid,” said Alex, “sailing team, always seems to have a tan?”
“That could be a lot of guys around Yale.”
Alex didn’t think he was playing dumb, but she couldn’t be sure.
“The other day you opened a portal in the jail,” said Turner.
“I had a tab on me when you guys picked me up.” Lance grinned. “Plenty of places to
stash something that small.”
“Why not just escape?” asked Turner. “Go to Cuba or something?”
“What the fuck would I do in Cuba?” Lance asked. “Besides, you can’t portal big distances from anywhere but the table.”
He meant the tomb. Scroll and Key still needed the nexus. Tara’s tabs weren’t enough
on their own.
“Wait,” said Alex. “You wasted your only tab going back to your apartment?”
“I thought I could get some cash, maybe make a run for it or get something to trade in
here, but your asshole cops had tore the whole place apart.”