staining the paper. As if the paper had a taste for it, the blood started to flow faster, a tide that crawled down the scroll as Zeb continued to chant in Italian.
As Darlington had known they would, the Grays began to appear, drifting through the
walls, drawn by blood and hope.
When at last the blood tide reached the end of the parchment, the Aurelians each lowered their sleeves, letting them brush the soaked paper. Zeb’s blood seemed to climb
up the fabric as the sound of the chanting rose—not a single language now but all languages, words drawn from the books surrounding them, above them, tucked away in climate-controlled vaults beneath them. Thousands upon thousands of volumes. Memoirs
and children’s stories, postcards and menus, poetry and travelogues, soft, rounded Italian
speared by the spiky sounds of English, the chugging of German, whispery threads of Cantonese.
As one, the Aurelians slammed their hands down on the blood-soaked parchment. The
sound ruptured the air like thunder and black spread from their palms, a new tide as blood
became ink and flowed back up the table, coursing along the paper to where Zeb’s hands
rested. He screamed when the ink entered him, zigzagging up his arms in a scrawl, line upon line, word upon word, a palimpsest that blackened his skin, slowly crawling in looping cursive up to his elbows. He wept and shuddered and wailed his anguish—but kept his hands flat to the paper.
The ink climbed higher, to his bent shoulders, up his neck, over his chest, and in the same instant entered his head and his heart.
This was the most dangerous part of the ritual, when all of Aurelian would be most vulnerable and the Grays would be most eager. They came faster through the walls and sealed windows, rounding the circle, looking for the gateways Alex and Darlington had left open, drawn by Yarrowman’s need and the iron-filing pungence of fresh blood.
Whatever worry had plagued Alex, she was enjoying herself now, hurling handfuls of graveyard dirt at Grays with unnecessarily elaborate gestures that made her look like a professional wrestler trying to psych up an invisible crowd. Darlington turned his attention
to his own compass points, cast clouds of bone dust at approaching Grays, murmuring the
old death words when one of them tried to rush past. His favorite Orphic hymn began O
spirit of the unripe fruit, but it was almost too long to be worth diving into.
He heard Alex grunt and glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see her engaged in a
particularly acrobatic banishing maneuver. Instead, she was on the ground, scrabbling backward, terror in her eyes—and Grays were walking straight through the circle of protection. It took him a bare moment to understand what had happened: The markings of
the southern gateway were smudged. Alex had been so busy enjoying herself, she’d
stepped on the markings and ruptured the southern side of the circle. What had been a narrow door to allow the flow of magic had become a gaping hole with no barrier to entry.
The Grays advanced, their attention focused on the pull of blood and longing, drawing nearer to the unsuspecting Aurelians.
Darlington threw himself into their path, barking the quickest, cruelest death words he
knew: “Unwept!” he shouted. “Unhonored, and unsung!” Some checked their steps, some even fled. “Unwept, unhonored, and unsung!” he repeated. But they had momentum
now, a mass of Grays that only he and Alex could see, dressed in clothes of every period,
some young, some old, some wounded and maimed, others whole.
If they reached the table, the ritual would be disrupted. Yarrowman would certainly die
and he might well take half of Aurelian with him. The magic would spring wild.
But if Beinecke was a living house of words, then it was one grand memorial to the end
of everything. Thornton Wilder’s death mask. Ezra Pound’s teeth. Elegiac poems by the hundreds. Darlington reached for the words … Hart Crane on Melville, Ben Jonson on the
death of his son. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem.” His mind scrambled for purchase.
Start somewhere. Start anywhere.
“A wanton bone, I sing my song
and travel where the bone is blown.”