built to keep something like that monster out? The Bridegroom had seemed to be winning.
And if he won? Who said he’d be any gentler than the thing in glasses? He hadn’t looked
gentle at all.
She tapped a message into her phone to Dawes. SOS. 911. There was probably some code she was supposed to use for bleeding from the mouth, but Dawes would just have to
make do.
If Dawes was at Il Bastone and not here at the Hutch, Alex was going to die on these
stairs. She could see the grad student clearly, sitting in the parlor of the house on Orange, those index cards she used to organize chapters spread out like the tarot before her, all of
them reading disaster, failure. The Queen of Pointlessness, a girl with a cleaver over her
head. The Debtor, a boy crushed beneath a rock. The Student, Dawes herself in a cage of
her own making. All while Alex bled to death a mile away.
Alex dragged herself up another step. She had to get behind the doors. The safe houses
were a matryoshka doll of safety. The Hutch. Where small animals went to ground.
A wave of nausea rolled through her. She retched and a gout of black bile poured from
her mouth. It was moving on the stairs. She saw the wet, shiny backs of beetles. Scarabs.
Bits of iridescent carapace glinting in whatever blood and sludge had erupted from her.
She shoved past the mess she’d made, retching again, even as her mind tried to make sense of what was happening to her. What had that thing wanted from her? Had someone
sent it after her? If she died, her petty heart wanted to know who to haunt. The stairwell
was fading in and out now. She was not going to make it.
She heard a metallic clang and a moment later understood it was the door banging open
somewhere above her. Alex tried to cry out for help, but the sound from her mouth was a
small, wet whimper. The smack of Dawes’s Tevas echoed down the stairs—a pause, then
her footsteps, faster now, punctuated by “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
Alex felt a solid arm beneath her, yanking her upward. “Jesus. Jesus. What happened?”
“Help me, Pammie.” Dawes flinched. Why had Alex used that name? Only Darlington
called Dawes that.
Her legs felt heavy as Dawes hauled her up the stairs. Her skin itched as if something
was crawling beneath it. She thought of the beetles pouring from her mouth and retched
again.
“Don’t vomit on me,” said Dawes. “If you vomit, I’ll vomit.”
Alex thought of Hellie holding her hair back. They’d gotten drunk on Jäger and then sat
on the bathroom floor at Ground Zero, laughing and puking and brushing their teeth, then
doing it all over again.
“Move your legs, Alex,” Hellie said. She was pushing Alex’s knees aside, slumping down next to her in the big basket chair. She smelled like coconut and her body was warm,
always warm, like the sun loved her, like it wanted to cling to her golden skin as long as
possible.
“Move your stupid legs, Alex!” Not Hellie. Dawes, shouting in her ear.
“I am.”
“You’re not. Come on, give me three more steps.”
Alex wanted to warn Dawes that the thing was coming. The death words hadn’t
affected it; maybe the wards wouldn’t stop it either. She opened her mouth and vomited again.
Dawes heaved in response. Then they were on the landing, through the door, toppling
forward. Alex found herself falling. She was on the floor of the Hutch, face pressed to the
threadbare carpet.
“What happened?” Dawes asked, but Alex was too tired to reply. She felt herself rolled
onto her back, a sharp slap across her face. “Tell me what happened, Alex, or I can’t fix
it.”
Alex made herself look at Dawes. She didn’t want to. She wanted to go back to the basket chair, Hellie like a glowing slice of sun beside her.
“A Gray, I don’t know. Like glass. I could see through him.”
“Shit, that’s a gluma. ”
Alex needed her flash cards. The word was there, though, somewhere in her memory. A
gluma was a husk, a spirit raised from the recently dead to pass through the world, go-betweens who could travel across the Veil. They were messengers. For Book and Snake.