“Thank you.” Alex winked. “Now we can be friends again.”
“Psycho.”
“So I hear,” said Alex. But crazy survived. Alex snatched up the key. “After you, Dawes.” Dawes passed through to the hallway, keeping a wide distance between herself and Alex, eyes on the floor. Alex turned back to Salome.
“I know you’re thinking that as soon as I’m in the temple you’re going to start making
calls, try to get me jammed up.” Salome folded her arms. “I think you should do that.
Then I’ll come back and use that wolf statue to knock your front teeth in.”
The Bridegroom shook his head.
“You can’t just—”
“Salome,” Alex said, shaking her finger. “Those words again.”
But Salome clenched her fists. “You can’t just do things like that. You’ll go to jail.”
“Probably,” said Alex. “But you’ll still look like a brother-fucking hillbilly.”
“What is wrong with you?” Dawes spat as Alex joined her at the nondescript door that
led to the temple room, the Bridegroom trailing behind.
“I’m a bad dancer and I don’t floss. What’s wrong with you?” Now that the wave of adrenaline had passed, remorse was setting in. Once a mask was off you couldn’t just slide
it back into place. Salome wouldn’t be calling the cavalry, Alex felt pretty sure of that. But she felt equally certain that the girl would talk. Psycho. Crazy bitch. Whether she would be believed was another thing entirely. Salome had said it herself: You can’t just. People here didn’t behave the way that Alex had.
The more pressing concern was how good Alex felt, like she was breathing easy for the
first time in months, free from the suffocating weight of the new Alex she’d tried to construct.
But Dawes was breathing hard. As if she’d done all the work.
Alex flipped a light switch and flames flared to life in the gas lanterns along the red and
gold walls, illuminating an Egyptian temple built into the heart of the English manor house. An altar was laden with skulls, taxidermied animals, and a leather ledger signed by
each of the delegation’s members before the start of a ritual. At the center of the back wall was a sarcophagus topped with glass, a desiccated mummy pilfered from a Nile Valley dig
inside. It was all almost too expected. The ceiling was painted to look like a vaulted sky,
acanthus leaves and stylized palms at the corners, and a stream cut through the center of
the room, fed by a sheet of water that toppled from the edge of the balcony above, the echo overwhelming. The Bridegroom drifted across the stream, as far from the
sarcophagus as he could get.
“I’m leaving,” Salome shouted from down the hall. “I don’t want to be here if
something goes wrong.”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong!” Alex called back. They heard the front door slam.
“Dawes, what did she mean if something goes wrong?”
“Did you read the ritual?” Dawes asked as she walked the perimeter of the room, studying its details.
“Parts of it.” Enough to know it could put her in touch with the Bridegroom.
“You have to cross into the borderland between life and death.”
“Wait … I’m going to have to die?” She really should start doing the reading.
“Yes.”
“And come back?”
“I mean, that’s the idea.”
“And you’re going to have to kill me?” Timid Dawes who, at the first sign of violence,
had curled into a corner like a hedgehog in a sweatshirt? “You okay with that? It’s not going to look good for you if I don’t make it back.”
Dawes expelled a long breath. “So make it back.”
The Bridegroom’s face was bleak, but that was sort of his look. Alex contemplated the
altar. “So the afterlife is Egypt? Of all the religions, the ancient Egyptians got it right?”
“We don’t really know what the afterlife is like. This is one way into one borderland.
There are others. They’re always marked by rivers.”
“Like Lethe to the Greeks.”
“Actually, to the Greeks, Styx is the border river. Lethe is the final boundary the dead