Chapter 26
The elevator fell for what seemed like an eternity, condensed down to the span of a few sickening seconds, and then stopped so abruptly it threw both Lennon and Dante off their feet and against the wall. The buttons on the control panel glowed dully, then flickered out, plunging the cabin into total darkness. The doors remained tightly closed.
“Mother fucker ,” said Dante, and he gave the doors a vicious kick. He hadn’t looked scared facing down that entity in Amsterdam, but he did now. Lennon could’ve laughed. Dante—unflappable, taciturn, and entirely composed—was claustrophobic ? After all they’d faced in Amsterdam, this was his Achilles’ heel?
Dante slit his fingertips into the crack between the doors and pried them apart with brute force. Lennon squeezed her eyes shut against the sunlight flooding into the cabin. Dante stepped out of the elevator, and Lennon staggered after him, making it only two steps before she broke to her knees, bent double, and vomited violently into the dust.
“Easy,” said Dante, and he stopped by her side. Put a hand on her back to steady her. “You’re all right.”
Lennon wiped her mouth clean on the back of her hand. Spit into the dirt. “I am not .”
“I told you not to come.”
“You didn’t tell me we were going to be fucking attacked.”
“I didn’t know. That’s kind of what makes the ambush, you know, an ambush .”
Lennon pushed, rather unsteadily, to her feet and wheeled to face the elevator they’d just emerged from, only to discover that it wasn’t an elevator at all, just some sort of industrial shaft jutting up from the dust.
“Mining shaft,” said Dante, squinting at it. “Didn’t even know these were still in use. How the hell did you conjure this?”
“I don’t know,” said Lennon, suddenly defensive. “I just knew you were either going to die or kill everyone else—all those girls in the windows—if we stayed. What was that?”
“I pushed myself too hard,” said Dante, in the tone of an apology, but he stopped short of offering one. “We should go.”
Lennon turned to look around. “Go where?”
Apart from the mining shaft—and the industrial wreckage, old gates, and rust-chewed machinery—as far as the eye could see there was nothing but flat dust. To the east the sky was a stark and startling blue. On the western horizon, a shelf of storm clouds so dark they were very nearly black. A two-lane road stretched out in front of them, but there were no cars in sight.
Dante fished his phone from the pocket of his jeans, but it was dead. The screen shattered. Another casualty of the ambush at the club. “Shit.”
In the distance, a threatening peal of thunder. “We should get going before that storm catches up to us.”
“It won’t give us trouble,” said Dante, as if the storm knew better than to test his patience. He started down the road, and Lennon followed after him. They walked for several miles in silence, heading away from the storm. Dante dragged himself along at a steady pace. He was still bleeding and clearly in pain but too prideful to lean on Lennon. It was just as well; he needed more help than what she could offer him then. A hospital—an ambulance, even—if he didn’t stop bleeding from his mouth. But when Lennon suggested that he wait by the roadside, let her find help and circle back, he merely waved her off and kept walking.
The storm caught up to them quickly, bringing with it the kind of wind that rips at your clothes and hair, a harsh deluge of cold rain. As they approached the town, nearly an hour after they’d started walking, they heard the whine of what Lennon could only assume were tornado sirens. They picked up the pace, passing an auto shop, and an accompanying gas station, until they reached a run-down by-the-hour motel with a cracked and empty parking lot. Dante staggered up to its doors, opened them for Lennon—a gentlemen even at his worst—and she went through ahead of him.
The girl at the front desk pasted on a smile. “Welcome to Chambers Inn. How can I—”
“Where are we?” Dante asked, limping up to the front desk.
“Um…Idaho?”
“Wonderful,” Dante muttered, and he wiped away some of the blood collecting in the corners of his mouth. He fished for his wallet, pulled out a hundred-dollar bill. “Is this enough for the night?”
“The night ?” Lennon demanded. “No. We’re getting you to a hospital. Now—”
The clerk’s wide-eyed gaze slid from Dante to Lennon, then back to Dante.
“Is it enough?” he asked again, eyes on the clerk, not looking at Lennon.
Mouth agape, the girl nodded, took the money, and gave him change and a room key. Dante snatched both and nabbed a couple of first aid kits from the shelves of the sundry shop on his way out of the lobby. He limped down the hall to their shared motel room, unlocked the door, and Lennon, at a total loss for words, followed.
Dante kicked off his shoe, which was filled with blood, his sock soaked through. “Oh my god, your foot—”
“It’s my leg,” said Dante, and he made his way to the bathroom, trailing a dark smear of blood behind him. “And I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I noticed. Thanks.”
“I think you should go to the hospital.”
“Not going to happen,” he said, and he stripped out of his jacket, tossing it out of the bathroom and onto the bed. Lennon watched by the door as he peeled up the hem of his blood-damp shirt, muttering to himself as he assessed a second wound, the one on his side. She had never seen an injury quite like it. The skin at his waist had been somehow torn, gashed apart, and deep bruises surrounded the slashes. To her eye it almost looked like something had attempted to claw its way out of him, which was, of course, impossible. She knew he must’ve been somehow injured during the stampede, shoved along something sharp, perhaps? Or maybe that entity had attacked him with a knife? His injuries didn’t look like knife wounds, though.
“This is fucking ridiculous. You need medical attention.”
Dante ignored that. “You sit tight. If anyone knocks on the door, don’t answer. I don’t care who they say they are.”
“What if you bleed out?”
“Then I want to be cremated, not buried,” he said and shut the bathroom door in her face. She half expected to hear the thump of Dante hitting the floor, but the only sound was a running faucet.
Pissed—but knowing she’d lost this battle—Lennon lay down on the bed beside Dante’s discarded jacket. That’s when she saw the money, sticking out from an inner pocket. Lennon glanced at the bathroom door and listened carefully to the hissing of the showerhead. When she was certain Dante wasn’t about to emerge, she reached carefully for the money and withdrew a thick stack of crisp hundred-dollar bills, folded in half and held fast with a money clip. A quick count confirmed that it was an easy ten thousand dollars, and upon further inspection of the jacket she saw that there was another folded stack of bills in the same pocket, this one in euros, and two more stacks in another, bringing the total sum of money to a cool forty thousand.
“Holy shit,” she whispered, shoving the money back into the pockets where it belonged.
Dante finally emerged from the bathroom with the first aid kit in hand, freshly bandaged and looking less pale. Lennon was making coffee in the instant machine and, without asking, she poured Dante a cup too, then they both sat down on the couch and watched reruns of a dog show that was playing on ESPN for a while in silence.
Lennon wanted to ask him about the money but knew she couldn’t without revealing that she’d snooped through the contents of his jacket. “So, are you going to tell me what happened back in Amsterdam?”
“Already told you. Ambush.”
“But who were we ambushed by? You said it was an old friend of yours?”
He nodded. “A former classmate. From Drayton. We parted on…bad terms.”
“Why was he like that?”
Dante finished the dregs of his coffee in a single swallow, stared down at the empty mug, which looked small in his large hands, like something from a child’s tea set. Lennon could tell her question was one he didn’t want to answer. “The power we wield has its costs. If you push yourself past a certain threshold, you can break your mind and lose yourself.”
“Will I turn into something like that, if I keep practicing persuasion?”
For a long time, he didn’t answer. “Not if you’re careful. Drayton will teach you how to kill it. But the catch is that it doesn’t stay dead. Every day for the rest of your life you will wake up and wrap your hands around that thing’s throat and strangle it. Or it will strangle you.” Dante delivered this indictment with his eyes locked on the TV in a dead-eyed, thousand-yard stare. “But this is true both of those who use persuasion and those who don’t. Every one of us harbors a facet of ourselves that wants, desperately, to destroy us. A part of us that longs for our own annihilation. It tells you to jump when you stand beside a tall drop-off. It makes you want to put a knife through your own hand when you’re chopping vegetables for dinner. It is hungry and it is corrosive, and it will come for your soul and your sanity. Which is why all of us must work actively against it, or else it will succeed.” The toll of saying this sapped what little strength he had left. He hung his head.
“You really do need to see a doctor.”
“I’ll be all right. I rinsed out the wound with alcohol.” He nodded to the first aid kit on the nightstand.
“May I have a look?”
Dante sighed. “If you must.”
Gingerly, she peeled up the side of his bloody shirt, wishing he had something clean to wear. He’d done a shitty job with the bandaging, though, so Lennon cut it away and started again. The wound below wasn’t as deep as it had looked at first. Dante had flushed it thoroughly with alcohol, and while it was slightly swollen it showed no signs of infection. Lennon rifled through the contents of the first aid kit, cut several thick squares of gauze and pressed them carefully to the wound, and held it fast with wrap and strips of tape.
“Where’d you learn to do this?” Dante asked, watching her work. His voice had the husky quality of someone who’d only just woken up.
“My mom was a nurse,” said Lennon, carefully wrapping the bandages around his waist. “But more importantly, I was a Girl Scout . A Cadette, actually.”
“High achiever.”
Lennon shrugged. “I mean, I don’t like to brag, but…I do what I can.”
Dante cracked a wry smile, then winced a bit as she tightened the bandages. “You saved us back there,” he said. “Thank you for that. I should’ve said that earlier.”
“You had more important things to deal with.”
“Even still. I owe you. I could’ve killed someone—”
“What do you mean? How?”
Dante seemed reluctant to answer, and she was surprised when he did. “Some persuasionists have the ability to siphon power from those around them. Essentially, they can manipulate the wills of others, use them as a power source. It’s dangerous—deadly, even.”
“And is that what you did back there? You took too much?”
“I shouldn’t have taken anything at all,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. It was…compulsive.”
When Dante had told her that he—like her—struggled to contain his own power, she hadn’t believed him. He was always so self-contained, entirely controlled. It was hard to imagine him acting on impulse or emotion. But that was exactly what had happened in Amsterdam. He’d lost himself, and the result had very nearly been deadly.
“What matters is that you stopped,” said Lennon. “You held yourself back.”
“No, you brought me back,” he said, “with that elevator. But if you hadn’t been there—”
“Then you would’ve found another way to return to yourself,” said Lennon, and she wasn’t exactly certain who she was assuring: him or herself or both of them.
“The city was screaming,” he said, speaking to himself now. “And I knew that I was doing it, but I was as powerless to stop as the people who were under my will—”
“Hey,” said Lennon, grabbing at his hand. “Look at me.”
He looked.
“You didn’t hurt anyone, all right? You didn’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do,” said Lennon. “I could feel it.”
With that, she tugged up his pant leg to examine the wound at his calf, but found that it was much smaller, and Dante had already covered it with a large stick-on bandage. “I did the best I could,” she said, sitting again beside him. “But I still think you should see a doctor tonight…or at the very least call someone at Drayton.”
“Drayton can wait until tomorrow,” said Dante, and when he spoke, she saw that blood was still collecting at the edges of his mouth. Was he bleeding internally? “I’m too spent to get to a gate tonight.”
Lennon made as though she hadn’t heard him. It was clear to her then that he was out of his depth. He needed medical attention, preferably at Drayton. “I’m calling an elevator—”
“Lennon, don’t—”
She didn’t listen; she was already dredging up the strength she needed to summon it. This time she could tell that the power was within her grasp, but her mind was tired and wounded from the feat she’d performed in Amsterdam. If she called another elevator, she knew it would be at a great bodily, and probably psychic, cost. But for Dante, she was willing to try. She focused her gaze on a bare spot on the wall, cast out a hand, and ordered the doors to appear, but before they did, she felt a small snick within her psyche, and she was abruptly severed from the source of her power.
It took her a moment to register Dante’s presence within her mind, impeding her ability to access her own power, tamping down her will, her thoughts, everything. And she was overcome with a horrible weariness that she recognized as catatonia only as she slumped into the couch. “Get out of my head,” she mumbled, and her lips felt so numb and swollen she was barely able to form words.
“You need to stop,” he said, but he withdrew from her mind. “Just because you can access your power now doesn’t mean it’s wise to do it whenever you want. You’ve learned an important lesson, and that’s good, I’m proud of you—”
Lennon felt her cheeks flush warm at the praise.
“But there’s more to persuasion than blunt power. Now that you’ve learned to summon an elevator at will, the most important thing for you to practice is knowing when to hold back. Restraint will get you farther than brute force.”
Lennon relented, knowing he was right. “I could’ve done it, you know. If you hadn’t stopped me. I can do it anytime I want to now. I’ve finally got the hang of it.”
Dante’s gaze remained even. “What changed?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what was your lynchpin? How did you unlock it?”
“I don’t know…” Lennon grasped for words to describe what felt like the ineffable. “It was just different in Amsterdam, more within my control. I felt like I had, or claimed, authority.”
“Elaborate on that,” said Dante, adopting a tone that was similar to the one he lectured with in class.
Lennon frowned, thinking. “The first time, in the garden, it felt both emotional and almost…hapless or accidental. And at Benedict’s, I felt like I opened an elevator out of desperation. As if I was, I don’t know, begging for it. Pleading almost. But in Amsterdam…in a way it felt like for the first time I made it happen. It was my will, my choice, alone. Not me being backed into a corner by Benedict or something supernatural happening to me. The elevator in Amsterdam felt like it belonged to me, and me only.”
“And you feel changed by that?”
Lennon hadn’t realized it until Dante had said it, but he was absolutely right. She was different—changed, as he put it. “I guess I feel like I won’t be the same after this. Like there was a before and an after. Now I know I can make an elevator appear not because I asked or begged for it, but because I’ll make it happen. No matter the cost. Even if I go mad doing it—if I bleed out through my nose or suffer a seizure—I know that I can.”
Dante smiled, looking almost impressed. If he wasn’t exhausted before, the act of tamping down her will had drained him fully. It was clear to Lennon that he had nothing left to give. If she tried to open an elevator now, she doubted he’d even be strong enough to stop her. And there was something about that fact—his vulnerability in the moment—that she found almost…endearing.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t try to make our way back to Drayton?” she said, and in what was perhaps too intimate a gesture she snatched a tissue from the box on the coffee table and wiped the blood from the edges of his mouth. “Isn’t there someone, anyone, we could call?”
“There is,” said Dante, closing his eyes. She’d half expected him to flinch away when she put the tissue to his lips, but he seemed at ease. “But all they’d be able to do is tell us to make our way to the closest gate. As it stands, I’m spent, and I need to rest. It’d be easier to drive down to Benedict’s in the morning than make our way to the nearest airport and fly into Savannah.”
“But we don’t have a car.”
“We’ll get one,” said Dante, stifling a yawn. “We rest tonight and leave in the morning,” he said, and she could tell from his tone that they’d reached the end of this discussion, and that he’d reached the end of his patience. He got up and went to the couch, where he would remain, sitting pensive and watchful, through the last of the night.