Chapter 31
Did I ever tell you about the time Stephen Tennant came into my dress shop looking for a gown?
He claimed it was for his sister, but the measurements he gave me were much too tall to be Clare’s.
” It wasn’t a very good story, truth be told, but Celia was running out of ways to distract Biz from the pain.
Sweat glistened across the socialite’s face.
Her skin was necrotic—going almost gray in places and blue around the lips.
Her blood was black. Only the ankh was holding her in place, though Celia was gripping her friend’s hand, passing along as much gossip as she could remember from her last shift at the shop.
Soon, she’d have to start reciting grocery lists.
But milk and eggs and mushrooms might make the ghouls around them even hungrier… Celia had noticed, as she prattled on, that the dead were creeping closer. There were more and more of them… too many for the Ageless Ones’ spells to suppress. The chamber around them had grown noticeably darker.
“What color?” Biz rasped.
“Hm?” Celia gripped her friend’s hand tighter, trying to ignore the dead thing that was crawling toward them on all fours. Like the spiders Calamity was so fond of chasing.
“What color was the gown?”
“Oh, it was plum. Clare never came in to try it on, if you can believe that.” Celia snorted. “I saw Stephen wearing it at a Victorian-themed party.”
“That feels like a lifetime ago.” Biz tapped at the ankh on her chest and tried to laugh—more blood oozed out instead. “Christ!” she gasped. “If Ezra doesn’t hurry back, I’m going to have to start haunting him too.”
Biz’s blasphemy only seemed to make the bold ghoul inch closer.
A hole unhinged where its mouth should be.
Celia tried not to think of Nour’s story: A few found mummified bodies to return to.
Others tried to possess the living. More and more poured out the door, taking over the necropolis, and then turning to nearby towns.
Children and the elderly were choked out of their bodies first—it was hell on earth.
Would the ankh’s protection extend to her?
Celia pressed closer to her friend.
Biz’s heart-shaped face looked a little less gray… Spots of color were returning to her cheeks and the stain on her linen dress was no longer spreading… In fact, the wound beneath almost appeared to be shrinking…
It is, Celia realized.
The hole in Biz’s chest was knitting itself back together. The flesh was impossibly fresh—no sign of a scar. Her gown looked like a war zone around it.
“Oh… Christ!” the socialite blasphemed again. This time more cheerfully. The ankh tumbled off her chest as she sat up and began poking the mended spot. “What happened?”
Celia grasped the ankh and brandished it at the ghoul, the way a priest might hold out a cross. It skittered back toward the sphinx, where more spirits waited. If they decided to storm the girls all at once, there’d be no stopping them.
“Ezra!”
The name was both an answer and a call. Celia looked to the door, but he didn’t appear.
She looked at the Ageless Ones, but they were too busy fighting their own dead…
More and more were sliding through the crack in the gate, drinking blood from the channel.
It was just like the cloud she saw in the Pool of Tears.
They won’t stop. Celia watched, horrified, as the ghouls swarmed over the bodies of the bound magicians.
Hugo and Everett convulsed inside their restraints, foam spraying from their mouths, along with a Babel-esque mix of languages.
Biz followed her gaze. Blood drained from the young woman’s face once more. “We have to shut the gate,” she said.
“What?”
“The gate. We opened it back up. It’s down to us to close it again. Keys work both ways, do they not?”
“You want to go back to the gate?” Celia bristled at the mere thought.
“I want to save this wretchedly wonderful world so I can live in it for a while longer. What’s the point of being resurrected just to watch the end of days?” Biz grabbed the ankh and thrust the relic at a skeletal hag that was shuffling too close. “I’ll try my best to keep the dead at bay.”
“Fair enough.”
Though, in truth, it wasn’t a fair fight at all: Wielding the ankh was like bringing an embroidery needle to a fencing match.
But Celia knew that the other young woman was right…
If they didn’t try to seal the gate, then everything else had been for naught.
She took a deep breath and plunged back into the cloud of dead, reaching the stone as quickly as she could.
Icy hands stroked her neck, her arms, her back… but she pressed forward.
Her left palm landed on the gate. Her last relic was still there, the necklace chain dangling down the length of the jagged crack she and Biz had made. She followed this to the top, to the searing shape of the key.
She gripped the relic.
Beyond Celia, death ached open.
Papa.
After all this, she still hadn’t seen him…
The sadness of the other ghosts seeped in around her.
Hundreds of goodbyes, said at train stations with flowers tucked into their rifles, or in letters dictated to field nurses, or rattled out on a dying breath…
Celia felt her own breath shudder. She felt the key in her wounded palm. What would it mean to let go? At last?
Something else brushed her shoulder then: golden and warm. Feathers! Ezra appeared at her side—glowing. Shadows moved around him, swirling like incense as they crowded the gate.
He’s sending the spirits back to the afterlife, Celia realized as she watched the scholar’s hands twist the darkness back through the door. Shadow-stringing… He’s using it to save us.
She recognized flickers of the Germans’ faces: there, then not.
Ezra was gathering ghouls from all corners—masque blazing.
By the time the cloud around them faded, his face was a high noon.
The chamber had been scoured bare with his light.
The Ageless Ones looked a good deal like the sphinxes—their faces set with inscrutable judgment as they watched the pair by the Duat’s gate.
“The immurement spell is broken,” the closest one said. “A new sacrifice must be made to seal the stone.”
A hundred sadnesses were gone, but Celia’s remained.
Papa…
This key was the last of him. His kingdom. Her fight.
Who was she, if not this?
I suppose it’s time to find out.
The relic was still glowing gold, but as Celia twisted the key, it began to melt, filling in all the cracks her rage had made with a beautiful molten liquid, until it was all one smooth and shining surface.
But it didn’t end there. The gold ruins of the key kept webbing through the stone in a leaflike pattern.
Shards of onyx began clattering to the floor.
More and more of the door fell away, until only the thinnest obelisk remained.
Ezra’s laugh rang around the chamber as this, too, crumbled to the ground.
Celia knew, staring at the pillar of pure gold that stood in its place, that they’d reached the end of something.
Her father’s key was gone.
This door to the Duat was locked for good.