Chapter 63 #2
“To bargain, you need leverage.”
“I’ll take the yoke. I will serve you ’til the end of days. But give my friends one hundred years.”
“No.”
“One hundred years of freedom and peace. A chance to live their lives.”
“Why would I offer you anything at all?”
“A gift for your new pet,” she proposed. “Be magnanimous in victory.”
“I will give them one year.” She knew he was lying. She had been there when Golgarot learned the skill. “A single year as a boon for you, who will become my most treasured hound. Wear the yoke and it is yours.”
A year to escape. To build some kind of magical boundary. To marshal the powers of the alumni. It all sounded logical. At least she hoped the demon thought so.
“I accept your offer.”
Golgarot smiled, and his form flickered—a mantis, a many-eyed spider, the head of Babbit Rabbit. He held the yoke aloft. How many times had she seen it in her nightmares?
“Then take the yoke, Wheelwalker. Pass through the gate and fulfill the promise that was made.”
She took a few steps forward and let hellfire leap from her hand, looping around the jeweled collar. It did not dissolve, but snared it like a lasso. The second test. Good. The rest … Well, she’d done stupider things.
Alex gripped the yoke. It felt almost alive between her palms, as if it were imbued with Golgarot’s hunger and yearned toward her throat. He had made it, forged it through hellfire.
“I will wear it,” she said, reaching for the exaggeration spell Dawes had created, letting hellfire course over her, wild and bright. “But not around my neck.”
She remembered the way she had used hellfire on the beach, the sense that it had substance.
Then she had used it to forge a shield, bending it to the shape of the Wheel, but she had felt that it could be made into anything at all.
She thought of poor dead Tara hanging scarves around her apartment, of Hellie buying plants to put on the windowsill, of her mother with her gems and geodes, her seashells and bound herbs, using every bit of her hope to make the garbage heap of their life into something beautiful.
That was the gift of coming from nothing. You learned to work with what you had.
The metal of the yoke collapsed in her hands, turning molten and liquid.
She had held Darlington’s soul inside her.
She had seen herself through his eyes, a girl made of night, a queen on a throne.
She remembered the shape of the crown in his mind and she forged it now, turning it as she turned the Wheel.
A well of hellfire erupted through her, fed on the stubborn anger of every soul in this cursed town.
A city’s worth of grievance had mended Alex’s wounds, but Golgarot’s look of astonishment was almost as healing.
“No!” he shrieked. “You can’t! That isn’t allowed! Kill her,” he commanded. “Run her through!”
Darlington lowered his head and bellowed. This time she would not survive him.
She lifted the golden crown, studded with garnet and onyx, forged for her in hell and reborn in her hands. What made a queen? She didn’t know. But she hoped she was about to find out.
Alex set the crown upon her head.
Golgarot screamed. “Pretender! Usurper!”
Darlington skidded to a halt. He stumbled, lost his footing, went to his knees.
Alex stood over him. She laid a hand on his shoulder. “If your vow is to serve hell, then serve me.”
The bands on his arms and neck flashed. His eyes shone bright and gold as coins. Horror came into his gaze, understanding of what he’d been made to do.
“Alex—”
“Danny, you can wallow in guilt later. Right now, we have a job to do.”
Again his face changed, rage overtaking him. He turned toward Golgarot and roared into the winter air. He lowered his horns and charged straight into the demon’s torso, tossing him high.
Golgarot hit the ground and scuttled backward. He was losing his human shape now, and Alex glimpsed the form of something otherworldly in him, maybe something beautiful.
But mercy was for benevolent queens. She was the soldier, and she and Hec had some debts to make good on.
Alex took the crown from her head. It had served its purpose, and she had another use for it now. She called on hellfire to form it in her hands.
Darlington shook his head. “Really, Stern?”
She shrugged. “I prefer to play to my strengths.”
She reached out to Hellie’s spirit, somewhere in the arena, rooting for her to the last.
Come with me, she asked, just once more.
Hellie’s strength was inside her, the memory of her mortal days on sun-drenched fields, the crowd cheering her on.
Alex lifted the golden bat and swung. It cracked against Golgarot’s skull. He shrieked and stumbled away from her.
“You know the people of your world are corrupt,” he seethed.
“I’ve heard.”
“You were meant to be our queen, our messiah. You may not wear the yoke, but you are their slave.”
“Better to serve in New Haven than to reign in hell.”
“Alex,” Darlington sputtered. “Did you just bastardize Milton?”
“Impressed?”
“A little.”
She knelt beside Golgarot. He spat in her face, and Darlington kicked him hard in the side.
“You can’t win,” she said. “Do you know why?”
“Because you are filth.”
“That’s right,” she said. “You expected the gilded boys of Yale, but you got me instead. Trash. Dirt. The things no one can ever quite get rid of. I’ll just keep coming. I’ll just keep getting up.” She nodded to Darlington. “Put him on his feet.”
“I will have what is rightfully mine,” Golgarot cried, and she remembered the creature in the box, mewling and whimpering. “I will be full again.”
She touched her hand to Golgarot’s burning skin.
It felt like scales beneath her fingers.
She took hold of his soul, reaching down the spokes of the Wheel to the demons that remained in New Haven, calling them back to their master, all those who had slipped through, who had evaded the hunt, some strong, some weak, some human in their form, some monstrous, and finally, the thing in overalls, the playground demon, wailing her rage.
All of them vanished into the gate, and from the other side, she heard screaming.
“I waited a hundred years for you,” said Golgarot. “A thousand. This world was meant to be mine.”
“All that time and you never learned no one gets what they deserve.” She released him. “Go home, lick your wounds, yell about how you were robbed. But this gate is closed to you.”
They all are. Alex saw the spokes of the Wheel ablaze with blue fire, seven bright doors illuminated by flame. One by one she turned the spokes and let those doors swing shut.
“Soldier,” she said to Golgarot. “Your hour is ended.”
She lined up her shot and swung.
Golgarot lurched backward. As he passed through the threshold of the gate, she saw his true shape. Countless faces, countless arms, countless eyes, so many hungry mouths. She didn’t know if what she felt was fear or awe, but that brief glance was enough.
“The box!” she shouted.
Darlington seized the Voynich Coffin and tossed it between the columns.
From somewhere in the vast darkness she heard shouts of rage and confusion and then a high, serrated keening, a howl of regret, the sound so forlorn, so full of betrayal, that despite everything, she felt an answering echo in her own heart.
She knew what it was to lose everything, to stand forsaken and alone, at the end of all hope.
She was sorry for every lost thing that would never find its way home.
The gate itself seemed to catch fire, the flames spreading outward.
“Now what?” she asked Darlington.
He drew her to him. “We hold on and hope we don’t burn too.”