Chapter 25
A DEEPER MADNESS
I can still hear the crowd chanting through the wall—Yida, khatam, shamar, la’olam—as we crash through a door at the end of the corridor into an open, dingy dressing room.
Despite the commotion, the utter collapse onstage, they are committed to seeing this night’s plan through.
Their zombie droning strikes fear through me, the belief that if Arla only says the word, they will flood this room and drag us back to do her bidding.
I can still feel their hands and bodies pressing me, pushing me onto the stage when I didn’t want to go.
But the guest star has escaped with the blood offering, and Arla can neither complete her pigment nor paint her seal without us.
I swallow back the urge to vomit and press on, Cadence in tow.
As we run, I do the best I can to reel the fire back in, but with so much oil smeared over their bodies, I don’t know if it’s already too late for Twig and Rock.
Sequins and feathers and shiny embroidered satins have been cast over folding tables and wire-backed chairs, simple black vanities and clothing racks made from industrial pipes.
A glamorous skin to cover the osseous truth.
To the left, a service elevator is the dressed-down counterpart to its golden twin on the other side.
I never realized the building had two elevators, never bothered to peek behind the gilded curtain.
I imagine this room would normally be full of performers changing and prepping, each evening’s lineup readying themselves for their set on the stage.
But tonight, ours was the sole performance, and everyone else—fire-breathers, waitstaff, bartenders—is already out on the floor.
I rush toward the elevator, grateful for any exit, any distance I can put between myself and that stage. Its dull black doors hold little promise, but the only way out of Medusa always seems to be deeper in.
I throw off the wreath of goldenrod, the gauzy fabric draped over me and pound at the buttons.
Doors slide open and I dart inside with Cadence, pressing the first number I see—second floor—and stabbing at the CLOSE button until we’re safely out of sight.
In the seconds we have between stories, I unbuckle her gag.
The ball drops from her mouth tethered to a long string of drool, and she sucks in air, working her jaw up and down. “Fucking hell,” she manages to grate out, voice hoarse and hairy, throat raw from muffled screaming and breathing around the gag.
“What happened back there?” I ask her as the elevator dings and the doors slide open at the second floor.
Her eyes find mine as we dart into the space, which looks to be a lot of open storage. “She’s been planning this for a long time,” she says now. “But she was hiding it from me. Brennan suspected but he could never quite put it together.”
“Planning what?”
“The ritual,” she says calmly. “The blood.”
“And you had no idea?” Cadence seems honest enough, but it’s hard to imagine she never got a whiff of Arla’s intentions, even living one floor below her.
She shakes her head. “I swear, Jude. She used my abilities against me, shoring up her psychic defenses with my power. She intentionally overwhelmed my system with constant input—psychic and sensory. And she was always pointing me in the wrong direction, getting me to focus my abilities on what amounted to nothing more than one distraction after another. I could barely focus long enough to brush my teeth, much less to see through her manipulation. She misdirected me for so long.”
“But the other day, at your door…”
Her gaze drops. “After Brennan disappeared, I knew he’d been right all along, but by then it was too late.”
As we cross the room, I note the Saint Andrew’s cross I’d seen on the stage before, as well as the giant birdcage, among other looming shapes and shadows—a human-sized champagne coupe, medieval stocks, a hospital bed.
“Do you know where Brennan is?” I beg.
“Oh, Jude,” she whispers, fists clenching.
I slow to a stop. “What? Tell me.”
Her face falls, her fingers relax, only to ball up again. “It claps like thunder, you know,” she says tragically, her eyes darting around as if she can hear it even now, even here.
“What does?” My brow crunches as I try to understand.
“The screaming.”
I’m almost too afraid to ask the next question. “And Aaron?”
She looks at the floor, shakes her head, squeezes and unsqueezes her hands.
“What happened to them?” It’s barely a whisper between us, and as soon as it’s out, I wonder if I actually want to know.
If I can handle knowing. These were my friends, and whatever fate they suffered is tied to my actions, at least in part, at least in Aaron’s case.
I don’t know if I can take more lives on my conscience.
My eyes burn and I cover my mouth with a hand as I suck in a sob, reality dropping like dead weight.
Cadence’s face crumples with anguish, and I realize it’s unfair to make her recount the details she knows.
“Never mind.” I stop her before she can get started.
“We’ll sort it out later. Let’s just figure a way out of here for now.
” Or we’ll be next, I think but don’t say.
Glancing around, I take in several old bistro chairs, a park bench, a couple of chaise longues, and brocade settees. “Where the fuck are we?”
“Storage,” Cadence tells me, wiping her eyes. “It’s a prop room. Come on—I know where there’s a stairwell. I used to escape down here when I needed a break from the twins’ constant shouting or moaning. They fight like cats and dogs. Screw like ’em too.”
“Stairs?” I question. “I thought there was only the elevator.”
She shakes her head and tugs me along. “It’s code. This is a public establishment. Fire warden wouldn’t be appeased with just an elevator. Anyway, don’t slow down. If anyone’s coming for us, I promise you they won’t.”
Her arms are striped in angry red slashes, burns from the fire I started. But she shook the ties off soon enough that they’ll heal. Her hands were fortunately spared.
Twig’s screams ring effortlessly through my skull. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I just wanted out. But there is no out with Arla, I’m learning. There is only a deeper madness, a slow descent into chaos.
As we pick our way around, I say, “I still don’t understand about the blood. Why yours?”
Cadence casts a weary glance at me. “Not just mine,” she says.
My mouth drops open. “Brennan’s too?”
She nods. “And yours, eventually. Twig’s and Rock’s.”
I tug my arm away. “What do you mean? She was going to kill us all?”
The psychic’s sigh is full of fatigue. “Her mind is wide open to me now because she has nothing else to hide, but despite her efforts to the contrary, I got snatches of information before. It was hard to piece together, and I never managed to extract a full picture. Only a limited series of details that felt useless on their own and that I was too afraid to share. But I knew she needed us for something, a full circle. I thought she needed our powers. Even when Brennan became suspicious, claimed she was siphoning magic away from us, I thought it was because she needed the full range of abilities for whatever she was hiding. But it turns out she never needed us alive, she needed us dead. She needed our blood—magical blood—to make the pigment hold.”
Arla’s words to me fall into place. Four kinds of blood, and a binding needs the right one. Magical blood versus mundane blood—but that’s only two types.
“She told me as much this morning, but I didn’t get it,” I tell her. “She said bindings required the right kind of blood. I just didn’t know it was ours. Not like this. I’m so sorry, Cadence. If I’d only listened to Brennan, maybe I could have prevented this.”
She stops to scan the room, but it’s dark. “Apparently, that’s where Rudzitin went wrong. He knew the summoning would call for blood, but he never understood what he had captured.”
The disappearances Levi read about come back to me. Was Rudzitin was trying to stave off the inevitable? When he felt the vulnerability in his spell, did he keep trying to reinforce it? I suggest as much to Cadence, quickly filling her in on the articles Levi found.
She looks at me. “Rudzitin was a catalyst, like Brennan, gifted with telekinesis. I could feel his power over everything here like a varnish since the day I moved in. It’s how he built the well to hold the Fathom in the first place.
And it’s the only reason his spell has held as long as it has after his death. ”
My mouth drops open in disbelief. Arla said he didn’t know what the spell needed because he wasn’t like us. So I never imagined he had magic, but now it makes sense. “His death?”
She nods.
“You’re saying he died here?”
She nods again. “I couldn’t understand why I kept sensing his flavor—red currant jelly—until I saw his ghost in the areaway.
I told you I used to spend extra time down there.
It was the only place I could get a little space from Arla’s overpowering aura and psychic meddling.
That’s when I knew he’d died in the building. ”
She did try to warn me it was haunted as fuck in the underground. I just never realized she’d experienced it personally or by whom.
“But now that Arla’s got her claws out of my third eye, I realize he didn’t just die, he sacrificed himself … to the Fathom.”
I gasp. “He must have known it was only a matter of time.”
Cadence shrugs. “Whether his was the only magical blood he knew of to fix the fading ritual or he simply couldn’t face the destruction his failure would surely bring, I can’t say.
Rudzitin always knew a binding requires blood, but a binding of this magnitude requires more than just any blood, and he didn’t learn that in time. ”
“Neither did we,” I point out.