The Devil Makes Three

by Tori Bovalino

  Dead eyes stared up at her, neck and jaw a mess of gore. “The devil knows your name, Tess Matheson,” a voice whispered in Tess’s head. And then the body exploded into a bomb of brackish, hellish ink.

  Tess choked and gagged on it, spitting out what had gotten into her mouth. She wanted to puke, but she didn’t even think that would get the horrible taste out of her mouth.

  Around her, ink dripped from the shelves. When it hit the ground, it turned to dust. There was nothing of Regina left except for the blood on Tess’s hands, coating the knife, and awful, charred bones. Tess wiped the knife on the carpet, smearing streaks of blood and bits of rotted flesh. Even though she waited, it did not fade away.

  She was free, for now. But she knew, sooner rather than later, the devil would be back.

  Tess ran.

  forty seven

  Eliot

  WHEN ELIOT CAME IN, TESS WAS MYSTERIOUSLY MISSING and only Mathilde was in the reading room, stationed behind the circulation desk. A slight, dark pinch of worry tweaked in his stomach. Either Tess was here and occupied, which was likely, or she hadn’t shown up for work in the first place.

  He could’ve asked Mathilde, but something about revealing he knew Tess to her boss felt forbidden. So he called her phone. There was no answer. That didn’t confirm or deny his suspicions, but it did send his heart beating into overdrive.

  He called her again, thinking she might’ve had her phone on silent or was in the middle of a task. Again, she didn’t answer. Which, Eliot considered, was beginning to feel like a pattern. Maybe Tess was just terrible at answering her phone.

  Eliot sat behind his desk, tapping his chin with one finger, staring at his phone. He had a few options. Mathilde was still down there. Even though speaking Tess’s name to her felt strange, he could do it.

  There was also the option of going to her apartment, swinging by to make sure she wasn’t in there—and if she was, that she was okay.

  If she wasn’t at her apartment, then he’d have to worry for the rest of the day. And if she was at her apartment, then going there would be as bad as publicly declaring his feelings for her.

  But she had to be safe. And if he sat here all day, hiding in his office like a coward while Tess was hurting somewhere …

  The thought was enough to force Eliot into action. He put his sweater back on and rolled the sleeves to the elbows. He was considering putting his tie back on, too—which felt like a waste of time, considering the importance of the mission—when his door flew open so wide it hit the wall and nearly shut again.

  When he turned, he was relieved to find Tess heaving the doorway. And then, immediately disturbed to see that she was covered in blood.

  “What happened?” he gasped.

  She stepped inside quickly and shut the door behind her. “Mathilde can’t see me,” she said. Eliot wanted to say if that was the case, then maybe she shouldn’t have opened the door so aggressively, but he couldn’t sass her when he saw how hard her hands were shaking.

  When he shut the door behind her, he realized that she smelled horrifically of death. She must’ve seen him screw up his nose because she said, “I know. It’s terrible.”

  There was an extra sweater in this office somewhere, and he rifled through drawers until he found it. It pained him a bit to hand it over to her, but she clearly needed it more than he did, and he had more than enough sweaters. Even if Tess kept ruining them.

  She wiped her face on it, smearing the cheerful blue fabric with dark streaks of ink and gore. Long scratches ran down her cheeks, trickling blood.

  “What happened?” Eliot repeated.

  She told him, starting from seeing Regina at the window and ending with the explosion in the stacks of not-Regina’s body.

  He wanted to say something that could comfort her. Clearly, she was a mess, and not just physically. Even though Eliot knew the truth of what Regina was—she’d been dead for days; there was no way they were going to get her back to normal once the devil had claimed her—he wasn’t the one who had to face the reality of ending her.

  The night before, it had been so easy. To pull her into his arms, to take her hand. But now, in the light of day, he couldn’t imagine crossing the space of the desk, reaching out, bridging the gap between them. Her hand was inches away. She was so close. The distance was impenetrable.

  “Let me heal you,” Eliot said. It was something. A small thing, but something.

  Tess looked at him for a moment, uncomprehending. And then she nodded.

  He felt oddly self-conscious, taking down what he needed for two spells: one for cleansing and one for healing. He felt Tess watching his every move as he drew the runes and cut his thumb, drawing a bead of blood.

  “Does it ever scare you?” Tess asked. “Using the magic.”

  Eliot shook his head. “Usually, I feel worse when I know I can’t.”

  He performed the magic carefully, overenunciating every word and double-checking his symbols. He didn’t want to mess up. Not on Tess. But soon enough, her skin was clean and the cuts on her cheeks were healed, leaving no trace behind. He didn’t miss her lifting the gauze on her wrist and peeking at the wound there. Even that was healed.

  There was a leftover smudge of dust on her cheekbone. Without thinking, Eliot set his tools aside and reached forward to rub the streak away with his thumb. Tess’s eyes flicked to his. He knew he was still touching her, that his fingers were curled under her chin; he knew he’d been caught taking care of her again.

  Eliot let his hand drop.

  “I think …” Tess started. She stopped and bit her lip, and then her face twisted in revulsion, like she could taste the memory of ink on her skin and instantly regretted it. He had the sudden stirring panic that she was going to say something bad about him and the way he couldn’t stand to be far from her, but a little softer, she continued, “I think we need to ask Mathilde for help.”

  Eliot hadn’t been expecting her to say this, so it took nearly half a minute for him to gather his thoughts enough to make a coherent answer. “Do you think she would believe us?”

  Tess looked at him, really looked, and for the first time, he saw that she was breaking. “Eliot, someone died. Their body exploded and is all over my fucking skin and the devil tried to kill me, multiple times.” Softer, creakier, she finished, “I can’t do this anymore.”

  He couldn’t fight the notion that he’d failed somehow, like he’d been meant to protect her and had found the task impossible.

  But he wasn’t meant to protect her. Tess wasn’t someone he could protect.

  To be honest, he was a little afraid of her. She had just decapitated someone.

  So Eliot said, “Okay.” If Tess thought she’d believe them, then Eliot had to have faith in that. He thought back to his conversation with Brooks the Friday before. There’d been a fire in Jessop, one Mathilde had been around for.

  Maybe, then, she knew about the vault and the book. Maybe she’d know what to do.

  Tess led the way out of the office, down the stairs, to the circulation desk. He followed her like a foot soldier trudging behind a celebrated general, resolutely certain of his imminent death.

  Mathilde saw them coming, and her eyebrows flew into her hairline at the sight of Tess’s disheveled hair and twisted clothing.

  “Theresa,” she said, standing. “What did you get into?”

  There was no lead-up, no prelude. “I think we summoned the devil,” Tess said.

  forty eight

  Tess

  THE THREE OF THEM SAT AT A PICTURESQUE WIRE TABLE IN the park plaza. It wasn’t close to peak lunchtime, so not many people were milling around the space. As soon as Tess admitted what they’d done, Mathilde had insisted on them getting out of the library and locking the door, even going so far as to disable the keypad access.

  “Start from the beginning,” Mathilde said when Eliot was settled with a cup of tea from the stand in the park.

  “We found a book,” Eliot said, not ma
king eye contact with Mathilde. Tess got the impression that he was afraid of her, or at least intimidated.

  “Found where?” Mathilde asked.

  Tess and Eliot exchanged a look. There was no point hiding the truth. Judging by the set to Mathilde’s mouth, she already knew exactly what they were going to say. And maybe that meant she knew something about how to fix the situation. Eliot nodded to Tess, like he felt the same way, urging her to speak. Slowly, Tess said, “In the basement of the library. Uh, the basement under the basement.”

  “The sepulcher,” Mathilde said.

  Sepulcher. Grave, she knew, from a particularly fraught reading of Poe’s “Annabel Lee” in a ninth grade English class. It felt ridiculous to associate the word, usually linked with some far-fetched, horrific fairytale, with Falk or Jessop.

  Ridiculous, but accurate.

  “We did some research. We think it’s called the Höllenzwang. Do you know about it? What it is?” Eliot asked, apparently already thinking ahead while Tess’s brain was still sputtering around in circles. He was leaning forward in his chair, elbows on the table, eyes urgent. This was clearly his scholar-on-a-mission mode.

  “Tell me you didn’t read it,” Mathilde said wearily, already knowing they had.

  Tess bit her lip. “Technically, I did,” she said, oddly wanting to take the blame away from Eliot, even though it was mostly his fault. If anything, this made her great aunt look even more distressed.

  Mathilde shook her head. Boys like that scare me, her aunt had said.

  “You know what it is, then. How did it get there? What is it? Why was it hidden instead of destroyed?”

  Mathilde stared at her hands, eyes distant. “I couldn’t destroy it. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I always thought, if the book stayed intact, then maybe he would come back, when the devil was gone.”

  Tess didn’t need to look at Eliot to know that he was staring at her, eyes full of questions. “He? Who is he?”

  “My husband, Harry,” Mathilde said. Tess tried to keep her face flat, but inside, she was shocked. She’d never known Mathilde was married, couldn’t imagine her being with anyone other than herself. “He’s the one who found that damned book in the first place.”

  “What happened to him?” Eliot asked. But Tess already suspected she knew the truth. If he’d tangled with the devil and he wasn’t here now, there was only one true answer.

  Mathilde stretched her wrinkled hands out, as if she was seeing them as they were forty years before, smooth and without age spots, wearing her wedding ring. “Harry was ambitious. Here was the goal: to find a book that held God, a book that held truth. He’d heard of it before, in whispers when he was at university; a book that held some monster and the secrets of the universe. No one knew exactly what it was: some called it Faust’s book, some said it was made from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, some said it was the seventh book of Moses. Others said it was just another grimoire.”

  “But grimoires aren’t that powerful by themselves,” Eliot said, eyes flashing. Something caught in Tess’s throat. Even the subject of it felt forbidden, ancient, unknowable.

  “If you don’t have magic, maybe not,” Mathilde said. She sounded lost to time as she spoke, there in body with them at the table, but mentally in some moment long past. Tess didn’t know what to make of it. “He went all over searching for it. Jerusalem. The remains of Mesopotamia. The catacombs of Sicily, the mausoleums of France, and then, finally, the tombs of England. Because the English took everything, didn’t they?” She made eyes at Eliot, who sat back in his chair and took an extended sip of his tea.

  “Did you go with him?” Tess asked.

  “No,” Mathilde said. “He said it was too dangerous, and I was needed here. It was right after Jessop was acquired from the university, and I was just starting my job here—exploring the library, ordering the books. The sepulcher was there then, but it was cleaned out and patched over, so nobody could access it. It was Harry’s idea to install the door, so he could keep the most precious of the books down there, out of sight.”

  Tess shook her head, trying to put the pieces together. “Okay. So he found the book when he was in England, didn’t he? And then he … what? Brought it back?”

  “He didn’t know it was dangerous,” Mathilde insisted. “There was no way to know what it was. But this is what we learned: there was a demon in the book, or a devil. There was something older than us, stronger than us. Something that wanted us dead.”

  Eliot nodded, listening but not judging. Tess envied him that ability. Because, right now, she was definitely judging. “And then he read it and the devil killed him. Right?”

  “No,” Mathilde said softly. “No, he didn’t read it.” Her eyes were softer than usual and blurred with tears when she looked up and met Tess’s eye. Tess wasn’t sure she’d ever seen her like this: so vulnerable looking. Not like butterfly wings. No, now she was a dewdrop on a leaf, only there for a moment, destined to disappear. “I did.”

  Tess blinked, a fierce relief rifling through her. If Mathilde read the book out loud and was still alive, then there was a way out of this. She looked at Eliot, certain she’d see the same delirious relief on his face, but his brows were drawn together and his lips were turned down into a frown.

  “How did you get out?” Tess asked, trying to lead Eliot to the same conclusion she had. That there was a way out in the first place.

  “Harry and I thought … We thought if we set the book on fire, if we burned it all down, we could be free.”

  “The fire,” Eliot said, sitting back in his chair, running a thumb over his chin. Tess had heard of it, in passing: a great fire years and years ago that had nearly taken the entire building down with it, but left Jessop smoldering.

  “I thought the fire happened before Falk bought the library,” Tess said.

  Mathilde shook her head. “No. It was soon after, so soon after. We thought … we thought if we could get rid of the book, we could get rid of the devil.”

  And that worked so well, Tess thought.

  “But clearly, that didn’t contain him,” Eliot said.

  Mathilde shook her head. Tess could barely align this—the story, the horror of it—with the reality of sitting in the park in summertime, midday, as the world continued around them. “He has to own you, to have your heartsblood. Only then can he be free, with you as his servant, until you face the same fate as the demon did, trapped in the book. Me, then. You, now. The reader. You don’t understand what he’s capable of. He won’t stop until you’re his, Theresa. He can’t harm you himself outside of your dreams, but he can take others. If you give in, he’s free. He’ll never be contained again.

  “We thought we could burn it all, but the devil got in Harry’s veins, started to possess him. Harry’s last act was to set the fire and burn with it so I could get free.”

  “And the book survived the fire,” Eliot said.

  Mathilde swallowed, and she was so thin that Tess could nearly see the saliva traveling down her throat. “It did. In the morning, I had to go into the smoldering library and deal with the devil by myself.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Tess said. “But Aunt Mathilde, I have to ask you. How did you get the devil back in the book? Because clearly, you did.”

  Mathilde sighed unhappily. “I did. The original reader must read the text backwards. Tess, in this case. That will trap him, little by little. But it won’t happen easily, I assure you.” She took Tess’s hand and squeezed it. Veins stood prominent, blue against the pale marble of her skin. “He can’t touch you, not unless he’s acting through someone else. He alone has no power over you so he will ruin everything around you. He will kill everyone you love. And in the end, he will get inside your head, and try to destroy you from the inside out.”

  Tess didn’t want to hear any more. She wanted to pull her knees up, to turn away, as if she could curl herself up and tuck her body away like an egg in a shell. Across the table, Eliot looked as stormy as she ha
d ever seen him. It took a moment for Tess to identify what it was. He looked like he was going to lose a battle, but he would fight it anyway.

  “He took Regina,” Eliot said wearily. Tess shot him a quick glance, uncertain, but he just shook his head. “That’s why … why we had to tell you. Tess dealt with her earlier.”

  Tess did not like the connotations of what he meant when he said she’d dealt with her. She didn’t want to think about it ever again.

  Mathilde looked between the two of them. “You dealt with her? Properly?”

  “Yes,” Tess whispered. “But what do we do? Who do we tell?”

  Mathilde only shook her head. “I will figure out how to handle it,” she said wearily. “But if he’s taken one person already, no doubt he’ll be searching for another vessel.”

  The words hung in the air. Tess turned them over, terribly aware that nothing was safe. “But you did it,” Tess said. “You bested him.”

  Mathilde’s eyes were cold and hard as flint. “I did.”

  They didn’t need it to be easy. They just needed it to be possible.

  forty nine

  Eliot

  TESS AND ELIOT DECIDED TO STAY TOGETHER. THE LIBRARY would remain closed, Mathilde insisted, until nightfall, when the three of them would return to finish off the devil once and for all: Mathilde for her knowledge, Tess to read, and Eliot to … to … be the muscle. Not that he had much in the muscle department. But he was here in this mess since the beginning, and there was no way in hell he would let Tess finish this herself.

  Tess’s roommate was home when they got to her dorm. She was a girl Eliot recognized from many of his classes—Anna Liu. He thought she was here on scholarship and on an accelerated track. They nodded to each other when Tess shut the door behind them.

  “Eliot,” Anna said. “I didn’t know you and Tess were, uh, friends.”

  Something about this made the back of his neck burn. Sure, what he and Tess had was unconventional, but it was odd that she hadn’t even said anything to her roommate about him.