on the beach in California, this rain of metal spheres onto Madagascar, this boiling lake in Namibia, villages spontaneously going dark in—”
“All right, all right, all right,” I said, holding my hands out, stopping myself a second before I covered the screen. “Okay.”
“Thousands of people have already died,” she said. “Nicky, the gates are all thinning. The alignment means that a dozen old spells slot into place, not just one or two. The Ancient Ones, They’re shifting, moving, crying out, like human dominion over the Earth is just a bad dream They’re having and it’s about to end. Magic is pouring through, not seeping. Magic and danger and evil and filth. People are getting contaminated already, other things, canaries in the coal mine, chemical indicators, that fucking oarfish. All my theories were way off-base. I can’t… there shouldn’t be… we have to go. Now.” She began to cram her notes into her bag, hands shaking. “There’s only one place left that might help guide us to the great gate. It’s just damn lucky he lives in Carthage now. I left a message—”
“He? He who?”
“Friend of a friend of a friend,” she said. “Used to work for the Department of Antiquities in Baghdad. His name is Akhmetov—”
“Not from around here, I guess. Is he one of those secret society people? Does he know about your covenant?” I said, and felt a slow flood of vertigo rise from my ankles up. I was glad I was sitting down, and watched as my hand white-knuckled the table, holding me upright. The word. A cov... an agree... someone had... someone in a dream... I fell asleep outside and... “Johnny, I...”
“What?”
“Nothing. Sorry. You were saying?”
“I wasn’t saying anything,” she said. “Are you all right? You look sweaty. Are you going to throw up?”
“No, I...” I looked down into her impatient, terrified face. Something felt different. Subtle, as if I had done no more than walk through a mist of something that had evaporated at once, only the memory of it on my skin. I felt… important. Seen. Something had spoken to me directly, not through her, something had tasked me with… with something. Something essential that only I could do. Something about saving the world. Better than her. For once, better and cleaner and easier than anything she had suggested. And I couldn’t quite remember what.
“Anyway, he’s got a private library that you kind of have to see to believe,” she said. “And if it’s got the last book we’re looking for, then we’re in luck.”
“We’ve been lucky so far,” I said. “Librarians want to help, like you said.”
“Well. He’s not a… librarian, really. He’s just a bibliophile.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You’ll see.”
“And if he doesn’t have it?”
“Time to make some more phonecalls,” she said, standing, swaying, and grabbing at the back of the chair. It promptly tipped, and I grabbed it before both she and it toppled to the floor. The spell was clearly taking it out of her—but after a moment she looked steadier, and her cheeks went from white to pink again. “I’ve already talked to people who have confirmed that there are warships gathering in the Gulf: American, Russian, and French. Tensions are running high. No one seems to know who gave orders for those ships to be there—”
“What?”
“—but no one’s moving, either.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and patted her pockets for the Sharpie. “I tried to buy some time before they begin hostilities. Begged, really. Till the afternoon of the fifth, I said. But things move so fast when they start going wrong.”
I watched the back of her neck as we walked, where the skin was tanning darkly instead of burning for now, fuzzed with fine golden haze that disappeared up into her hair and down into her t-shirt, wanting badly to touch it, comfort her, but also wondering how delicate it was, the spine, the spinal cord below it, how it might crunch and pop in my hands. How if I took her around that slender throat quickly enough I could crush her windpipe, make the sides stick together. She’d suffocate at my feet without landing a single blow.
“You coming?” she said, and I realized with a start that I had fallen far behind; she looked up at me from a dozen steps down, small, expectant. So much smaller than me. That sixty or seventy or eighty pounds that she didn’t have, that inertia that she didn’t have. My hands began to shake. If I pushed her here,