Now that the wave of adrenaline had passed, remorse was setting in. Once a mask was off you couldn’t just slide it back into place. Salome wouldn’t be calling the cavalry, Alex felt pretty sure of that. But she felt equally certain that the girl would talk. Psycho. Crazy bitch. Whether she would be believed was another thing entirely. Salome had said it herself: You can’t just. People here didn’t behave the way that Alex had.
The more pressing concern was how good Alex felt, like she was breathing easy for the first time in months, free from the suffocating weight of the new Alex she’d tried to construct.
But Dawes was breathing hard. As if she’d done all the work.
Alex flipped a light switch and flames flared to life in the gas lanterns along the red and gold walls, illuminating an Egyptian temple built into the heart of the English manor house. An altar was laden with skulls, taxidermied animals, and a leather ledger signed by each of the delegation’s members before the start of a ritual. At the center of the back wall was a sarcophagus topped with glass, a desiccated mummy pilfered from a Nile Valley dig inside. It was all almost too expected. The ceiling was painted to look like a vaulted sky, acanthus leaves and stylized palms at the corners, and a stream cut through the center of the room, fed by a sheet of water that toppled from the edge of the balcony above, the echo overwhelming. The Bridegroom drifted across the stream, as far from the sarcophagus as he could get.
“I’m leaving,” Salome shouted from down the hall. “I don’t want to be here if something goes wrong.”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong!” Alex called back. They heard the front door slam. “Dawes, what did she mean if something goes wrong?”
“Did you read the ritual?” Dawes asked as she walked the perimeter of the room, studying its details.
“Parts of it.” Enough to know it could put her in touch with the Bridegroom.
“You have to cross into the borderland between life and death.”
“Wait … I’m going to have to die?” She really should start doing the reading.
“Yes.”
“And come back?”
“I mean, that’s the idea.”
“And you’re going to have to kill me?” Timid Dawes who, at the first sign of violence, had curled into a corner like a hedgehog in a sweatshirt? “You okay with that? It’s not going to look good for you if I don’t make it back.”
Dawes expelled a long breath. “So make it back.”
The Bridegroom’s face was bleak, but that was sort of his look. Alex contemplated the altar. “So the afterlife is Egypt? Of all the religions, the ancient Egyptians got it right?”
“We don’t really know what the afterlife is like. This is one way into one borderland. There are others. They’re always marked by rivers.”
“Like Lethe to the Greeks.”
“Actually, to the Greeks, Styx is the border river. Lethe is the final boundary the dead must cross. The Egyptians believed the sun died on the western banks of the Nile every day, so to journey from its eastern bank to the west is to leave the world of the living behind.”
And that was the journey Alex would have to make.
The “river” bisecting the temple was symbolic, hewn of stone mined from the ancient limestone tunnels beneath Tura, hieroglyphs from the Book of Emerging Forth into Night carved into the sides and base of the channel.
Alex hesitated. Was this the crossroads? Was this the last foolish thing she would do? And who would be there to greet her in the beyond? Hellie. Maybe Darlington. Len and Betcha, their skulls crushed in, that cartoonish look of surprise still stuck on Len’s face. Or maybe they’d be made whole somewhere on that other shore. If she died, would she be able to cross back through the Veil and spend an eternity flitting around campus? Would she end up back home, doomed to haunt some dump in Van Nuys? So make it back. Make it back or leave Dawes holding her dead body and Salome Nils to share the blame. The last thought wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
“All I have to do is drown?”
“That’s all,” said Dawes without a hint of a smile.
Alex unbuttoned her coat and drew off her sweater, while Dawes shed her parka, drawing two slender green reeds from her pockets. “Where is he?” she whispered.
“The Bridegroom? Right behind you.” Dawes flinched. “Kidding. He’s by the altar, doing his brooding thing.” The Bridegroom’s scowl deepened.
“Have him stand