I’d started to pull from his grip, but stopped suddenly.

  “How’s your health?” I asked him. “Any blackouts?”

  He snuck a glance around, but we were beyond the earshot of his assistants, who’d hung back. It didn’t seem to occur to him to ask what I was doing in City Hall. He was too desperate to placate me.

  “No, none. I swear it.”

  I searched his eyes. He appeared to be telling the truth.

  “Call me if you do. Like I said, your life depends on it.”

  He let out a nervous laugh and took another swipe at his cowlick. “Hey, I’d really love to know what that means.” As I started walking again, he fell behind. “You sure you don’t have twenty minutes? How about ten? Let me help you, Everson.”

  “I don’t have any,” I said, which was the grim truth.

  In three days I would be bonded to my ashes.

  20

  With no money for a taxi, I hopped a turnstile at the City Hall subway station and came up for air twenty minutes later in the West Village. I’d deliberately left my keys and phone at home before setting out that morning. I called Ricki collect from a payphone to ask her to meet me at the front of our apartment building.

  “Hello?” someone answered.

  I hesitated. “Who’s this?” I said coldly.

  The voice wasn’t Ricki’s. It wasn’t even a woman’s.

  “Well, I just happened to be… That is, I was standing closer to the…”

  “Claudius,” I said, releasing my pent-up breath. “What are you doing? Is everything all right?”

  “Well, there’s a little bit of a, ah, a situation, I suppose you could call it.”

  I stiffened. “Is Ricki all right?”

  “Who’s he?”

  Claudius suffered from a badly perforated memory, but with Ricki and our future child in potential danger, my adrenaline took over. “She’s my wife. Is she there?”

  “Oh, yes, yes. I’m looking right at her. A picture of loveliness, if I haven’t said it before. Why, when I was younger—”

  “And she’s all right?” I interrupted.

  “She’s signaling something… What’s that? Oh, she wants you to come.”

  “I’m two minutes away. Meet me at the front door. I don’t have a key.”

  I sprinted the three blocks to our Tenth Street apartment. When I arrived, I was surprised to find that the senior member of my Order had actually heeded my directive. He was pacing the steps between the front door and sidewalk, carrying on a conversation with himself.

  When he saw me approaching at a run, he parted his curtains of black hair, eyes blinking beyond his blue-tinted glasses. His confused face took on a look of alarm, and his fingers leapt into a casting position. In the space between us, a portal began to yawn open. Deep inside, lava sloshed and belched.

  “Claudius, it’s me!” I shouted. “Everson!”

  As he looked again, the wrinkles around his eyes smoothed.

  “Ah, Everson,” he said, lowering his hands. “What brings you here?”

  “I live here,” I said, waving away the acrid smoke as I sidestepped the closing portal. “I just talked to you on the phone.”

  Fortunately, the door hadn’t closed all the way behind him, or we both would have been locked out. He hustled inside after me on his sandaled feet. But when I headed for the stairs leading up, I noticed he was going down.

  “Wrong way,” I said.

  “No, no, everyone’s down here.”

  “Everyone?”

  As I stepped through the doorway of the basement unit, I saw it was just my wife and Tabitha, but it took me another moment to make sense of the scene.

  Tabitha, who still looked as if she’d been to the taxidermist’s, lay stiffly on my casting table. Ricki stood over her. She’d changed into black leggings and a gray tank top after dropping me off that morning, and her right hand was inside Tabitha’s mouth.

  “What in the hell’s going on?” I asked.

  Relief welled up inside my wife’s eyes at the sight of me, but her expression quickly turned stern again. “I made the mistake of calling him,” she said, jutting her chin at Claudius, who had shuffled in behind me. He blinked from her to Tabitha, as though trying to recall exactly what he was doing here.

  “Hmm, you did call me, didn’t you?” he murmured.

  Ricki tensed her lips and addressed herself to me. “Tabitha still wasn’t showing any signs of life, and I wanted to give you one less thing to worry about when you got back. I also needed something to take my mind off your mission. When he said he could use an extra pair of hands, I didn’t realize he meant literally.”

  As she spoke, I hugged her to my side.

  “Everything went all right with you?” she asked, her expression softening. “You’re okay?”

  “I’ll tell you about it in a minute.” I kissed her. “But first, why is your hand in her mouth?”

  She was wearing a yellow dishwashing glove, but the sight of Tabitha’s sharp teeth ringing her wrist made me uneasy.

  “Oh, ah, I can explain that,” Claudius said, seeming to have recovered his orientation. “Your wife, that is, ah, Ricki…” His eyes lit up at having remembered. “Yes, Ricki filled me in on your cat’s condition. You’re quite correct, she did withdraw into herself as a defense mechanism. However, she’s not in stasis.”

  “She’s not?”

  “No, she’s locked in a battle for her very life.”

  “Really? A battle against whom?” I asked.

  “Well, that part isn’t clear, but the signs are all there. Your stimulant helped, gave her some extra kick. Without it, she would surely have succumbed. But she needs something stronger, and it has to be applied directly to her core. So I prepared some… well, I forget the name, but it’s essentially a mortar of whoop ass.” He chuckled at his own turn of phrase. “I didn’t think you’d mind me borrowing a few of your ingredients.”

  I looked over the mess on the far side of my casting table. Various herbs and tinctures were scattered around open jars and upended bottles. In the center was my mortar and pestle, which held the remnants of a purple paste.

  “Not at all.”

  “The thing is, to really have an effect, the salve needs to be massaged into her stomach with a polished stone, preferably topaz. But I couldn’t fit my own hand down far enough for the topaz stick to reach. Luckily, your wife, with her very lovely fingers, agreed to assist.” Claudius’s eyes swam with affection as he looked at her.

  “How much longer do I need to massage?” she asked thinly.

  “Oh!” He blinked. “It only requires three minutes, give or take.”

  “I’ve been doing this for thirty,” she informed him through a clenched jaw.

  “Yes, yes, then by all means…” He mimed retracting his arm.

  “Careful,” I said, bracing Tabitha’s body while my wife worked her hand and the topaz stick back out. She peeled the glove off inside out and tossed it into the wastebasket. At the kitchenette, she scrubbed her hands vigorously.

  “I hope she appreciates this,” she said.

  “She won’t,” I replied, “but I do. A lot. What happens now?” I asked Claudius.

  “Well, we’ll have to see whether it was enough. The rest will depend on her and how badly she wants to live.”

  As we peered down at Tabitha, my concern for her grew around my very real problems. Whatever I’d released from the whip was now attacking her. Correction, was continuing to attack her, since yesterday. Nuggets of guilt crab-crawled around my gut for having put her in this situation.

  “Where did you go off to earlier?” Claudius asked.

  “Hmm?” It only took a moment for the urgency of my situation to come surging back to the fore. “I was in the shadow realm. I called to tell you that this morning, remember? Regardless, I’m glad you’re here. What I’m about to share needs to be communicated to the senior members of the Order.”

  Ricki returned, drying her hands on a dishtowel. “I’d like to hear this, too.”

  I scooted the room’s two chairs together, helped my wife into one and gestured for Claudius to take the other. I then slid Tabitha’s stiff body over before hiking myself onto the corner of the casting table.

  “I captured Persephone’s scepter,” I said, “but Hermes never showed up to transport me back here.”

  Ricki’s eyebrows drew together. “I warned that little jerk.”

  “It may not have been his fault,” I continued. “He left me a—”

  “Ah, can you hold that thought?” Claudius interrupted. From a pocket in his cardigan, he produced a piece of hard candy wrapped in green foil. “Ginseng,” he explained, popping the candy into his mouth. “It makes me a little sharper.” He suckled on it loudly for several moments before signaling that I was free to continue.

  “Hermes left a note for me to meet him at the park, but en route I was intercepted by the Street Keepers. The bike gang with the whip. Persephone’s forces intervened, recovered the scepter, and hauled me to City Hall. Intact,” I assured Ricki. “In fact, the goddess healed me. She even freshened up my clothes.”

  Ricki looked at me in a way that suggested I could have left out that last detail.

  “But then shadow Budge started into a full court press, trying to convince me Hermes was the actual root of the problem.”

  I recounted for them everything he had said, including his claim that Hermes had attempted to align with Persephone—that he’d even gone so far as to create the energy-capturing design that would open Tartarus.

  “So who do you believe?” Ricki asked. “Team Hermes or Team Persephone?”

  I massaged my forehead, suddenly very tired, and dragged the hand down my cheek. “Both sides could be trying to get the other out of the way for their own power aims. I’ve been siding with Hermes, but how much of that is because I want to believe he’ll release Alec and leave our world for good when this is over?”

  “Is there a way to know?” she asked.

  “I’ve been chewing on it.” I was also growing very worried about Alec.

  But whatever his intentions, Hermes had been leading me around by the nose. Volunteering me to battle Koalemos to make his draftees behave, sending me on the mission for Persephone’s scepter, then inexplicably disappearing. Now Persephone was doing the same, releasing me to obtain the tablet under threat of death. And shadow Budge was doing her one better, demanding I destroy the tablet.

  “What I do know is that I’m tired of being yanked around.” I looked up with fresh resolve. “I keep saying that these are versions of the gods in question, not the gods themselves. But to know these versions, to truly know them, I need to think less like a wizard and more like a professor—namely a professor in the field. I need to go to the sites where they were worshipped.”

  “Okay, and where’s that?” Ricki asked warily.

  “For Hermes, it would be Athens, Greece. The box holding his tablet came from an Attican thieves guild. As for Persephone, Hermes never told me her place of origin, only that she was worshipped as a wronged and vengeful god. But back at City Hall, I caught something. At one point Budge called her ‘Sephassa,’ likely short for ‘Persephassa.’ That was the name of a pre-Hellenistic goddess whom the Greeks adopted into their mythology as ‘Persephone.’ And the only cults to Persephassa resided in central Sicily.”

  “Athens and Sicily,” Ricki repeated in a way that told me she was not keen on me traveling to either one. “Can’t the Order help you?”

  “Well, ah, they’re really tied up in the interdimensional planes at the moment,” Claudius interjected. “I think they understate the gravity of the tears sometimes. But last I spoke to them, they reiterated their full confidence in Everson here.” He smiled brightly, which did nothing to reassure my wife.

  “What about Gretchen?” she asked.

  “My teacher?” I snorted. “After embarrassing herself with that boyfriend stunt, she fled back to Faerie.” Gretchen had enchanted a bugbear, dressed him in tailored suits, and called him “Enzo” as part of a wacky plan to make Bree-yark jealous. “No one’s seen or heard from her since. Probably just as well.”

  “So no Order,” Ricki recounted, “no teacher, and what happened to your cane?”

  “I gave it to Hermes,” I said dismally.

  Though I’d tried several times, I’d been unable to connect with its energy, meaning it was still in the shadow realm. The thought that I might never recover my sword and staff roiled my insides, but I forced it aside.

  “Great,” she said. “Well, I can’t let you go alone.”

  “I’m not.” I turned to Claudius. “He’s giving me a ride.”

  When Claudius realized I was referring to him, he sat up suddenly, nearly choking on his ginseng candy. “To where again?” he asked when he’d stopped coughing long enough to find his voice.

  “Athens, Greece and Enna, Sicily.”

  He squinted off to the side and moved a finger around as though trying to recall old roads and byways.

  “Yes, yes,” he said at last. “I believe I know a good route to both.”

  I doubted the “good” part very much, but it was unavoidable. A commercial flight would take too long. I pictured my ashes in the urn on Persephone’s counter, soaked through with the bonding potion. One more ingredient, or perhaps just a spoken word by the goddess, and I would crumble to dust.

  I studied my fidgeting hands for a moment, debating whether to tell Ricki that part—Lord knew, I’d already piled enough on her for one day—before deciding that, yes, I couldn’t keep this from her. When I raised my head, though, I found her looking toward the door, where a figure now stood.

  Alec cleared his throat. “Can I come in?”

  21

  “Alec!” I jumped up from the table and rushed toward him. “Are you all right, buddy? What happened to you?”

  The fatigue under his eyes had spread, and his slender body seemed to slump under the weight of his pack. Otherwise, he looked okay. It took me a moment to notice his quizzical expression.

  “I’m… fine,” he said, looking between me and Ricki, who had risen and was watching with maternal concern. Claudius was regarding him too, though I could tell he was having trouble placing him.

  “I went over to the college to browse the bookstore,” Alec said. “I ended up getting a used book on symbols, and I took it to a coffee shop to read. I didn’t realize you guys were waiting for me.”

  “Solid or cloudy?” I asked.

  His brow bunched up before he understood that I was referring back to our conversation from the night before regarding his memories. “Cloudy,” he decided quietly. “So none of that was real, huh? Hermes made it up. Explains why I don’t have the book anymore. Thought I left it on the bus. Were you with him?”

  “He took me to the shadow present this morning, but he wasn’t there to bring me back. I thought something might have happened to him—to you. Well, to both of you. Do you remember being over there?”

  He shook his head in dismay.

  I squeezed his bony shoulders. “It’s all right.” I searched his eyes for any glimmer of the god. “Hermes,” I called in my wizard’s voice.

  Alec looked uneasily to one side. “It’s… still me.”

  “You didn’t happen to have my cane at any point today, did you?”

  “Your cane? No.”

  It was worth a shot, but at the moment I was too relieved to have him back here, safe, to give it more thought.

  As Alec adjusted his pack—not removing it, I noticed—I revisited the shadow mayor’s claim. If I destroyed the tablet, all of the gods would fall, normalcy would be restored, and Alec would be freed. I wanted to believe that, but it was just as likely Budge was hoodwinking me, making it seem as though we were on the same team when, in fact, he was just a very persuasive pawn in Persephone’s game.

  “Hey, you wanted to tell me something last night,” I said.

  Alec angled his head in question. “I did? What about?”

  “You shared your concerns about your memories, and then you said there was something else that could be important.”

  I was beginning to suspect Hermes had erased the memory when Alec nodded slowly. “It had to do with my runes. I’m always sketching new ones. Usually I have some idea what they are, or at least what they’ll do. But I started working on a new one last week and…” He blew the air from his puffed cheeks and shrugged. “I have absolutely no idea what it was for. I thought maybe Hermes was up to something.”

  “Do you have the sketch with you?”

  “Yeah.” He brought the pack around to his front. But as he searched through the small pocket for his sketchpad, panic spread over his face. He unzipped the main compartment and dug around the box.

  “It’s—it’s gone,” he said.

  Hermes may not have erased Alec’s memory, but had he hidden the evidence of the rune he’d designed for Persephone? I remembered the note Hermes had left me in the loft and patted the inside pocket of my jacket to ensure it was still there.

  “Do you have a pencil I can borrow?” I asked.

  Still looking distressed, Alec nodded and handed me one. At my casting table I spread the note face up so the word “PARK” was showing. Ricki and Claudius came over. Giving up on his sketchpad, Alec donned his zipped-up pack and joined us.

  “This could be nothing,” I said, bringing the edge of the pencil to the paper.

  I began shading over it very lightly, hoping to pick up something from the page that had been sitting on top of it. At first it looked like an artist’s impression of a rainy day in London—a gray wash—and then faintly, very faintly, a network of lines began to stand out. When I finished, I tilted it toward the light.

  Claudius let out a low “ooh.”

  “That’s it!” Alec exclaimed. “That’s the one I was drawing.”

  My heart sank into my stomach. It was the siphon sigil that Persephone was using to call up Cronus. The shadow mayor had been telling the truth, at least as far as that went. Did I need to believe the rest of what he’d said? Ricki, who had an uncanny gift for reading me, cocked an eyebrow as though to ask, Is that bad?