“I told you how to end it,” Iris snapped. “He’s a Harrower, Audrey. You wouldn’t be murdering an innocent.”
“Not like you,” I said.
She didn’t hesitate. “Not like me.”
Mom reached us then, tugging me into her arms for a moment without speaking. She smoothed my hair with one hand, and I heard her breath hitch. When she released me, she stepped back, looking me over critically for a moment, and then said, “I didn’t want you here.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Mickey said from nearby. There was a scrape on his forehead and the side of his face. “She didn’t want me here, either.”
“And look how well that turned out,” Mom said, as she reached out and touched his arm.
He grunted, rubbing his forehead. “I’d rather be out here than hiding away.”
“Did you learn anything from the other Circles?” Leon asked Mom.
Her expression turned grave. “We lost all communication hours ago.”
“The radios have all been coughing out static,” Mickey added.
“So we’re on our own,” I said. I turned, gazing out at the encroaching gloom. This was Valerie’s vision called forth, I thought. I had seen it before, in the last flickering images that sped through Susannah’s mind as she died. The city gone gray, the glare of bloodred stars.
Iris had managed to sit up with Elspeth’s help. “What else do you need to convince you?”
“That’s why we’re here,” I said. “To find Gideon.”
“To kill him,” she answered.
I stared down the block toward Harlow Tower, rising high and dark. “To do what I have to.”
There was a sudden shift in the darkness. I spun and felt Leon’s hands catch my shoulders, steadying me. In the thick red shadows that spread across the buildings, a Harrower was stealing forward. It wasn’t alone. A second shuffled up behind it, and a third. I turned again. On the other side of the street, more demons gathered. I could see Shane among them, still half-human, his blond hair ruddy with blood.
These were not the Harrowers from before. I sensed the difference in them even as they began to step forth together, slowly, forming a loose net around us. They didn’t move to attack with the same heedless anger of the demons we’d fought before. An eerie hum built between them. And then they spoke, rasping, hissing, the same whispering voice I heard in the empty around us.
“The Circle will open,” they said. “Your Kin will end.”
Dread coiled tight inside me.
The Beneath was no longer controlling just Shane. It was controlling all of them.
Mom swore, lifting both her arms before her, poised and ready for battle. Camille and the other Guardian had risen to their feet. Elspeth remained on the ground, hugging Iris to her with one arm, the other shining with pale Guardian lights.
Iris looked at me. “Audrey. Go.”
I didn’t hesitate.
Leon and I ran for Harlow Tower.
We came to a stop outside the building, where the revolving doors were locked, and the thick gray sky made the glass opaque, too dark to see in. I thought of the last time I’d stood there. Six months ago, with the snow swirling in the air around me, and Iris waiting atop, a knife in her hands, Gideon at her feet. If I closed my eyes, I could see them both—the way Iris’s eyes had gone white, the way Gideon had whimpered when he’d woken, telling me he wanted to go home. We’d taken him away, but part of him had remained behind. Part of him had always been here.
You set something in motion that night on Harlow Tower, I heard Susannah say.
“How do we get in?” Leon asked.
I shook my head. “We don’t. He’s not in there. He’ll be in the alley outside.”
Where he’d fallen seventeen years ago.
Where his body had come to rest after he and my mother sailed through the air, wrapped in the Circle’s light. Where that light had burned into him, remaking him, shaping him into something else. Someone else. Where my friend had been born.
“You have to stay here,” I told Leon.
His gaze went wary. He was going to argue, and I couldn’t let him.
Gideon would kill Leon. He would’ve killed Mr. Alvarez if Tink hadn’t intervened. But he hadn’t killed her. And he wouldn’t kill me.
The only question was whether or not I’d be able to kill him.
“This isn’t about you protecting me right now,” I told Leon. “All of us, every one of us, is going to die if we don’t end this. Maybe this is the whole reason you’ve been protecting me. Maybe this was it all along. What I have to do right now.” I looked up into his eyes, watching the struggle within him. I grabbed his hand and held it in mine. The cool air had chilled his skin, but I could feel the warmth of his heartbeat. He lifted his free hand and touched my face.
“But I have to do it by myself,” I said. Slowly, I released his hand, let his fingers slide from mine. “I’m the only one who can.”
I hurried away before he could stop me.
Around me, the city had gone silent. The hush of the Beneath had swallowed the sirens; all I heard was the sound of my footsteps falling hard on the concrete, and that constant, quiet threat that whispered into my ears. This was what it was like, I thought. This was what Harrowers carried with them, the corruption they couldn’t escape. That relentless voice and the reek of death. The grief that had taken root inside of them the moment the Old Race crossed over. The deep, hungering darkness. The hate. I rounded the corner, kept running, trying to outdistance it.
I found Gideon huddled in the alley. He sat against the wall of the building, his arms wrapped around his knees. His head was bowed. All around him, the light of the Circle was pulsing out, glowing hotter with every step I took toward him. It waved in the air in warm colors, soft and rippling, like Gideon was surrounded by the northern lights.
With every step I felt the hum of the connection between us. The Astral Circle, bound to us both.
He looked up as I approached, staring at me with Verrick’s eyes. “I was waiting for you,” he said. “It said you would come to open the Circle.”
It. The Beneath. Though there were no Harrowers near us, I felt its presence. It was everywhere, lurking, pressing near. I felt its stare in the gray, swollen sky above us. Each star was an eye, keeping close, careful watch. That cold, baleful red, up in the infinite dark beyond.
I maintained my distance, a few steps from Gideon. There was dirt on his face, and a streak of blood that slashed down the front of his shirt. Mr. Alvarez’s, maybe. Gideon didn’t appear to be injured. The wound on his knuckles had scabbed over. He looked very young sitting there, his hair tangled, his knees clutched against him. There was a rent in his jeans. His shoelaces were untied.
“Is that why you’re here?” he asked, looking up at me. “To open the Circle?”
“To cut your connection to it,” I said. I swallowed, feeling other words there in my chest. I had come to kill him. I didn’t say it, but it seemed that Gideon could hear it anyway, in the thickness of my voice, maybe, or in the way I held back. I closed my eyes briefly. “I saw what happened. You couldn’t hurt Tink.”
“I chose not to.”
“Because you remember her. Because you know she’s your friend. She wanted—she asked me to thank you.”
“Don’t lie. You didn’t come here out of friendship.”
I didn’t speak. I wanted to step forward and reach out toward him and tell him he was wrong. I wanted to remind him of memories we’d built between us: of baseball games and barbecues; of winter mornings; of long, sleepy hours spent together. And I wanted to shout at him. I wanted to grab him and scream that he was Gideon, not Verrick, that he had a family, worried and waiting. But he was right. I hadn’t come out of friendship. I had come out of need. I had come because this was the moment that every moment before had been leading toward, the completion of the pattern that had been woven seventeen years ago.