THIRTY
“The game is afoot,” Emmet said, glancing over at me as we pulled up to the gates of the Tillandsia house. I rolled my eyes, and he smiled. He turned down the long drive, pulling near the oval, which had been a patch of dirt only a few days ago. Tonight, a decades-old magnolia stood there, fragrant in its full and miraculously timed bloom. The scent wafted in through my cracked open window. It intoxicated me, almost as much as the few times I’d allowed myself to glance over at Emmet. His piercing eyes burned, and despite their fire, they were even blacker than the tuxedo he wore. His hair was combed back in thick onyx waves. I fought the urge to run my fingers through them. My love for Peter was all that prevented me from acting on my desire.
I forced myself to concentrate on the matter at hand. Our plan was good, although I was not about to jinx it by thinking of it as foolproof. My job was to unlock the energy, and then Emmet would relay it to Jilo, who had ensconced herself in her haint-blue chamber and would be waiting to take charge of any magic we sent her way.
We pulled around the oval, where attendants were opening car doors and collecting keys. Emmet placed the car in park and turned to face me, a hint of a grin on his lips. “I’ve never driven before. Did I do okay?”
I laughed even though I shouldn’t have. I should have questioned his overly earnest request to act as chauffeur. Tonight, though, I didn’t want to ask too many questions of him. I was afraid of the answers. “You did great.”
Powerful searchlights crossing beams overhead and smaller lamps scattered throughout nearly turned the night into day. Peter’s crew had done no additional work since Tucker’s death, but the Tillandsia house shone, the very image of perfection. Only magic could have transformed it so quickly. The sad and peeling paint had been exchanged for a fresh and nearly luminescent white that coated the house’s Doric pillars as well as the building itself. The shutters had been enameled black. Only the door remained as it had been, the same black and red that the Tillandsia Society had evidently adopted as its symbol.
The attendant opened my door, and I stretched out my legs, making sure that my much higher than usual heels connected safely with the still fresh pavement. Emmet met me at the side of the car and offered me his arm. I let myself lean on it, enjoying the comfort of his strength. My fingers dug into his jacket as we stepped past the infamous door and over the threshold. My eyes darted nervously around the entranceway, but there was no visible dome overhead. The true architecture of the house fully honored the Georgian preference for symmetry—two stairways curved gracefully up to the top floor, one on each side.
Eyes fell on us from every direction, predatory and hungry—some for me, some for Emmet, and a good number for us both. I recognized some of the faces, including a teacher from my high school and a few business people and their respective spouses. Most of the faces were new, but all, the new and the known, glowed with the same carnivorous delight. Conversation stopped as a servant who was attired in a period costume, complete with a powdered wig, stepped forward. “Your invitation, please.” He held out a silver tray to receive it. I looked at Emmet with panic in my eyes. I’d forgotten to bring it. He smiled and produced the paper from his coat pocket. After he placed it on the tray, the servant picked it up. “Miss Mercy Taylor and Mister . . . ?” He paused, appreciating the dark wall of man next to me.
“My name is Emmet Clay.”
“Wouldn’t mind spinning that clay on my wheel.” A stage whisper floated down from a group of middle-aged ladies at the top of the stairs. The conversation picked up again in spurts and stops, soon reaching its previous volume and complexity, even though most eyes remained fixed on the two of us.
“A warm Tillandsia welcome to you, Mr. Clay,” the servant said and bowed.
Emmet leaned over and whispered into my ear. “They can’t take their eyes off you.” His warm breath tickled.
“I think you are the one everybody’s checking out.”
“No,” he said. “You are breathtaking in that dress.”
I bit my tongue to keep from turning it into a joke, from saying, “What, this old thing?” Instead I returned a simple “Thank you.” I wore another of Ellen’s finds, an ice-blue vintage cocktail dress with trails of slightly darker flowers that ran down the fabric in rows. It read as very sweet and demure, and my amplified cleavage was well hidden by the collarbone-high neckline and wide straps. Even with the pleated waist, it still covered me without drawing attention to my pregnancy. The skirt fell a little below the knee. I’d borrowed Ellen’s pearls, wearing them for good luck as well as a sign of my faith in her, and had my hair up in a loose bun. The entire effect came across as much more Sunday school than orgy. I surveyed the room filled with high slit skirts and deeply plunging necklines, and realized the seductive power my modest look held simply due to juxtaposition.
Even though I knew the participants were here of their own volition, the house had the feeling of a zoo or prison, each room as a separate cage. I reached up and touched my aunt’s pearls, focusing on them, using them to help me hone in on her energy. “Aunt Ellen is here,” I said to Emmet. “I can sense her.”
“Do you detect that she is in danger of any kind?”
“No, she doesn’t seem to be under any stress.” In fact, when I reached out to her, I experienced a sense of calmness, as if she were resting or medicated. Waiters walked around carrying glass after glass of Ellen’s favorite form of medication.
“Then let us focus for now on the power.” Emmet lifted his hand, using it like an antenna or maybe a dowsing rod. “There is much of it here, just waiting for us to tap into it.”
“I feel it too.” The power did not resonate like the smooth and vibrant energy of the line, nor did it sizzle like the nearly psychotic electricity that had built up at the old Candler Hospital, having fed off the pain and misery of those who had been lost there. It lay somewhere between the two, and it felt something like silk being pulled across a ragged rock. I gave a slight tug to the bond Emmet had helped set up between Jilo and myself. She tugged back.
“The real party is this way,” a naked man I recognized as a former state senator said with a grin, using his sex to point to the doorway of what had probably been the parlor or drawing room.
I felt the blood rise to my face as I watched his pasty buttocks pass through the arch of the door. I turned nearly purple when the servant who announced us approached. “If you’d prefer a more private setting, there are rooms upstairs. Although there will be several,” he said, giving Emmet a thoroughly appreciative stare, “who will be very disappointed if you don’t join the festivities.”
“We came here to ‘participate,’?” I said, dreading the thought of crossing the barrier into that room.
“We don’t have to stay, Mercy. We can find Ellen and leave if that is what you would prefer.”
“If you are speaking of Mrs. Weber,” the servant said using the correct German pronunciation, “she is already in there with her friends.” He stretched his hand out to indicate the room into which we had just been invited. Emmet and I looked at each other, each reflecting the other’s uncertainty. “Don’t be shy. Dive on in,” the servant said. “The water’s warm.”
I nodded to Emmet, and he placed his arm around my shoulder and led me from the entrance into what I’d assumed was the party room. Once there, I realized that the old parlor was simply being used as a cloakroom. At one end, a female attendant, pretty close to my own age, stood perfectly naked and totally unashamed. At the other end, a muscular man, nude except for a gun belt, stood guard at the door that led from the cloakroom into what I now knew to be the party room.
“Welcome, y’all,” the attendant said, offering us rubber bracelets with numbers printed on them. “Here are your claim numbers when you are ready to head out tonight, so take care not to lose them.” She dropped both bands into Emmet’s large hand, and then held up two black vinyl garment bags with the corresponding numbers written on them.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I think we’ll keep our clothes on for now.”
“Oh, I am sorry. This must be your first time.” She smiled congenially at us newbies. “No one gets in without, well, displaying their goods.”
“In our case, you will please make an exception,” Emmet said in a calm voice. He wasn’t attempting to charm her magically, as Oliver would have done; he was simply stating his wish in his habitual, matter-of-fact manner.
“I am afraid we can’t do that, sir. Fair is fair. Besides, I am sure that neither you nor your pretty lady has anything to be ashamed of.” She smiled at me, her eyes asking me to talk some sense into my date. “Your lady friend can keep her pearls, if she likes. And her shoes,” she offered.
“When in Rome, I guess,” I said, and when Emmet looked at me, his eyes were filled with surprise. “We’ll only need one bag.”
“Oh, sweetie,” the attendant said, her shoulders relaxed. She seemed relieved by my surrender. “Don’t go making that mistake. You are a true beauty and all, but it’s quite a rarity for a couple that comes to Tillandsia together to leave together.”
Emmet’s face clouded over like a storm about to burst. His eyes narrowed and his brow creased. “I apologize. I believe when I used the word ‘please’ earlier, you thought I was making a request. I am telling you that in our case, you will make an exception.”
The woman lowered the bags as Emmet dropped the bands on her table.
“Listen here,” the doorman said, moving his hand to his holster. “Everybody’s just here to have a good time. Loosen up or leave.”
Emmet turned to face the guard. Even though the man was close to six feet tall and had the muscles of a professional bodybuilder, Emmet towered over him by nearly a foot. I could tell the guard feared Emmet might call his bluff and make him pull his pistol from its holster. Emmet stood firm, and after a few taut moments, the guard drew aside. Emmet placed his arm around my shoulder again and led me into hell’s second circle.
The hall, for you couldn’t simply call it a room, stretched out much larger than I had imagined it could, or perhaps the sense of size was an optical illusion created by the numerous gilt-framed mirrors that lined its walls and had been suspended from the ceiling. Still, even with the hall’s size, it felt close and claustrophobic. It had no windows, and the only perceivable exit was the entrance through which we’d just come. It was too dark to even determine the color of the walls, save in one corner where a bright spotlight illuminated a stage and the wall behind it. It had been painted plum—a good shade for debauchery, I decided.
Deep inhalations and sighs sounded from one end of the hall to the other, answered by soft moans and whispers and the occasional alarming cry of pleasure. I lowered my eyes, trying not to look at anything. But there, all along the floor, writhed piles and mounds and rows of bodies, lying together, caressing one another, in kaleidoscopic combinations. A heaving, groaning work by Bosch. A green scent like acacia in hot sun. Another, seaweed washed up on the damp shore. Tattoos and scars and every shade in the rainbow of flesh. Faces contorted with pleasure or contorted with pain, as per their inclination, appeared from the shadows only to be swallowed again by the darkness moments later. Waiters circled, offering any vice from alcohol to tiny packets of white powder to hypodermic needles loaded with God only knows what. Pillars of smoke floated in and out around us, some smelling sweet—cloying, even—others like vinegar. I tried not to breathe the smoke in, fearing the effect it might have on my baby. I should never have come here. I should never have risked Colin. I should have put him first, before Maisie, before my own selfish need to prove to myself that my mother loved me. I wanted to scream as the truth hit me. Regardless of my reasons, my justifications, that was the true reason I’d come. Well, I no longer cared. All that mattered was proving to my son that I loved him.
I turned and tried to push my way back to the exit, desperate to leave the hall, but dozens of revelers had followed us in and were crowding around us. I started to panic, striking out, slapping, clawing at those who surrounded me. Emmet picked me up and strode away from the center of the room, where we had somehow found ourselves. He sat me down with my back against the far wall, and used his own mass to shield me from those who would have crushed up against us. “I want to get out of here. I need to get out of here,” I cried into his ear. “Forget the plan.”
“I know, and I will find us a way to do just that.”
“Just get us to the exit,” I said, not comprehending why this wouldn’t show itself as the obvious solution.
“The wall behind us is where the exit was . . . Your back is directly against it.”
I felt around behind myself, feeling nothing but wall, but then I turned and saw my own eyes dimly reflected back at me by a mirror that had taken the place of the door. They mimicked the eyes of a trapped and desperate animal. Emmet put his hands on my shoulders and turned me back toward him. “Don’t panic,” he said. “It’s the magic in this room. It is seeking to master us, but we must take control and become its master instead . . . We must continue with the plan. You can do this. We can do this.”
His words calmed me, and I found myself unconsciously mimicking his breathing. Deep, slow breaths. My heart slowed its wild beating.
“There is only one way out of here, and that is to capture the magic,” he whispered in my ear, his hot breath tickling the sensitive skin beneath it. “And there is only one way to capture the magic.” He pressed my back gently against the mirrored surface. His hands reached out and found mine, pressing our palms together, lacing our fingers. His heat consumed me, and again I felt his energy, his power, coalesce at the tip of my spine and climb its way up through me. In spite of my fear, in spite of the revulsion that the gathering had engendered in me, I felt my body give into pleasure. “Picture it, Mercy,” he said, his lips brushing against my earlobe. “See the power of this room becoming yours.”
I tried to envision the energy coming into my grasp, my control, but I sensed the hall around us changing. A sound, caught somewhere between a human moan and the buzzing of locusts, began to reverberate around the space, although only Emmet and I seemed to notice. The partiers remained blithely unaware of any change in the atmosphere. I struggled to look beyond Emmet’s shoulder. A beam of light, cold and uncomforting, bounced from one mirrored surface to the next, weaving a web around all those who were gathered here.
The beam pierced my heart with horror because it revealed that we were no longer standing in the mirrored hall, but in the hexagonal entranceway where I’d seen my mother murdered. The dome hovered over us once again, backlit in a way that attested to its presence, but lent no illumination to the space beneath it. Even though the mirrors had disappeared with the plum walls that held them, I could still see everything around us reflected from a thousand different angles. I looked forward and saw myself from behind, my arms raised and intertwined with Emmet’s.
The servants who had been purveying their stupefying substances had dragged one of the partygoers to the center of the room. The shaved head and mangled stump of an arm identified him as Ryder. The participants who had been so intertwined that they’d appeared to be a single mass of writhing flesh began to disengage, each body unknotting from the others, individuating. Some rose to their feet, others only to their knees. The most terrible of all were those who’d abandoned any pretense of humanity, rising up on all four limbs. Faces dotted with black and alien eyes turned to focus on Ryder at the center of the gathering. “His blood for their glory” came from one side of the circle that had formed around him, and then the others took up the cry, chanting it over and over again.
A symbol, like an Egyptian ankh mated with the symbol for infinity, had been carved into Ryder’s forehead. It glowed an angry red, but Ryder himself seemed indifferent to the situation unfolding around him. He knelt, too wasted to protest, too intoxicated to care what was happening. The revelers cheered as another man, naked except for a mask of Janus that covered his entire head, stepped forward and slid a knife across Ryder’s throat. His body slumped forward as it bled out. The blood defied the laws of physics, running up the walls instead of pooling at the lowest point of the room.
The dome was no longer fixed in place—it started ascending, and the staircase that led to it started to grow longer, level after level. This was no longer the room where I had seen my mother die. It was growing into a tower, and it kept growing ever more quickly, stretching higher and higher and gaining speed as it did so.
The man with the knife removed his mask and cried out. He turned to face me, his eyes entirely black except for glowing crimson dots that had replaced his pupils. I recognized him instantly. It was Joe, Ryder’s buddy. The crowd turned their attention from Ryder’s exsanguinated corpse to Emmet and me, and they began to advance on us, chanting in a language I could not understand. I screamed and struggled, trying to alert Emmet to what was occurring behind him, only to realize that he was frozen in place, trapped by the power we had tapped into as surely as you can get stuck to an electrified fence. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t disconnect from the power that rose up through him and into me. The black magic filtered into my body, settled in around my solar plexus, and then found its prize, the point at which the line had connected its magic to mine. It had found a vulnerability in the line itself, and I had provided it with an entry point. The full gravity of absolute darkness pulled at me, its source, the power I had been so foolish to welcome into myself, the power of Tillandsia.