Page 150 of Dead Beat

Alex tried to move toward her, but she couldn’t. She was rooted to the spot.

“All you have to do is name the card and you can walk through that door, back to the stairs and your absurd quest. But if you fail…” Belbalm gave the careless, disinterested shrug Alex had so admired before she knew who and what the professor really was. “My lord awaits you.”

Alex looked back to the door where she and Hellie had entered. Through the swaying beaded curtain, she saw the steps of Sterling Library where she’d once escaped Golgarot. The starving hounds the demon kept circled two empty thrones, whimpering and panting. One of them gripped the jeweled yoke intended for Alex in its crooked jaws.

“Hey!” Hellie yelped. “Stop it.” She was crying now. “I don’t like this. Alex? I want to go. Let’s get out of here, okay?”

Alex couldn’t bear it. She was failing Hellie all over again.

“Name the card, Alexandra.” Belbalm had always gotten her name wrong.

“I’m coming, Hellie,” Alex said. “Just hold on. I’m coming.”

“So many promises,” Belbalm said, the card flipping front to back to front in her hand. “But you never arrive on time. Not for Mercy. Not for Hellie.”

Hellie screamed. She was writhing on the table now, but the tattoo artist’s hand gripped her thigh, holding her down.

Alex couldn’t think straight. The card flipped and flipped again. A staff—no, a scepter, the miter. This was easy. The High Priest. The Hierophant. She’d lived with Mira long enough to know it.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Belbalm demanded. “Listening to her cry out? But you were always so cold, Alex. It took forever to make you come. A real fucking chore.”

“Would you shut up so I can think?” Alex bit out, but her heart was pounding.

Hellie released a high wail, a child’s cry, desperate and lost. Alex wanted to smash the glass counter. The tattoo artist craned his neck and looked back at her.

Ariel. The last man to hurt Hellie. The one to make her want to die.

I killed you, Alex thought frantically. Hellie and I made sure you could never hurt another girl again. But there would always be men like Ariel.

Think.

Scepter and miter. That was the Hierophant. But that was too easy, and nothing about this was supposed to be easy.

Belbalm grinned and a long string of drool fell from her lips, pooling on the countertop. “Name it,” she growled.

I need you, Dawes. She would know in an instant. The Hierophant—maybe, but look again. The scepter is jeweled. Could he be a king? The Emperor? A dog peeked out from behind his throne, sweet-faced and small, nothing like Golgarot’s hounds. That could be the Fool?

Not a dog, Alex. Something sillier, more wonderful. Look again.

An otter. That meant this was the Whithorn deck, and its artist, a follower of St. Cuthbert, had switched up the iconography of the Magician and the Hierophant. No one knew why. Deliberate or a mistake? Penicillin, Alex thought wildly. Let’s hear it for good mistakes.

Hellie screamed.

Alex snatched the card from Belbalm’s hand and slammed it down on the counter. “The Magician,” she spat, feeling Dawes’s relief and pride flood through her. “Choke on it.”

Belbalm’s jaws snapped. The tattoo parlor vanished and she was back on the Harkness stairs.

Alex pressed her hand to her mouth, trying to push back a surge of nausea. What about Hellie? She needed to know Hellie was okay.

“It wasn’t Hellie,” she said out loud. Not Hellie. Not Belbalm. Not even Ariel. Just demon games. “I solved your fucking puzzle.”

But whose puzzle was it? The donors got together and they consulted their ancient texts and they hired an architect and they built a Gauntlet and a tower and they let their mice loose in the maze, but who was watching? Who was judging? If she had been called, then who was on the other end of the line? God or the Devil? What if it was no one at all?

“I can do this,” she said. “I can win.”

So why didn’t it feel that way? If she could just get a moment away from that awful hum, that tolling of the bell. But all she could do was climb.

“Seventy-two,” she grunted out and used the railing to drag herself up. “Seventy-three.”