“Okay,” she said. Cautious, unsure. The camaraderie and ease they’d earned over the last months gone like passing weather.

“I’ll ward it,” he said. “We’ll go back to Il Bastone and talk this out.” Did he mean that, he wondered? Or did he mean, I’ll learn what I can before I turn you in and you go quiet. Tonight, she’d still be looking to barter—a trade of information for his silence. She was his Dante. That should matter. She’s a killer. And a liar. “This isn’t something I can keep from Sandow.”

“Okay,” she said again.

Darlington drew two magnets from his pocket and traced a clean sign of warding over the portal. Doorways like this were strictly Scroll and Key magic, but it was a ridiculous risk for the Locksmiths to try to open a portal away from their tomb. Nevertheless, it was their own magic he would use to close it.

“Alsamt,” he began. “Mukhal—” The breath was sucked from his mouth before he could finish the words.

Something had hold of him, and Darlington knew he’d made a terrible mistake. This was not a portal. Not at all.

He realized in that last moment how few things he had to tether him to the world. What could keep him here? Who knew him well enough to keep hold of his heart? All of the books and the music and the art and the history, the silent stones of Black Elm, the streets of this town. This town. None of it would remember him.

He tried to speak. A warning? The last gasp of a know-it-all? Here lies the boy with all the answers. Except there would be no grave.

Danny was looking at Alex’s old young face, at her dark well eyes, at the lips that remained parted, that did not move to speak. She did not step forward. She cast no words of protection.

He ended as he had always suspected he would, alone in the dark.

19

Last Summer

Alex couldn’t trace where the trouble began at Ground Zero that night. It all went too far back. Len had been trying to move up, to get Eitan to let him take on more weight. Weed paid the bills, but the private school kids at Buckley and Oakwood wanted Adderall, Molly, oxy, ketamine, and Eitan just didn’t trust Len with more than dime bags of green, no matter how much he kissed up.

Len loved to bitch about Eitan, called him an oily Jewish prick, and Alex would squirm, thinking of her grandmother lighting the prayer candles on Shabbat. But Eitan Shafir had everything Len wanted: money, cars, a seemingly endless line of aspiring models on his arm. He lived in a mega mansion in Encino with an infinity pool that overlooked the 405 freeway surrounded by a crazy amount of muscle. The problem was that Len didn’t have anything Eitan wanted—until Ariel came to town.

“Ariel,” Hellie had said. “That’s an angel’s name.”

Ariel was Eitan’s cousin or brother or something. Alex was never sure. He had wide-set eyes with heavy lids, a handsome face framed by perfectly groomed stubble. He made Alex nervous from moment one. He was too still, like a creature hunting, and she could sense the violence in him waiting. She saw it in the way even Eitan deferred to him, the way the parties at the house in Encino grew more frantic, desperate to impress him, to keep him entertained, as if boring Ariel might be a very dangerous thing. Alex had the sense that Ariel, or some version of him, had always been there, that the messy clockwork of men like Eitan and Len could not operate without someone like Ariel looming above it all, leaning back in his seat, his slow blink like a countdown.

Ariel got a kick out of Len. Len made him laugh, though somehow Ariel never seemed to smile when he was laughing. He loved to wave Len over to his table. He’d slap him on the back and get him to freestyle.

“This is our in,” Len said the day Ariel invited himself to Ground Zero.

Alex couldn’t understand how Len didn’t see that Ariel was laughing at him, that he was amused by their poverty, excited by their want. The survivor in her understood that there were men who liked to see other people grovel, liked to push to see what humiliations the needs of others would allow. There were rumors floating around Eitan’s place, passed from one girl to the next: Don’t end up alone with Ariel. He doesn’t just like it rough; he likes it ugly.

Alex had tried to make Len see the danger. “Don’t mess around with this guy,” she’d told him. “He’s not like us.”

“But he likes me.”

“He just likes playing with his food.”

“He’s getting Eitan to level me up,” Len said, standing at the chipped yellow counter at Ground Zero. “Why do you have to shit on anything good that happens to me?”

“It’s garbage-can fentanyl, for fuck’s sake. He’s giving it to you because no one wants it.” Eitan didn’t mess with fentanyl unless he knew exactly where it had come from. He liked to stay off law-enforcement radar, and killing your clients tended to draw attention. Someone had paid off a debt to him in what was supposed to be heroin cut with fentanyl, but it had passed through too many hands to be considered clean.

“Don’t screw this up for me, Alex,” Len said. “Make this shithole look nice.”

“Let me get my magic wand.”

He’d slapped her then, but not hard. Just an “I mean business” slap.

“Hey,” Hellie had protested. Alex was never sure what Hellie intended when she said, “Hey,” but she was grateful for it anyway.

“Relax,” Len said. “Ariel wants to party with real people, not those plastic assholes Eitan keeps around. We’re going to go get Damon’s speakers. Get everything cleaned up.” He’d looked at Hellie, then at Alex. “Try to look nice. No attitude tonight.”

“Let’s go,” Alex had said as soon as Len left the apartment, Betcha in the passenger seat, already lighting up. Betcha’s real name was Mitchell, but Alex hadn’t known that until he got picked up on a possession charge and they had to scrape together bail. He’d run with Len since long before Alex and was always just there, tall, stocky, and soft-bellied, his chin perpetually flecked with acne.

Alex and Hellie started walking, heading toward the concrete bed of the L.A. River, then up to the bus stop on Sherman Way, with no destination in mind. They’d done it before, even sworn they were leaving for good, gotten as far as the Santa Monica Pier, Barstow, once all the way to Vegas, where they’d spent the first day wandering hotel lobbies and the second day stealing quarters from old ladies playing the slots until they had enough for bus fare home. Speeding down the 15 in the air-conditioning on the way back to L.A., they’d fallen asleep leaning on each other’s shoulders. Alex had dreamed of the garden at the Bellagio, the water wheels and piped-in perfume, the flowers arranged like a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes it took Alex and Hellie hours, sometimes days, but they always came back. There was too much world. There were too many choices, and those only seemed to lead to more choices. That was the business of living, and neither of them had ever acquired the skill.

“Len says we’re going to lose Ground Zero if Ariel doesn’t come through,” Hellie said as they boarded the RTD. No grand plans today. No Vegas, just a trip to the West Side.

“It’s talk,” said Alex.

“He’s going to be pissed we didn’t clean up.”

Alex looked out the murky window and said, “You notice Eitan sent his girlfriend away?”

“What?”

“When Ariel came to town. He sent Inger away. He hasn’t had any of the usual girls around. Only Valley trash.”

“It’s not that big a deal, Alex.”

They both knew what Ariel was coming to Ground Zero for. He wanted to slum it for a while and Alex and Hellie were supposed to be part of the fun.

“It never feels like a big deal until it is,” Alex said. There had been other favors. The first time was a film guy, or at least someone Len said was a film guy, who was going to get them lots of Hollywood business, but Alex learned later he was just a production assistant, straight out of film school. She’d ended up sitting on his lap all night, hoping that might be all there was to it, until he’d taken her back to the little bathroom and put their filthy bath mat down on the tiles—a weirdly chivalrous gesture—so that she could blow him in greater comfort while he sat on the toilet. I’m fifteen, she’d thought as she’d rinsed out her mouth and cleaned up her eye makeup. What does fifteen look like? Was another Alex going to slumber parties and kissing boys at school dances? Could she climb through the mirror above the sink and slide into that girl’s skin?

But she was fine. Really okay. Until the next morning, when Len kept slamming cabinet doors and smoking in this way he had where it seemed like he wanted to eat the cigarette with every drag, until at last Alex had snapped and said, “What is your problem?”

“My problem? My girlfriend is a whore.”

Alex had heard that word so many times from Len it barely registered anymore. Bitch, slut, occasionally cunt when he was feeling particularly angry or when he was affecting British gangster. But he’d never called her that. That was a word for other girls.

“You said—”

“I didn’t say shit.”

“You told me to make him happy.”