"I've got her." He doesn't have her, and I can feel that he knows it, feel his fear spike as my hand keeps sliding under his grip, a slow, relentless inch he can't hold against no matter how hard he drags. His blood sense slams into mine—his pulse hammering where his thumb lands, his fear pouring up my arm hot and bright—and none of it is enough. The Well is older than a heartbeat and louder than one, and it has waited longer than Ren has been alive.
"Helena." Brittany. The flat's gone out of her now. "Helena, she's—she'ssmiling."
Am I? I can't feel my face. I can only feel the deep. The down. Theyesbuilding behind my teeth like the blood built on my lip, and under it, so much relief I could cry from it, the relief of finally being allowed to stop.
Somewhere past Ren, Felix's cards hit the floor. I hear them go, a small percussion under everything else, and I know without looking that his hands came apart on their own the same way mine did—know it because a second later his fingers are on my other arm too, adding his grip to Ren's, his knee cracking hard against the stone as he lunges to get there in time. Atlas is already moving, a shape breaking away from the door too fast for something that big. Callum's voice cracks out my name once, raw, before Helena's cuts over the top of it.
"Everly Grey." Helena's voice cracks across the room like a slap. "You are a door. Not a guest.Close."
Nothing closes.
I can feel it not closing—the working still open, still pulling, my hand another inch nearer the rim despite Ren's whole weight thrown against it, despite Felix's fingers digging in hard enough to bruise on top of the bruise already there. The room understands it's losing this. I can feel that too.
She's already moving.
Ninety-six years bound above this thing taught her exactly what it sounds like when it picks someone. She crosses the candlelight faster than a body that old has any right to, gets both ruined palms flat to the rim of my circle, and pulls.
It doesn't give.
She sets her whole weight against it, both arms shaking with it, and for one endless second nothing happens at all—the circle holding, the Well holding, Ren's grip failing by degrees under my hand—and then something in Helena's palms tears instead of the ring. Blood wells up dark between her fingers where theold scars split open again. That's what does it. Sacrifice, not strength.
She doesn't close it. She rips it. The way you rip a stitch from a wound gone wrong.
The working comes out of the stone with a wrench I feel in my own teeth. The cold goes out of them all at once and leaves a raw socket where it lived. Every candle dies in a single breath of wind with no door to come through.
And the pull—the deep, enormous, reachingyes—lets go of me so completely that I fall back into Ren and Felix both, my body forgetting in an instant which way it had just been leaning. Blood down my chin. My whole body shaking with the size of a thing I'm horrified I wanted, hard enough that my teeth click together, and I don't try very hard to stop it.
For a long moment the dark is total, and no one breathes in it.
I hear them find their way to me in it anyway. Felix's hand closes hard over my ankle, like he needs the proof of me more than he needs the light. Atlas's breath comes out of him in one ragged rush somewhere close by, the first sound I've ever heard fear make in him. Callum's shadow pulls back off the threshold all at once, gone slack with relief.
Then: a match. Brittany's hand not quite steady around it. The little flame shows me Helena on her knees, palms still flat to the dead ring, head down, breathing like she ran the whole way here from 1930.
"That," she says, when she has the air for it, "is why you hold and do not reach."
"I held." It comes out cracked. "I held the whole time."
"You held. And it reached anyway." She lifts her head. In the matchlight her eyes aren't afraidforme. They're afraidofme, a little. "Because you are what it's gone hungry for. And a starving thing does not wait to be asked."
"I had it." My voice won't quite work. "Brittany. The thread. Did we lose it?"
Brittany's got a second candle lit now. Herbert nowhere I can see, which means somewhere I'll find in a sleeve later. She looks at me over the flame, and her face does the thing it almost never does. It forgets to be deadpan.
"We didn't lose it," she says. "That's the problem."
"What does that mean?"
"It didn't reach a memory." She swallows. The candle shakes. "A memory's somewhere else. In her head, wherever her head went. This one'shere.In the building."
"Brittany."
"It's not a thing that happened to Enya." Her voice goes very small for Brittany, which is to say almost normal. "It's where Enyais."
The room stops.
Ren goes still in the exact way he goes when his blood sense has already confirmed the thing the rest of us only just thought.
"She's alive," he says.
