“Are you sure you should be going in alone?” Rook asks, leaning against the wall, arms crossed.
I give him a reassuring smile. “This is just a trial run. I won’t be alone for the real thing.”
He smiles back, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
Ever since LA, I’ve been mulling over the very real possibility that the Cult of Hades killed Rook’s sister, and I’ve got a number of theories as to why. Perhaps some Crawford ancestor made a bargain with a demon, but Rook didn’t keep his side of the deal. Or maybe the family was part of an anti-demon cult. Or purveyors of holy water. Or demon slayers. Or I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here. But no matter the reason, if I’m reading Rook correctly, he knew about the Cult of Hades and kept it from us.
“And why are you doing a trial run?” Ezra asks, still pacing.
“Rule Number Fifty-Five,” Poppy calls from the kitchen. “Always do a test run when taking objects into the Afterlife.”
At that, CJ’s head pops up from where they’ve been napping on the floor. When CJ and Poppy arrived today—together—Poppy was her normal self. CJ, on the other hand, wasblushing.Again.It’s all very concerning.
I grab Ezra’s arm to get him to stop pacing and nod to the couch. He sits, but his leg immediately starts bouncing.
“Taking manmade things into the Afterlife is fiddly,” I explain. “You’re taking a physical object into a metaphysical world. We have to see how it…behaves.”
He gives me a distraught look. “What does that mean?”
I shrug. “I could get to the Afterlife and the book won’t open, or maybe it won’t close, or all the pages have rearranged themselves. Or it’s turned into a bowl of petunias. We won’t know until we do the trial.”
He pulls on his left ear. “So, how does it work? Do you just hold on to the book when you fake die?”
“Codex!” comes Poppy’s muffled voice. “That’s what I’m doing! And for the record, I hate it!”
Ezra raises his eyebrows at me expectantly.
“She’s coating the codex in Soul Attaché,” I say. “She hates it.”
“And that is…?”
“A potion that has a bit of your hair or blood. You coat whatever you want to take with you in it, and then it’s like,attaché’dto your soul.”
Ezra wrinkles his nose. “Like a parasite?”
“Sure.”
Poppy walks out of the kitchen, bringing me the grimoire. It looks the same and feels the same, but the potion has fundamentally changed it into the transdimensional version of carry-on luggage.
“You know,” she says to Ezra, “you’re handling this whole thing really well.”
“By this whole thing, you mean learning that I broke into a museum full of possessed witches wearing dead people’s bones and then fought a literal demon?”
“Technically,” I say, “you ran away from the demon.”
Ezra smiles sarcastically.
Tolliver returns from the basement, a bag full of a pearlescentliquid hanging from the prosthesis he wears for alchemy, the one Poppy’s spelled with a bunch of runes for things like protection and steadiness.
He fiddles with some dials, then hooks the Miracle Max up to a vaporizer. “Ready?”
“Freddy,” I say, pulling the mist mask over my nose and mouth.
Ezra and Rook hover nearby as Tolliver makes the final adjustments, and as much as I love attention, it feels like I’m an animal in a zoo. Or a patient in an operating theater.
A few presses of buttons and then a twist of a valve, and I’m doused with Miracle Max. It smells like death. Literally. Magic with notes of rotten meat, feces, and mothballs.
You’d think you’d get used to it, but it always hits me like a punch to the gut. Luckily, Miracle Max works fast. Within a few seconds, the world around me fades, and I’m adrift in an endless galaxy, stars and planets circling me as a tiny pinprick of light moves toward me, getting closer and closer, growing and growing, until it’s right up on me and it consumes me, and I…
