The Devil Makes Three Read online

  She clenched her fists and immediately realized something was wrong with her hands. Tess looked down.

  Her calluses. They were gone.

  Hard calluses marred her fingers for the last few years, created by her cello strings. They peeled every so often, but never all at once and never like this. Her hands were unfamiliar and useless, as if she’d never picked up a cello.

  She looked back up at her father. He was frowning at her, brow furrowed.

  “Where’s my cello?” she asked, too frantic.

  Her father’s expression clouded. “You sold it, Tess. You stopped playing. You gave it up. Don’t you remember?”

  “No.” She staggered back, catching herself on a shelf. This was it: The end of what she could handle. The absolute bottom. Tess could handle her father’s failure, the embarrassment of losing everything, the pain of keeping Nat and herself afloat, the agony of just getting through the day. She could bear it because, at the end of the day, she could become someone else in the music. Tess could feel the weight against her knees, rest the curve of it against her heart like a second heartbeat, and become someone else.

  Her father looked away from her. “You did what you had to do. We all have to sacrifice our dreams eventually.”

  Before Tess could answer, the bell above the door chimed. She turned to see Eliot Birch walk into the shop, and her heart swelled with something like relief. Eliot would know what to do, or he would say something right. But no, this was not Eliot. It was never Eliot when she wanted it to be.

  “You’ve done this,” Tess hissed, because it was too familiar. It was the empty studio all over again, the burning forest. It was another illusion. “What did you do?”

  “Who are you talking to?” Tess’s father asked.

  She turned between the two of them, taking in her father’s confused expression against the devil’s growing smirk.

  “Dad. Why did I stop? Why did … How did this happen?”

  “You already know what—”

  “Tell me.”

  They stared at each other, unveiled. Both failures. Both empty. It was everything Tess had always feared.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mr. Matheson said finally. He went to the register and opened the drawer with a creaky whoosh. Tess didn’t have to see to know it was empty. “The why isn’t what matters. You decided you weren’t going to be me. You decided you weren’t going to throw everything away for a dream. You grew up. And you did it without bringing everyone else down with you.”

  He slammed the register shut. Tess winced.

  “Why am I seeing this?” Tess asked the devil, who skulked by the front door.

  “Because you need to see it.”

  She bit her lip. This place was too awful, too painful. It represented everything destroyed and lost. “You were supposed to protect me from this,” Tess said, surprised by the catch in her own voice. She angrily swiped at the tears in her eyes.

  But when she looked up, her father was gone. It was only Tess and the devil. Tess and Truth.

  She lashed out, sweeping a row of marbled papers off the shelves. While they fluttered down to the floor, she tipped over a table and kicked down a display case, relishing in the shattering of the glass. This place deserved to be destroyed.

  She turned on Truth, on this useless devil. “Why did you show me this?” she yelled, hating the shrillness in her voice. Falk, the library, Emiliano’s … All of it was supposed to make her feel more powerful, give her something of her future back. She’d never meant to come here again.

  Truth did not move from the doorway. She hated him for his silence. Tess pushed over another case, cutting her useless hand on the cracked glass.

  She turned on him, clutching her bleeding hand to her chest, breathing too hard. “Tell me.”

  “This is your story.”

  Tess closed her eyes. The fight went out of her. He wouldn’t lie to her, not about this. Not when she knew deep in her soul that it was true.

  She was weak. She was a failure. She would give up.

  “This is your story, but it doesn’t have to be. Let me unwrite it.”

  “How?” she asked. Her voice cracked on the word.

  He came closer and ran his fingers over her cheekbone. She could smell the ink on them, just as strongly as she could smell it everywhere around her, and bottles shattered and bled from shelves in her peripheral vision. “You can be more than this, if you do what I ask. If you give in to me.”

  Tess’s brain was foggy. She couldn’t remember exactly what it was he’d asked of her, or really, if he’d asked anything at all. Somewhere, in the back of her head, pumping in the vessels of her heart, she heard the mournful cry of a cello.

  “I don’t remember,” Tess said, but even now, the images were returning. Blood on her skin, blood on the floor. A revision: “I can’t.”

  “You can’t?” the devil asked, moving closer. His lips were there, inches from hers, and his breath smelled like orchids. “You can’t, or you won’t?”

  He reached for her hand and she expected to feel the cold metal of the blade on his palm when he twined his fingers through hers, but his hand was empty. Of course. He’d already given her the blade, the weapon of her own destruction.

  “I can’t,” she said again, but that wasn’t the truth. She could. She knew where the blade was. In her mind, she saw how it had fallen out of her open palm. It glittered against the floor under the couch like broken glass.

  She could. She wanted.

  “Eliot,” Tess said, because his face was so very close.

  The devil’s eyes went dark. “That’s not my name,” he said, “and you’d best remember that.”

  Of course it wasn’t. He was Truth. He was the devil. He was eternal death. He made her believe he was everything that wasn’t this failure, this emptiness, this calamity.

  She was standing in the ocean. She was on the edge of a precipice. She was falling from some great height and crashing and drowning and flying and there was something damp on her wrists now, not just the damp of inky muck, but the damp of something hot and new.

  This was the only way out. This was the only salvation. She was not her father, and she would not allow herself to become him.

  This was not her story. Not anymore.

  She reached up with her bleeding hand and tangled it in the devil’s hair. Tess had only a second to see the shock flutter across his face before she brought his face down to hers.

  When Tess kissed the devil, she tasted death on his mouth.

  twenty eight

  SHE KISSED YOU, AND SHE TASTED LIKE MORTALITY. SHE kissed you, and she tasted like light. Your hands skimmed over her arms, raising goose bumps. If she was real, if she was not just a dream stuck in your nightmare, you would be able to seize her from the inside. You would be able to take her heart in your fist.

  But this was not the reality. Instead, you felt her body, soft against yours. You felt the hitch of her breath. When you kissed her, you felt as inhuman as you ever had.

  You clung to the image of Eliot Birch, pulled over you, cloaking the horror of your own body. You relied on his boyishness to charm her as her unwoken body stumbled through the apartment, searching for a knife that had come from your hands.

  You were a boy once. You were a boy and you remembered, and you knew what it was to have flesh and bones and blood and not be trapped here, like this, wanting but never having.

  When you were a boy and not the devil, it wasn’t so bad to feel this way; to have the clawing of want digging talons into your throat.

  “Tess,” you breathed against her lips, relishing her name despite yourself. In the duality of her mortal body and her dream one, you felt the press of the knife, cold and metallic. You traced a path and felt a rush of blood.

  This was not something you could want.

  You were not human. You could not want the things you used to, the things you bargained for. There was a boy once, a boy whose name you once knew, and he made a bargain
and he gained everything and lost even more.

  And now, you shouldn’t have wanted to touch her skin; you should have wanted to inhabit it. You shouldn’t have wanted to feel her heart pounding against your hand; you should have wanted to stop it. But the wants of the boy you once were and the wants of the devil you became mixed up and grew distorted.

  You were a boy, and the only way to get back to anything other than this torment was to kill her. Leave her dead and drained, this girl who released you, and take her body for yourself.

  You shouldn’t have wanted to give her everything knowing you’d take it all away.

  In the past, there was a long-forgotten bargain, meaningless against the swell of time. There was a boy whose name you’d neglected to hold close. You remembered his face but you could not pull the ink of you into the shape of him. You remembered the feeling of his skin, the tightness of his muscles, the tug of being inside of something real.

  There was a boy, and there was a book, and you were not meant to remember either. Half-open eyes, an inhalation of breath, her hand on the back of your neck, and you almost felt like a boy again. Almost allowed yourself to shift back, to believe, and that was enough to lose control of her.

  But the dream was shifting, changing, as pain came to her mortal body. Underneath you, her brow furrowed. She bit her lip. She pulled back, pulled away, and you were left with nothing.

  twenty nine

  Tess

  THERE WAS BLOOD ON HER SHEETS.

  Tess wasn’t sure when she’d woken up, but she had the impression of kissing the devil and then she was here, in her own skin, with pain burning on one wrist and metal biting into the opposite palm.

  She tried to swipe the sleep out of her eyes but only succeeded in smearing her vision with blood.

  She dropped the slender blade and rubbed the blood away from her face with a dry section of her sheets. From the waist down, they were smeared with inky muck that might never come out no matter how much she scrubbed them.

  A gash marred her left wrist, jagged around the edges, still oozing blood. She wanted to throw up, but the pain was almost a blindness and she knew that she needed to treat the wound fast.

  But why treat it? The devil whispered in the back of her mind. You know what you need to do.

  Tess closed her eyes and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyelids. A drop of blood skimmed her cheekbone and rolled down her face like a tear. She didn’t want to do it. She didn’t want to surrender, to give Truth any part of herself. She closed her lips against a scream and tasted the death he’d breathed into her mouth.

  She wrenched out of her tangled sheets and pressed her wrist against her shirt to staunch the bleeding. Every tiptoed step between her bedroom and the bathroom was head-pounding agony.

  Tess stripped and got into the shower to wash away the blood and corruption. The cut on her wrist was deeper than she’d imagined, dirty with ink. If she went to the hospital, there would be too many questions. She’d have to just wrap it herself, then, and hope for the best. Anxiety gnawed a hole in her stomach, but her head was feeling a little better, she wasn’t nauseous, and there hadn’t been that much blood in her bed. Perhaps she’d be fine. Perhaps it would heal on its own.

  She rinsed the gore from the wound, then washed one-handed, her wounded wrist raised over head, so as not to disturb the scabbing blood on her wrist. Dripping wet, sitting on the edge of the tub, Tess clumsily wrapped gauze around it and secured it with half-damp tape that barely held. It wouldn’t last long, but she couldn’t do better. Hopelessness mingled with exhaustion.

  Now that she wasn’t bleeding out, it was harder to keep her creeping horror at bay. Tess stared at her hands, examining the clinical patch of white gauze against her skin.

  Movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. There was something dark dripping down the shower walls, coming from the shelf where they kept their shampoo and conditioner bottles. Tess squinted at it, trying to decipher if it was errant blood.

  No. It was ink. Of course it was, she thought, stifling the sob that threatened to choke her. Ink from the labels of the bottles, running down.

  She wasn’t alone. Not here, not in her dreams, not in the library. She was never alone anymore.

  The ink pooled in the remains of the water, seeping up the edges of the bathtub. She wanted to feel afraid. She wanted to feel anything other than exhaustion.

  Tess couldn’t remember how the cut was made. She was deeply certain she’d done it herself, intentionally or otherwise, but she just couldn’t remember.

  That was the scariest part of it all: there was no agency on her part, no sense of will. There had never been a decision to slice, no memory of getting the knife from under the couch. She remembered the taste of the devil’s lips and then the searing heat of her wrist. There was no in-between, no middle.

  She wanted out.

  Tess dropped her head to her hands. All she could smell was her own blood. But the scent of blood reminded her of a story her father used to tell.

  When Tess was much younger, he would sit in bed with Tess and Nat on either side of him and read them folktales. Her favorite were the ones about vampires—how they stole in at night, the fear that surrounded death, the image of garlic between pointed teeth. And this: The protection that came from a revoked invitation. If a vampire was not invited in, it could not enter.

  Tess closed her eyes. She wanted to be home, in her bed, in the small room she shared with Nat. She wanted to be in the farmhouse where she knew every creak like it was the sound of her own breathing. She wanted to be where the smell of ink was light and familiar, not deadly.

  But this was no vampire. This was no children’s story, meant to frighten her when the lights were out.

  Except … vampires weren’t the only creatures who could be expelled. She did not know anything about her religion, even though she’d been born into it, but she did remember enough scary movies to know about exorcism.

  Could she exorcise the devil? She didn’t know. There weren’t any other options.

  A hazy memory came to her, shattered and distorted by waking: Wherever you go, wherever you belong, I will belong there too.

  But not anymore.

  “I don’t give you permission,” Tess whispered. “I don’t want to be a part of this story. I don’t want you in my head. I don’t want to die.”

  It couldn’t be enough, but the plea was all she had.

  When she opened her eyes, blood had already soaked through the layers of bandages. This whole thing was hopeless. She’d never escape the devil. But behind her, the ink had settled in the bottom of the bathtub. It didn’t move.

  “Holy shit. Tess.”

  Tess whipped around, and the tape on her wrist gave way. Sleepy-eyed Anna was there in the doorway, dark hair pulled into a braid, dressed in pajamas. Her eyes flew wide when she saw the blood.

  “Tess! Oh my God! Are you— Did you—”

  And then Anna was crying.

  It was so sudden that Tess could only sit there, naked, exposed, confused. Anna slid to her knees next to the well of the bathtub and grabbed Tess’s wrist as the bandage unfurled. She didn’t even seem to mind that Tess was naked, even as Tess scrambled for a towel with her free hand.

  “Did you do this to yourself?” Anna asked, and her voice was low and furious and horrified.

  “I didn’t … I didn’t mean to.” How could she tell the truth? How could she be honest with Anna? She turned her face, expecting pity or horror. But all she got was this: Anna throwing her arms tight around her, burying her face in the back of Tess’s shoulder blade, nestling into her wet hair.

  “Please don’t hurt yourself,” Anna whispered against Tess’s skin. “I care about you too much. So many people love you too, too much.”

  Even though it hadn’t been intentional or wanted, even though she hadn’t done it on her own, Anna’s words broke something inside of her. She wept as Anna recovered the soft black robe from her room
and dressed Tess in it, and even more as they sat at the kitchen table and Anna bandaged the wound properly after Tess wouldn’t go to the hospital. And she wept as Anna made tea for both of them and said nice things about her: how good she was at the cello, how much she loved her sister, how well she was doing with the world on her shoulders.

  Finally, through snot and tears, Tess said, “I didn’t mean to.” She wiped her nose on a tissue Anna handed her and insisted, “I really, really didn’t. I think I … I’ve been having dreams. Bad dreams. And sleepwalking.”

  To her surprise, Anna wasn’t insulting or suspicious. Her dark eyes were full of concern. “You didn’t do it intentionally?” Anna asked.

  “No,” Tess said, wiping away more snot. God, if only she wasn’t so leaky, if only she could speak right, if only she could tell Anna the truth. If only she could call Eliot.

  “I’m afraid,” she admitted, because it was as close as she could come to telling the truth.

  Anna reached across the table and laid her hand over Tess’s. It was hot from the mug of tea, and dandelion-fluff light on hers.

  “Afraid of what?” Anna asked.

  Afraid of the devil. Afraid of the library. Afraid of the book. Afraid of growing up. Afraid of her future. Afraid of disappointing Nat and Mathilde and her parents. Afraid of failing.

  Afraid of everything.

  “I’m afraid to go to sleep,” Tess said.

  “Sleep in my bed,” Anna said. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”

  She wasn’t sure how to say yes—but she was exhausted and terrified. And she’d been at Falk for months, thinking she’d only found enemies, and had come home to Anna every single day. They’d laughed together and commiserated together and stayed up late and eaten ice cream and talked about home and boys. And through it all, Tess hadn’t realized just how much she had come to count on Anna until now, when she no longer had to be alone.

  “Okay,” Tess said. “Let me get dressed.”