Page 53 of An Academy for Liars

“What was that thing?”

“An old friend of mine,” he said.

Lennon felt a pricking at the back of her neck, all of the downy hairs bristling and standing on end. It was the feeling of being hunted. “Why is your old friend trying to kill us?”

“I don’t have time to explain. Do you think you can call an elevator?”

Ashamed, Lennon shook her head. “I tried back in the club, but I’m too weak. I’m sorry—”

“Do you remember the way to the elevator we took here?” Dante asked, skirting past one of the crimson windows of a brothel. One of the girls in those windows—tall and brunette, standing on platform stilettos, dressed in beige spandex, as if wearing the hide of someone she’d skinned—blew him a kiss as he passed.

“No,” said Lennon, ashamed that she was of such little use. That she had begged Dante to allow her to come, only to be such a burden. She hadn’t even been able to raise a gate when they’d needed one most.

“That’s all right,” said Dante. “Here.”

Lennon felt something like pain, and then became privy to the transference, a blurry memory, the way back to the elevator returning to her, like a video of the walk played at three times the speed. Dante’s memory made hers.

The effort of this act of transference drained him considerably. He staggered, his knees folding beneath him, and caught himself on one of the lampposts that lined the narrow street. Lennon tried to help him to his feet, pressed a hand to his side. When Dante stood and straightened, her palm came away dark with blood. “Dante—”

“Never mind that,” he said. “I’ll be fine. You know the way now?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then you go. You go back to Drayton. You tell Eileen what happened.”

“But I can’t—”

“No buts.”

“Iwon’tleave you.”

At this moment Lennon realized something. The street they were standing on, which had been so busy only a few minutes before, had been entirely cleared of crowds. The windows of the brothels went dark, one by one.

“He’s here,” said Dante, and when he smiled Lennon could see blood filling the seams between his teeth. For a moment she thought he was injured, but then she realized that his gums were bleeding, the same way her nose bled in class sometimes from the intense effects of persuasion.

He began to laugh, and Lennon staggered back, realizing that the man in front of her was no longer the Dante that she knew.

Across the street, from an open window, a baby began to cry. And then it was the pigeons, a flock of them roosting in the arch beneath a bridge, that took to the sky wailing. The lights in the windows of thebrothels began to flicker; girls broke to their knees, tearing at their hair, gnashing their teeth, weeping and screaming and dragging their nails along their thighs. Like Dante, they tossed back their heads with laughter—their necks boneless—eyes rolling back to expose a slivered glimpse of white. In the distance, a chorus of shrieking car alarms. The sound of breaking glass. The whole city was under attack, and this time it wasn’t the girl from the club, it wasDantedoing this, destroying everything, conducting this orchestra of chaos and anguish. He was coming undone, and everything in his vicinity was coming undone along with him…except Lennon.

“Dante.”She seized him by the shoulders, shook him roughly. “You’ve got to stop this—you’ve got to come back. Please, you’re hurting people.”

His bleeding smile only widened. She wanted to slap it off his face. Would that be enough to bring him back to her? Or would that make things worse?

As it turned out, Lennon didn’t have the chance to decide.

The entity, that demented aberration from the club materialized behind them, stepping into the center of the street, and Lennon saw—as if a double exposure—a face beneath the one the boy wore. His true face—soft, almost doll-like—was screwed with grief. He seemed younger than Lennon, and he looked…afraid.

Dante twisted to face him so sharply he tore free of Lennon’s grasp and sent her sprawling to the asphalt at his feet. The boy’s mouth wrenched open to shape a scream—but the sound was lost amid the shrieking chorus of sirens and sobbing and hysterical laughter. He lunged for Dante, a thick and wicked shard of broken glass clutched in his bleeding hand.

Dante didn’t move. The city kept screaming.

Lennon closed her eyes.

After that first night in the garden, every time that she had tried to call an elevator, Lennon had asked a simple question:Will you please appear?When the elevator did not answer, she’d grown increasingly desperate. She’d begged and she’d bargained. She’d wheedled like a sniveling child. On her most desperate occasions—like the day Benedict had provoked her with pain—Lennon had cut her psyche wide open and let her own will spill from her body like blood from a wound, her a groveling servant, the elevator a god sneering down at her pathetic offering.

But no more.

This time, Lennon asked no questions. There would be no more begging or bleeding. No bargains to be made.

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