One eyebrow raised, I elbowed him as we got out of the car and stepped into Silk Road. “What the hell was that all about then? With Prudence’s grandma.”
Sterling shrugged as he lit a cigarette. “Dunno. I just don’t like people being mad at me, I guess.”
Odd response, I thought, and one that I would have expected from Asher, and never from Sterling. I kept my smile to myself. Maybe Asher’s sweetness was rubbing off on him. Imagine that: Sterling, being sweet. I shuddered.
Yet headin
g all the way to Silk Road and combing practically the entirety of the Black Market turned out to be useless in the end. Madam Chien was right. Even a bazaar as diverse and – well, bizarre as the Black Market didn’t trade in things like the breath of the dying, or the screams of those in truest pain.
Sterling, Gil, and I got several uncomfortable looks each time we asked. There was no way to be subtle with it, too. One wizard reached under his desk for a gnarled wand, fixing us with warning stares and very pointedly telling us to leave. And so we did, empty-handed.
I ruffled my hair in frustration as we left the void of the Black Market and reentered Valero’s reality. One whole day spent on nothing. Meanwhile the Eldest were somewhere beyond our atmosphere, charging their fucked-up orbital laser, waiting for the right time to strike. We’d gotten jack shit done.
For what must have been the hundredth time that night, I sighed again.
“At least we have two ingredients,” Gil offered helpfully.
He was right. We had the amulet, and a lock of hair, freely given by a powerful being. It was anyone’s guess how Arachne could have possibly known, but she set me up in the best possible way all that time ago. She didn’t actually want the hair from Nyx, the goddess of the night.
In her own terrifying, precognitive way, Arachne must have known that I would need a lock of goddess hair sooner or later. I reached for it, somewhere in the depths of my backpack, sensing the warmth of the stars woven through Nyx’s hair under the pads of my fingers. Good. So it was still there, and in one piece.
But again: we still needed two incredibly rare, and incredibly incriminating ingredients. I was so distracted that I couldn’t remember what Sterling and Gil were talking about just then, and I just blurted it out.
“I’m not killing anyone,” I said. “Not for this. I’m not torturing anyone, either. This is fucked.” I pushed my hair back against my scalp, raking my fingernails across my skin in frustration. “No. We’re fucked.”
Gil’s huge, heavy hand clapped me on the shoulder. “Hey. We’ll find a way, okay? Despair doesn’t look good on you. Come on.”
Sterling threw his arm over me, rubbing the back of my neck with fingers like cold sausages. “We’ll take care of you, buddy. Just us boys of the Boneyard, from now until forever, hey?” He bumped our foreheads together, as affectionate as Sterling would ever be. “Carpe noctem. Remember.”
I smiled. Right. Sterling’s catchphrase, and our touchstone, to remind us Boneyard boys that we worked best in darkness, that we would always do our best together as a team, as a unit. It did make me feel better. Only just.
Then a shaft of silver brilliance struck from out of the sky, bathing the three of us in a beam of near-blinding light.
“The hell is this supposed to be?” Gil growled, shielding his eyes.
“It’s not the Eldest this time,” I said, still crouching, still wary. “I don’t hear the awful noises. Do you?”
“No,” Sterling said, his fingers digging into my jacket. “But I still say we make a run for it.”
I dragged them along with me as I maneuvered for the nearest shadow, just under a lamppost, but the searchlight from the sky followed, swallowing us up in its radiance.
And I mean that literally. Silk Road, its many, many shops, Valero itself vanished from around us as the night went silver –
Then back to black again. Gil, Sterling, and I instinctively arranged ourselves into a tight circle, back to back, ready for battle. But just some feet away, two silvery points of light appeared, accompanied by a swirl of even more pinpricks of brilliance. Little stars, arranged in the shape of a woman.
Through teeth shining with silver light, the woman smiled, and all around her familiar forms and faces manifested from out of the darkness.
“Carpe noctem, gentlemen,” Nyx said. “Welcome back to the Midnight Convocation.”
Chapter 17
I whirled in place, studying our surroundings. It was pitch-dark, the only light coming from distant points that I knew instinctively to be stars, or from the glowing bodies of the gods, demons, and entities that surrounded us in a circle.
“Don’t panic,” Gil said.
“Too late,” Sterling growled, his fingers crooked like talons.
“Guys, it’s cool. We’re cool. I think.” I recognized the gods, some of them faces I’d already seen the first time I met with the Convocation. I looked to Nyx, one eyebrow raised. “This isn’t the Lunar Palace.”