Before the Devil Breaks You by Libba Bray
His thin lips stretched into a mirthless smile. “How insatiable you are. I feed from your desires. From the violence you cloak in dreams. And now, I, too, am grown insatiable. I would have more. Behold, my Manifest Destiny of the Dead!”
The King of Crows swept his arm wide, a circus barker’s invitation. Behind him, restless spirits glowed like a sea of bone. They burned like hunger. Memphis saw Gabe among these dead. Gabe, with his mouth torn away. Gabe, who had once been his friend.
“Memphis…” Isaiah whispered beside him.
“I see, Ice Man.”
“But what about you, Diviners? You who bridge worlds.” The very air seemed to stutter, and then the King of Crows was in front of Theta. “Theta Knight. The fire starter. Left on a church step. You had a different name then, a name scattered to the winds.” He blew on the tips of his yellowed nails. Lightning tripped along his fingertips and died. “Such is the story in this country of scattered names and lost people hunting for the missing pieces of themselves.”
Theta felt a fierce yearning deep inside. “You… you know my real name?”
The man smiled. “What would you give to know?”
The King of Crows moved down the line and stopped in front of Sam. “Little thief. Sergei Lubovitch—ah, excuse me. Sam Lloyd. Will you always have to steal what you want? Or perhaps you enjoy going through life invisible, though I suspect you yearn for much more.”
The King of Crows grinned his rictus grin. “And what have we here? The dream walkers. How enchanting. Tell me, when you escape into dreams each night, do you imagine yourself as little gods? Does it help you escape your loneliness? Your pain? Do you feel less the misfit?” he asked Ling. “Or the unwanted son?” He looked to Henry. He shut his eyes, fingers playing the air. “Yes. I can feel your desires.”
The King opened his eyes again, fixing his gaze on Evie. “I have something you might want, object reader.”
“I doubt it,” Evie challenged, even though she did not feel brave.
The King of Crows cocked his head in two quick jerks. “Not even your brother?”
And before Evie could say another word, the man in the hat rolled his hand with a flourish. Against the thick murk, Evie saw James and the other soldiers as she’d seen them many times in her dreams: playing cards, trading jokes, lacing shoes, unaware of the terror to come. “Sometimes death is a blessing.”
“What do you mean by that?” Evie said, feeling newly afraid.
The King of Crows closed the images in his fist and threw them away. “What would you give me to know? What bargain would you be willing to make with me?” The King of Crows opened his arms, palms upturned, bobbing them gently like scales struggling with weight.
He took two elegant strides forward, his long black coattails fluttering behind him, and stopped in front of Isaiah, his smile hardening. “You see much, clairvoyant. Perhaps too much. Tell me, Isaiah Campbell, would you see your own fate writ here inside my coat?” The man in the hat toyed with the feathered edge, letting out just a bit of yellowed shine. “What would you give to change it? Or”—he cast a meaningful glance toward the rest of the Diviners—“to change the fates of others?”
“Stay away from my brother!” Memphis was nearly chest to chest with the King of Crows. He drew in a sharp breath. This close, the strange man was even more terrifying. Flies crawled along the shifting vein work of his mottled skin. His lip curled, revealing a mouthful of thin, pointed teeth. But his eyes… it would be easy for any fella to lose himself in the power of their dark pull. Memphis felt as if he stood with one foot over the edge of a new grave, in danger of falling. Instinctively, he took a step back, blinking till his eyes ran with tears.
“And at last we have the healer.” The King of Crows said, drawing out the designation. “We have unfinished business, you and I.”
From deep in the trees, Viola Campbell emerged, nearly swallowed by the shroud of her feathered dress. Her eyes were large, her face full of grief.
“What would you give me for your mother’s freedom?” the King asked.
Viola started. “Don’t make a bargain with him, son. I told you, you should never bring back what’s gone—”
The King of Crows pointed his clawed hand in Viola Campbell’s direction, and her words turned to squawking.
“Memphis,” Isaiah whimpered. “Memphis, it’s Mama.”
“Let her go,” Memphis demanded.
The King of Crows sighed and the feathers of his cloak sighed as well. Their fringed spines curved and wriggled as if trying to break free. “Ah, poor mother. Death should offer freedom from life’s trials and tribulations. Its… injustices. It should offer rest at long last. Would you not agree, healer?”
Viola struggled in vain to speak. But her voice had been taken by the King’s magic.
“I said, leave her be.”
“She could rest in peace, you know. But I’ll need something from you first.” The man held up a long gray index finger. His yellowed fingernail was sharp as a scalpel’s point. “A promise. A bargain struck in good faith. In time. In time… For unlike some, I honor my word. This”—he swept his arm wide, gesturing to the ravenous dead—“is not my doing. It is theirs. What they did. Choices have consequences. Tell me: What is most valuable in any world? Where does power lie? In wealth? In titles?”
When no one answered, the King of Crows stuck out his arms. His hands were tightly clenched. “Information,” he said, drawing out the word. “What we tell. What we hold back. Truth…” Slowly, he opened his right hand. In it rested a newborn chick, slick with afterbirth. “And secrets…” He opened the left. A slim green garden snake wound between his spread fingers. “You wish to find the Eye.”
“Yes,” Evie answered. “Do you know what it is or how we find it?”
“Information,” the King of Crows repeated. He closed his fists. The chick and snake disappeared. He hooked his thumbs beneath his lapels and paraded before the Diviners. “Let us play a game to see if you are worthy of my largesse.”
“We’re not playing anything with you,” Sam said.
“The game is already in play, little thief, whether you join in or not. But ask yourself—who has held the truth from you? Not I. You have no idea what they have done. What they continue to do. You are in great danger, Diviners.”
Once more, he swept his hand against the air, and a picture appeared of two men in gray suits, hats pulled low across their brows. The men drove, and behind them, the roads of America stretched long as shadows. The King of Crows blew out a puff of air and the scene was gone.
“Very well. I shall offer you a small something to show good faith. Tell me, when you”—he fluttered his hand—“dispatched my dead just now, did you feel a surge of pure power?”
“Yes,” Ling answered. It made her feel a bit dirty to say it. But then Evie said, “You, too?” And one by one, the others nodded.
“Did they not tell you that with each wraith you destroy, your powers grow? Ah, I can see from your faces that they did not.” The King of Crows clicked his tongue against his teeth. “So many secrets. Like how the Eye came to be, its terrible purpose, and what it has to do with your brother, object reader.”
“Please, oh, please…” Evie started.
The King of Crows pulled at the tattered, smudged lace of his long cuffs. “That is not my story to tell—not without a price. It is yours to find.” He looked out over his sea of dead. “You wish to know truth of it, then seek the answers from the dead. Of course, they may not give the information so willingly.”
“Are you asking us to destroy your ghosts?” Theta asked.
The King’s thin lips stretched into a semblance of a smile, cruel and mesmerizing. “I ask nothing, fire starter. I tell you nothing. Your choices are yours alone.”
He took a few steps back.
“But I have tarried too long. Tonight is for introductions only. We will meet again, most assuredly. In what manner—ah!—that remains to be seen. Aaah, Conor Flynn. Son
Conor trembled.
“Let us up the ante in our game. Checkmates and balances and whatnot. I shall take this one with me. As leverage.”
The King beckoned and Conor stumbled forward as if compelled until he collapsed into Viola Campbell’s motherly arms.
“Shhh, baby,” she said, holding him close. “Shhh.”
“Let him go! Conor has nothing to do with this! That isn’t fair,” Evie demanded.
The King of Crows glowered. He spoke through tight teeth. “You speak to me of fairness?” His fingers toyed at his lapels and a bit of history’s unbearable shine threatened at the edges. “Fairness. Very well. I shall give you a bargain: Find the answers you seek from the dead, and I shall return him to you. Awake, my children,” the King of Crows commanded in a voice that was not loud but demanded full attention. “Rise, my army.”
Broken and rotting and hungry, the dead crawled from their graves and gathered behind their leader. Lightning split the clouds.
“As for you, Luther Clayton,” the King said. “You were owed to me, and I would have payment for their sins. That is justice.”
Luther’s head rolled from side to side. “No,” he whispered again and again, his voice rising to a scream. “No!”
Evie charged toward Luther. The King of Crows put up a hand, and she felt as if her breath were turning solid in her lungs, weighing her down.
“Would you come for me so soon, object reader? You might save your strength for a battle yet to be.” Something awful pulsed in the King’s face as his mouth set into a grim line. But just as quickly, he let Evie go. She coughed, pulling the putrid air deep into her aching lungs. “We’ve only just begun our dance.”
The King of Crows smiled at Luther Clayton. “Have your fill, children. For we are the storm. We are come to claim what is ours. I alone will care for you. I alone give you what you require. Feed.”
Luther screamed as the dead rushed forward, jagged mouths open. The King of Crows tugged at the brim of his tall hat in the slightest of gestures. “Happy hunting, Diviners.”
With that, the Diviners were jolted from the vision. It seemed as if they tumbled through space until they stood once more in the potter’s fields. The rain had stopped. Across the river, the city’s neon bloomed. Several ferries were arriving at the pier. Firemen and medics hurried toward the asylum with stretchers and hoses. The fog was gone. So was Conor Flynn.
And atop a disturbed grave was what little remained of Luther Clayton.
MISTAKES
It was still dark but edging toward dawn when the Diviners returned to the museum. Evie had called Will from the asylum, telling him only that he and Sister Walker should be waiting for them in the library. The Diviners had answered questions from the police about what had happened to Conor Flynn, who was listed as missing, and to Luther Clayton: Jesus, how did the poor fella end up… like that? Did one of the patients do it? Was it Conor? Detective Terrence Malloy had arrived at last. The Diviners hadn’t seen him since the Pentacle Murders case six months before, when all of this had started. He’d taken one look at Evie and the others and shaken his head. “How come every time I see you folks it’s something nobody can explain but something I know is gonna cause me no end of headaches? Go on home,” he’d said on a sigh. “I got any questions, I know where to find you. Give my regards to your uncle.”
The lights were burning at the Creepy Crawly. As the Diviners descended on the library, an anxious-looking Will and Sister Walker rose to their feet.
“Thank heavens you’re back,” Will said. “What happened out there? We were very worr—”
Evie marched up to Will and slapped him hard. “How could you? How could you!”
“We know everything,” Sam said, coming to stand beside her. “What you did during the war to those soldiers. Your experiment? We know the whole story.”
Will rubbed at the fresh mark on his face. “Somehow I don’t think you do.”
“You’ve been lying to us about everything. Even after we asked you to be honest with us,” Ling said. She could barely look at Sister Walker. “I trusted you. I admired you.”
“Anything we held back we did in order to protect you,” Sister Walker said.
“In order to protect yourselves, you mean,” Ling said.
Evie was sobbing now, and it felt as if she were swallowing down the world and its awful sins along with her broken cries. “He was my b-brother. Your nephew, Will. And you let him die! No—you got him killed. You got all of them killed!”
“It… it was an accident. I swear it,” Will said.
“Oh, why can’t anyone just tell the truth?” Evie pleaded.
“Because…” Will started. “Because it’s so hard to know what the truth is. It shifts, depending on who’s telling it and when.”
Evie’s finger was a dagger stabbing at the air between them. “No. That is a lie you tell yourself so you can sleep at night! You just don’t want to know that you had anything to do with that horror! Well, thanks to poor Luther, I was there. I saw! I know. You can’t take that from me by spinning some new story into butter. I won’t let you! And now Luther Clayton is dead! He’s dead because of your lies, murdered by those horrible beasts and the King of Crows!”
“What happened to Luther?” Will demanded.
“Those wraiths got to him. The King of Crows unleashed them,” Henry explained.
Will’s eyes widened. “You met the King of Crows? You spoke to him?”
“How did this come about?” Sister Walker wanted to know.
Evie snorted derisively. “A man is dead, but who cares about that?”
Sam shoved his hands in his pockets and slumped against the wall, exhausted. “We made one of those energy fields and destroyed some ghosts—”
“Destroyed them how?” Will asked, wary.
“And then we were in this creepy place full of the hungry dead, in case you wanted to hear the rest of that sentence.”
“Yes, we destroyed them,” Evie said. “Without your help.”
Will raked a hand through his thinning hair. “What is he up to now?” he muttered more to himself than anyone present.
Sister Walker reached for her notebook and a pencil. “What did he say to you?”
“That you couldn’t be trusted. That you’ve been lying to us all along,” Sam said. “Guess he was right about that. I’m the con who got conned.”
“Please. I need you to remember what you saw and precisely what he said to you. It’s vitally important,” Sister Walker said.
“We’re not telling you anything else, Miss Walker,” Memphis said. “Not till you’re honest with us. For once.”
“You have a right to feel upset, Memphis, but—”
Memphis’s voice boomed. “Stop telling me what I have a right to feel and start telling us the truth!”
Sister Walker seemed the slightest bit rattled, but then she collected herself. She stood tall, smoothing a hand down her dress and speaking with a curated calm. “All right, then. Yes. It was us. All of us at the Department of Paranormal—Will, Rotke, Jake, Miriam, and me. We opened that door to the world of the dead. We were as naive as we were ambitious. The King of Crows baited us, and we took that bait without question. We let him into our world with our ignorance. We made a mistake, and now that mistake is back to haunt us with a vengeance.”
“We assumed that because the experiment had been a catastrophic failure, that was the end of it, and the opening into that world had been sealed once more,” Will continued. “The government shut down the Department of Paranormal. Margaret burned the files so that the experiment could never be repeated. She paid the price for that.”
“I was imprisoned until they decided I was no longer a threat,” Sister Walker said. “They left me with nothing.”
“For years, there was no sign of any activity. We had no reason to
“Are you describing him or yourself?” Evie snapped.
“You are our only hope of getting the answers we need about him if we’re to be safe from him and his army. Your powers joined together in purpose can heal that breach at last! We cannot stop our work now. You’ve seen for yourselves that the storm isn’t just coming—it’s here. It’s here, and we must stop it from getting worse before it’s too late!” Sister Walker said.
“See, that’s your generation all over—you muck up everything and then expect us to fix your messes,” Sam growled.
“I understand your anger. Mistakes were made,” Will said.
Evie’s eyes flashed. “No! You. Made. Mistakes. You were the one who talked about our choices. About evil being what humans bring about. You made evil.”
“There are choices you make, things you do, that you don’t know are wrong when you do them. Only time gives you that perspective. Only history,” Will pleaded.
“We made mistakes,” Sister Walker said a bit more crisply. “And now we must atone for those mistakes. I’m sorry, but it’s going to take all of us to fix it.”
Evie’s laugh was bitter. “After you murdered my brother? After what you did to our mothers? After you engineered us to be your little army of freaks and kept the truth of it from us? When did we ever get a say in any of it?” Evie shook her head and backed away. She couldn’t even look Will in the face. Not after what he’d done to James and the other soldiers. “I hate you for what you’ve done. I’ll hate you till my dying day! I will never, ever have anything to do with you again!”