So I did the only thing that made sense to me in that moment: I decided to draw first blood.
I sprang out of the bushes and Nox froze mid-step. That extra second was all I needed. I scooped up the tank, leveled the nozzle at the bastard’s face, and pulled the trigger.
The spray hit him in his steely eyes and he bellowed in pain. The chemical smelled foul, like rotting eggs and onions, and I didn’t relent until the acrid fog enveloped us both. Nox swung his arms blindly, hoping to connect with me, but I ducked under them. Detective Grimshaw and Drumm both rushed at me, so I sent two bursts of the chemical into each of their faces, blinding them as well.
Something hard and unforgiving pressed into my throat. Aries had snuck up behind me and was choking me with the shaft of her croquet mallet. “You look like your brother,” she rasped. “But do you whimper like him, too?”
The scent of the ethyl mercaptan must have finally reached the condors, because they descended through the mist in a cacophony of hisses and fluttering wings. One bird swooped toward my face, its wingspan spread the full ten feet. I grabbed Aries’s mallet and spun the two of us 180 degrees, forcing her into the path of the condor. She shrieked as it latched onto her spiral horns and tackled her to the ground. I wheezed a hoarse, relieved breath as the pressure came off my windpipe.
Through the flash of wings and mayhem, I saw Drumm come at me again, but Smitty wrapped his arms around the titan’s legs, impeding his progress. The distraction gave me enough time to scoop up the empty canister, wind up, and strike Drumm hard in the face. His nose collapsed on impact, blood pouring out onto his shirt, and he dropped face-first to the ground.
I fought off a condor, then seized Smitty by his bloody hand, pulling him toward the exit to the greenhouse. Nearby, Aries had wrestled one bird to the ground only to have a second land on her back. Cowardly Detective Grimshaw crawled into the bushes while two more condors raked at his flesh.
Nox, however, had swatted away the bird attacking him and drew a gun from his waistband. His eyes blinked rapidly, bleary from the chemicals, but I saw a smile tickle his lips when he saw us. He raised the gun.
With a deep, raspy squawk, the largest condor of all dropped down from its perch. Its talons sank into Nox’s shoulders and the gunshot went wide, blowing a hole in the tree trunk next to my head. The bird dragged Nox back into the manmade river with a satisfying splash, allowing Smitty and me to escape the greenhouse with our lives.
We weren’t out of the woods yet. I led him out the nearest exit I could find, and we spilled out into the backyard. This was the part that was really going to take courage.
Because I knew the condors inside the greenhouse wouldn’t hold the four gangsters for long. If we went for the main road on foot, Nox and his men would chase us down in cars.
They would never expect us to escape via the ocean.
As I sprinted across the lawn toward the cliff, Smitty realized exactly what I intended. “Are you nuts?” he said, out of breath.
“Do you want to see your wife and kid again?” I asked.
Even through the crimson sheen of blood covering his face, I saw the grim determination that came over him. He ran faster. If we were going to clear the rocks at the base of the cliff and have any chance of survival, we would need to leap as far out to sea as we could.
We were almost to the cliff when I heard the gunshot. Smitty’s body snapped forward. I almost slowed down to help him, but as he rolled across the grass, I saw the gaping wound the bullet had drilled into the back of his skull. He was gone.
I raced the last few yards to the cliff’s edge, and with no hesitation, I hurled myself into the air. The jump was awkward and my body rotated mid-leap, enough that my last image before I plummeted to the water was of Nox standing in his backyard with a gun trained on me.
Then gravity dragged me downward in a death spiral toward the rocky shallows below.
Meanwhile, back at Nox Manor
As soon as the Tides girl disappeared over the cliff, Horace Nox relaxed his finger on the trigger, then finally let the gun fall to his side altogether. By the time he reached the edge, Sabra had already been carried a football field away by the south-roving current, her head bobbing in and out of the surf. Nox was a pretty good marksman, but he had only intended to maim her—you couldn’t milk a dead cow, after all—and at this distance, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t accidentally pop her melon. The last thing he needed was a corpse washing up in one of his neighbor’s backyards.
One by one, Aries, Drumm, and Grimshaw emerged from the mansion, all nursing various flesh wounds from the buzzard attack. Drumm swayed on his feet, still dazed, with his mangled nose resembling a flattened beet.
Despite the tic-tac-toe board of claw marks on her face, Aries still buzzed with excitement thanks to the fresh dose of Blyss flowing through her veins. “Want me to fire up the boat?” she asked. “I have a harpoon I’d like to introduce that bitch to.”
Nox shook his head. Sabra Tides had come crawling around the Nightingale and then broke into his mansion. Her brother must have bequeathed her with some information about the riddle he’d found. With any luck, he’d left her the page itself.
So why not step back and let her find the eighth riddle for him?
He addressed Drumm first. “I want you to stake out the MFA. We know her brother had a lead on the next riddle somewhere in the museum, so maybe she’ll pick up the trail there, too.” To Aries, he said, “I want you to case her house tonight. Get something with her stink on it so Pearce’s hounds can pick up her trail. If she’s smart enough not to show her face by morning, put eyes on the hospital. Sooner or later, she’s going to drop by to visit that diseased little brat.” Aries gleefully gave her boss a mock salute before galloping off across the lawn.
Nox turned to Detective Grimshaw last. “I want red flags on her credit cards. The moment she even buys a bag of peanuts at a gas station, you call me immediately. Get a warrant to put tabs on her cell phone, too, if you can.” He leaned close to the detective, then pointed at the steaming remains of Smitty. “And take out my garbage before it starts to stink.”
With his troops dispatched, Nox sat down on the cliff’s edge and lit a cigar. Behind him, the detective grunted as he dragged Smitty’s corpse toward the landscaping shed. A minute later, the wood chipper sputtered to life.
Nox tuned out the drone of the machine and listened to the water lapping at the rocks below. He took a puff of his cigar then exhaled a smoke ring in the direction where Sabra had disappeared. “The thing about throwing a snail out to sea,” he said to no one at all, “is that sooner or later, the tide will carry it right back to you.”
I had never fallen thirty feet before, but the descent was over before I had time to wonder how badly it was going to hurt. I hit the surface of the water so hard and with such poor form that I thought for sure I’d landed on the rocks, my body smashing into little chunks of watermelon while my consciousness lingered just long enough to process its final few seconds of life.
But then, remarkably, I was underwater. The frigid embrace of the Atlantic momentarily deadened everything but my sense of touch. As soon as I’d gathered my wits, I resurfaced with a panicked breath and swam with the current. It wouldn’t be long before Nox reached the cliff’s edge, and the bullets in his gun definitely moved quicker than I could breaststroke.
I couldn’t be sure how long I was in the water or how far I drifted. Whenever my arms grew too tired to carry me any farther, I would flip onto my back and float. All the while, I fought to keep a safe distance from the mainland, in case Nox’s men were scouring the area.
Eventually I spotted the protective mouth of a harbor and the thin yellow smile of a beach. With no strength left in my limbs, I ultimately let the tide carry my exhausted, battered body the remaining journey to shore.
The first thing I did when I reached land was check my hoodie pocket. Once I was certain that the journal page had miraculously stayed with me, still dr
y in its laminate, I collapsed.
Frigid and feeling very much alone, I lay with my face pressed into the wet sand of Bassing Beach.
I am dead, I thought.
I might have escaped Nox’s lair, but I had only postponed the inevitable. He knew who I was. I’d witnessed Smitty’s murder firsthand and had information connecting Nox to the homicide of my brother. Sure, he had Detective Grimshaw on the payroll to sweep this under the rug, but I was still a loose end that Nox would want snipped.
With Jack dead and my father in jail, I had no one to turn to for help. If I brought Mom into this, I’d be endangering both her and Echo. From what little I knew of Nox, the man did his research, which meant he’d probably post his men at both my house and Children’s Hospital to wait for me.
When I racked my brain, I realized there was one person who I could call that Nox wouldn’t be on the lookout for.
I took the cell phone out of my soggy pocket. In my line of work, I often found myself in sudden downpours, pedaling my cab through torrential rain. For this reason, I’d opted for a waterproof phone case. When I’d purchased it last year, I never thought it would one day come in handy when making an aquatic escape from a murderous drug lord.
I only had to scroll to the “A” section before I saw the name and number that I’d recently copied off a dirty gym shirt.
Atlas picked up on the second ring. “You know,” he said, “they say you’re supposed to wait three full days after getting a guy’s number before you call. So you don’t seem too eager.”
How he’d guessed it was me, I didn’t know, but I decided the best time-saver would be to lay my situation on him as matter-of-factly as possible. “I just nearly died. I’m stuck in Cohasset without a car. There are bad men on their way to my house as we speak to finish the job, and given what I’m into, even the police can’t help me.” I added, “How’s that for eager?”
There was a short pause, then his voice returned, grave and assertive. “Give me an address and twenty minutes.”
In the end I waited the better part of an hour for Atlas to arrive—even his willingness to play knight in shining armor was no match for the traffic that plagued I-93, which even Moses couldn’t part. I climbed into the passenger’s seat of Atlas’s rusty Chevy Silverado. I could feel the alarm in his eyes as he studied me—my soaked clothes, my shivering, hypothermic body, the crimson splash of Smitty’s blood on my hoodie. Meanwhile, I could only stare blankly through the windshield. Dark clouds had rolled over the harbor and a warning volley of raindrops speckled the glass.
“Look,” I said when it became clear that he wasn’t going to drive anywhere without an explanation. “I didn’t want to play the damsel-in-distress card. I don’t want to drag you into this. All I need right now is a ride downtown and a place to crash for the night.”
Atlas responded by cranking up the truck’s heat and angling the vents in my direction. As the cocoon of warmth lapped at my damp skin, I felt it thaw the resilient, tough-as-nails front I’d put up for the last week. All at once, my face was wet with tears and I couldn’t even remember starting to cry.
Atlas squeezed my knee. His voice was quiet, but it was the confidence with which he spoke that I found most calming. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to drive you some place safe. You’re going to take a long shower until the hot water tank runs dry. And then we’re going to talk this out.”
I simply nodded with my face buried in my hands.
The truck ride back to Boston was silent except for the rhythmic squeak-squeak of the windshield wipers, until Atlas pulled off the highway five exits earlier than I’d expected, taking us into Boston’s South End. “Where are you taking me?” I demanded. “I thought we were going back to the university.”
Atlas shook his head. “The dorm room has been … compromised. When I got back from class this morning, all of Jack’s stuff was gone. That mountain of books, his clothes, even his goddamn toothbrush—everything vanished.” He glanced sideways at me. “Even if that weren’t the case, I’m pretty sure that taking a girl in a bloody sweatshirt onto a campus where thirty thousand undergraduates are walking to dinner would be an excellent way to draw unwanted attention.”
I drew in deep breaths, squashing my paranoid thoughts. Not everyone is trying to kill you, I reminded myself. “Where to then?”
“I’m taking you to the Dollhouse,” he replied, with no further explanation. His voice fluttered with amusement.
The South End was an interesting place. It bordered some of the rougher boroughs in Boston and used to have a similar reputation itself. It featured heavily into the tales my father told Jack and me about his mischievous youth. Of course, whenever my mother overheard Buck reciting any of those stories, she would rip him a new one, which simply made us want to hear them more.
Over the last two decades, the South End had transformed into the posh cultural epicenter of Boston—in came the haves and out went the have-nots. Young professionals and families scrambled to move into its iconic brownstones and property values tripled. Seemingly overnight, developers gutted decrepit buildings and filled the renovated spaces with art galleries and upscale French bistros. Some of the best tips I made driving my pedicab were from passengers dining in the South End.
Atlas took a hard right toward an old factory that had been converted into loft-style apartments. The setting sun illuminated the luxury building’s massive windows in an electric shade of orange. The road dipped, and the metal gates of the subterranean garage magically parted to let us through.
Once we’d parked, he made me turn my bloodstained hoodie inside out before he would let me out of the truck. He herded me through the lobby, which was so decadent that it featured an indoor waterfall and a grand player piano that performed a Gershwin tune on its own. If the ghosts of the destitute factory workers who had slaved away here a century earlier could see the space now, they’d die a second time.
I pointed to the empty mahogany desk in front of the elevators. “Think the doorman is taking a nap somewhere?”
“Nah, he probably abandoned his post to rescue some stranded teenage girl.” Now I remembered him telling me during our very first meeting that he worked as a concierge.
Atlas took me up to the eighth floor, to a condo labeled 8D. After he fumbled with an obnoxiously full key ring, he found the one he was looking for. “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” he said as he cast open the door and flipped the light switch inside.
The condo was gorgeous, from its cherry hardwood floors to the stainless steel appliances in the kitchen. Massive French windows lined the back wall, providing an astonishing view of downtown Boston. The John Hancock Tower, Boston’s tallest building, dominated the skyline, a sleek column of reflective blue glass that looked transparent to the sky beyond it.
I wandered into the room and steadied my exhausted body against one of the leather sofas. “This whole day has been like a movie. It started out The Godfather and apparently now I’m Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.”
Atlas laughed. “It’s not a real condo, just a model staged to look like people actually live here. Whenever new tenants come to consider buying a unit in the building, the realtors show them this one. That’s why we call it the Dollhouse: It’s where adults come to play house in their imagination.”
“I can’t stay here,” I protested.
“You can and you will,” Atlas replied. “Unless you’d rather let Witness Protection hide you away in some Podunk swamp hut. Besides”—He gestured to the glass—“it’s criminal that a view like this only gets two visitors a month. Now go take a shower, try to relax, and I’ll be back as soon as I close out my shift.”
I had neither the strength nor the will to put up a fight. After I’d locked the deadbolt behind Atlas, I stripped out of my soggy clothes and filed into the elegant shower. I cranked the dial until it was scalding, then sat down heavily on the tiles, with my bare back pressed against the opaque glass door. I let the steam swallow me up.
When I emerged thirty minutes later, the wet clothes I’d balled up outside the bathroom were gone, replaced with a red Boston University sweatshirt and a pair of plaid men’s pajama pants, folded on top of a fresh towel.
Swaddled in my new wardrobe, I wandered down the hall and found a pizza and a two-liter of Coke waiting for me on the kitchen counter. In the living room, Atlas stood in front of a crackling fire, and if I wasn’t mistaken, it was my hoodie and jeans that were currently being consumed by the flames.
Atlas had changed, too, trading his doorman’s suit for jeans and a flannel shirt that hugged his broad shoulders like a sock might fit a bowling ball. “I know you’re a far cry from XL, but those clothes were the best I could do on short notice,” he said.
“Right now I’d wear a garbage bag as long as it was dry.”
He poked at my smoldering clothes with a fire iron. “There are plenty beneath the sink if black non-biodegradable plastic is more your style.”
I set a course for the pizza box. My stomach had been in knots since I witnessed Smitty’s murder, but my appetite caught up with me now that I was temporarily safe. I shoveled the better part of an entire slice into my mouth before I remembered to mumble, “Thanks for dinner. And for saving my ass.”
“I think it’s about time that you explain why exactly your ass required saving. I have a sneaking suspicion …” He paused mid-sentence, set the fire poker aside, and picked up something off the mantle: an old piece of paper encased in plastic. “… that it has something to do with this.”
It was the journal page, which to my great relief he had salvaged from my pocket before he cremated my hoodie. I was such a zombie that the riddle hadn’t even crossed my mind when I saw my sweatshirt in flames.
Part of me wanted to resist sharing anything with this boy I barely knew. Jack was my brother. Echo was my sister. This should be my quest to bear alone.