The interrogation room in the basement of the Central District headquarters was a gray concrete box, windowless and airless, furnished with a metal table and two metal chairs bolted to the floor. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a sterile glow that left no shadows and offered no comfort. It was a room designed to strip away illusions, to reduce its occupants to the bare facts of their existence. It was, Maris Keene thought, exactly the wrong place to interrogate a man who had opened a door between the living and the dead.
Edric Voss sat in one of the metal chairs, his hands cuffed in front of him, his expression calm and distant. He had not spoken since the boarding house. He had not resisted arrest or demanded a lawyer or asked any of the questions that a guilty man was supposed to ask. He simply sat, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond the concrete wall, as if he was watching something that only he could see.
Keene stood on the other side of the one-way mirror, studying him. She had been standing there for ten minutes, trying to reconcile the man she saw with the monster she had imagined. Edric Voss was not a monster. He was a professor, a scholar, a grandson who had watched his family's last hope be extinguished by seven justices in black robes. He was a man who had been pushed past the breaking point and had found, in the ruins of a dead civilization, a way to push back.
But he was also a killer. Four times over. And if she did not find a way to stop him—to stop the ritual he had set in motion—he would be a killer three more times before the door was fully opened.
She pushed open the door and entered the interrogation room. Edric looked up as she came in, and for a moment, something flickered in his eyes. Recognition, perhaps. Or curiosity. Or the faint, fading ember of the man he had been before the ritual had claimed him.
"Professor Voss," Keene said, taking the chair across from him. "I'm going to record this conversation. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand?"
"Yes. But I don't need an attorney, Chief Inspector. I'm not going to contest the charges. I'm not going to lie to you. What would be the point?"
Keene studied him for a long moment. His voice was steady, his gaze clear, his demeanor that of a man who had made peace with his choices and was not interested in denying them. It was the honesty of someone who knew that the truth was stranger than any lie he could invent.
"The point," Keene said, "is that four people are dead. Three more are in danger. And you are the only person who knows how to stop it."
"I told you at the boarding house. The ritual cannot be stopped."
"You also told me it could be bound. Contained within a vessel. A willing vessel."
Edric's expression flickered. "I told you that because I was trying to warn you. The binding is not a solution. It's a postponement. The Maw cannot be destroyed. It can only be imprisoned. And the prison is a living soul. Your soul, if you're foolish enough to offer it."
"I've been a police officer for twenty-two years," Keene said. "I've put my life on the line more times than I can count. I've walked into rooms where armed men were waiting. I've faced down people who wanted to kill me. I've never been afraid of dying."
"This isn't dying. This is something worse. The Maw lives inside you. It whispers to you. It shows you things—the grievances of the dead, the injustices of the world, the endless ledger of wrongs that have never been righted. It feeds on your anger, your guilt, your desire for justice. And it waits. It waits for the moment when you give it an opening. A moment of weakness. A moment of doubt. And then it takes control."
"Sounds like a marriage," Keene said dryly.
Edric stared at her. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. It was a hollow sound, but it was genuine—the laugh of a man who had not expected to find humor in the depths of his damnation and was surprised to discover it there.
"You're not what I expected, Chief Inspector."
"What did you expect?"
"Someone who believed in the system. Someone who thought that justice and law were the same thing. Someone who would arrest me and charge me and put me on trial and never once ask whether the trial would accomplish anything except the satisfaction of procedure."
Keene leaned back in her chair. "I stopped believing in the system a long time ago. I believe in results. I believe in protecting people who can't protect themselves. I believe that sometimes the law is an obstacle to justice, not a vehicle for it. Does that surprise you?"
"It does."
"Good. Then maybe you'll believe me when I tell you that I'm not here to judge you. I'm here to stop the ritual before it kills anyone else. And I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Even if it means becoming the vessel myself."
Edric was silent for a long moment. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The one-way mirror reflected the room back at them, two figures sitting across from each other at a metal table, the hunter and the hunted, the law and the outlaw, the woman who wanted to save the world and the man who had set it on fire.
"Why?" Edric asked finally. "Why would you do this? You don't know the justices. You don't owe them anything. They're part of the same system that you stopped believing in years ago. Why risk your soul for theirs?"
"Because it's not about them," Keene said. "It's about the people the Maw will kill after the seven are dead. You said it yourself—the ritual is a key. Once the door is open, it stays open. And what comes through will not stop with the justices. It will keep killing. It will keep feeding. It will never be satisfied. I'm not doing this for the justices. I'm doing this for everyone else."
Edric looked at her, and for the first time since she had entered the room, something shifted in his expression. The calm detachment cracked, and beneath it she saw something raw and wounded and desperately tired. The man who had started this. The man who had lost everything and wanted the world to feel his loss.
"I was like you once," he said quietly. "I believed I could control it. I believed the ritual was a tool, a weapon, something I could wield and then set aside when the work was done. But the ritual is not a tool. It's a partnership. And the Maw does not share power. It consumes it. It consumed me, piece by piece, until there was nothing left except the hunger."
"You're still here," Keene said. "You're still talking to me. You're still warning me. That means there's something left. Something the Maw hasn't consumed."
"Maybe. Or maybe the Maw wants you to think that. Maybe it's using me to lure you in, to make you think the binding is possible, so that you'll offer yourself willingly. The Maw needs a willing vessel. It can't take one by force. It has to be invited."
"Then I'm inviting it," Keene said. "Tell me how."
Edric stared at her for a long moment. Then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, there was something different in his gaze. Something that might have been hope, or despair, or the strange and terrible fusion of the two.
"The binding ritual is the inverse of the summoning," he said. "Instead of opening the door, you close it. Instead of speaking the words outward, you speak them inward. Instead of marking the target, you mark yourself. The mask—you took the mask from the boarding house?"
"It's in my office."
"You'll need it. You'll need the bone. You'll need the ink. And you'll need to go to the place where the door is strongest. The place where the ritual began."
"The Vault," Keene said. "The Zyrakh collection."
"Yes. The bones of the dead priests are there. The remnants of the civilization that created the ritual. The door is anchored to them. If you perform the binding there, you might be able to contain the Maw before the seventh death. Before the door opens all the way."
"And if I fail?"
"Then the Maw takes you. Not your life. Your soul. Your body becomes its vessel, and the door opens, and what walks out of the Vault will be you and not you, wearing your face and speaking with your voice, but hungry in ways that no living thing has ever been hungry."
Keene absorbed this in silence. The fluorescent lights flickered, just for a moment, and the shadows in the corners of the room seemed to deepen. She thought about the cold that had followed her since Justice Hahn's death. She thought about the writing on the walls, the patterns that were becoming more articulate, more deliberate, more like a language that was learning how to speak. She thought about the seven justices, four dead and three living, and the door that was opening wider with every passing hour.
"When do we do it?" she asked.
"We?" Edric's eyebrows rose. "You want me to help you?"
"You're the only expert on Zyrakh ritual practice in the country. You're the one who started this. You're going to help me finish it."
"The police will never allow it. I'm a suspect in four murders. I'm not leaving this building except to go to a holding cell."
Keene stood up. She walked to the door and opened it, gesturing to the officer stationed outside. "Take Professor Voss to the secure holding area. He's to have no contact with anyone except me. I'll be back in two hours."
She left the interrogation room and walked through the corridors of the Central District headquarters, her mind churning. The binding ritual. The Vault. The mask and the bone and the ink. She did not know if she believed in any of it—the Maw, the door, the ancient power that Edric had summoned. But she believed in the deaths. Four justices, dead of causes that defied medical explanation. Four smears of pigment that contained human bone dust. Four crime scenes marked with writing that no living language could account for.
She reached her office and closed the door. The funerary mask sat on her desk, wrapped in the black silk she had taken from Edric's wooden box. She unwrapped it carefully, feeling the warmth of the stone against her fingers, the pulse that matched no heartbeat. The elongated features seemed to watch her, the too-large eyes glistening in the dim light, the mouth caught between a scream and a smile.
"What are you?" she whispered.
The mask did not answer. But in the silence of her office, Keene felt something stir. A presence. A curiosity. A hunger that was patient and ancient and vast.
She wrapped the mask again and placed it in her bag. Then she picked up the phone and called Helena Stross.
"Dr. Stross, it's Keene. I need access to the Vault. Tonight. And I need you to prepare the Zyrakh collection for a ritual. A binding ritual. I'll explain when I get there."
She hung up before Helena could ask questions. Then she sat at her desk, in the gray light of the winter afternoon, and began to prepare herself for what was coming.
Four justices were dead. Three remained. And somewhere in the darkness, the Maw was waiting for the door to open a little wider.
But Maris Keene was done waiting. She was done chasing shadows and reading transcripts and trying to solve a crime that had no solution in any law book. She was going to face the darkness, and she was going to close the door, or she was going to die trying.
Either way, the killing would stop.
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