Steal the Alkahest, bring it to us, and all of your suffering will be over.

None of it made any sense. Alastair had been going to use the Alkahest to kill him, hadn’t he? He’d wanted to destroy the Enemy of Death.

Call remembered the astonishment on his father’s face as he’d struck the wall, remembered the feeling of overwhelming fury. What if he’d been wrong about Alastair? What if Alastair hadn’t been lying when he said he wasn’t going to kill Call?

But if Alastair wanted to get rid of him and get the soul of his real son back, that was just as bad. Maybe he didn’t want to kill Call outright, but sticking his soul back in Constantine Madden seemed a lot like dying.

“What?” Tamara was leaning so far off the bed that she was nearly falling. “Call, what does it say?”

“Nothing,” Call said grimly, folding up the most incriminating note and sticking it in his pocket. “It’s a bunch of tips on how to grow begonias.”

“Liar,” said Jasper succinctly, snatching one of the letters off the bed. He started to read out loud, eyes growing wider. “Wait, these are … these are really, really, really not about begonias!”

It was horrible. Tamara and Aaron clearly hadn’t believed him, but the look of betrayal on both their faces was almost as awful as Jasper’s smug gloating. Worse, they read everything. Line after bizarre line — though to Call’s relief, nothing in the letters referred directly to the fact that he possessed the soul of Constantine Madden. Who knew what they would have thought if they’d gotten ahold of the letter in his pocket?

“So, he really has the Alkahest and he’s going to give it to the Enemy?” Jasper looked frightened. “I thought you said he’d been wrongfully accused.”

“Look at this one,” said Tamara. “Alastair must have agreed, because Master Joseph is writing about how he’ll contact him and how they’ll meet. It’s supposed to take place two days from now.”

“We need to go back to the Magisterium,” said Aaron. “We have to tell someone. Call, I believed you about your dad, but maybe you were wrong.”

“We can’t risk the Alkahest falling into the hands of the Enemy,” said Tamara. “It means Aaron could be killed. You see that, right, Call?”

Call looked at the fire burning in the lamps. Had he completely misunderstood what was going on with his father? He’d assumed his dad was a good person on the side of the Magisterium and the Masters, on the side of stopping Constantine Madden, whatever the cost. But now it seemed like maybe his dad was actually a bad person on Master Joseph’s side after all, and was willing to do whatever it took to get the soul of his kid back. Which was not the worst thing from a certain perspective. But if Alastair decided to join up with Master Joseph, was Call morally obligated to let him do it or to stop him?

Call’s head hurt.

“I don’t want anything bad to happen to Aaron,” Call said. That was the one thing he was sure about. “I never did.”

Aaron looked miserable. “Well, we’re not going to get anywhere tonight,” he said. “It’s late and we’re all tired. Maybe if we sleep for a couple of hours, we can figure something out in the morning.”

They looked at the two beds. Each was about big enough for one adult or two kids.

“I call that one,” said Jasper. He pointed at Tamara and Call. “And I call Aaron, because you’re creepy and you’re a girl.”

“I can sleep on the floor,” Aaron offered, looking at the expression on Tamara’s face.

“That doesn’t help anyone but Jasper,” said Tamara crossly, and got onto the leftmost bed. “It’s fine, Call; we’ll just sleep on top of the covers. Don’t worry about it.”

Call thought that maybe he should offer to sleep on the floor like Aaron had, but he didn’t want to. His leg already hurt and, besides, he knew for a fact that there were sometimes rats hiding in the barn.

“Okay,” he said, climbing in gingerly beside her.

It was weird.

In the other bed, Jasper and Aaron were trying to share a single pillow. There was a muffled cry as someone was punched. Call pushed the pillow on his bed over to Tamara and laid his head down on his crooked arm.

He closed his eyes, but sleep didn’t come. It was uncomfortable trying to keep to one side of the bed, making sure that even his toes didn’t stray over to Tamara’s side. It didn’t help that he kept seeing the words in the letters Master Joseph had written, painted on the backs of his eyelids.

“Call?”

He opened his eyes. Tamara was looking at him from a few inches away, her eyes big and dark. “Why are you so important?” she whispered.

He felt the warm gust of her breath on his cheek.

“Important?” he echoed. Jasper had started to snore.

“All those letters,” she said. “From Master Joseph. I thought they’d be about Aaron. He’s the Makar. But they were all about you. Call is the most important thing.”

“I mean … I guess because he’s my dad,” Call said, floundering. “So I’d be important to him.”

“It didn’t sound like that kind of important,” Tamara said softly. “Call, you know you can tell us anything, right?”

Call wasn’t sure how to answer her. He was still trying to decide when Havoc began to howl.

HAVOC, QUIET! SHHHHHH!” Call said, but the wolf kept on barking, shoving his snout into the gap between the barn doors and scratching the wood with his paws.

“What do you see, boy?” Aaron asked. “Is there something out there?”

Tamara took a step toward the wolf. “Maybe your dad came back.”

Call’s heart gave a wild thump. He ran to the door that Havoc was nosing at and pulled it back, opening the barn to the cold air outside.

Havoc darted past him. The night was quiet. The moon was a sliver in the sky. Call had to squint to see his wolf dart across the trampled grass toward the lines of wrecked cars, looking humped and unnatural in the darkness.

“What’s that?” It was Jasper, his voice a scared whisper, pointing. Aaron stepped forward; they were all crowding around Call now, in front of the open barn door. Call looked where Jasper was pointing. At first he saw nothing; then, staring harder, he caught sight of something slipping around the side of one of the cars.

Tamara gasped. The thing was rising, seeming to grow from moment to moment, swelling right before them. It gleamed under the moon — a monster made of slick metal, dark and wet-looking, as if its surface were rubbed with oil. Its eyes were like two massive headlights, flashing in the darkness. And its mouth — Call goggled as its massive jaw unhinged, lined with rows of sharklike metal teeth, and then closed on the hood of an ancient Citroën.

The car made a horrible crunching sound. The creature threw its head back, swallowing. It bulged outward as the car disappeared into its vast maw. A moment later the car was gone and the creature seemed to grow more gigantic.

“It’s an elemental,” Tamara said nervously. “Metal. It must be drawing power from all those cars and junk.”

“We should get out of here before it notices us,” Jasper said.