“Okay, you’re still not explaining how he can be feeding off anything and why that matters.”
“Because he’s becoming more powerful,” Montserrat said, looking thoughtful. “The first time I saw him, he was a vague reflection, and now he can throw things around a room. When he was murdered, Ewers empowered the film; it was a blood sacrifice. It gave it great might. And then all that bad luck tied to everyone who worked on the project, all those deaths and bad things that happened. They accumulated over time. And now, it’s no longer just a print in a freezer, it’s somethings that lives. The more we use magic and the more he interacts with us, the stronger he becomes. Yes, he’s feeding off us, but we’re feeding off him, too. That’s why suddenly there’re magic dogs and furniture flying around. It’s like Abel said: pressure building up inside a pot. It’s decades of deaths and malice and spells.”
“How much more powerful can Ewers get?” Tristán asked worriedly.
Powerful enough that he might actually be able to return to life, Montserrat thought. Oh, she hadn’t been sure his ritual would have worked in the first place back in 1961, but she thought it might work now. Alma Montero had drawn on Ewers’s spell, his old magic, for her own purposes, but she had not drained it completely, and Ewers’s magic had also remained latent in that nitrate film. It persisted, Montserrat and Tristán’s tinkering with this magic made it worse, and at this point Montserrat was certain that if Clarimonde Bauer and her associates got hold of the nitrate print they would somehow be able to restore Ewers to pristine health.
They were two steps from encountering Ewers in the flesh. This would surely be disastrous for Montero and López. Montserrat wasn’t sure it would be better for her and Tristán. They were not members of his cult, and Ewers was no friend of theirs. Who knew, maybe the first thing Ewers would do after returning to life might be to kill both of them.
“He’s concerned, otherwise he wouldn’t have come here,” López said. “He wanted to stop us. He knows he’s in danger. We will use the sequence of runes as dictated by Abel—”
“There was something wrong with Abel,” Tristán said, cutting him short. “There, toward the end, before Ewers interrupted him. He was trying to tell me something and couldn’t.”
“You need to get that film,” López said and pointed to an armoire across the room. “There are blessed nails in there. Take my car, sprinkle the nails behind you as you get into the vehicle…the wards I drew, they haven’t washed off…that should suffice. I will not survive a second attack. You need to go, now.”
Montserrat opened the armoire’s door and began pulling out drawers. She found a plastic bag filled with copper nails and turned to Tristán, who took her aside.
“If we go out there we are completely exposed,” he said, his voice low. “And should we be leaving the man alone like this? What if Ewers comes back?”
“He’s coming back one way or another,” Montserrat said.
“You don’t know that.”
“He is not going to give up. But neither are we.”
Montserrat hurried back to the room where they’d slept and put on her jacket, slinging her purse over her shoulder. The keys to the car were on a shelf by the front door, under a postcard from Hawaii that had been taped to the wall.
Tristán pressed a hand against the door, blocking her way. “Have you paused to think Ewers might want us to leave this house?”
“What do you mean?”
“It could be a trap. Abel was trying to warn me about something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
Montserrat rubbed a hand against her head. She felt tired, and her body ached. López could say everything he wanted about them being younger and stronger, but this spell casting hit you like a punch to the gut. She’d felt it when she’d reflected Clarimonde’s spell, and it was thrice as bad now. Yet there was no avoiding it, and she knew it even if Tristán wanted to deny it: they had to hurry.
Montserrat grabbed the key ring and stared at Tristán resolutely. “We need to vanish him.”
She opened the door and walked toward the front gate. Despite his protestations Tristán followed her. She tossed nails as they walked toward the car and flung some more out the window at stoplights. No vehicle seemed to be following them, and the street in front of Antares was deserted when they parked.
She threw more nails and quickly dug her hand into her purse, finding her keys and opening the door. The lobby was a mess, filled with streamers, plastic plates, and cups. She saw pizza boxes piled in a corner. The office Christmas party must have taken place on Friday, and nobody would clean up until Monday. She had completely forgotten about the celebration.
“Come on,” she told Tristán and guided him down the long hallway flanked with tall mirrors and doors leading to the offices and editing bays. They turned left. The storage rooms were closed at night, and as Montserrat jimmied the lock she thanked God that it was the holidays. There was no chance they’d be interrupted.
She flicked on the lights and they were in a vast room with shelves filled with blank cassettes for the duplicates they made. Past a tall pile of boxes there was a door with a sticker that said “Vault One” on it.
“We keep the masters there,” she told Tristán.
There too they stored some of the older equipment that nobody had the heart to throw out, including a Moviola that had supposedly been used by Carlos Savage. On the other end of the room there was a door with a sticker that said “Vault Two.” It was a glorified closet rather than a room. Inside it was the steel fireproof cabinet where she’d stashed Ewers’s reel. Montserrat forced the lock to the small vault, opened the cabinet, and quickly stuffed the film can into her purse. She was still carrying Ewers’s book with her, which she supposed was oddly fitting.
She closed the cabinet, and they headed back the way they’d come. When they reached the long hallway that would take them to the lobby, they paused.
An old woman stood at the other end of the hallway, wrapped in a dark navy coat, her white hair pulled back from her face and pinned perfectly in place. Montserrat did not recognize her at first but then something in the way she held herself up allowed Montserrat to connect the dots.
“Alma,” Montserrat said. She had aged a decade in the span of a few days.
“I want that film,” the woman said. Her voice was hoarse, but her eyes remained sharp and knowing.
“We’re going to destroy it. Like you should have done.”
“That film is power. Ewers’s magic has kept my old age at bay for over thirty years.”
“It doesn’t seem to be working anymore.”
“No,” Alma conceded, slowly walking toward them. “You and Abel did something. You threw everything off balance. It’s cost me a lot to find you and come here. All my reserves of power, every inch of my magic…but it’ll be worth it.”
Before Montserrat could reply there was a great popping sound and the lightbulbs above their heads began to waver and fizzle out, plunging the hallway into darkness. Then there came a hissing, almost a hum, and Tristán let out a loud grunt, pushing against Montserrat.