Juan’s depression wasn’t only about the deaths he thought he was responsible for. Or about Eddie’s sacrifice. After the massacre we spent a day making statements, and the day after that we were at Florence’s house. We had no reason to return to Cheyne Walk: if we needed clothes or documents, an assistant could get them. But Juan wanted to go back because he was convinced about something, and Stephen went with him. The passage to the Other Place had closed. Now, when Juan opened the door, he only saw the bed, the paintings, the window. He tried several times. He leaned against the wooden doorway, begging please. The Other Place had disappeared after receiving its sacrifice. Pájaro que comió, voló, as they say in Argentina. It had got what it wanted. Eddie was lost in that dead world. Of course, the Place of Power had also dried up. Florence received that news with a scream. She didn’t know how to interpret it. She related it to the purge Eddie had inflicted, of course, but she was missing the necessary details to fully understand what had happened. Just one Ceremonial in London, she said. What a waste.

Juan felt free and at the same time desperate when he found that his centers of power had vanished. I thought about leaving, he said later. Walking to the nearest train station, getting off in a town, drinking a beer in the pub, squatting on one of the abandoned farms, letting myself die in the ruins of some castle or at the side of a highway.

Why didn’t you? I asked. They always say they can find you, but what if you’re the exception, the one who can escape? We were in the darkness of his room in Cadaqués, and I could feel his heart beating, arrhythmic and frantic, against my own chest.

I don’t want to choke to death in a village hotel with my lungs full of fluid and my body half-paralyzed. I don’t know how to work. I can’t find my way with a map. It’s easy to talk about getting away, leaving, dying, changing, when leaving it all behind means nothing. But to feel the power in my whole body, to claw and mark people, to have a role as the companion of the god of night—it means something. It’s mine.

I’m yours too, I told him in a low voice.

You’re mine too, he replied.