As she raced down Orange Street, Alex could feel the little Gray clamoring to be released, rattling around her head like someone had given him too much sugar. But she wasn’t letting him go until she knew she could get inside Il Bastone.
Alex took the steps in a single, awkward leap. What would it mean if this door remained closed to her now? If the Lethe board had already banished her from this place of protection? From quiet and safety and plenty?
But the door flew open. Alex lurched inside, falling forward. She felt the little Gray’s ghost yanked free, the wards preventing him from entering, even hidden inside her body. He left in a sulky rush, taking his strength with him. The door slammed behind her, hard enough that the windows shook.
Alex felt her thighs wobbling with fatigue. She used the banister to pull herself up, felt the cool wood beneath her palm, pressed her forehead against the finial, the ridges of the sunflower pattern hard against her skin. This was home. Not her dorm room. Not the wreckage she’d left behind in Los Angeles.
She drew a few long breaths and made herself peer through the window in the front parlor. Hellie—or the demon pretending to be Hellie—stood on the sidewalk across the street. How had Alex mistaken a monster for the real thing? Hellie had the confident grace of an athlete, easy in her beauty, even when their lives were fraying at the edges. But the thing across the street held itself taut, wary, its hunger barely leashed.
I was the one who was meant to bounce back. I was supposed to leave you behind.
“Shut up,” Alex muttered. But she couldn’t pretend those words were a demon lie. The wrong girl had died at Ground Zero.
Alex picked up her phone and texted the group. There’s a blonde outside of Il Bastone. Looks like a girl. IS NOT A GIRL. Use salt.
But her eye caught movement on the sidewalk. Dawes and Tripp. Had they seen her message?
Alex hesitated. She didn’t have time to raid the armory for salt and weapons. She had no salt pearls left. Fine. She couldn’t stand there and do nothing.
You stole my life. You stole my chance.
Alex shuddered and threw open the door. “Dawes!”
The demon leapt across the street, straight for Alex on the porch of Il Bastone, its gait wild, and loping, and inhuman. Alex braced for impact.
The demon lunged over the low black fence and then shrieked, falling to the ground in a heap, its flesh bubbling as Dawes and Tripp hurled fistfuls of salt at it.
She should have known Pamela Dawes would come prepared. “Get inside!” Dawes shouted.
Alex didn’t need to be told twice. She stumbled up the stairs and back into the entry hall. Once Dawes and Tripp were inside, they locked the door, then nearly jumped when the bell at the back of the house rang.
Mercy and Turner were outside.
“We’re safe in here?” Turner asked, eyes scanning the hallway as they entered.
An unnerving thought entered Alex’s mind. “What did you see?”
Turner was moving from room to room closing curtains as if expecting sniper fire. “A dead man.”
“Oh God,” Mercy gasped. She was standing at the front window in the parlor staring out at the street.
Hellie was there, but she wasn’t alone now. Blake Keely was with her, his head whole and perfect and wedding cake handsome. A middle-aged man in a cheap-looking suit was there too—arms crossed, rocked back on his heels, as if he’d seen it all and wasn’t impressed—along with a tall, rangy guy who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
“Spenser,” Tripp said. “You … you guys see him? I thought I was imagining things.”
Alex recognized them all. She’d seen them in hell. All of their victims.
All of their demons.
“We didn’t close the door,” Dawes said, her voice rough, frightened. “We didn’t complete the ritual. We—”
“Don’t say it,” said Tripp. “Do not say it.”
Dawes shrugged, her face pale. “We have to go back.” It was half a question, a plea for someone to correct her. “Come on,” Alex said. “Let’s go to the library.”
Dawes tucked her hands inside her sweatshirt. “If Anselm—”
But Alex cut her hand through the air. “If Anselm could have locked us out, he would have. This is our house.”
Dawes hesitated, then she gave a firm nod. “First, we cook.”
 |
Dawes got a pot of chicken soup and dumplings going and sent them upstairs with a list of search terms to write in the Albemarle Book. When the shelf swung open on the library, Alex was surprised to find the room seemed bigger, as if the house knew a larger group required more space.
They sat down to read, each with a tidy pile of index cards provided by Dawes from what Alex suspected was a limitless supply. It was too soon for them to be together again, after what they’d seen and all they’d been through. They needed time to shake off each other’s memories, to push all that grief and sadness back into the past before they contemplated another descent. But they didn’t have that luxury.
Everyone other than Mercy was still suffering from the aftereffects of the first journey. Alex saw the signs. They were all shivering with the cold. Tripp had dark smudges beneath his eyes, his usually ruddy cheeks gone sallow. She had never seen Turner anything less than immaculate, but now his suit was rumpled and there was stubble on his chin. They looked haunted.
If they were really going to attempt a second trip to the underworld, it couldn’t just be a rescue mission. They needed to know how to fight off the
wolves or whatever hell sent after them. Plus, they had to lure their demons back to hell and make sure nothing followed them home when they made their return. But right now they had to figure out how to keep those demons at bay before they all lost their minds.
Alex had been over some of this ground when she was trying to find a defense against Linus Reiter, and she knew they were in trouble. Unlike Grays, demons weren’t deterred by memento mori or death words; they had no pasts they wished to cling to, no memories of being human, no unfinished business. Darlington or Michelle Alameddine should have been with them in this library. Someone who actually knew how to name these enemies and best them.
“What have you found?” Dawes asked when she emerged through the library door an hour later.
“No soup?” Tripp looked like he’d just learned there was no Santa Claus.
“It needs to reduce,” Dawes said. “And we don’t eat in the library.” “Are they still outside?” Mercy asked.
Dawes nodded. “They … they look very solid.”
Turner tapped the book he was reading. “You thought Darlington got eaten, right? By Mammon?”
“Maybe,” Dawes said cautiously. “There are a lot of demons associated with greed. Devils. Gods.”
Greed is a sin in every language. That was what Darlington had said.
Sandow’s hunger for money. Darlington’s desire for knowledge.
“But these demons aren’t trying to make us feel greed, are they?” asked Turner.
Ambition, drive, desire. What was the opposite of that?
“Hopelessness,” said Alex. That was what she’d felt as Hellie—not Hellie—screamed at her, a sense of inevitability, that this was her due, that she was only getting what she deserved. She was a criminal who had stolen the chance at this gilded life, and of course there would be a price to pay. It was why the demon tormenting her wore Hellie’s face instead of Len’s or Ariel’s. Because Alex had never shed a tear for them. It was Hellie’s loss she had wept over. “They want us to feel hopeless.”
“I thought Hellie was a blonde,” Dawes said. “She is,” said Alex. “Was.”
Mercy nodded. “I saw her too. In our Shakespeare lecture.”
Dawes’s face was troubled. Without a word they followed her out of the library and down the hall to the Dante bedroom, to the windows overlooking Orange Street.
The demons were still there, a pack of them in the shadows between the streetlamps.
Hellie’s golden hair looked black, her eyes dark. Her clothes … all black.
“She looks like you, Alex,” Dawes said. And she was right.
Alex took in the warm hue of Blake Keely’s hair, something like the bright red of Dawes’s bun. Detective Carmichael had been wearing a cheap suit when she’d first glimpsed him, but now that suit looked sharp, the lines more elegant, the tie a deep lilac, something Turner might wear. And did Spenser look a bit more hapless, a bit less tough and rugged?
What had Alex thought when she’d gazed at Not Hellie across the street from Il Bastone? That she didn’t have Hellie’s easy, athletic grace. That she looked wary, taut. Because she was looking at herself. That live-wire anger was Alex’s own.
Alex pulled the heavy blue curtains closed. She’d learned to love this room, the patterns the stained glass made in the late afternoon, the claw-foot tub she still hadn’t worked up the courage to use. “I think I know what happened to Linus Reiter.”
“Who?” asked Tripp.
“He’s a vampire I tangled with out in Old Greenwich. It’s … it’s how I lost the Mercedes.”
Dawes drew in a sharp breath.
“A vampire?” Mercy sounded terrified and thrilled all at once. “For fuck’s sake,” said Turner.
“Linus Reiter was a student here at Yale,” Alex continued. “But he had a different name then. He was a Bonesman. And I think he’s one of the people who used that Gauntlet back in the thirties. I think Linus—or really Lionel Reiter—went to hell.”
“We can’t be sure of—”
“Come on, Dawes. Why build it if they didn’t intend to use it? Why kill off an architect—”
“They killed an architect?” Mercy squeaked.
“No one killed Bertram Goodhue!” Dawes snapped. Then she bit her lip. “At least … I don’t think anyone killed Bertram Goodhue.”
Alex found herself pacing. She couldn’t stop seeing the creature on the sidewalk. Hellie-not-Hellie. Alex-not-Alex.
“They offed the original architect,” Alex said. “They built this insane puzzle into a giant cathedral. Why? Just to see if they could? As some kind of grand gesture?”
“They’ve done crazier shit,” said Turner.
He wasn’t wrong. And she could imagine these careless, daring, terrible boys making just this kind of trouble. On a lark, Bunchy might say. But she didn’t think that was what had happened this time.
“They built the Gauntlet,” she said, “and then they went to hell. Lionel Reiter, member of Skull and Bones, was one of the pilgrims.”
Tripp took off his cap, ran a hand through his sandy hair. “And he brought a demon back?”
“I think he did. And I think it got the best of him. Literally. I think it drained away his hope and stole his life.”
“But you said Reiter was, uh … a vampire.” Tripp whispered the word, as if he knew how unlikely it sounded.
“Vampires are demons,” Dawes said quietly. “At least that’s one theory.”
It made damn good sense to Alex. Reiter fed on misery; blood was just the vehicle. And of course he wasn’t Reiter at all. He was a demon who had fed on the real Reiter until he walked like him, spoke like him, looked like him. Just like the demons down on the sidewalk.
Lionel Reiter had been the son of a wealthy Connecticut family. They made boilers. They built a gracious home. They sent their son and heir off to New Haven to practice his Latin and Greek and make business connections. And Lionel had done well for himself, even made it into the school’s most prestigious society. He’d made friends with young men
whom he brought home for horseshoes and tennis on the lawn in the summer, sledding and carols in the winter. Young men with names like Bunchy and Harold.
He’d been ushered into a world of the arcane and he’d felt safe, even as he’d watched men cut open and their insides jostled by the hands of a haruspex. He’d stood in his robe and made his recitations, and he’d felt the thrill of all that power and known he was protected by his wealth, by his name, by the mere fact of not being the man on the table. He’d joined the members of Bones, and Scroll and Key, and maybe Lethe one fateful night. He’d walked the Gauntlet and seen … what? Unless Alex was very wrong about these merry wanderers of the night, they weren’t murderers. So where had they gone in hell? What corner of the underworld had they visited and what had they seen there? And what had they brought back with them when they returned?
“There’s no record, is there?” Turner asked. “Of their little sojourn in hell? They scrubbed the books.”
“They tried,” said Alex. But the library had known what Reiter was, probably because there had once been documentation of their attempt to use the Gauntlet. “We should look up the Lethe Days Diary of whoever was serving as Virgil when Reiter was a senior.”
Turner leaned against the wall, keeping one eye on the demons below. “I want to make sure I understand you. If we don’t put these … things back where they came from, they’re going to become vampires?”
“I think so,” Alex said. Vampires wearing their faces, fed on their souls. “They’re going to eat the heart out of us,” Tripp rasped. “Spenser
was … He said…”
“Hey,” Alex said. “He’s not Spenser.”
Tripp’s head snapped up. “He is. Spenser was just like that. He knew … he always knew the meanest thing to say.”
Alex didn’t need convincing. She remembered feeling frightened and helpless, knowing no one would believe that Spenser was a monster. It had been like being a little girl all over again, surrounded by Grays, alone without magic words or handsome knights or anyone at all to protect her.
Alex sat down next to Tripp on the bed. She had pushed him into something he wasn’t equipped for, and he was feeling it worse than all of them.
“Okay, so Spenser was pretty fucking bad. But you have to try to remember what those things down there feed off of. They’re trying to make you feel defeated before you even try. They want to make you feel hopeless and small.”
“Yeah, well,” Tripp said, eyes on the carpet. “It worked.”
“I know.” She looked around the room at the others, all of them tired and frightened. “Who else tangled with one of them?”
“Carmichael showed up,” said Turner. “But he didn’t say much. Just scared the shit out of me in the squad room.”
Dawes tucked her hands inside her sweatshirt. “I saw Blake.” “Did he talk?”
Her chin dropped. Dawes doing her disappearing act. Her voice was low and thready. “He said plenty.”
Alex wasn’t going to push on the details, not if Dawes didn’t want to give them up. “But all they did was talk?”
“What else would they do?” Turner asked.
Alex wasn’t sure how to reply to that. Why had Hellie attacked her when the other demons had stuck to words? Was it because Alex had chased her down? Or did Alex just have a gift for the worst possible outcome?
“Hellie got physical with me.”
“They can … they can hurt us?” Tripp was digging his fingers into his thighs.
“Maybe it’s just me,” said Alex. “I don’t know.”
“We need to plan for the worst,” said Turner. “I’m not going into what might be a knife fight thinking I’m in for a lively debate.”
Mercy had been silent through all of it, but now she stepped forward looking like she was about to perform a solo in an a cappella group. “I … I think I found something. In the library. Something to help.”
“Let’s eat first,” Alex said. Tripp needed that soup. And maybe a shot of whiskey.
