“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.”
