“You’re not a killer,” said Alex.
“Yet. Maybe I’m a late bloomer.”
Dawes returned to the dining room with a big tureen of steaming soup.
“This isn’t a joke!”
“Let’s try to remember that not being a murderer is actually a good thing,”
Darlington said. “I’ll take Tripp’s place. I’ll be the fourth.”
Dawes set the tureen on the table with a loud, disapproving thud. “You will not.”
Alex didn’t like the idea either. The Gauntlet wasn’t meant to be used as a revolving door. “I’m not giving up on Tripp. We don’t know that Not Spenser got him. We don’t know anything yet.”
“We know the math,” said Turner. “Four pilgrims to open the door— four to make the journey, and four to close it all up at the end. The full moon is tomorrow night, and unless Tripp suddenly slinks out into the open, the prodigal demon is our only option.”
“We’ll find another way,” Dawes insisted, ladling soup into bowls aggressively.
“Sure,” Turner replied. “Should we just have Mercy stab someone?” “Of course not,” Dawes snapped, though Mercy looked scarily game.
“But…”
A faint, sad smile touched Darlington’s lips. “Go on.”
Now Dawes hesitated. “Look at you,” she said quietly. “You aren’t …
you aren’t completely human anymore. You’re bound to that place.” She glanced uneasily at Alex. “You both are.”
Alex crossed her arms. “What do I have to do with it?”
“You were on fire,” said Dawes. “The same way you were in the underworld.” Dawes dipped her spoon into her bowl, then set it down. “We can’t send Darlington back, and I … if Tripp’s demon … if something happened to him, it’s our fault.”
No one could disagree. Dawes had said that Alex and Darlington were tied to the underworld, but the truth was that they were all bound together now. They had seen the very worst of each other, felt every ugly, shameful, frightening thing. Four pilgrims. Four children trembling in the dark. Four fools who had attempted what should never be dared. Four shoddy heroes on a quest who were meant to survive this reckless endeavor together.
But Tripp wasn’t here.
“I’ll go back to his place tomorrow,” Turner said. “Reach out at his job.
But we agree right now, no matter what, we make the descent tomorrow night. We can’t let those things keep feeding on us. I have seen some shit in this life and been through it too. But I won’t make it to the next full moon.”
No one was going to argue with that either. Alex didn’t want Darlington back in hell, but they were out of options. If what he had just done to Not Hellie couldn’t stop these things, nothing in the mortal realm would.
“All right,” said Alex.
Dawes gave a short nod.
“How exactly did you get Darlington out?” Turner asked a little too casually.
Alex was tempted to ask if he wanted her to write up a statement. But Dawes and Mercy and Turner were owed an explanation, or whatever answers they could patch together.
So they ate, and they talked—about Anselm who was no longer Anselm, the bodies they’d left at Black Elm, the murders of Professor Stephen and Dean Beekman, and the third murder that would have been committed if Turner hadn’t arrested Andy Lambton.
When they were done, Turner pushed his empty bowl away and scrubbed his hands over his face. “You’re telling me Lambton is innocent?”
“He was there,” said Alex. “At least for Beekman. Maybe for Marjorie Stephen. I think Anselm enjoyed making him an accomplice.” “That’s not his name,” Darlington said.
“Well, whatever you want to call him. Golgarot, the demon king.”
“He’s a prince, not a king, and it would be unwise to underestimate him.”
“I don’t understand,” said Mercy. “The … demon prince or whoever …
he ate Anselm. Shouldn’t he be a vampire now? Why is he messing around with getting some guy to commit random murders?”
“They weren’t random,” said Darlington. His voice was bleak, cold, something left at the bottom of a lake. “They were a puzzle, steeped in New Haven history, a custom lure for my mind, for Alex, for Detective Turner. A perfect distraction. He was having fun.”
“But not drinking blood?” Alex asked. She’d tussled with Not Anselm, and aside from being able to create fire out of thin air, he’d been physically weak, nothing like Linus Reiter.
“Golgarot is not like your demons or the demon that devoured Lionel Reiter. He tortured me in hell. He had already fed on my misery, and when I tried to come through the portal you opened at Scroll and Key, he was able to follow.”
“When the circle bound you to Black Elm,” Dawes said.
“But not Golgarot. He hadn’t fed enough on me to be trapped by Sandow’s spell.”
“And the horns?” Turner asked.
“You were all travelers, moving between this world and the demon realm while your bodies remained here. That wasn’t true for me. I walked right into the mouth of a hellbeast, and when I entered the demon realm, I split.” He kept his words steady, but his gaze was faraway. “I became a demon, bound in service to Golgarot, a creature of … appetites. I became a man who fed his keeper with his own suffering.”
“Right down the middle, huh?”
Darlington’s smile was small. “No, Detective. I think you well know that one can be both a murderer and a good man. Or at least a man who tries to be
good. If only the evil did terrible things, what a simple world it would be.
Both demon and man remained in hell. Both demon and man were bound by the circle of protection.”
“Anselm followed me into hell,” Alex said, “when I crossed the circle.”
“He had to in order to fight you. Golgarot is both more and less powerful than your demons. As long as I was bound to the circle, he could move freely, consume victims as he chose, but he remained weak. He couldn’t enter this realm completely, not without killing me or pushing me back into hell forever.”
“But … but he’s dead now, right?” Mercy asked.
Darlington shook his head. “I destroyed his mortal body, the one he’d constructed. But he’ll be waiting for me in hell. For all of us.” Dawes frowned. “Did he know we’d found the Gauntlet?”
“No,” said Darlington. “He knew you were searching, but he had no idea you’d found it or that you were trying the ritual to free me on Halloween night.”
“He said he came to Il Bastone and saw our notes,” said Mercy.
