“Then do it.”
Alex drew another long breath in through her nose. “The flowers rustle when I touch them. Someone’s singing down the hall. My own fucking heart pounding in my chest.” She rubbed a hand over her face, feeling some of her terror recede. “Thanks, Dawes.”
“I’m going to text the group to warn them about Reiter. Remember, your salt spirit should work against him too.”
“How can you sound so calm?”
“I wasn’t attacked by a vampire.”
“It’s daytime. How—”
“I’m assuming he’s not in direct sunlight. He’ll keep to the shadows, and he certainly won’t be able to hunt until dusk falls.” That wasn’t reassuring.
“Alex,” Dawes insisted, “you have to stay calm. He’s just another demon and he can’t change shape or get in your head.”
“He’s fast, Dawes. And so strong.” She’d been no match for him, even with the strength of a Gray inside her. She’d barely escaped him once, and she wasn’t sure she’d be that lucky again.
“Okay, but all of the reading I’ve done says he won’t stay away from his nest for long. He can’t.”
His precious nest full of priceless objects and white flowers. That Alex had set fire to.
Alex made herself get up and pull back the curtain. Not Hellie was gone.
She saw Reiter moving across the courtyard toward the gates that would take
him out of JE and hopefully away from campus. Someone in dark clothes and a hooded jacket walked beside him, keeping a white umbrella above Reiter’s head.
“What if Reiter gets peckish on the way home?” Alex said. “I brought him here. I put all these people in his sights.”
“Stop it. Reiter knew about Yale long before you. I think … I think he’s here to frighten you. And maybe because we used the Gauntlet.”
Now Dawes’s voice wavered. If Alex’s theory—really Rudolph Kittscher’s theory—was correct, then Reiter was actually a demon who had followed the real Lionel Reiter out of hell and taken on his form and identity.
He’d fed on Reiter’s soul and now he sustained himself with blood. Had the demons that followed them through the portal to hell called to him somehow?
Did he care that the Gauntlet had been awakened, or did he just want payback for Alex wrecking his fancy things?
It didn’t matter. There was only one way to deal with him.
“Add him to the list, Dawes. We get rid of the demons and we get rid of Reiter too.”
“It’s not going to be easy,” Dawes said. Now that the task of taking care of Alex was done, she seemed less sure. “The things they know…”
Alex looked down at the empty bench. “Do you want to tell me what Blake said?”
There was a long pause. “He was outside of my window this morning.
In the snow. Whispering.”
Alex waited.
“He said he was innocent. That he never hurt anyone. That his mother cried herself to sleep every night. He said…” Dawes’s voice wobbled.
Alex knew Dawes didn’t want to go on. But demons ate shame, fruit grown from seeds cultivated in the dark.
“Hellie told me I stole her life,” Alex said. “That I should have been the one to die, not her.”
“That isn’t true!”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe not. Not if it feels true. He said … Blake said I killed him because I’m the kind of girl he would never bother to fuck. He said … he said he could tell what my … what I looked like down there. That I was ugly.”
“God, that really does sound like Blake.”
What were these demons made of? Hellie’s sadness. Blake’s cruelty.
Alex’s shame. Dawes’s guilt. But what else? What was the difference between ambition and appetite? These creatures wanted to survive. They wanted to be fed. Alex understood hunger and what it could drive you to do.
“It isn’t true, Dawes. We have to keep saying it until we believe it.” It was just too easy to let those words take hold.
“Is he there now?” Alex asked.
“The loris bit him.” Dawes giggled. “It climbed right through the window and bit him on the cheek. He just started screaming, ‘My face! My face!’”
Alex laughed, but she remembered the snakes lunging for Hellie’s cheek.
As if the salt spirits didn’t like the lie of the demons, the pretense of the human masks they wore.
