In the cold dark of the basement, Alex took stock of her mistakes. She should have stayed with Turner and finished the interview with Andy Lambton. She shouldn’t have come to Black Elm alone. She should have told Dawes her suspicions, or Turner, or anyone. She should never have trusted her gentleman demon. But she’d wanted to believe that Darlington would be okay, that whatever he’d endured in hell wouldn’t leave a mark, that she could be forgiven and order restored. He would be made whole and she alongside him.
But what if she was leaping to the wrong conclusions now? What if Not Hellie or one of the other demons had pushed her down the stairs, or some squatter who hadn’t shown up on Dawes’s cameras? What if Eitan and Tzvi had trailed her here? Or Linus Reiter with his white umbrella?
Too many shadows, too much history, too many bodies piling up. Too many enemies. There was no way to fight them all.
At least Alex would be visible on the cameras. Someone would know where she had gone. If she didn’t come back. The pain in her ribs made it
hard to take a deep breath. She looked at the Grays in front of her. Not just any Grays. Harper Arlington and Daniel Arlington IV. Darlington’s parents.
No one from Alex’s long list of enemies had a motive to see them dead.
No one but Darlington, little Danny left alone again and again. Heaven, to keep its beauty, cast them out, but even Hell would not receive them.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
Daniel’s eyes darted to the corner, as if he expected something to appear through the walls. “I don’t know.” Harper nodded in agreement.
“You can’t get out?” Alex asked. Grays never stayed with their bodies for long, not unless they had a reason. Like Hellie wanting to say goodbye.
The real Hellie who had loved her.
“He told us to stay.”
“Who?”
They said nothing.
Alex bent to look at the bodies. The cold had helped keep the corpses from rotting too badly, but they still smelled terrible. Gently, she rolled them over. There were gaping trenches carved into both of their chests. Claw marks. And they’d gone deep. Straight through the sternum, the ribs, leaving two dark, pulpy craters. He’d torn their hearts out.
“Who did this to you?”
Harper opened her mouth, closed it, like a marionette worked by a clumsy hand. “He was our son,” she said, “but not our son.”
Again, Daniel’s eyes slid to the corner. “He left that there. He said it could happen to us too. He said he would eat our lives.”
Alex didn’t want to know what was in the corner. The shadows seemed darker there, the cold deeper. She swung the light from her phone in that direction, but she couldn’t make sense of what she saw: A heap of wood curls? Scrap paper? It took her a moment to understand that she was looking at a body—the remnants of one. She was looking at someone who had been devoured, nothing left but a husk. Was that what Linus Reiter would have left of her? Was that what Darlington had started to do to Marjorie Stephen, leaving her withered and aged but still recognizable?
Alex knew it was pointless, but she tried calling Dawes. The screen hung on the number. Service at Black Elm was sketchy at best and nonexistent
underground. She cast the light from her screen up the steps again. What was waiting for her up there? Had Darlington tucked her away for a midnight snack? Was he still somehow tethered to Black Elm, or had he been creeping through New Haven to set his little murder scenes? It made a kind of sense.
Darlington had survived in hell as both demon and man. Some part of both of them had returned to the mortal world to sit in that golden circle. And some part of that demon boy still loved New Haven and its peculiar lore, would have known the story of the three judges, would have liked building a macabre scavenger hunt for her and Turner.
But did it really add up? Had his desperation all been an act? Was he more demon than man? Had he always been?
Whatever he was, he didn’t really know what she could do, that she might be weak and injured but that the things he’d left to terrify her were going to be weapons in her hands. Her ribs ached every time she breathed, and her shoulder was throbbing where she’d connected with the stairs, but she’d had worse. Even so, the door up there was heavy enough that she wasn’t going to be able to kick her way through on her own. She touched her wrist where the salt star marked the place the snake had entered her. She could only hope it was ready to strike.
“Who wants to help get us out of here?” she asked the Grays.
“You can bring us back to life?” Daniel asked.
So the Arlington brains had skipped a generation.
“No,” she said. “But I can at least make sure you don’t spend eternity in a basement.”
“I’ll go,” said Harper.
“Don’t leave me alone down here!” Daniel cried.
“Fuck it,” said Alex, though she had no idea if what she was about to do was even possible. “Everybody into the pool.”
She held out her hands and Darlington’s parents rushed into her. It felt like she was standing in a crowded party, a hundred voices shouting, the noise unbearable. She tasted crisp champagne on her tongue, smelled clove, tuberose, amber. Caron Poivre. The name of the scent arrived in her head, the vision of a bottle on a dressing table, a glass grenade. She saw her lean face in the mirror; a little boy was playing on the floor in the reflection, dark
hair, serious eyes. He was always watching her, always needing something from her, the longing in him exhausted her.
Then she was walking the grounds at Black Elm. They were tidier, green and lush in the heat of summer. She was watching an old man walk with that same little boy, a short distance up the path. He loved them both. He hated them both. He hated his own father, his own son. If he could just get a foothold, if he could just find his way to a little luck, he wouldn’t have to feel like this, like a nobody, when he was an Arlington.
Alex gave her head a shake. She felt like she was drowning in selfloathing. “The two of you really need to think about how you want to spend your afterlife. I recommend therapy.”
She glanced at the corpses on the ground. She remembered Darlington in the dream, human and heartbroken. I don’t know how to not love them.
Apparently he’d figured it out.
Then she was racing up the stairs. The sense of strength in her was almost too much, as if her body couldn’t contain the force. She didn’t feel the pain in her shoulder or her ribs anymore. Her heart beat loudly in her ears. She took the stairs two at a time, threw her arms up to protect her face, and crashed through the bolted door.
Alex heard someone scream and saw Michael Anselm crouching by the open back door, his face white, his eyes wide with terror.
“Alex?” he squeaked.
