After a long moment, Alex held out the cereal box. An odd peace offering, but he took it, dipped his arm in, tossed a handful of puffs into his mouth.
Immediately he regretted it.
“Good God, Stern,” he gasped as he spat into the kitchen sink and rinsed the remnants away. “Are you eating pure sugar?”
Alex crammed another handful of garbage into her mouth. “Pretty sure there’s some corn syrup too. And real fruit flavoring. We can stock up on your nuts-and-twigs stuff … if you want to stay here.”
Darlington wasn’t ready to make any decisions about the house. About anything. “I’ll sleep at Il Bastone tonight.” He didn’t want to say what came next, but he made himself form the words. “I need to see their bodies.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “Their car is in the garage.”
“Golgarot must have put it there.” The name felt wrong on his human tongue, as if he was speaking with a tourist’s accent.
“I only knew him as Anselm. His— The real Anselm’s husk is down there too.”
“You don’t have to go with me.”
“Good.”
Darlington was tempted to laugh. Alex Stern had gone to hell twice for him, but the basement was a step too far. He dug in a drawer for a flashlight and headed down the steps.
The smell struck him, but he’d known that was coming. He wasn’t prepared for the way the bodies had been mutilated.
He paused on the stairs. He’d meant to … He wasn’t certain what he’d intended. To close their eyes gently? To speak some words of comfort?
He’d spent three years studying death words, but he still had nothing to say. All he could think of were the words emblazoned on every piece of Lethe House ephemera.
“Mors vincit omnia,” he whispered. It was all he had to offer. He’d been washed up on a familiar shore, but the sea had changed him. Grief would have to wait.
He turned his flashlight on what had been the body of Michael Anselm, a man he’d met only briefly when he was a freshman being inducted into Lethe as the new Dante. Exactly how were they going to explain a dead board member? That would have to wait too.
He climbed the stairs. The basement door had come off its hinges, and he leaned it carefully against the jamb, the boulder at the door to the tomb.
Alex had returned the cursed cereal to its cupboard and was leaning on the counter looking at her phone, her hair a black sheaf, a dark winter river.
“I need to know what to tell Dawes,” she said. “Anselm avoided her cameras, but she knows I’m here and she knows the ballroom camera is offline. Are you ready to be back?”
“I don’t know that it matters. Perhaps it would be best to explain in person.” He hesitated, but there was no reason not to ask. “Did you see them?
My parents? After…”
She nodded. “They helped get me out of the basement.”
“Do they think I killed them?”
“Sort of?”
“Are they here now?”
Alex shook her head. Of course not. He knew better than that. Grays rarely returned to the scene of their deaths. Contrary to most popular fiction, ghosts didn’t come back to haunt their murderers. They wanted to be reminded of places and people they loved, human pleasures. It took a vengeful and dedicated spirit to haunt someone, and neither of his parents had that kind of drive.
And they would have wanted to be far from Golgarot. The dead feared demons because they promised pain when the pain should be over. They’d been very frightened of Darlington indeed.
Alex drew her coat more tightly closed. “The old man is here.”
“My grandfather?”
“I can hear him. I can hear all of them now.”
Darlington tried not to show his surprise, his curiosity, his envy. How could this scrap of a girl have so much power? How could she see into the hidden world that had evaded him for so long? And after a year in hell, why did he still give a damn?
“They never shut up,” she added.
She’s trusting me, he told himself. Alex was handing him knowledge that he knew, with complete certainty, Lethe didn’t have. Another offering. He found he was as greedy for her trust as her power. He pushed those thoughts away.
“What is he saying?”
Now Alex’s eyes shifted uneasily to the toes of her boots. “He says to be free. That you’ve given up enough blood to this place. It’s yours to take or leave. It always should have been.”
Darlington snorted. “You’re lying. What did he really say?”
Alex shrugged and met his eyes. “That Black Elm needs you more than ever, that this is your home by right of blood and treasure, and a lot of rambling about the Arlington legacy.”
“That sounds much more like him.” He paused, studying her. “You know what happened here, don’t you? What I did? Why I survived the hellbeast?”
Alex didn’t look away. “I know.”
“I always wondered if I’d done the right thing.”
