“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.
“He told us that,” Alex said. “But it’s impossible. He’s a demon. He couldn’t get past the wards. It’s why he didn’t take us to the Hutch the night he banished us from Lethe.”
Darlington nodded. “He’d set up an early-warning system. Hell is vast.
He couldn’t guard every entry. But he knew where you were headed, and once the alarm was tripped, he knew you’d found me.”
Turner drew in a breath. “The wolves.”
“That’s right. He’d set them to watch over Black Elm.”
“They were demons,” said Alex, the realization like a slap. “They became our demons.”
Four wolves for four pilgrims. They’d all drawn blood when they’d attacked, all gotten a taste of their human terror. Alex remembered the wolves burning like comets as they’d fled hell. The demons had followed them into the mortal realm.
“Golgarot stopped the ritual,” Mercy said. “He made me turn off the metronome.”
“But he didn’t step into the courtyard.” Alex remembered him hovering beneath Dürer’s magic square. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to risk seeing it or getting caught up in the puzzle.
“He wasn’t going to let you take me out of hell,” Darlington said. “He intended to strand you there with me.”
“But Alex got us out,” Turner said.
Alex shifted in her seat. “And left the door open for our demons to follow us through.”
“I don’t understand,” Dawes said. “Why are there no warnings about the Gauntlet in the Lethe library? Why are there no records of its construction, of what happened to the first pilgrims who walked it, of Lionel Reiter?”
“I don’t know,” Darlington admitted. “It wouldn’t be the first cover-up in Lethe’s history.”
Alex met Dawes’s gaze. They knew that well enough. Lethe’s members, its board, the few in the Yale administration who knew the true occupation of the secret societies, had a long history of sweeping all kinds of atrocities under the rug. Magical casualties, mysterious power outages, strange disappearances, the map in the Peabody basement. Everyone had believed Daniel Arlington was in Spain for most of last semester, and almost no one knew Elliot Sandow had turned out to be a murderer. There were no consequences, not if you just kept finding new places to bury your mistakes.
Mercy had set her red notebook next to her soup bowl and she was drawing a series of concentric circles in it. “So they covered it up. But Lionel Reiter became a vampire. We don’t even know what happened to the other pilgrims or their sentinel. Why leave the Gauntlet intact if they knew how dangerous it was?”
There was silence then, because no one had the answer, but they all knew the truth couldn’t be good. Something had gone wrong on that first journey, something bad enough that the Gauntlet had been wiped from the books and Rudolph Kittscher’s diary had been hidden or destroyed. It might just be that Reiter had been followed by a demon, that Lethe was responsible for creating a vampire. But then why not hunt him? Why leave him to prey on innocent people for nearly a hundred years?
“Could I go alone?” Alex asked. She didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to do it. But they might be down one pilgrim, and the longer they waited, the worse it was going to get. “I don’t need the Gauntlet. Why can’t I just walk back through that circle and find some way to drag our demons with me?”
“That’s awfully self-sacrificing,” said Turner. He glanced at Darlington.
“She fall on her head?”
