“Because I was one of them. I was a demon feeding on the suffering of the dead.” He’d meant to say it easily, casually. Instead the words emerged haltingly and stinking of confession.
“Am I supposed to be shocked and horrified?”
“That I engaged in a kind of emotional cannibalism to survive? That I ate pain and enjoyed it? I’d think even you might be troubled by that.”
“You’ve been in my head now,” she said. “Did you get a look at the things I did to survive this life?”
“Glimpses,” he admitted. A string of bleak moments, a deep and desperate ocean, Hellie shining like a golden coin, her grandmother glowing like a banked ember, her mother … a disaster, a cloud, a tangle of frayed yarn, a mess of pity and longing and anger and love.
“We do what we have to,” Alex said. “That’s the only job of a survivor.”
A strange benediction, but one he was grateful for. He folded his hands, debating his next words, unwilling to let them remain unspoken. “What if I told you that some part of me still hungers after suffering?”
Alex didn’t flinch. Of course she didn’t. It wasn’t in her repertoire.
“I’d tell you to keep your shit together, Darlington. We all want things we shouldn’t.”
He wondered if she really understood what he was. If she did, she might run from this room. But it wouldn’t be a worry for long, not after the descent.
Until then, he could make sure the demon didn’t slip its leash.
“You need to accept that hell is going to try to keep one of us,” he said.
“It will be me, Stern. I was never meant to leave.”
He wasn’t sure what he expected: Laughter? Tears? A heroic demand that she take his place in hell? He had lost track of who was Dante, Virgil, Beatrice. Was he Orpheus or Eurydice?
But all Alex did was lean back in her chair and cast him a skeptical glance.
“So after we fought and bled to drag you out of hell, you think we’re going to just bring you back like a foster dog who shit on the carpet?”
“I wouldn’t put it—”
Alex rose and tossed back his glass of his expensive Armagnac like it was a dollar shot on ladies’ night at Toad’s. “Fuck off, Darlington.” She strode to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To the armory to talk to Turner. Then I have some calls to make. You know your problem?”
“A predilection for first editions and women who like to lecture me about myself?”
“An unhealthy respect for the rules. Get some sleep.”
She vanished down the dark hall, there and gone, like some kind of magic trick.
41
Alex didn’t fall asleep until the early hours of the morning. There was too much to plan, and her time with Darlington had left her buzzing at some uncomfortable frequency that made sleep impossible. She had been talking to him in her head so long, it should have been easy to sit and hold a conversation. But they were not the same people anymore, student and teacher, apprentice and master. Before, knowledge had flowed one way between them. Power had rested in his hands alone. But now that power was in motion, constantly shifting, bumping up against their understanding of each other, confused by the mysteries that remained, falling into the shadowed places where that understanding failed. It seemed to fill the house, a coil of hellfire that ran through the halls and up the stairs, a lit fuse. Yale and Lethe had belonged to Darlington, but now they were playing on a wider stage, and Alex wasn’t yet sure what role either of them were meant to fill.
She had barely dozed off when she was woken by Dawes shaking her shoulder.
At the sight of her panicked face Alex bolted upright. “What is it?”
“The Praetor’s coming.”
“Here?” Alex asked as she leapt out of bed and pulled on the only clean clothes she had—Lethe sweats. “Now?”
“I was making lunch when he called. I told Mercy to stay upstairs. He wants to go over preparations for the wolf run. Didn’t you email him?”
“I did!” She’d sent her notes, links to her research, along with a fourhundred-word apology for being unprepared at their last meeting and a declaration of her loyalty to Lethe. Maybe she’d overdone it. “Where’s Darlington?”
“He and Turner went to Tripp’s apartment.”
Alex drew her fingers through her hair, trying to make it respectable.
“And?”
“No one answered the door, but the salt knot at the entry was still undisturbed.”
“That’s good, right? Maybe he’s just hunkering down with his family or
—”
“If we don’t have Tripp, we won’t be able to lure his demon back to hell.”
They would have to face that problem later.
They were halfway down the stairs when they heard the front door open.
