Alex thought of her mother walking down the street, shining with hope. But Alex was always in shadow.
She wanted to tell her mother to go away for a few days, to go stay with Andrea, but she couldn’t do that without panicking her. And if she failed tonight, none of it would matter anyway.
Alex checked her phone. Still no message from Turner. She wasn’t going to call, wasn’t going to risk tipping the scales the wrong way. What she’d asked him to do wasn’t exactly criminal, but it also wasn’t anywhere close to honest, and Turner’s virtuous streak was too wide for her comfort.
“Just what are you planning?” he’d asked when she’d found him in the armory the previous night.
“Do you really want to know?”
He’d taken a long moment to consider, then said, “Absolutely not.”
Without another word, he’d lain back down and pulled the blanket over his head.
“But you’ll do what I asked?” she had insisted. “You’ll make the call?”
“Go to bed, Stern,” was all he said.
Now she looked down at her phone and dialed Tripp’s number for the twentieth time that day. No answer. How many people would be dead before this was over? How many more bodies would float in her wake?
Alex hesitated, the phone in her hand. The next call might save her or quite literally damn her.
Eitan picked up on the first ring. “Alex! How are you? You go to see Reiter?”
Alex kept her eyes on the glass moon. “This is a courtesy call. I’m done being your errand girl. I’m going to work for Linus Reiter.”
“Don’t be silly. Reiter is no good. He—”
“You can’t stop him. You don’t have a weapon in your arsenal that can.”
“What you say is very serious, Alex.”
“I’m going to tell him every last thing about your organization and your associates.”
“Your mother—”
“Mira is under his protection.” Or she could be.
“I’m in New York. Come see me. We talk. We make a new deal.”
Alex had no doubt she would not return from that meeting.
“No hard feelings, Eitan.”
“Alex, you—”
She hung up. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. Shakespeare again. One of the strippers back at the King King Club had the quote tattooed
above her pubic bone. Alex had been jumping to do Eitan’s bidding for months. It was time for him to be afraid. It was time for him to come running.
Reiter was the devil the other devils couldn’t best, the one they warned each other about.
“You’re up to something, Stern,” Darlington said as they packed for the wolf run later that night. “I can tell.”
“Just keep your head down and don’t let anything try to kill me.” “It’s my price to pay,” he warned her.
“It’s Sandow’s price. You didn’t end up in hell because you did something wrong.”
“But I did.”
Alex took stock of the contents of the duffel: salt, silver rings, and a silver dagger for good measure. “We can debate this when we’re done. Dawes will take notes. We can bind them up and put them in the Lethe library. Stern’s Daemonologie.”
“Arlington’s Daemonologie. Aren’t you going to valiantly offer to stay in hell in my place?”
“Fuck off.”
“I did miss you, Stern.”
“Did you?” She hadn’t meant to ask, but the words were out before she could stop them.
“As much as an unholy fiend without human feeling could.” That almost made her laugh.
No, Alex wasn’t about to volunteer for an eternity of anguish. She didn’t have the makings of a hero. But she wasn’t leaving Darlington down there again. Hell’s price must be paid. All that meant was hell was no different from any other place. There was always a price and someone to pay it. And someone was always on the take.
When they left Il Bastone to meet with the Wolf’s Head delegation at Sleeping Giant, she felt a kind of ease, as if the thread that bound them now had drawn tight, as if no demon would dare to face them together.
I will serve you ’til the end of days. Had that been a dream or some kind of prediction? Had Alex, like her grandmother, somehow looked into the future to this moment? Even if she had, that gave her no greater insight into
what it meant, or those golden shackles at Darlington’s wrists, or the disturbing comfort it brought her to know she could call and he would come running. Gentleman demon. A creature even the dead had feared.
