Alex saw fear in his eyes and it was like a drug to her. “All is well.”
Anselm released her wrist with a furious roar. She could see her blood coating his chin. Alex thrust the dreck of his spirit out of her and plunged into the water, terrified that at any minute she would feel his grip on her ankle, dragging her back.
Her lungs ached for air, but she kept kicking, kept swimming, desperate to see light ahead. There—a spark, then another. She was soaring upward through a sea of stars. She burst through the surface and breathed in the cold air of a winter night.
Alex tried to get her bearings. They were in the courtyard at Sterling. Tzvi was gone—probably chased away by the sight of Darlington in fullhorned demon glory—and Eitan’s body lay facedown in the mud. She heard the ticking of the metronome come to an abrupt stop.
Something was blurring her vision—flurries of white. It had started to snow. She counted her friends—Mercy, Turner, Dawes, and Darlington, her gentleman demon. Their ramshackle army, all of them soaked and shivering, all of them safe and whole. Above them the Weaver’s web glimmered still, fragile in its architecture, weighted with frost and sorrow.
Dunbar dragged a tramp in from the railway station last night, sooty asa coal can and dressed in clothes so dirty they could stand on their own.
Claimed he had the Sight. Rudy said it was a waste of time and I wasinclined to agree. The man stank of cheap gin and had all the markingsof a charlatan. He babbled on about long journeys and great wealth, thefortune-teller’s usual stock in trade. His speech was so slurred I couldbarely make his words out, until at last Dunbar got bored and put us outof our misery.
I wouldn’t even remark on the whole sorry business, only—and Iput this down so that I may laugh at my own milk-liveredhandwringing later—when Dunbar told him it was time to go andslipped a fiver in his pocket, the tramp claimed he’d not yet said whatneeded saying. His eyes rolled back a bit—base theatrics—and then hesaid,
“Beware.”
Rudy laughs and asks, quite naturally, “Beware of what, you oldfraud?”
“Them that walks among us. Nightdrinkers, moonspeakers, allsthem that dwell in the dead and empty. Best watch for them, lads. Bestbar the doors against them when they come.” He wasn’t slurring then.
His voice was clear as a bell and it boomed through the hall. Raised thehair on my arms, I’ll tell you.
Well, Rudy and Dunbar were done with it. They hauled himoutside, and sent him packing, and Rudy gave him a kick for goodmeasure. I felt badly about it and thought I should slip him anotherfiver. No doubt we’ll laugh about all of it tomorrow.
—Lionel Reiter, Skull and Bones Commonplace Book, 1933
45
Darlington couldn’t quite put together the moments after the descent. He remembered snow falling, the dreary weight of his sodden clothes on his body. They were all tired and shaken, but they couldn’t simply drag themselves home. There was too much evidence to dispose of. When he’d stepped into the mouth of the hellbeast, he’d been a man who followed rules, who believed he understood his world and its workings. But as he was not quite human any longer, he supposed a more flexible approach to morality was called for.
There were books scattered around the Linonia and Brothers Room. One of the tables had been knocked over. The demons had crashed through the eastern-facing windows, destroying an image of St. Mark at work on his gospels in the process, then smashed straight through the windows leading to the courtyard. There was nothing to be done about the damage. There was restoration magic they could use, but all of it was long and painstaking. It hurt Darlington to leave Sterling in such a state, but when the university reported the vandalism, Lethe could offer use of the crucible and whatever else they could find in the armory. For now, they just had to remove any sign of the uncanny.
It was easy enough to return the spiders to the spindle with another prick of Mercy’s finger, but the web above the courtyard still hung thick with melancholy. It took them the better part of an hour to pull it down with a broom they borrowed from the janitor’s closet, and transfer it into the waters of the basin, where they watched it dissolve. They were all weeping uncontrollably by the time they were rid of the damned thing.
They had left the body for last. Eitan Harel lay facedown in the mud and melting snow.
Turner retrieved his Dodge and waited for them by the York Street entrance. The tempest Dawes had brewed was still hot enough to manage the
cameras, but there was nothing magical or arcane about the act of putting a corpse in a trunk. It was a cold act, ugly in its transformation: the body made cargo. Mercy hung back, clutching her salt sword, as if it might ward against the truth of what they’d done.
“You said you weren’t going to help clean up our messes,” Alex noted when the work was finished, and they piled into the Dodge, damp and weary, dawn still hours away.
Turner only shrugged and gunned the engine. “This is my mess too.”
The door to Il Bastone sprang open before they reached the top of the steps.
The lights were on, the old radiators pumping heat through every room. In the kitchen, Dawes had lined up thermoses of leftover avgolemono that they drank in greedy swallows. There were plates of tomato sandwiches and hot tea spiked with brandy.
They stood at the kitchen counter, eating in silence, too tired and battered to talk. Darlington couldn’t help but think of how rarely the dining room at Il Bastone had been used, of how few meals he’d shared with Michelle Alameddine or Dean Sandow, of how few conversations he’d had with Detective Abel Turner. They’d let Lethe atrophy, let its secrecy and ritual make them strangers to each other. Or maybe that was the way Lethe had always been intended to function, toothless and powerless, bumbling along with a sense of their own importance, a sop to the university while the societies did as they pleased.
At last, Mercy set her mug down and said, “Is it done?”
The girl was brave, but tonight had been too much for her. The magic, the spells, the strange objects had all been a kind of play. Now she had helped to kill a man, and the weight of that was no easy thing to carry, no matter the justification. Darlington knew that well.
Alex had warned them that there would be a moment when she needed their defense, when she would ask them to fight for her without question.
They’d done it—because they were desperate, and because for all their noble protestations, none of them wanted to suffer for eternity. Mercy had been
eager to go along with the plan, to wear her salt armor, to face a very human monster. Maybe she regretted that now.
But this was not the time to be gentle.
“It’s not over,” he said. “There are more demons left to kill.” Maybe there always would be.
Alex was weak from all the blood she’d lost, so Dawes applied balm to the wound Anselm had left at her wrist, then took her upstairs to drop her into a bath of goat milk in the crucible. They had a kind of easy routine of caretaking that Darlington didn’t quite understand and that made him feel like a child left out of a game. So he would make himself useful instead.
He went with Turner back to Black Elm.
“I can’t believe I’m a wheelman for a demon,” Turner muttered as he pulled out of the Il Bastone lot.
“Part demon,” Darlington corrected. They drove without talking for a while, but eventually he asked, “How did Alex get you to go along with this anyway?”
“She came to see me last night,” said Turner. “I didn’t want to do it. She was asking me to use my badge to set up a murder. Then I took a look at Eitan Harel’s record.”
“That convinced you?”
