He shook his head. “No. I’m actually very fond of due process. But you know Alex—she sees an opening, she’s going to wiggle through it like a window.”
“An apt description.” We do what we have to. That’s the only job of a survivor.
“She told me Eitan was a soldier for evil.”
Darlington cast Turner a disbelieving glance. “That doesn’t sound like Alex Stern.”
“She was quoting me. Soldiers for good, soldiers for evil. I know you won’t agree, but as far as I’m concerned, this was always about keeping the devil down. She kept telling me it was bullshit. Until last night.”
“And then?”
“Then she said, ‘But what if I’m wrong?’”
Now Darlington laughed. “That’s Alex Stern.”
Turner tapped the steering wheel as he navigated the near empty streets.
“I’m going to be honest with you. That’s not really what changed my mind either.”
Darlington waited. He didn’t know Turner well, but it was easy to see he wasn’t a man who liked to be rushed.
“I picked her up in Darien,” Turner went on at last, “the night Harel sent her to take on Linus Reiter. She was … I’ve seen her trade punches with a guy twice her size. I’ve seen her nearly get her skull split by a frat boy looking for revenge. But I’ve never seen her scared like that.”
When they reached Black Elm, Darlington unlocked the kitchen door and they rolled Eitan’s body down the stairs into the basement. The home he loved had become a tomb. He wondered what his grandfather made out of the carnage, or the fact that his grandson had abandoned this noble pile of rock. For the time being, at least. He wasn’t sure what they were going to do with all of those corpses, or what kind of burial he owed his parents. What would it mean if they just disappeared? And what about Anselm’s family?
It was too easy to vanish. He’d done it himself. And who had there been to seek him out? Dawes and Alex, Turner and Tripp. What life could he put together from what was left?
Darlington called to Cosmo, hoping the cat would make an appearance and he could offer some gift of gratitude, tribute in the form of tuna fish. But it seemed he would just have to be patient. Like all cats, Cosmo would arrive when he wanted to and not a moment before.
Turner helped Darlington lean the basement door against the jamb once more. Then there was nothing to do but turn their backs on the dead.
Darlington slept for the first time since he had been restored to this world, for the first time in over a year. He had never been allowed to sleep in hell or to dream. No rest for the wicked had turned out to be a very literal proposition.
He dreamed he was back in hell, a demon once more, a creature of appetite and nothing else. He knelt again at Golgarot’s throne, but this time, when he raised his head, it was Alex who gazed down at him, her naked body bathed in blue flames, a crown of silver fire at her brow.
“I will serve you ’til the end of days,” he
promised. In the dream she laughed. “And love me
too.” Her eyes were black and full of stars.
He woke at noon, his body aching. Sluggish and miserable, he showered and dressed in the jeans and sweater he’d packed in his grandfather’s old leather bag. He couldn’t seem to get warm.
“Hell hangover,” Alex explained when she saw him. She was sitting in the parlor, one leg curled beneath her, still in Lethe sweats, a book of Hart Crane’s poetry open in her lap—reading for one of her classes, he presumed.
It pleased him too much to see her there, easy on the velvet couch, hair tucked behind her ears. “Dawes made breakfast soup.”
From scratch, of course. The perfect cure. He ate two bowls of changua with fresh cilantro, little toasts topped with poached egg floating in the milky broth. His mind was beginning to clear enough to think of something other than survival. He supposed he’d have to reenroll. Lethe would help him.
Assuming he was still considered a member of Lethe.
“Where’s Mercy?” he asked.
Alex kept her eyes on her book. “I walked her back to JE this morning.”
“Is she okay?”
“She wanted to talk to her pastor and have lunch with Lauren. She needs a little normal.”
Unfortunately, normal was in very short supply.
After breakfast, he went to the armory and spent an hour digging through the drawers and cabinets. They needed to deal with the bodies in the Black Elm basement. He considered trying the library, but he couldn’t quite bear to find the right phrase for the Albemarle Book. How to dispose of a body. How to dispose of your mother’s remains. It was all too bleak. What he really needed to know was how to grieve for people he had done his best to stop loving years ago. His parents had come and gone from his life like unexpected gaps in the clouds, and if he had spent his days waiting for those brief hours of sunlight, he would have withered and died.
Briefly he considered the Tayyaara, a “magic carpet” that really could take you anywhere by simply opening a portal beneath it. But the destination had to be woven into the design, and anyone who had the skill for such things was long gone, so the weave had remained unchanged, and the carpet could take you only one place: a catacomb beneath Vijayanagar. For several hundred years, it had served as a kind of unofficial dumping ground for unwanted objects and people. He didn’t know if what he felt for his parents was duty or love or the memory of love, but he couldn’t toss them on some ancient garbage pile.
Alex and Dawes found him sitting on the floor of the armory, surrounded by glittering artifacts and bits of ephemera, stuck. The boy with the rock in his hand, forever trying to build something that had long ago been lost. They helped him put everything back in its proper place, and then they drove to Black Elm.
The whole house was beginning to smell. Or maybe he just knew what was waiting for them as they shuffled the door to the basement aside and stared down into the dark.
“Do you … want to say anything?” Alex asked.
He wasn’t sure. “Is my grandfather here?”
“He’s in the kitchen with Dawes.”
