“I don’t smell smoke.”

So what was making that dancing light?

It didn’t matter. If Darlington were here, standing at this threshold, he wouldn’t hesitate. He’d be the knight. He’d be a lot better prepared, but he’d walk up those stairs. Protect your own. Pay your debts.

“I’m going up, Dawes. You can stay here. I won’t hold it against you.”

She meant it. But Dawes followed anyway.

They plunged past the brightly lit kitchen and into the dark. Alex never explored Black Elm’s other rooms when she came to feed Cosmo or pick up the mail. They were too silent, too still. It felt like walking through a bombed-out church.

Dawes paused at the bottom of the grand staircase. “Alex—”

“I know.”

Sulfur. Not as powerful as it had been at Scroll and Key but unmistakable.

Alex felt a cold bead of sweat roll down her neck. They could turn back, try to arm themselves better, get help, call Michelle Alameddine and tell her they’d gone ahead and done something stupid. But Alex felt like she couldn’t stop herself. She was the cannonball. She was the bullet. And the gun had gone off when Dawes had told her there’d been some kind of disturbance at the house. You want to open a door that isn’t meant to be opened. There was nothing to do but keep going.

At the top of the stairs, they paused again. That same golden light flickered in the hallway, filtering out from beneath the closed ballroom door.

She could hear Dawes breathing—in through the nose, out through the mouth—trying to calm herself as they approached the door. Alex reached for the handle and yanked her hand back with a hiss. It was hot to the touch.

“What did we do?” Dawes asked on a trembling breath.

Alex wrapped her shirt around her hand, grasped the handle, and pulled open the door.

The heat hit them in a gust, an oven door opening. The smell here wasn’t sulfuric; it was almost sweet, like wood burning.

The room was dusty, its boarded-up windows as sad as ever, the walls littered with weights and workout equipment. They hadn’t bothered to clean up the chalk circle they’d created for Sandow’s failed new moon ritual. No

one had wanted to return to the ballroom, to remember the hellbeast looming above them, the cries of murder, the horrible finality of it all.

Now Alex was grateful they’d all been such cowards. The chalk circle glowed golden, less a circle than a shimmering wall, and at its center, Daniel Tabor Arlington V sat cross-legged, naked as a baby in the bath. Two horns curled back from his forehead, their ridges gleaming as if shot through with molten gold, and his body was covered in bright markings. A wide golden collar ringed his neck, ornamented with rows of garnet and jade.

“Oh,” said Dawes, her eyes darting around the room as if afraid to let her gaze land anywhere, but finally settling in the far corner—the place most distant from the sight of Darlington’s cock, which was very erect and shining like a supercharged, oversized glowstick.

His eyes were closed and his hands rested lightly atop his knees, palms down, as if he were meditating.

“Darlington?” Alex choked out.

Nothing. The heat seemed to be radiating directly from him.

“Daniel?”

Dawes took a shuffling step forward, her Tevas smacking against the dusty floorboards, but Alex blocked her with an outstretched arm.

“Don’t,” she said. “We don’t even know if that’s him.” Whatever survived in hell wouldn’t be the Darlington you know.

Dawes looked helpless. “His hair grew out.”

It took a second for Alex to catch up, but Dawes was right. Darlington’s hair had always been kept tidy but not too tidy, as effortless as the rest of him.

Now it curled around his neck. Apparently there were no barbers in hell.

“He … he doesn’t look hurt,” Alex ventured. No scars, no bruises, all his limbs intact. But she knew that she and Dawes were thinking the same thing: that while they’d been trying to solve the mystery of how to get into hell and living their lives, watching TV, eating ice cream, and planning for the school year, Darlington had been alive and trapped, maybe being tortured, in hell.

Had she not quite believed it? Despite her talk of the gentleman demon?

Despite the arguments she’d made to Anselm and the board? Had some of her thought everyone else was right and that this ridiculous quest was just

another opportunity to throw herself into harm’s way and appease her own guilt over his death?

But here he was. Or someone who looked very much like him.

“The circle is binding him,” Dawes said. “It’s Sandow’s old casting.”

Hear the silence of an empty home. No one will be made welcome. When Sandow had realized Darlington might be alive on the other side, he’d used the last moments of the ritual to ban him from Black Elm and the living world.

Dawes tilted her head to one side. “I think he’s trapped.” Then it was as if she had woken from sleep. She looked almost panicked. “We have to find a way to get him out.”

Alex cast a glance at the horned and naked creature sitting in what her mother would have praised as a very fine sukhasana pose. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

But Dawes was already striding toward the circle. She reached for it.

“Dawes—”

As soon as her hand broke the perimeter of the circle, Dawes screamed.

She stumbled backward, clutching her fingers to her chest.

Alex lunged for her, pulling her away. The smell of sulfur overwhelmed her again and she had to struggle not to gag. She crouched beside Dawes and forced her to release her wrist. Dawes’s fingertips were singed black. Alex remembered Cosmo howling out of the kitchen. He’d tried to cross the circle too. He’d tried to get to Darlington.

“Come on,” Alex said. “I’m getting you back to Il Bastone. There’s got to be some kind of potion or balm or something there, right?”

“We can’t leave him,” Dawes protested as Alex dragged her to her feet.

Darlington sat silent and unmoving like some kind of golden idol.

“He’s not going anywhere.”

“It’s our fault. If I had finished the ritual, if the portal—”

“Dawes,” Alex said, giving her a shake. “That’s not how this works.

Sandow sent the hellbeast—”

A low growl rumbled through the room. Darlington hadn’t moved, but there was no question that sound had come from him. Alex felt a shiver pass over her.