“Look,” said Dawes, her voice barely a breath.
Alex was already looking. They’d boarded up the windows on the second floor after Dean Sandow had deliberately botched his ritual to bring
Darlington home. A faint light shone through the edges, soft, flickering amber.
Dawes parked the car outside of the garage. Her hands gripped the steering wheel, white-knuckled. “It might be nothing.”
“Then it’s nothing,” said Alex, pleased with how steady she sounded.
“Stop trying to strangle the steering wheel and let’s go.”
They both shut their car doors gently, and Alex realized it was because they were afraid to disturb what might be waiting upstairs. There was a chill in the air, the first hint of the end of summer and the autumn to come. There would be no more fireflies, no more drinks on the porch or sounds of tag played late into the night.
Alex unlocked the kitchen door, and Dawes gasped as Cosmo sprang from behind the cupboards, screeching past them into the yard.
Alex thought her heart might leap straight out of her rib cage. “For fuck’s sake, cat.”
Dawes held her satchel to her chest as if it were some kind of talisman.
“Did you see his fur?”
One side of Cosmo’s white fur looked like it had been singed black. Alex wanted to make some kind of excuse. Cosmo was always getting into trouble, showing up with a new scar or covered in brambles, jaws clamped around a poor murdered mouse. But she couldn’t force her mouth to make the words.
Before they’d left Il Bastone, they’d stopped in the Lethe armory for more salt, and they’d brought the silver chains. They seemed silly and useless, toys for children, old wives’ tales.
Dawes hovered at the kitchen door as if it were the actual portal to hell.
“We could call Michelle or…”
“Anselm? If we summoned some kind of monster, do you really want to tell him?”
“It’s pretty quiet for a monster.”
“Maybe it’s a giant snake.”
“Why did you have to say that?”
“It’s not a snake,” Alex said. “It could still be nothing. Or … an electrical fire or something.”
“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.
