“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.
“I don’t think he likes that,” whispered Dawes.
Is it you? Alex wanted to ask. She wanted to try charging straight through that circle. Would she end in a heap of cinders? A pile of salt? And what was waiting on the other side of that shimmering veil? Darlington? Or something wearing his skin?
“Come on,” she said, herding Dawes out of the ballroom and down the stairs. She didn’t want to leave him, but she didn’t want to be in that room a minute longer.
Alex was locking up the kitchen door when her phone buzzed. She drew it from her pocket, keeping one eye on Dawes, one on the light from the boarded-up windows above. She hesitated when she saw the name on her screen.
“It’s Turner,” she said, pushing Dawes toward the car.
“Detective Turner?” Call me.
Alex scowled and replied: You call me. Remember how?
She didn’t know why she was bitter. She hadn’t heard from Turner in months. She’d understood he was angry after the dean’s death, but she’d thought he liked her and that they’d managed some pretty good investigating together. To her surprise her phone rang almost immediately.
She’d been sure Turner would ignore her. He didn’t like to be told.
Alex put the detective on speaker.
