The question hung between them in the car, another passenger, a ghost along for the ride. Alex considered just telling him. What would it feel like to be free of the secret of that night? What would it mean to have an ally against Eitan?
She watched the light from the highway splashing bright, then dark across Turner’s profile. She liked him. He was brave, and he was willing to stroll into the underworld to rescue someone he hadn’t particularly liked just because he believed it was right. But a cop was a cop.
“What happened to those people back in Los Angeles?” he pushed.
“Helen Watson. Your boyfriend Leonard Beacon. Mitchell Betts. Cameron Aust. Dave Corcoran. Ariel Harel.”
The same thing that happens to anyone who gets close to me.
Alex studied the road slipping by, caught a glimpse of someone studying the screen of his phone against the steering wheel, a billboard for some band playing at Foxwoods in November, another for an accident attorney. She didn’t like the way Turner had rattled off those names. Like he knew her file inside out.
“It’s funny,” she said at last. “People talk about life and death as if there’s some kind of ticking clock.”
“There isn’t?”
Alex shook her head slowly. “That tick tick tick isn’t a clock. It’s a bomb.
There’s no countdown. It just goes off and everything changes.” She rubbed her thumb over a spot of blood on her jeans. “But I don’t think hell is a pit full of sinners and a guy with horns playing bouncer.”
“You believe what you need to, Stern. But I know what I saw when I walked into that room back at Black Elm.”
“What?” Alex asked, though some part of her desperately didn’t want to know.
“The devil,” said Turner. “The devil trying to make his way out.”
22
Alex was glad Dawes wasn’t at Il Bastone.
She let herself in, grateful for the house, its wards, its quiet. It was nearly 8 p.m. Only a few hours had passed since she’d set out for Old Greenwich.
The lights flickered and soft music floated through the halls, as if Il Bastone knew she’d been through something terrible.
She washed Reiter’s blood off the brass knuckles in the kitchen sink, returned them to their drawer in the armory, then dug through the cabinets to find the balm Dawes had used on her feet the night she’d sleepwalked to Black Elm. The schoolteacher had lent her enough strength to escape, but it was Alex’s body that had taken the punishment. She was cut up and bruised, her lungs hurt, and her whole body throbbed from her run across county lines.
In the Dante bedroom, she set out the first aid supplies she’d purchased on the pretty writing desk and then headed to the bathroom to peel back her bandage.
The wound on her neck was already closing, and there was no fresh blood.
It shouldn’t have healed up so fast. Did that mean he actually had pierced her jugular and it had just started healing right away? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. She wanted to forget Linus Reiter and his angelic face and all of that pain and fear. She could feel his teeth sliding into her, his grip on her skull, the knowledge that she was nothing but food, a cup he held to his lips, a vessel to be emptied.
She hadn’t been afraid, truly afraid, in a long time. If she was honest, she had enjoyed facing off against Darlington’s parents, Oddman, the new Praetor. When Dawes had summoned a herd of fire-breathing horses from hell, she’d been scared but okay. She liked forgetting about everything except the fight in front of her.
But those had been fights she could win. She wasn’t strong enough to beat Linus Reiter any more than she was clever enough to get out from under Eitan Harel’s thumb. They were the same man. Linus would have happily drunk her dry and planted her in his backyard to feed the roses. Eitan would just keep using her, sending her on jobs until she didn’t come back.
She rubbed balm into the wound, replaced the bandage, and looked for a clean pair of Lethe sweats. She’d forgotten to bring back the last couple of pairs to be laundered, so she had to go up to the Virgil bedroom to pillage Darlington’s closet. They were too long and too baggy, but they were clean.
Her next stop was the Lethe library. She drew the Albemarle Book from the shelf outside, ignoring the faint screams and the puff of brimstone that emerged from its pages. The book held the memory of whatever had been researched last, and Dawes had clearly been studying some version of the underworld.
Alex drew a pen from the wicker table beside the shelf, then hesitated.
She knew she needed to be very specific in her request. Vampires were all over folklore and fiction, and she didn’t want to have to sort through what was myth and what might actually be useful. Also, if you were too vague with the library, the walls started shaking, and there was a good chance it might cave in entirely. Maybe she should start smaller.
She scrawled, Linus Reiter, and returned the book to its place. The shelf rattled gently, and when it had settled, Alex let it swing open to the library.
There were more than a dozen books on the shelves, but as Alex sorted through them, she realized most were focused on the Reiter family and their grand home in Old Greenwich, Sweetwell. The Reiters were German immigrants and had made their money manufacturing boilers and water heaters. Sweetwell and its surrounding land had always passed from one Reiter heir to the next, but Alex suspected they were all the same man.
She was surprised to see one of Arnold Guyot Dana’s scrapbooks on the library shelf, a fat volume bound in navy blue, Yale: Old and New emblazoned in gold on its spine. Darlington had been obsessed with the scrapbooks dedicated to New Haven and Yale, and had cherished volumes sixteen through eighteen, which, along with Hiram Bingham III’s diary, had
been pilfered from the Sterling Library years ago to hide vital information on Lethe and the flow of magical artifacts through the city.
Alex flipped through the thick pages of newspaper clippings, old photographs, and maps, until her eyes landed on a photo of a group of young men at Mory’s, all stern-faced, all suited. And there was Linus, in the back row, his face solemn, his pale blue eyes nearly white in the old picture. He looked softer somehow, more mobile in this photo than he had been sitting in his own living room. Had he been human then? Or already turned and having a laugh? And how was she supposed to best a drug-dealing blue blood Connecticut vampire?
Kittscher’s Daemonologie was also on the shelf, the same book Michelle Alameddine had recommended and that Dawes had been using for research.
Alex flipped through, still hoping for a catalogue of monsters and ideally how to best them. But the book was as Dawes had described: a series of debates on hell between Ellison Nownes, a divinity student and devout Christian, and Rudolph Kittscher, an atheist and member of Lethe.
Nownes seemed to be arguing for Turner’s version of hell—a place of eternal punishment for sinners: Whether there be nine circles or twelve, whether pits of fire or lakes of ice, though the architecture of hell be indeterminate, its existence and purpose are not.
But Kittscher disagreed: Superstition and bunk! We know there are other worlds and planes and that their existence enables the use of portals —why, ask any Locksmith if he thinks he’s simply disappearing from one place and reappearing in another. No! We know better. There are other realms. And why should we not understand “hell” as one of these realms? Here, the transcript noted “loud applause.”
Some of what they were saying went right over Alex’s head, but she was pretty sure Kittscher was suggesting the existence of hell—and heaven —
was a bargain between demons and men: Just as we may be nourished by meat or fowl, or survive upon a diet of simple roots and berries, so demons are nourished by our base emotions. Some feed on fear or greed or lust or rage, and yes, some hunger after joy. Heaven and hell are a compromise, nothing more, a treaty binding demons to remain in their realm and feed only upon the dead.
This was where the crowd turned on Kittscher and the notes described Nownes as “red-faced.” Nownes: This is what comes of a vision of a world without God—not only a life but an afterlife devoid of any higher morality.
You suggest that we, creatures born of God and made in His image, are thelowliest of beasts, timid rabbits trapped in a snare, made not for great studyor high achievement, but to be consumed? This is the purpose and fate ofhumanity?
