Kittscher had laughed. Our bodies are food for worms. Why should our souls not be made meals too?
At that point both parties had nearly come to blows and a recess had been taken.
Alex rubbed her eyes. She’d been straight with Turner: She didn’t believe in his Sunday school version of the underworld. But she wasn’t sure she bought into Kittscher’s theory either. And why had this turned up in her search regarding Linus Reiter?
She combed through the index for any mention of him, then slid her finger down to V, for vampire. A single page was listed.
Kittscher: Think on the vampire.
(Jeering from the assembly.)
Herman Moseby: What’s next, leprechauns and kelpies?
(A call to order from the moderator.)
Kittscher: Have you never wondered why in our stories someseduce and some terrify? Why some are beautiful and othersgrotesque? These disparate stories are proof that demons remain inour world, some who feed on misery or terror, others who feed ondesire, all of whom take the forms most likely to elicit those emotions.
(Terrence Gleebe is recognized by the moderator.)Gleebe: In this scenario, is blood a vehicle or incidental to theprocess?
(Laughter from the assembly.)
Alex touched her fingers to the bandage on her neck. “Incidental, my ass.”
She thought of handsome Linus Reiter in his white suit. Why would a vampire become a drug dealer? There had to be a thousand ways to make
money when you had that kind of power and that much time. But what if you fed on desperation? What if the money meant nothing but you required an endless buffet of fear and need? Alex remembered the hangers-on at Eitan’s house, the losers at Ground Zero, her own aching sadness, the desolation that had been her life, the scraps of hope she’d wrung from the moments of peace that a little weed, a little alcohol, a pop of Valium could provide.
So if Kittscher was right and vampires were demons, at least she knew what she was dealing with. But how to keep the monster at bay?
She left the library and took out the Albemarle Book, wrote: how to avoid vampires, nonfiction. Then she hesitated. Why had the library provided her with information on a vampire when she had specifically asked for books mentioning Linus Reiter? She kept the Albemarle Book open and returned to the round table where she’d left Kittscher’s Daemonologie. Reiter hadn’t been listed in the index. She flipped to the back of the book.
Minutes taken by Phillip Walter Merriman, Oculus, 1933. Inattendance:
The participants were listed by society, and there, under Skull and Bones: Lionel Reiter.
He’d been there. Under a different name, but he’d been in this house, under Lethe’s roof. Maybe he’d been mortal then. But maybe there had been a demon in one of the societies, inside Il Bastone, and no one had been the wiser. And what about the date? 1933. A year after Sterling had been built.
Did that mean there really had been a first pilgrimage to hell? Was that the subtext here? Who had known about the Gauntlet, and was this less a heated argument about philosophic hypotheticals than a very real debate about the possibility of traveling to the underworld?
And if demons fed on humans, on their happiness or their pain, even their blood, was there another variable she had to consider? She remembered Marjorie Stephen, old before her time, eyes milky and gray. What if there hadn’t been any poison? Could Reiter be involved? Or some other demon having his fun? Taunting them with scripture? Turner would have told her if they’d found neck wounds on Professor Stephen or Dean Beekman, but
before tonight, Alex hadn’t known vampires were real. What else might be lurking out there in the dark?
Alex felt panic rising up to choke her. She thought of all those studious young men from well-to-do families debating morality and immortality, arguing semantics, while a monster enjoyed their hospitality. Because we’re all a bunch of amateurs. Lethe pretended they knew the score when they didn’t even know the game. But this house, this library, could still protect her.
After three more searches, she had regained some small sense of calm, and she had a list of recommendations culled from the few books she could find in English that covered repelling demons and vampires, most of them involving weapons made of salt. According to the books she skimmed, stakes, beheading, and fire all worked because they killed just about anything.
Crosses and holy water were dependent on the faith of the user, since they lent courage, not real protection. Garlic was only effective as a repellent toward a particular type of succubus. And the wards worked. That was what mattered. In the armory, she located a wide lacy collar made of tiny salt pearls that dated back to colonial times and that she could tuck neatly under her shirt. She lay down in the Dante bedroom, beneath the velvet blue canopy, and dreamed she was playing croquet on Linus Reiter’s lawn. She was barefoot and the grass was wet. She could see blood seeping up between her toes.
“Intriguing,” he whispered, but in the dream, he was Darlington, in a white suit with glowing golden horns. He smiled at her. “Hello, honey lamb.
Have you come to be devoured?”
The house behind him was no longer Sweetwell but Black Elm, covered in ivy, somehow lonelier than even a vampire’s castle on a hill.
Alex drifted inside; she knew the way, that same strange sense of compulsion drawing her on. The rooms seemed bigger, their shadows deeper.
She climbed the stairs to the ballroom, and Darlington was there, in the circle, but he was her Darlington, just as she remembered him the night he’d disappeared from Rosenfeld Hall, handsome, human, dressed in his long dark coat, his weathered jeans.
Through the windows she could see the demon with his curling horns, standing amid the discarded croquet set on the lawn, gazing up at her with golden eyes.
“There are two of you,” Alex said.
“There have to be,” Darlington replied. “The boy and the monster. I am the hermit in the cave.”
“I saw everything. In your grandfather’s memories. I saw you try to survive this place.”
“It wasn’t all bad.”
Alex felt her lips twist. “Of course it wasn’t. If it was all bad, you could just let go.”
“When did you get so wise, Stern?”
“When you went on sabbatical to purgatory.”
“I could hear them,” he said, eyes distant. They were dark brown, tea left to brew too long. “My parents. When they were yelling at the front door.”
“Should I have let them in?”
