You stole my life. You stole my chance.

Alex shuddered and threw open the door. “Dawes!”

The demon leapt across the street, straight for Alex on the porch of Il Bastone, its gait wild, and loping, and inhuman. Alex braced for impact.

The demon lunged over the low black fence and then shrieked, falling to the ground in a heap, its flesh bubbling as Dawes and Tripp hurled fistfuls of salt at it.

She should have known Pamela Dawes would come prepared.

“Get inside!” Dawes shouted.

Alex didn’t need to be told twice. She stumbled up the stairs and back into the entry hall. Once Dawes and Tripp were inside, they locked the door, then nearly jumped when the bell at the back of the house rang.

Mercy and Turner were outside.

“We’re safe in here?” Turner asked, eyes scanning the hallway as they entered.

An unnerving thought entered Alex’s mind. “What did you see?”

Turner was moving from room to room closing curtains as if expecting sniper fire. “A dead man.”

“Oh God,” Mercy gasped. She was standing at the front window in the parlor staring out at the street.

Hellie was there, but she wasn’t alone now. Blake Keely was with her, his head whole and perfect and wedding cake handsome. A middle-aged man in a cheap-looking suit was there too—arms crossed, rocked back on his heels, as if he’d seen it all and wasn’t impressed—along with a tall, rangy guy who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

“Spenser,” Tripp said. “You … you guys see him? I thought I was imagining things.”

Alex recognized them all. She’d seen them in hell. All of their victims.

All of their demons.

“We didn’t close the door,” Dawes said, her voice rough, frightened.

“We didn’t complete the ritual. We—”

“Don’t say it,” said Tripp. “Do not say it.”

Dawes shrugged, her face pale. “We have to go back.” It was half a question, a plea for someone to correct her.

“Come on,” Alex said. “Let’s go to the library.”

Dawes tucked her hands inside her sweatshirt. “If Anselm—”

But Alex cut her hand through the air. “If Anselm could have locked us out, he would have. This is our house.”

Dawes hesitated, then she gave a firm nod. “First, we cook.”

Dawes got a pot of chicken soup and dumplings going and sent them upstairs with a list of search terms to write in the Albemarle Book. When the shelf swung open on the library, Alex was surprised to find the room seemed bigger, as if the house knew a larger group required more space.

They sat down to read, each with a tidy pile of index cards provided by Dawes from what Alex suspected was a limitless supply. It was too soon for them to be together again, after what they’d seen and all they’d been through.

They needed time to shake off each other’s memories, to push all that grief and sadness back into the past before they contemplated another descent. But they didn’t have that luxury.

Everyone other than Mercy was still suffering from the aftereffects of the first journey. Alex saw the signs. They were all shivering with the cold. Tripp had dark smudges beneath his eyes, his usually ruddy cheeks gone sallow.

She had never seen Turner anything less than immaculate, but now his suit was rumpled and there was stubble on his chin. They looked haunted.

If they were really going to attempt a second trip to the underworld, it couldn’t just be a rescue mission. They needed to know how to fight off the wolves or whatever hell sent after them. Plus, they had to lure their demons back to hell and make sure nothing followed them home when they made their return. But right now they had to figure out how to keep those demons at bay before they all lost their minds.

Alex had been over some of this ground when she was trying to find a defense against Linus Reiter, and she knew they were in trouble. Unlike Grays, demons weren’t deterred by memento mori or death words; they had no pasts they wished to cling to, no memories of being human, no unfinished business. Darlington or Michelle Alameddine should have been with them in this library. Someone who actually knew how to name these enemies and best them.

“What have you found?” Dawes asked when she emerged through the library door an hour later.

“No soup?” Tripp looked like he’d just learned there was no Santa Claus.

“It needs to reduce,” Dawes said. “And we don’t eat in the library.” “Are they still outside?” Mercy asked.

Dawes nodded. “They … they look very solid.”

Turner tapped the book he was reading. “You thought Darlington got eaten, right? By Mammon?”

“Maybe,” Dawes said cautiously. “There are a lot of demons associated with greed. Devils. Gods.”

Greed is a sin in every language. That was what Darlington had said.

Sandow’s hunger for money. Darlington’s desire for knowledge.

“But these demons aren’t trying to make us feel greed, are they?” asked Turner.

Ambition, drive, desire. What was the opposite of that?

“Hopelessness,” said Alex. That was what she’d felt as Hellie— not Hellie—screamed at her, a sense of inevitability, that this was her due, that she was only getting what she deserved. She was a criminal who had stolen the chance at this gilded life, and of course there would be a price to pay. It was why the demon tormenting her wore Hellie’s face instead of Len’s or Ariel’s. Because Alex had never shed a tear for them. It was Hellie’s loss she had wept over. “They want us to feel hopeless.”

“I thought Hellie was a blonde,” Dawes said.

“She is,” said Alex. “Was.”

Mercy nodded. “I saw her too. In our Shakespeare lecture.”

Dawes’s face was troubled. Without a word they followed her out of the library and down the hall to the Dante bedroom, to the windows overlooking Orange Street.

The demons were still there, a pack of them in the shadows between the streetlamps.

Hellie’s golden hair looked black, her eyes dark. Her clothes … all black.

“She looks like you, Alex,” Dawes said. And she was right.