“Add him to the list, Dawes. We get rid of the demons and we get rid of Reiter too.”

“It’s not going to be easy,” Dawes said. Now that the task of taking care of Alex was done, she seemed less sure. “The things they know…”

Alex looked down at the empty bench. “Do you want to tell me what Blake said?”

There was a long pause. “He was outside of my window this morning.

In the snow. Whispering.”

Alex waited.

“He said he was innocent. That he never hurt anyone. That his mother cried herself to sleep every night. He said…” Dawes’s voice wobbled.

Alex knew Dawes didn’t want to go on. But demons ate shame, fruit grown from seeds cultivated in the dark.

“Hellie told me I stole her life,” Alex said. “That I should have been the one to die, not her.”

“That isn’t true!”

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe not. Not if it feels true. He said … Blake said I killed him because I’m the kind of girl he would never bother to fuck. He said … he said he could tell what my … what I looked like down there. That I was ugly.”

“God, that really does sound like Blake.”

What were these demons made of? Hellie’s sadness. Blake’s cruelty.

Alex’s shame. Dawes’s guilt. But what else? What was the difference between ambition and appetite? These creatures wanted to survive. They wanted to be fed. Alex understood hunger and what it could drive you to do.

“It isn’t true, Dawes. We have to keep saying it until we believe it.” It was just too easy to let those words take hold.

“Is he there now?” Alex asked.

“The loris bit him.” Dawes giggled. “It climbed right through the window and bit him on the cheek. He just started screaming, ‘My face! My face!’”

Alex laughed, but she remembered the snakes lunging for Hellie’s cheek.

As if the salt spirits didn’t like the lie of the demons, the pretense of the human masks they wore.

Her phone pinged. A Call me text from Turner. Why didn’t he ever just call her?

When she hung up with Dawes, she checked the group chat: Everyone had checked in, and Dawes issued her warnings regarding Reiter. They were all armed with salt and they would meet at Il Bastone before dark. They’d be safer when they were behind the wards together.

Alex called Turner, expecting to hear he’d sighted Big Car lurking at the station.

“You okay?” she asked.

“What? Fine.” Of course Turner was fine. He was the mighty oak. “We picked up Ed Lambton’s son.”

It took Alex a beat to remember who Lambton was. The professor at the center of the double murder. “I thought he was in Arizona.”

“Andy Lambton is in New Haven. We apprehended him outside the apartment of one of his father’s fellows.”

“One of the people who falsified data?”

“Exactly. We’d put a protective detail on the other faculty involved with his censure and on the fellows who worked in the lab.”

So the Charles II lead had been right, the son avenging the father. But it all seemed so theatrical, so bizarre. “He really killed two people because he thought his dad got the short end?”

“It looks like it. I want you to meet him.”

“Worst blind date ever.”

“Stern.”

“Why, Turner?” The detective had been willing to involve her on the periphery of the case, a look at the crime scene, a chat about theories, but meeting a suspect was a very different thing. And now that Alex might be out of Lethe and Yale forever, she wasn’t sure she had the heart or the will to dig into a murder mystery. “You’ve never wanted me in your business before.”

“There’s something wrong here and no one else seems to agree.”

“He’s got an alibi?”

“His alibi didn’t hold up. And he confessed.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Do you want to meet this guy or not?”

She did. She liked that even after she’d fallen out of favor with Lethe, Turner still gave a damn what she thought. Besides, if Turner believed something was off, there was. She’d been in his head, looked through his eyes. She’d seen the world as he did, the details of it, the signs and signals everyone else missed or ignored. She’d felt the prickle at the base of her skull.

“I have to meet with the Praetor this afternoon,” she said. “I can go after that. But you’ll have to give me a ride over to the jail.”

“He’s not at the jail,” said Turner. “He’s at Yale New Haven.”

“The hospital?”

“The psych ward.”

Alex wasn’t sure how to respond. She’d spent enough time in and out of rehabs, scared-straight programs, and twenty-four-hour observation holds that she didn’t ever want to set foot on one of those wards again. But she also wasn’t going to tell Turner any of that. Maybe she didn’t have to. He’d seen her life through Hellie’s eyes.

“I need to know what you told the cops and the Praetor about the fire,”

she said.

“Vandalism,” said Turner. “No way to pass it off as an accident. They didn’t find accelerant and the fire didn’t build, it just went up. That’s a mystery they aren’t going to unravel.”

Hellfire? Something else? Which weapons did the demons have at their disposal? Maybe Turner could just arrest Linus Reiter and save them all a lot of trouble.