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.
Alex took in the warm hue of Blake Keely’s hair, something like the bright red of Dawes’s bun. Detective Carmichael had been wearing a cheap suit when she’d first glimpsed him, but now that suit looked sharp, the lines more elegant, the tie a deep lilac, something Turner might wear. And did Spenser look a bit more hapless, a bit less tough and rugged?
What had Alex thought when she’d gazed at Not Hellie across the street from Il Bastone? That she didn’t have Hellie’s easy, athletic grace. That she looked wary, taut. Because she was looking at herself. That live-wire anger was Alex’s own.
Alex pulled the heavy blue curtains closed. She’d learned to love this room, the patterns the stained glass made in the late afternoon, the clawfoot tub she still hadn’t worked up the courage to use. “I think I know what happened to Linus Reiter.” “Who?” asked Tripp.
“He’s a vampire I tangled with out in Old Greenwich. It’s … it’s how I lost the Mercedes.”
Dawes drew in a sharp breath.
“A vampire?” Mercy sounded terrified and thrilled all at once.
“For fuck’s sake,” said Turner.
“Linus Reiter was a student here at Yale,” Alex continued. “But he had a different name then. He was a Bonesman. And I think he’s one of the people who used that Gauntlet back in the thirties. I think Linus—or really Lionel Reiter—went to hell.”
“We can’t be sure of—”
“Come on, Dawes. Why build it if they didn’t intend to use it? Why kill off an architect—”
