Dead Gates of Lethe

Chapter 1. Winter

Winter

When he had been a man only and not both man and monster, Darlington had understood his city and the bad bargains it had made.

He knew the changing shape of its harbor, the scars carved into its old neighborhoods by a deluge of federal cash that had seemed inexhaustible—as most floods do, until the drought arrives.

He’d loved this tidy square named for a revolutionary general, its steepled church, its row of brownstones with their welcoming stoops.

He had marveled at the strangeness of New Haven that could take a pocket neighborhood nestled against the noise and fumes of a highway and make it so desirable.

The man he had been noted these things. He considered the branches of each cherry tree, black bones that would soften with pink in the spring.

The demon thought only of bodies. Human hearts tucked safely away in their houses.

He could feel their longings—sharp spikes of ambition, the grind of simple appetite, lust like the heavy pull of a riptide. Their greed was everywhere, a buffet of gluttony. He hungered after their hunger, and it was maddening.

He forced his focus back to the golden windows of the brownstone before them.

He was standing with Turner and Alex in the deep shadows of Wooster Square Park, waiting for a sign that they were in the right place.

Turner remained motionless, a stone sentinel in a fashionable overcoat.

Alex rocked back and forth on her heels, trying to keep warm, her black hair gleaming in the lamplight, her hands jammed into the pockets of her cheap wool jacket.

It was hard not to keep looking at her, at the ruthless slice of her cheekbone, the grim set of her mouth.

A pulse of desire passed through him, another thought he leashed, his own longing an unwanted companion, dogging his steps since they’d returned from hell.

He would master this thing in him. He would become the man he’d been again.

He would do it the way he had managed everything in his careful life, with the Arlington discipline his grandfather had taught him: Manners, might, and know-how.

One always did the trick. For now there was the task at hand.

Through the glass he could see a family seated at dinner: a man in his thirties, a little boy rolling a tiny toy truck back and forth over the tablecloth beside his plate, a woman who looked sick and sad as she picked at her food.

“He’s feeding on her,” Turner said, shaking his head in disgust.

Sometimes the demons they’d been hunting showed enough restraint that their victims could be challenging to spot.

But not tonight. The man—Ron Keep, thirty-four, associate professor of anthropology—split his attention between his meal and his son, but his eyes never strayed too long from his wife.

Those glances might have indicated concern, or they might be watchfulness, a predator tracking his prey, making sure she didn’t attempt escape.

Of course, she wouldn’t run, not when he’d fed so well from her.

She wouldn’t have the will. And she wouldn’t even know what he was doing as he drained the substance of her away, consuming her soul bit by bit, feeding on her fear or her love or her sadness.

Every demon had its own appetites. That was what made them so hard to identify.

“I don’t see signs of change,” Turner conceded, the plume of his breath dissolving in the winter air.

But Darlington knew better than to hope. “We have no idea what he looked like before.”

As demons fed, they took on the appearance of their hosts until eventually they assumed their lives and identities entirely.

It had happened to Linus Reiter, the ghoul lurking in his mansion miles away in Old Greenwich.

It had happened to Tripp Helmuth, who was waiting back at Il Bastone and who was not really Tripp any longer, only the demon who had consumed him.

But will it happen to me? This was the matter that haunted Darlington’s days and nights. The question of who he was and who he might become had ceased to be a purely philosophical one.

Again he reeled his thoughts back to the dark work before them.

The call had come from Turner that morning, when Darlington had been sanding down and restaining a portion of the sunflower staircase.

Il Bastone was well over a hundred years old, and it was always crying out for repair.

He knew he was lavishing the care on it that he couldn’t give to Black Elm, but staying busy helped keep the demon in check. Idle hands and all that.

“Dawes was right,” Turner had said over the phone.

Dawes was usually right, but Darlington still felt weary hearing the words.

Almost three months had passed since they had made it out of hell, alive but not unscarred.

Bruises and nightmares aside, they had also managed to leave the door open behind them.

Since then, demons had been trickling through and with each day they grew smarter at staying hidden.

Clever, not smart, Dawes reminded them again and again, though Tripp always took offense.

But clever was enough to survive.

Turner called them parasites; Darlington knew that wasn’t quite accurate. If a parasite killed the host, the parasite died too. But a demon simply slid into the dead host’s life. In death the demon thrived.

Ron Keep looked like he was thriving. His wife could barely lift her fork.

“He’ll be strong,” Darlington warned.

Blue hellfire ignited over Alex’s skin. “I’m stronger.”

For how long? he wondered. She had always been skinny; now she was jutting bones held together by determination and delusions about her own limits.

It had snowed last night, and the silence of the park felt thick and cold, as if the world had gone dormant, trapped in a slow-moving river, all of them sleeping under ice. Only Alex burned bright. She was already moving toward the front door.

Then he heard it. He touched Alex’s sleeve. “Wait.”

The sound was high and piercing. A baby crying.

“Janie—” Ron said, his voice muffled through the glass.

The little boy with the toy truck reached for his mother. “Mama, stay,” he begged.

Janie Keep yanked her hand away. “Would you just fucking give me a minute?”

The boy shrank back in his chair, clutching the truck to his chest.

“She doesn’t mean it,” Ron said, laying a hand on his son’s shoulder.

Janie pushed away from the table, hurrying down the hall and toward that high cry.

“I thought they only had one kid,” Alex said.

Turner’s face was bleak. “They do.”

Something cold crept over Darlington, raising the hair on his arms. The flames around Alex banked.

Her eyes met his, dark water, an unknown sea. “Come on.”

They moved in unison, three figures creeping toward the back of the house where they could see the pale blue walls of a nursery, a mobile of clouds and stars turning gently above a crib.

“Damn it,” muttered Turner.

“Tell me we’re wrong about this,” Alex said, and Darlington could hear the raw pleading in her voice.

Janie bent over the side of the crib. “What is it, sweet boy?” she crooned, cradling the infant to her.

“Are you hungry?” The baby’s scream was too loud, and beneath that high, frantic sound, Darlington thought he could hear a counterpoint, a terrible harmony, the low thrum of a growl. “No, no, it’s okay. Mama’s here.”

Janie lifted up her blouse. Her ribs were the shadowed furrows of a field awaiting planting; her breasts were shrunken pouches. Bruises bloomed like unfurling petals around her nipples, dark blotches radiating from swollen red punctures. Bite marks.

“There you go, sweet boy.” Her eyes were glittering, full of tears. She looked both giddy and miserable. “Drink your fill.”

The baby latched and Darlington tried not to wretch at the sound of it suckling.

It was feeding on her joy, her desperation, and on her blood too.

Turner pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and took a shuddering breath. “What do we do?”

Alex tucked her hair behind her ears. “What we came here to do.” She strode to the front of the house without waiting to see if they would follow.

“She’s going to burn out,” Darlington said as Turner laid down a salt knot in case the demon tried to escape through the window.

“It’s her mission,” said Turner.

“We’re all responsible for getting this done.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it. She’s been called.”

This again. Turner hadn’t relinquished his belief that this was some kind of holy war, and Darlington still didn’t know what to make of it.

They needed the detective on their side, not just because of his preternatural ability to suss out the truth, that shockingly accurate prickle that was better than any lie detector, and not just because his position with the New Haven PD lent him authority that stretched beyond the reach of the university.

They needed numbers. Holy war or back-alley brawl, they had too few soldiers for the fight to come.

They followed in Alex’s wake and joined her at the steps to the brownstone. Darlington could no longer tell if he was her shadow or a shadow cast over her, but they were all too tired, too hollowed out by the grim business of the hunt to think deeply on the roles they’d chosen.

Maybe Turner was right. Maybe they’d simply been called.

It was a tempting thought, the idea that some wise and benevolent hand had brought them together to stand against the tide.

But there was magic and then there was magical thinking.

One might help them build a dam against the flood. The other would get them killed.

“Stay close,” Alex said, the words a bare rasp, as if she’d been shouting. She knew what was to come.

He might have said I will. He might have told her not to worry.

Instead, he let a growl rumble through him, the demon’s voice, the demon’s strength. Tonight she didn’t need the man. She needed to know the monster was near.