Chapter 2
Ron Keep opened the door with the harried air of a man who didn’t want to be bothered—no, he did not want to sign a petition; no, he did not want his windows cleaned. He wore a snug sweater and collared shirt with his jeans and Sperrys, like a man auditioning for the role of sitcom dad.
“You left this on the stoop,” Alex said.
His eyes lit on the gleam of gold in her fingers, and he reached for the coin of compulsion in her hand.
Magpie impulse. Human curiosity. Good old greed.
She didn’t know why people reached for the coin, but they always did.
The bit of persuasion magic was so valuable Alex almost didn’t want to release it, but she needed to keep moving or she would never see the end of this night.
As soon as Keep’s hand closed over the coin, his face went slack.
“Daddy?”
The little boy was still at the table where his father had clearly told him to wait. Alex didn’t love that there would be an uncompelled witness to this, but no one believed kids anyway. She should know.
“It’s okay,” Alex lied. “We just need to see your brother.”
“I don’t have a brother.”
“He doesn’t have a brother,” Ron repeated, the coin nudging him past compliant to helpful.
“So what’s in the other room?”
“I don’t know. One day he … it was just … here.”
Alex had learned a few things about demons since she’d gone to hell and back. Sometimes they took the form of your deepest fear. Sometimes they became what you most desired. But the end result was always the same: They ate your heart.
“Stay right there,” Alex said to the little boy.
“Why?”
“Do you want your mother back?”
“Alex—” Darlington cautioned.
“I can give her back to you. But only if you stay put. Close your eyes. Cover your ears. What’s your favorite song?”
“‘Love Rollercoaster.’”
“The Red Hot fucking Chili Peppers?” There was no way side-part-and-sweater Ron Keep was listening to the original.
“A little decorum, please,” Darlington urged.
But the boy giggled. “You said a swear.”
“You like shitty music.”
Darlington sighed.
“You’re going to sing that garbage song all the way through,” Alex instructed. “Twice. And when we’re done, your mom will be back.”
“She’ll be better?”
Alex thought about just telling him what he wanted to hear. But she suspected this kid had seen too much in the last few weeks to keep trusting fairy tales. “It’ll take a while.”
He nodded and clamped his hands over his ears.
She and Darlington exchanged a brief glance.
Kids were the easiest people to explain magic to.
They didn’t stop to question or to prove that they knew better.
They understood that the rules most adults lived by were lies.
Age, rational thinking, moderated expectations—all the things that made the adult world navigable made magic more difficult to grasp.
Possibility died as you aged, pruned away by experience, and the ability to imagine a wider world faded with each of those lopped-off branches.
But maybe there was more to it. Maybe you couldn’t go to work every day, send your children off to school, get through the mundane business of living if you knew what was really lurking in the closet, under the bed, in every shadowed corner, what might just be waiting, biding its time for the moment the lights went out.
Ron Keep kept talking as he led them down the hall, the coin loosening his tongue.
“Janie wanted another baby so badly. I said we should be grateful we had Caleb. Happy and healthy. But she wanted to keep trying. We burned through our savings. I told her we couldn’t afford another round, but she was so unhappy. It was eating her alive.”
“Apt choice of words,” murmured Darlington.
She could hear the tension in his voice.
They’d been hunting for three months now, since that night in November when they’d emerged from Tripp’s apartment to see a demon crouched atop Harkness Tower.
They’d known it wouldn’t be the last. The devil had his foot in the door, and he was going to find a way in.
The problem was that they had no idea how or where the demons were entering their world.
At first they’d been sure it was the library where they’d walked the Gauntlet to enter hell, but their vigils and cameras had captured nothing.
So Dawes and Darlington had put their heads together in the Il Bastone library looking for what they could use as an early warning system.
Alex had felt the brush of her old resentment, the sense of being a mere onlooker in the life around her, always two steps behind.
But then Darlington had glanced up from the book he and Dawes were perusing and for the briefest moment his eyes flashed gold—there and gone.
He waved her over and in that natural gesture she’d been welcomed back into their circle.
You belong here, she’d allowed herself to think, ignoring the refrain that always followed: For now.
“It’s going to be easier than we expected,” Dawes had said, tapping the page of what turned out to be a Lethe Days Diary from 1912.
“I’m not familiar with that turn of phrase,” Alex said.
Darlington laughed. “I doubt it’s ever been spoken in this house.”
She allowed herself a look back at him now as they trailed Ron Keep down the hall to his suffering wife.
She had the unpleasant sense that this was forbidden.
Lot’s wife. Orpheus. She might have only a passing knowledge of the classics, but she understood shit never went well when you looked back.
Even so, she needed to know he was there.
It was that simple and that humiliating all at once.
As it turned out, the demon security system they needed had already been built for them.
Back when the great men of Lethe had been trying to understand the flow of magic into New Haven and the creation of the nexuses that allowed the societies to perform their rites, they’d created an enchantment called the Sighing of the Elms.
They’d never gotten any closer to understanding the mystery of the power that moved through the city.
But the bone chimes they’d created were waiting in a drawer and Alex and Dawes and Darlington had spent most of November hanging them in trees, occasionally assisted by Turner or Tripp.
Not Mercy, though. There had been a time when she would have jumped to help with anything Lethe required, but not since she’d helped Alex murder Eitan.
Homicide had somehow dampened her interest in magic.
Ten steps down the hallway, twenty. The nursery seemed too close and too far away.
The only real challenge they had faced was finding elms for the bone chimes, since most of them had been killed off by blight.
But enough had survived to create a magical dragnet, a series of trip wires to point them to another demon slipping through that open door.
In an ordinary breeze, the chimes made no noise, but when the magic of the city increased, they released a soft sigh somewhere between a moan and an exhalation, as if the city had dreamed badly and was turning in its sleep.
Alex hated the sound, but it gave them a starting point. The rest was up to Turner.
Turner, who was waiting outside. Turner, who understood the job at hand. Another bit of security she wanted to hold on to.
He would walk the area the chimes had indicated, navigating by the unerring prickle Alex had felt when she’d experienced his memories during the descent.
It brought them to a coffee shop where a barista had been withering as a demon fed on her literary ambitions to the beat of bad slam poetry, then to an old oysterman hollowed out to nearly nothing by a demon gorging on nostalgia, then to an entire neighborhood giving way slowly to a demon disguised as a pimpled teenager delivering pizza.
At least the pizza had been good. Alex had taken home two garlic and tomato pies from Zuppardi’s, and it had almost made the rest of it worthwhile.
But how many are slipping through? That was the problem that kept them all watching, listening, that was driving her down this well-appointed hallway that smelled of quality floor polish and the meatloaf Janie or Ron Keep had made that night.
How many demons had successfully consumed their hosts?
How many had become vampires preying on New Haven?
Had they joined Linus Reiter in his luxurious nest up the road in Old Greenwich?
Were they burrowing into their own secret warrens and bolt-holes, laying claim to a human city one soul at a time?
She’s been called. It wasn’t the first time Turner had said it or the first time Alex had ignored it.
But she wasn’t like him or Darlington or Dawes.
She didn’t care if she was one of the good guys or if this was a righteous quest. She wanted to win because winning meant she stayed alive.
Her mother. Her friends. They all got to stay alive.
So she would keep hunting even as she felt death creeping closer.
Maybe tonight it would take her. Here on this pretty street with the lights in the windows and the redbrick chimneys and neatly salted front steps.
Here in this cozy house with this family that was slightly larger than it should be, that had lost its proper shape, warped by a tumor that needed to be excised.
The room before them was dark, but from it Alex heard those long, wet sucking sounds. She took a deep breath, forcing her gorge to settle.
“Stay here,” she heard Darlington say to Ron. “If your son comes down the hall, stop him.”
Somewhere in the house she could hear a high, happy voice singing … “Rollercoaster! Of love!”
“Darlington,” she whispered.