Chapter 3
When they arrived at Il Bastone, Dawes had a fire burning in the parlor grate and big pot of pastina simmering on the stove.
The house gave a disapproving little shudder as they entered, the crystals in the chandelier tinkling above.
“I’m okay,” Alex whispered, laying a hand on the post as they passed through the front door, though she wasn’t entirely sure that was true.
Tripp was setting the table, bundled into what he called the Salton Suit but which was really more of a cross between a shroud and a straitjacket that was laced with salt and bound with containment incantations.
It left him covered in boils, but it was the only way Il Bastone would let him past the stoop, and much like the human he’d been, Not Tripp didn’t like to feel left out.
He had moved to a small apartment across the street where he’d happily nested with his big-screen TV and recliner and a bizarre assortment of family photographs and sailing memorabilia.
Their rules were simple: no preying on humans, no solo field trips in case of temptation.
Alex had assumed Tripp would get bored and restless, but he seemed content to watch an endless stream of YouTube videos and play sous-chef to Dawes.
“He’s lazy,” Turner had said contemptuously.
“He’s lonely,” Dawes had shot back. “And he can’t go home because he’s a demon now. He just needs … purpose.”
Alex was glad Tripp was low on energy and ambition. It made him easier to manage.
Dawes bundled Alex into the butter-yellow crocheted blanket her sister in Westport had sent for the holidays, then settled her at the dining room table with a bowl of soup and a big glass of what she said was Sancerre.
Soup made from scratch helped to offset contact with the demonic.
Wine helped offset Alex’s desire to set fire to all of New Haven then steal a car and watch it burn in her rearview mirror.
Darlington shrugged his coat from his shoulders and placed the Voynich Coffin on the table. Dawes slapped Tripp’s hand as he reached for it.
“Sorry,” Tripp said. “My bad.”
“Do you want to end up stuck in there?” Dawes demanded.
Turner finished brushing the damp off his parka. “I can think of worse places for him.”
“It isn’t straight,” said Tripp, squinting at the puzzle box and holding up his fingers as if he were lining up the sights of a rifle.
Alex made herself look, then look again. “Damn. He’s right.”
“It’s fine,” Turner said, but then he frowned and sat down hard. “The angles aren’t ninety degrees anymore.”
Dawes hovered by the table, a plate of grilled bread in her hands. “Does that … Is it losing its structure?”
“Possibly,” Darlington replied. He leaned back in his chair, the picture of ease despite the night’s events.
Every sign of the demon had disappeared, and he was once more the golden boy of Lethe, a gentleman who frequently went to war with monsters and occasionally became one himself.
“We’ve crammed twenty-two demons of varying forms and appetites into an untested magical object.
And we have no idea what they might be getting up to in there. ”
Alex rubbed her eyes, fighting her fatigue.
Maybe setting fire to the city was the way to go.
She had pictured the Voynich Coffin as a kind of salt prison where each demon was contained in a cell, locked into its fascination for a puzzle that couldn’t be solved.
She hadn’t imagined them all meeting up in the yard for a smoke and a chat.
“You’re saying we have twenty-two hellish fiends planning a prison break?” Alex asked.
Darlington shrugged. “Maybe they’ll settle for a riot.”
“Comforting,” Turner said. Carefully, he lifted the coffin from the table and returned it to the lead-lined case they kept in a linen closet on the other side of Il Bastone.
They were in uncertain territory, and if something did go wrong and the coffin gave way, no one wanted it anywhere near the treasures of the armory or the gas line in the kitchen.
“We can’t go on like this,” he said when he returned. “We’re on borrowed time with that thing.”
It was what they were all thinking, had been thinking as the days and nights of hunting wore away at them.
Again, Alex wondered, How many are we missing?
Left alone to feed on her longing, Janie Keep’s “baby” would have eventually taken on her form, then fed on the blood and emotions of her friends and neighbors, her real son, her husband, anyone it needed to stay alive.
Alex was the only person in this room who had tangled with a vampire, and even with the strength of a Gray inside her and a pair of magical brass knuckles, she’d barely made it out alive.
“It’s not just that,” Turner continued. He poured himself two fingers of whiskey. “I can’t keep going like this. I’m basically working two jobs. I’m not sleeping, and none of you look like you are either.”
“I am,” said Tripp.
Turner took a long swallow. “Have you ever gotten a bad night’s sleep in your life?”
Tripp appeared to give the question serious consideration.
“Fair to say we could all take better care of ourselves—” Darlington began.
“And each other,” added Dawes as she nudged the plate of bread toward Turner. “Eat.”
“But until we find a way to shut the door,” Darlington went on, “we should be counting our blessings.”
Alex almost choked on her soup. “Help me out with that math.”
“We can’t shut the door, but they can’t open it any farther or they would have.”
“I’ll break out the champagne.”
“Are we sure…” Dawes set down her spoon, lifted it, changed her mind again. “What if they’re just wearing us down?”
“Like an advance team?” Tripp said. He sounded a little too impressed, and Alex suspected it was only Dawes’s glare that kept him from adding Nice.
Turner took a piece of the bread. “A war of attrition.”
“Fabian strategy,” Darlington mused. “You avoid large-scale actions, wear the enemy down. But usually it’s used by a smaller force against a larger one. Maybe that means Golgarot doesn’t have the numbers.”
“He does,” Alex said. “I saw him when I purged that demon.” It happened every time she drew one of those things inside her. She took a sip of wine, trying to wash away the memory of sulfur and misery. “He said his armies were infinite.”
“My name is Legion,” quoted Turner, “for we are many. Legion meant thousands back in Christ’s time. How are we supposed to fight thousands when there are four of us?”
“Five,” Tripp noted.
“My mistake. We’re unstoppable. Tell Golgarot to do his worst.”
“This man lived in the tombs,” said Darlington, “and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain.”
“You’re quoting Mark?” Turner asked, clearly pleased.
“Arlington men go to church every Sunday,” Alex recalled, though she was surprised too.
“Went,” Darlington corrected.
“Are you worried you might burst into flames?”
“I imagine a visit to the underworld might make some men more religious,” Darlington said with a bob of his chin toward Turner. “But I find I’m plagued with questions that make it tougher to sit still in a pew.”
Had that been a loss for him? Alex knew that Turner’s belief had only grown stronger and that Mercy was struggling to reconcile everything they’d done and seen with her own faith.
Alex hadn’t spent much time contemplating religion or scripture.
Maybe if Mira had let Alex’s grandmother drag her to synagogue, she would have real faith to take comfort in.
But it was too late to embrace piety now.
“For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet,” Darlington continued.
Turner picked up the quote. “No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.”
“We don’t need the Bible,” Alex said, her irritation rising. “We need to know what happened to Rudolph Kittscher and the first pilgrims who made the descent.”
“I’m doing my best,” said Dawes. “But it’s all gone. Not just Kittscher’s Lethe Days Diary, but his Dante’s diary too. I thought maybe they’d just placed a prohibition on the Albemarle Book, but they stripped everything from Lethe’s physical archives too.”
Lethe had been instrumental in constructing the Gauntlet and four Yale students chosen from the societies had used it to visit hell back in 1933.
Rudolph Kittscher had been Lethe’s representative.
Skull and Bones had sent Lionel Reiter, who had become the vampire most recently known as Linus Reiter.
But that was all Alex and the others had been able to learn.
They had speculated that the other candidates had been selected from Scroll and Key and Book and Snake, but they had no way of knowing who the other two pilgrims had been or the specifics of their journey or exactly what bargain they’d struck with Golgarot nearly one hundred years ago.
“We need those diaries,” Alex said. “And I don’t see how Mark or any of the other apostles are going to help us close the door to hell.”
Turner was studying Darlington. “That’s not why you were interested in that passage from Mark, is it?”
“No,” he admitted. His gaze shifted to Alex. “When you were tapped by Lethe, I made it my business to learn everything I could about people with your gift, people who could see Grays. We had knowledge of others who had the same ability, but most of them ended up like the man described in Mark.”
“Completely batshit?”
“I might choose a less colorful turn of phrase, but yes. Now pay attention to the way they describe his strength. He tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Remind you of anyone?”
Alex thought back to the night she’d first used Hellie’s strength, to the men she’d left behind in her bloody wake.
She’d almost gotten used to it now, how easy it was to borrow a Gray’s strength.
Only once had a ghost invaded her mind without invitation: the Bridegroom.
He’d shoved his way into her head and yanked her strings like a marionette.
She never wanted to feel that way again.
“You think Grays got hold of them?”
“I think so, and I think it looked very much like possession. But you and Belbalm and maybe other Wheelwalkers are different.”
Turner refilled his glass. “Different how?”
“In their ability to use Grays and hold demons. The rest?” Darlington lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know. But it may be important. According to Golgarot, it’s Alex’s presence in hell that would unlock the door to our world and keep it that way. He drank her blood so that he could prop it open.”
Alex knew where this was going. She could feel the expectation in the others.
“We’ve been over this,” she said. “I’ve tried talking to my mom about my father. It never goes anywhere. And I’m not going to compel her.”
Dawes tucked her hands into the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “It doesn’t have to be anything … invasive.”
Alex had lied to her mother, stolen from her, but somehow this felt worse.
And she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know the truth about whatever was lurking in her genetics.
Her father was a gap, a void. Even the word father didn’t quite line up to anything in her understanding.
She had a handful of facts: He surfed. He was handsome.
He liked Joy Division. Stars in a constellation.
You were supposed to see a shape in the absence: a scorpion, a bear, a woman running, but Alex could never fill in the blanks.
“Maybe,” she said.
“We could bring her here,” said Dawes. “Or even do it over the phone.”
“We’re not bringing Mira to New Haven. I’m not putting a target on her back.”
Alex had pulled every string and called in every favor to get her mother settled in a new spot that Eitan’s old buddies couldn’t find if they came looking.
A check had arrived: a settlement from a lawsuit from one of the many MLMs Mira had been suckered into over the years.
Most people would have raised a brow at such remarkable good fortune, maybe dug a little more.
But not Mira, who believed in fate and faeries and the planets aligning, who had a postcard pinned beside her bed that said, Miracles happen if you let them.
But when her mother sent Alex the photo of the new bungalow she’d just put a deposit on, it had felt like stepping in front of a city bus.
Alex had been to that house. They all had—Turner, Dawes, Darlington.
The porch, the garden full of silvery sage and purple spikes of salvia, the arched entry to the kitchen.
They’d seen it when Golgarot had offered them all their dearest wishes and Alex had dreamed of this house, a place of peace and plenty where Mira would have lived if her daughter hadn’t drained away her youth and emptied her bank account for psychologists and scared-straight programs, if Alex had done everyone the courtesy of dying young.
“We need answers,” Turner said. “We can’t keep on like this. The balance is going to change, and we need to make sure it shifts in our favor.”
Alex shoved back from the table and slid on her coat. “We’re supposed to be on Lynwood before midnight to get the circle in place for St. Elmo’s.”
The duties of Lethe didn’t really matter tonight.
St. Elmo’s practiced weather magic, but they’d lost their crypt years ago and the nexus beneath it when the university had claimed the elegant red towers of Rosenfeld Hall for itself.
The society had been all but obsolete since.
The new St. Elmo’s delegates would wave their arms around and it might get a little muggy, then they’d look sheepish and apologize and everyone could go home.
Still better than sitting here debating messing with her mother’s mind.
“Alex,” Darlington said gently, “we’re running out of options.”
“Then find some new ones,” she said. “Do your job and I’ll do mine.”
Alex jammed a second piece of bread in her mouth and turned her back on them.
She was tired, hungry, and sick of swallowing demons and spitting them back up again for the sake of saving a world that had never been particularly kind to her.
If they wanted nice on top of all that, they could find another Wheelwalker.