Chapter 4
The walk to Lynwood would have taken them a half hour so they drove.
Darlington’s old Mercedes was still sitting in the garage at Black Elm.
No one could bear to look at it, let alone drive it since they’d found Michelle Alameddine’s body in the trunk.
Instead, Dawes had brought her parents’ old Subaru up from Westport for them to use.
Alex knew it was more practical than the glamorous Mercedes, but she always felt a little like she was carpooling to damnation.
“Go on,” Alex said when they parked a few blocks from the squat brick house. “Tell me what’s at stake.”
He kept the engine idling in the cold. At last he said, “There’s a ritual called the Sleepwalker that was created for intel gathering during the Cold War. It doesn’t require a portal or a nexus, and your mother will be at no risk.”
“Don’t bullshit me. There’s no such thing as magic without risk.”
“Were you always a cynic, Stern?”
“From birth.”
He gave a small shrug. “I’m not going to push you.”
“You’re pushing me now.”
“I’m hardly one to lecture on the matter of familial bonds.”
“Do you miss them?”
She hadn’t meant to ask about his parents.
They’d never talked about what Golgarot had done to Darlington’s mother and father, not since the day they’d stood on the basement stairs and let Harper and Dan Arlington’s bodies burn away in a tide of hellfire.
There was nothing left of them in this world, not even ash.
“I miss … the idea of them. I’ve read enough books to know what families are supposed to be like. Close families. Broken families. We weren’t like any of them.”
Another fractured constellation. You knew the shape you were meant to look for in those scattered stars, but sometimes it just didn’t line up.
She peered at the weathervanes spinning on the rooftop of St. Elmo’s.
A ship. A rooster. A rabbit emerging from a top hat.
Overseeing the ritual had been a way to escape Turner’s scrutiny, but now she wished they could just skip right over this sorry business with St. Elmo.
The problem with stopping, with letting yourself rest, was that it made it that much harder to move again.
“Do we really have to do this?” Alex asked. Darlington sighed, and she laughed. “This is where you’re supposed to remind me of our sacred duty as delegates of Lethe.”
“I know,” he said. “But it’s hard to feel much investment when we’re spending most of our time—”
“Staving off Armageddon?”
“I fear we’ve veered into melodrama.”
“You sure?”
“No,” he admitted.
In the warm pocket of the car, his profile was limned in a gold wash of light from the streetlamps.
She had the sudden feeling that she’d slipped into another life, a safer, more lovely version of the world.
They’d spent a happy evening together. He’d taken her to a nice dinner in a restaurant with vases full of fresh flowers and white tablecloths.
He’d parked his car to drop her off at the end of the date.
Except Darlington was a gentleman. He would walk her to the door.
We’d go to a play, a diner, the park. We wouldn’t know each other’s secrets.
Alex wasn’t sure she’d ever been on a real date.
She and Len had gone to the movies a few times and she’d agreed to meet her TA from Psychology of Milton for coffee before she realized it was maybe closer to a date than a study session.
He would walk me to the door, and then what?
Usually, she avoided looking at Darlington.
She didn’t think about it; she just kept her head down, kept her focus elsewhere.
Because once she looked, she just wanted to keep looking.
His beauty was offensive, absurd, powerfully unfair.
He had been given too much of it and left scraps for the rest.
“Stern?” He turned to her, confused by her silence, and when he saw her watching him, his eyes flickered gold. The world felt suddenly distant. “We should go.”
He had turned off the engine and leapt from the car before she could reply, shutting the door behind him and stamping his feet in the cold.
She gave her head a shake, relieved he couldn’t read her mind.
She was tired and being near him was harder than she wanted it to be.
During his long absence, he had lived in her thoughts—confidant, companion, and, on the hard days, an unwelcome conscience.
But the reality of his presence, the weight and heat of his body beside her, was so much more complicated than that precise, knowledgeable voice in her head.
She wished they were walking into something tricky or dangerous; it would be easier to keep her mind straight.
But instead they had to go waste two hours with the duds of St. Elmo.
“Why did they buy the ugliest house on the block?” she asked as they approached the squat lump of red brick and white trim.
“It was available,” Darlington said. “And I’m sure they thought it was temporary.”
That Alex understood. When you were in the slide, you always had to tell yourself the bad choice wouldn’t last. We’ll squat until we find something permanent.
I’ll sleep in my car until the next paycheck.
I’ll chip away at the vig next week. But loss was easy.
It was why she’d held so tightly to this life at Yale.
She knew that if she let herself get too far from this place, she’d never find her way back.
They were greeted at the doorway by a short redhead with thick bangs wearing a ratty cloak embroidered with clouds. “They’re here!” she called over her shoulder. She stepped aside and declared, “Welcome, delegates of Lethe.”
“We are one step away from a m’lady,” Alex grumbled as they entered.
“I’m Nell,” the girl said, closing the door. “Sorry, I’m not sure who’s Dante and who’s Virgil.”
“It can be hard to tell lately,” Darlington replied.
But Alex just hiked her thumb at him. “That’s the man in charge.”
“Amazing,” Nell said. “Really great.” She was staring, a common response to Darlington’s ridiculous beauty, but he didn’t seem to notice. Remember that, she warned herself. Beauty is careless. It forgets its own power. “Right this way.”
Nell led them down a hallway cluttered with coats and discarded boots and into a perfectly square living room lined with bookshelves and cleared of all other furniture.
The ceiling had been painted dark blue and inscribed with a compass in shiny bronze paint.
At its center was the St. Elmo seal they referred to as “the boat and goat.”
The rest of the Weathermen were gathered in the kitchen beyond.
“Do you want anything to drink?” Nell asked. “We made punch.”
“No, thank you,” Darlington said, manners intact, never mind the hidden horns. “We’ll see to the circle of protection. Please watch your step when you return.” But as soon as she was gone, he said, “My God, this is depressing.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“It smells distinctly of foot.”
He enunciated the word as if trying to expel it.
Darlington was a snob, but he was also right.
There was something sad about these people in their worn velvet robes, the cheap Ikea bookshelves they’d lined with black-and-white photographs of better times and relics of past prestige.
Divorced from the grand architecture of the tombs, it all looked pathetic, like a sad set for a high school play.
Alex’s friend Minki had worked at a BDSM club sandwiched between a discount furniture warehouse and an auto repair shop on Lankershim.
She’d brought Alex with her on a shift once and it had reeked of the same desperate air of make-believe.
They set a wide circle of graveyard dust around the perimeter of the room and marked four gateways with bone chalk to stave off Grays.
All part of the same hopeful pantomime. St. Elmo’s nights were the easiest every semester, and Alex was already calculating that she’d be back in the dorm and in bed by one thirty.
She could get six hours, wake up early, and work on her Milton paper.
“Focus please, Stern.”
She didn’t know if Darlington had always been this attentive to her mind wandering or if being bound by hellfire made her easier to read, but it was annoying.
“What is this?” she asked, approaching what looked like a copper barrel set on a stone base at the center of the room.
“The Kettle. It used to be in the basement of Rosenfeld. Here.” He handed her a pair of earplugs. “Put them in once they start. You can thank me later.”
It didn’t take long to understand. Once the Weathermen gathered, Alex and Darlington stationed themselves at either side of the eastern gate by the house’s front windows.
She could smell the fruity tang of whatever punch Nell had cooked up.
It was probably more powerful than any magic they might make tonight.
The Weathermen began to chant, and based on Darlington’s wince, their Latin was not up to snuff. Then a young man with buzzed brown hair began banging on the rim of the barrel with long metal tongs and Alex wished she could hurl herself through a window.
“Tyler Norris,” Darlington murmured in her ear. “Delegation president. Computer engineering major.”
“I’m glad I brought you back from hell.”
“So I could do the homework?”
“Exactly.” He probably knew the names of everyone in the room, their hometowns, majors, and favorite desserts.
Alex wasn’t sure what the point was. The delegations came and went, a fresh batch of seniors every year.
Magic took a toll and the young were better able to endure it.
But no one really knew what kind of mark these rites left.
No one wanted to ask. The results were too precious.
Alex shoved the earplugs in. The din Tyler Norris was making in the Kettle sounded close to a steel drum, but there was no discernible rhythm, just a frantic rolling up and down like a clumsy giant playing in the world’s worst resort band.