Chapter 8
“Who is Linus Reiter?” Walsh-Whiteley demanded as they were seated at a long table set with what Alex thought was probably real silver.
“A former member of Skull and Bones,” Alex replied.
“Oh,” he said on a gust of relief.
“And a vampire.”
“Pardon?”
Alex was spared from explaining by the clink of a knife on a wineglass.
She had known they weren’t being called to New York because the Praetor had finally gotten his way.
She just wasn’t sure how all this was going to play out or how much the Lethe board knew.
Alex’s old dealer Eitan had been using her as muscle, and he’d sent her to Reiter’s place in Old Greenwich on the pretense of collecting a payment.
Alex still had nightmares about that fight, about the feeling of his fangs tearing into her neck.
When the train had passed through Reiter’s town, she’d almost expected the wheels to come screeching to a halt, for the doors to open and reveal the man himself: lean, ageless, a killing machine in an impeccable white suit.
Hello, honey lamb. What’s on the menu tonight?
She would forget Reiter if she could, but the problem was that Lethe had played a role in creating him. The man the demon had consumed, taking on his life and his appearance, was one of the original pilgrims to hell.
As Walsh-Whiteley prattled on, Alex tried to get a read on the room.
No one really expected her to talk. They all knew her history.
She was the charity case who was just lucky to be seated among her betters.
They got to feel good for giving her a chance and she got to try to look humble while stuffing herself on warm rolls. She’d made worse deals.
The roster of board members featured the usual mix of lawyers and financiers alongside a linguistics professor working out of the Sorbonne, another academic who focused on mapping the family trees of witches while teaching medieval history at USC, an archaeologist studying the hidden temple at Ephesus, a tech entrepreneur working out of his houseboat in Seattle on an AI that could create and reproduce digital charisma, and a neurologist writing a secret paper on the hauntings resulting from the lobotomy craze of the 1940s.
This was the Lethe Alex had discovered in their histories and handbooks: people more concerned with hoarding knowledge, or landing research grants, or wresting some bit of power from the societies for themselves than actually fulfilling the supposed mission of the Ninth House.
They had swept Sandow’s death and the murder he committed under the rug.
Manuscript and Scroll and Key had violated pretty much every rule that existed to maintain the boundaries between the societies and the student body, but they’d slid by with little more than a stern talking-to.
Lethe had hidden Darlington’s disappearance, and Anselm’s and Michelle Alameddine’s too.
Walsh-Whiteley was an ass, but he wasn’t wrong about these people.
They were willing to do anything to keep the societies happy and keep their own seats at tables like these.
The unpleasant truth was that Alex knew she had more in common with them than Darlington or Dawes or Turner, or even the Praetor.
She might not have the poise or the degrees to mask her hunger, but she hadn’t come to Yale to be a hero.
She’d come for the perks. For the prestige.
For the chance to drag herself out of the mess she’d made of her life.
She scanned their faces as she attempted to make polite conversation about choosing a major and being a Californian in a New England winter, wondering if any of them might reflect back an attainable future.
She had believed it didn’t really matter what she studied so long as she passed, that the plan was the degree—the Yale name and all the doors it would open, the magic it would work to erase her past and every bad decision she’d ever made.
But if Lethe had taught her anything, it was that there were limits to what magic could do.
Assuming she lived long enough to worry about it.
After the dessert had been served—vanilla sponge with fruit and small glasses of tawny port that the Praetor nodded approvingly over—Alban Reed rose from his place at the head of the table.
He had shaggy brown hair and a closely cropped beard that was beginning to show gray.
Reed ran a hedge fund, but Alex knew from Darlington’s notes that he had been a very talented member of Lethe and now ran a side business trading alchemical manuscripts.
He’d apparently been one of Dean Sandow’s favorites.
“He did his graduate work in New Enochian,” Darlington had warned them. “He’s smart and he knows more about the occult than just about anyone.”
“How uncharacteristically humble,” Turner had noted.
“I said just about anyone.”
Now Reed held up his hands like a magician at a show. Can I get a volunteer?
“I’m not going to subject you all to a long speech. We all know Lethe has had a rough few years, and I have made it my goal to ensure that changes. This past Thursday, Detective Turner contacted me to let me know about a series of disappearances in New Haven and its surrounds.”
Professor Walsh-Whiteley nearly choked on his port. “You should have spoken to me first,” he whispered furiously. But Turner ignored him and Reed continued on.
“These span several years, and while few have directly impacted the Yale community, he believes there’s a pattern, and I agree. We think the vampire Linus—previously Lionel and Ludwig—Reiter has become active again.”
Again. The word caught like a thorn in Alex’s thoughts. She knew Reiter had been preying on Connecticut and possibly some of New York for almost one hundred years, burying his victims beneath his garden at Sweetwell. But had Lethe known? That was an ugly bit of news.
“We’ve been told that he was sighted on campus,” Reed went on. “And we believe he has been spying on the doings inside Lethe. It’s time we took action.”
Reed explained he was forming a task force, took questions from the alumni.
No one mentioned where Reiter had come from or what might have created him.
No one spoke Michelle’s name. No one demanded to know why Lethe had let a vampire set up house a short drive from the university and rack up a body count for the better part of a century.
When a woman in a navy sweater set asked, “Why is he hunting again now?” Alex held her breath, waiting for someone to point an accusing finger at her.
That reprobate broke into his house. Send her back where she belongs.
The San Fernando Valley. Community college.
A fate worse than hellfire for the crowd at this dinner.
But Reed simply said, “We can only speculate.”
Something was off about all of it. If Reed really believed Michelle had been spying for Reiter, then he had to recognize the possibility that the vampire had other sources feeding him information from within the Ninth House.
Reiter could have struck a bargain with anyone in the room. Or Reed himself.
“Notice anything?” Darlington murmured beside her.
“They’re all talking a lot and saying nothing?” whispered Turner.
“No,” Alex said, realization striking. “They’re not talking enough. They’re not doing the Lethe thing. They really don’t know Reiter walked the Gauntlet.”
The men and women of Lethe loved to debate, to talk theory, to show off their understanding of obscure texts and ancient rites.
Instead, they were discussing crime statistics and what might be fact or fiction from the folklore around vampires.
Not a word was said about demons. They had no idea how or why Linus Reiter had come to be.
The board had seemed like a myth to her, impossibly powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, carelessly batting her future around like a shuttlecock.
But they were so much worse than that. Not villains. Just another bunch of amateurs.
The dinner finished with a wave of chatter over the disappearances, the victims—which were “members of the Yale community” and which were firmly town—how long Reiter had been active, though Alex wasn’t sure he’d ever gone dormant at all.
Turner had pulled unpaid overtime to dig into the disappearances since he had no logical way to connect a father vanishing from a football game at UConn with a tourist from Arizona never returning to her hotel room after a day of shopping in Westport.
If you didn’t know a demon was preying on the populace, it all seemed arbitrary, and his boss wasn’t going to let him waste valuable hours on cold cases.
It was strange to watch the detective working the room now, smiling, shaking hands. “I forgot how good he is at this,” she said to Darlington.
“He’d make quite the congressman.”
They had both seen that possible future for Turner, and watching him charm a room full of the Yale elite, Alex could believe it might come to pass.
His wariness and frustration had been hidden away so thoroughly it was like a glamour taking hold, the irritable, dogged detective vanishing behind a slick veneer, his anger buried deeper than one of Reiter’s victims. Alex would have given good money for a little of that talent.
She’d never been able to make the illusion of respectability stick.
She was relieved when the group began to disperse, heading home to apartments and condos or catching trains to the suburbs.
She sensed Alban Reed approaching as she shook hands with the woman in the navy sweater set—Deena?
Doris? Alex couldn’t remember her name, only that she had created a synthetic form of the stimulant basso belladonna and had an under-the-table contract with the US military for its use.
Reed kissed Deena/Doris on both cheeks as she said her goodbyes and then turned his attention to Alex. “How is your mother enjoying her new home?”
“She likes it a lot,” Alex said, waiting. Reed was a predator of some kind; she knew that. She just wasn’t sure if he was a standard finance shark or someone she actually had to watch out for.
“I approved that expense. A bungalow in Los Angeles is no small thing, even in Reseda.”
“Cost of doing business, am I right?” Alex wasn’t going to thank him. She’d put her life on the line for Lethe multiple times and covered up murders and scandals alike. If they wanted continued compliance, they could pay for it.
“A mercenary nature,” he said pleasantly. “I appreciate that. Are you satisfied with the results of this evening’s meeting?”
“Of course.”
“And a liar too. Well, I should be grateful for it, since you’ve lied on Lethe’s behalf plenty of times.” That might just be the Lethe equivalent of Thank you for your service. “Do you know why the board took no real action tonight?”
Reed was playing the outsider, as if he’d been a mere observer here. “Does Lethe ever take action? We’re just the cleanup crew, right?”
“Lethe is and has always been a pretense, a false promise from one institution to another. Nothing will be done because no one in this room gives a fuck about Reiter or his victims and never has.”
Now Alex was paying attention. He was being honest. Or at least he wanted her to think so.
“Then what was all this about?” she asked. “Why convene the board and call us to New York?” Alex had her own reasons for wanting the meeting, but Reed had no way of knowing that.
“It was the easiest way to get to speak with you in some degree of privacy.”
“Easier than making the drive to New Haven?”
He gave a rueful laugh, and Alex knew that to everyone else in the room it looked like they were having a warm chat. Only Darlington and Turner were watching, only they looked like they could smell the rot on this man.
“I think not. Bad things happen to the men of Lethe where you’re involved, Alex Stern. Your mentor, Daniel Arlington. Dean Sandow. Michael Anselm. I think you’ve slid by so far either through guile or the profound negligence of the board.”
Was this it? Was this where he ousted her and told her not to return next semester? Where they chose a new Dante to study with Darlington and cast her out into the cold? But then why the dinner, the performance, the reminder of what Lethe had done for Mira?
“What exactly do you want, Mr. Reed?”
“Alban, please.” He smiled again, and she realized it was a tell—the look of a man who knew he had a winning hand. “I want a new nexus, Wheelwalker.”