Chapter 10
Alex used Sunday to try to get a handle on her coursework.
She had a paper due on Christina Rossetti, whom she was liking less than expected, and another on Milton, whom she was liking more than expected.
Or maybe it was that Paradise Lost felt more relevant these days.
It was hard to focus on anything with Reed’s threats echoing in her head.
She had played dumb when he’d told her he wanted a nexus, but she knew he hadn’t believed her.
“No one knows what creates a nexus,” she’d told him. “How am I supposed to help you find one?”
“Don’t make me play games, Alex. I find them tiresome. Probably because I always win.”
“I want to help,” she’d said with as much conviction as she could muster. “You know how much I need my place at Yale. I don’t want to jeopardize any of it. But you should talk to Dawes or Darlington. They know so much more about all of this. I’m just—”
“You are a collision of bloodlines that never should have occurred. You are a walking, talking natural disaster in the making.”
What’s the worst that can happen? Alex had thought. I wedge open a doorway to hell?
“I can help protect your gifts and you. Together we can find an ethical, humane way to put them to use. There are others out there who won’t have those priorities. Think on it. I can be a very good friend to have.”
He had smiled, clapped her on the shoulder like he was congratulating her after a big game, and drifted into the crowd.
There are others out there. Those were the words she couldn’t shake.
Alban Reed could take away her place at Yale.
He could get her mother kicked out of that dreamy little bungalow.
Those were real problems she would need to find a way around.
But the real question was how the hell he knew she was a Wheelwalker and how many other people had that knowledge too.
She was grateful when evening finally came.
She packed her pockets with salt and walked over to Il Bastone to find out what Turner and the others had learned about Kittscher.
Fighting demons had a certain immediacy that poetry lacked and Sunday dinner had become a ritual for them.
Dawes made a roast and Yorkshire puddings, or pork chops lacquered in maple glaze, or fish heaped with dill, and they tried to figure out what had to be done for the week.
But tonight was different. Dawes was serving cassoulet and they had a real lead.
“No mysterious disappearances in Thomas Neumann’s neighborhood,” Turner said between bites. “No strange spikes in death rates. If he’s feeding on the locals, he’s being a lot more careful than Reiter. What do we actually know about this guy?”
“Kittscher was working class,” Darlington said. “He didn’t have Reiter’s background or connections, but he was smart and cocky and aggressively social.”
“Ambitious,” said Alex.
“You’d have to be to plan an excursion to hell.”
Turner didn’t look impressed. “The word audacious comes to mind.”
“That too,” said Darlington. “If we want to be kind, we can say Kittscher aspired to greatness. This was the age of exploration. Egypt. The Arctic. Our own Hiram Bingham in Peru.”
Alex toyed with her fork. “Golgarot said as much. He said exploration was just another word for conquest.”
Darlington nodded. “Why do you think there were so many stories of Egyptian curses?”
“Pillager guilt?” Turner suggested.
“Very likely,” said Darlington. “Death comes on swift wings and all that.”
Alex sat up straighter. “What?” It was too close an echo to the thought that had been hounding her, the feeling that death was circling somewhere above her, waiting for its chance.
“It was a curse on Tutankhamun’s tomb,” said Turner.
“No,” corrected Darlington. “That’s a myth. It was invented by journalists to sell papers.”
“There’s no curse?”
“You actually look disappointed,” Alex said. “I thought you hated magic.”
Turner scowled. “I still like a good story.”
“I didn’t say there were no curses,” Darlington clarified.
“That particular line doesn’t appear anywhere and written curses are very rare in Egypt.
The ones that do exist are more like Please mind the gap or Stay off the grass.
But the Valley of the Kings is full of unwritten prohibitions and wardings.
It’s why some tombs have never been found and never will be. ”
“They made their own curse and left it for us.” Dawes gestured to the diary pages. “When Kittscher scrubbed the records, they weren’t just hiding the Gauntlet or the journey. They were covering up the bargain they made. Remember what Golgarot said: They walked away with wealth and power.”
Darlington nearly knocked over his wineglass.
“That isn’t what he said.” Alex recognized his look, startled and studious, the mad scientist finding the flaw in his own equation.
“Not all of it. Golgarot said, They walked away with wealth and power, stores of ancient knowledge and good fortune. I didn’t see it before, but you’re right.
He was being specific—four gifts for the societies.
Good fortune probably went to Reiter and Skull and Bones, the society of prognostication.
Knowledge had to be for the scholar, for Lethe. ”
“Sounds like Kittscher,” said Dawes. “He loved his theories.”
And the sound of his own voice. Alex had struggled not to fall asleep making her way through Kittscher’s speeches in the Daemonologie.
“Power for the soldier?” Darlington mused.
Soldier, your hour draws closer. But who was he? Had he made it back from hell?
“Anyone else feel like we got cheated?” Alex asked.
“We did escape with our lives,” said Dawes.
“Sure, but where’s my parting gift?”
Alex hadn’t wanted to tell the others about Alban Reed’s threats or what he’d said about her bloodline.
They would push her even harder to raise the issue of her father with Mira.
And maybe she should. Reed had said nothing else that indicated he was somehow eavesdropping on their conversations at Il Bastone.
If he had been he would have threatened to bring their use of the Gauntlet to light or the fact that they were sheltering a vampire, or that Darlington was part demon now.
And yet, somehow he knew what Alex was and what she could do.
She had no intention of making a nexus for him, but she would have to lead him on until she figured out who his source was and how dangerous that person might be to her.
And then what? Reed was powerful far beyond the world of Yale and Lethe.
He had connections to tech, to the military, and to endless stores of magic.
Death comes on swift wings. It was waiting for her. Alex could see it, perched in the towers above the university like the demon on the night of their first hunt, like Reiter in his den. It was biding its time, and eventually death would find its moment.
Some part of her didn’t care. She was tired.
She was bruised. She was sick of trying to swim against the current with weights tied to her ankles.
But when she thought of what might be waiting for her on the other side of the Veil?
Of Golgarot laying claim to her soul? That was the thing she feared: not death but the yoke.
She’d suffered enough in this life. She wasn’t going to let anyone make her suffer in the next.
They agreed to visit Thomas Neumann’s house on Wednesday—in very bright daylight.
Alex had Science, Morality, and Taboo in the morning, a class that helped fulfill her science requirement and that thankfully involved absolutely no science.
She would have the rest of the day free, and they’d have plenty of sunny hours to investigate.
If Kittscher really had become a vampire, they would be challenging him in his nest, and Alex wasn’t going to take any chances.
She would be going in armed, and more importantly, she would have Darlington with her.
She tried to let the thought reassure her.
As long as there was a clear task before them, being around him wasn’t so difficult.
The man was honorable. The demon was lethal.
That was what mattered. That should be enough.
Alex didn’t want to think about Darlington, and she didn’t want to imagine the horrors waiting for them in Rhode Island, so she took those blessed days free of Lethe and its monsters to catch up on reading, to eat, to sleep as much as she possibly could—and to try to fix things with Mercy.
Alex knew this might not be a break that would mend.
She’d needed a way to get free of Eitan, and hell had required a murderer to fulfill its blood price.
Mercy had known what Alex intended, but she’d been drunk on magic, too high on the thrill of secrecy and scheming to think about the reality of taking another person’s life.
Alex had known it, and she had let Mercy stumble headlong into the consequences.
She caught her on the way into their Shakespeare in Cinema lecture, only the fourth lecture of the semester.
Alex had missed the second and third and could admit that she hadn’t been paying particularly close attention through the first. She’d been too exhausted and too rattled by the prospect of hell knocking on Yale’s door.
But she should have been more attentive—not just to Professor Girard but to Mercy too, to how diligently she was taking notes, to the shine in her eyes when she talked about this course.
She had a crush. That wasn’t the end of the world.
But Lauren’s alarm bells had rung, and Alex wasn’t going to dismiss that.