Chapter 11
Darlington spent his Wednesday morning reworking the wiring for the old sound system at Il Bastone.
It just didn’t want to stay fixed, but there was a limit to how much time he could spend in the library coming up with new queries for the Albemarle Book to try to crack the pilgrims’ nicknames and excavating every detail from Kittscher’s Lethe Days Diary.
At noon he put his tools aside, turned the electricity back on, and patted the breaker box.
“I’ll figure it out eventually,” he promised the house.
He headed downstairs to meet the others.
Turner had to work a drowning out at Savin Rock but told them to check in when they arrived at Kittscher’s. He wanted regular updates. “If anything goes wrong, you call. If it even starts to feel wrong, you call. I can have local PD out there fast.”
“And tell them what?” Alex asked as they packed up salt and something called the Asphodel Torch.
The torch just looked like a dried branch of slate-colored flowers, but when whispered to in Greek and shaken roughly, it produced a gout of flame that startled all of them—and utterly petrified Tripp.
Demons didn’t seem to like fire in the human realm.
Darlington felt natural fear but no powerful aversion, and he had decided that meant he was still mostly human; the logic was wobbly but comforting.
“Noise complaint,” Turner said. “Reports of shots fired.”
“Mayhem in a seaside town!” Alex cried, imitating an old news broadcast.
Turner ignored her. “Just leave that part to me.”
They were bringing Dawes along to act as lookout and to contact Turner if they couldn’t. Or to call the Praetor if things went really sideways.
Tripp was waiting outside next to the open front door like a dog hoping it was time for a walk. Il Bastone wouldn’t let him so much as set foot in the foyer if he wasn’t wearing his salt shroud.
“I told you no,” Darlington said before Tripp could start in again.
“Come on, I can be helpful, and I’m so bored.”
“Read something.”
“There’s nothing good to read.”
Darlington considered putting a stake through his heart. He wasn’t sure it would do much, but that level of stupidity was a personal affront.
“He’s just antsy,” Dawes said, retrieving a small cooler from the kitchen. “It would be nice to have someone else there.”
“He’s not going to be much use in a fight,” Darlington noted.
Parsing truth from fiction where vampires were concerned had proved challenging, but there was no question they were stronger and more at ease in the dark and in close proximity to their nests.
Out in Rhode Island Tripp would be at a disadvantage.
“Come on,” Tripp whined. “I can help.”
Alex was walking up the path with a backpack slung over her shoulder. “We don’t know what we’re heading into. Couldn’t hurt to have an extra body.”
“I get to go?” Tripp practically leapt toward the gate, the movement so fast and so startling Darlington snarled before he could think better of it, instinctively placing his body between Alex and the threat. “Oh shit,” Tripp said, holding his hands up. “My bad.”
But they were all staring at Darlington.
“Apologies,” he managed. Tripp Helmuth had never been a threat in any incarnation. But the demon didn’t think. It acted. And sometimes it brought ceilings down on their heads.
“Can I still come?” Tripp pleaded.
“Sure,” Alex said. “You’re our backup.”
Darlington threw up his hands in frustration. “I spend one year in hell and I lose all authority.” He jabbed his finger at Tripp. “Behave yourself.”
Tripp executed a bizarre little dance, and Darlington had to amend his thinking. Tripp Helmuth was certainly a threat to both rhythm and good taste.
They packed into the Subaru with the heater cranked up and the radio tuned to a local talk station to keep their minds off the mission ahead.
Dawes didn’t like to drive on the highway, so she sat in back with Tripp; Alex took the passenger seat, fingers drumming restlessly on the worn thighs of her black jeans.
Darlington didn’t know what to make out of their little army.
Cabot Collins, self-appointed poet of Lethe, had written copious ballads dedicated to the mission of the Ninth House.
But there was no chance that Lethe’s founders had envisioned such a peculiar crew standing “hoplite, hussar, dragoon” against the strange forces at work in this city.
A beleaguered graduate student. A failed third-generation Yale legacy who had become a vampire.
A New Havener with a demon riding shotgun in his head.
And Alex Stern: Wheelwalker, multiple murderer, and sophomore.
Even so, Lethe had never been quite so noble as he had hoped, and none of those descriptions really added up to the truth of the people making small talk as they hurtled north on 95.
It wasn’t the truth for Dawes, who had braved hell beside Alex to save him and mastered skills most Lethe delegates could only dream of.
Nor for Tripp, who was not really Tripp but who had somehow retained his hapless, hopeful nature.
Certainly not for Alex, who Darlington had so easily dismissed as a lost cause with a lucky gift but who had become the greatest soldier in this secret war.
And he could admit that he was not who he had imagined himself to be. He was neither the hero nor the knight and only time would tell if he was the beast to be slain. If Lethe was a lie, then maybe he was too.
“I suspect it’s meaningful that, if this is Rudolph Kittscher, he lives so far from New Haven,” Darlington said as they exited to Highway 2.
Alex ceased tapping. “All the way to exotic Rhode Island?”
“Farther than Belbalm ever got. Farther than Reiter.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not a vampire,” said Dawes.
“Or maybe he’s a cool vampire,” said Tripp. “Like me.”
“That remains to be seen,” Darlington replied, casting him a stern look in the rearview.
Tripp’s lip jutted out. “Why are you and Turner always giving me such a hard time?”
“Because you’re a demon who wants to eat us.”
“But I don’t actually eat you! That should count for something, right?”
“It does,” Dawes said soothingly. She handed him a juice box.
Alex gagged. “Jesus, is that blood?”
“He needs to stay hydrated. If he gets too hungry … I think it would be best if he didn’t.”
“The Rock eats cod eight times a day,” said Tripp between slurps. “He needs the protein.”
Alex looked over her shoulder. “Dawes, tell me it’s not your blood.”
Darlington hadn’t even considered that. “If it is, I’m kicking you both out of the car.”
“It’s my car!” Dawes protested. “And no, it is not my blood. I’m not an idiot. It’s pig blood from the butcher and you can all calm down.”
Darlington did feel calm, calmer than he had when they set out.
It felt good to be foolish, to talk about nothing, to worry about Tripp instead of the monster they might be about to face.
Whether human or vampire, if Kittscher was still alive, he might be in touch with the other pilgrims or know what had become of his companions.
But that could also mean he was in communication with Reiter and that he would be ready for them.
The house at the address Turner had provided was a cozy Cape Cod covered in wooden shingles and white trim, seated just above the sandy beach.
There were tidy homes on both sides of the gently curving street.
Darlington drove past, then circled around and parked a block away where they still had a good view of the pebbled path to the front door.
“It’s not like Reiter’s place,” Alex said. “Not isolated.”
“The house was purchased through a trust not long after Kittscher graduated,” Dawes said. “Thomas Neumann had a law practice in Provincetown for years. He did well for himself.”
That was a bit of an understatement. Darlington didn’t know if magic was involved or bribes, but Neumann simply hadn’t lost cases. Ever.
“He retired in the 1970s,” Darlington added. “Never married. No kids.”
Dawes bristled. “Those aren’t crimes.”
“No, but they’re anomalies for men of his time.”
“So he has to be a vampire, right?” asked Tripp. “We live a long time.”
“He could be a son or a grandson,” Alex shot back. “Or have nothing to do with Rudolph Kittscher at all.”
Darlington cast her a brief glance. Her arms were folded and her jaw was set. She was terrified and there was no cure for it. There wouldn’t be until the door to hell was shut and locked forever.
They waited, trying to get a feel for the place before they made a move.
Darlington wasn’t sorry to sit for a moment, to wait together.
The scenery was bleak, but he liked coastal towns better in the winter, when the wind and cold cleared the crowds of sunseekers from the beaches and the sea could stop pleasing and simply return to itself.
His eyes tracked the gray slice of sand with its patches of pale grass bending to the wild weather, the dark slate waves roiling with whitecaps.
It was as if the tide had come in and washed all color away.
“It’s so empty,” Tripp said at last.
“Midday in the middle of the week,” Alex replied.
The door to Neumann’s house opened and a young man bundled into a parka emerged with trash bags in his hands. He shouted a hello to his neighbor at her mailbox and she waved back.
“Could that be him?” Alex asked.
“I don’t think so,” Dawes said as she handed forward the photograph of Kittscher they’d taken from the Lethe archives.
Alex peered at it, then frowned. “It’s hard to tell in black-and-white.”
For a long while each Virgil had been photographed before graduating, the portraits becoming increasingly irreverent as the years passed.
When they’d fished out the old collection, Darlington had felt a stab of embarrassing longing at the idea of the picture he might never take in the Lethe parlor, followed by a wave of remorse at the memory of Michelle Alameddine standing before the sunflower staircase, one hand on her hip, grinning like she would never have anything to worry about in the world.
She’d probably already been spying for Linus Reiter then, feeding him information along with her blood. But it was easier to forgive the dead.
Rudolph Kittscher would have been twenty-one when this picture was taken.
He wore a dark three-piece suit with a white collared shirt and a black tie, his face unsmiling, round glasses perched on his narrow nose, his dark hair neatly parted on the side and combed back from his forehead to reveal a slight widow’s peak. He looked bright, arrogant, alive.
The young man shoving garbage into bins in front of the house had a thick mop of brown curls.
He was spectacle-free, but he might be wearing contacts.
He looked more athletic too, but Darlington didn’t know what rules governed a vampire’s musculature.
Maybe they were unchanging, locked in some kind of stasis.
No one really knew. He supposed that was something Tripp could help them understand.
“It’s time,” he said, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to. Why not just sit in the warmth of this idling car, speculating forever? After a sojourn in hell, any comfort felt like something to cling to.
And yet even if the stakes had not been so high, he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from getting out of the car and handing Dawes the keys.
He needed to know as he’d always needed to know.
The same greed that had driven him to understand New Haven and the magic at its heart drew him onward, the hunger to see the mystery solved.
It had led him to hell and now it would lead him inside this comfortable beachside house with its neat white trim and its creaking weather vane in the shape of a whale.
“If anyone comes out of that house other than us,” he told Dawes, “you get out of here. If we’re not back by three, you do the same.”
“That only gives you an hour.”
“You can’t risk getting trapped here after dark. Definitely not with Tripp.”
“Hey!” Tripp objected. Darlington cast him a yellow glare and Tripp threw up his hands to make peace. “Easy, killer.”
“I might say the same.”
“He’s trying to help,” said Dawes.
“He can help by watching your back and making certain you get home safe.”
“That’s your job,” Alex said to Tripp, holding his gaze. “We can cover our own vig. Dawes is yours to watch over. Understood?” She held up her knuckles.
Tripp gave them a bump. “Understood.”
Dawes blew out an exasperated breath. “I’m not completely incapable of defending myself.”
“You better not be,” said Alex. “If we get eaten, you’re the only one standing between New Haven and the legions of hell.”
Dawes went from pale to positively wan, and Darlington considered offering some words of comfort, but Alex was already striding toward Kittscher’s front door.
She’s been called.
Maybe. But Darlington was finding it harder and harder to discern the difference between a calling and a death wish.