Chapter 13
Alex studied the young man writhing in his salt cuffs in the warm light of a low New England sun, craning his neck, jaw snapping at the air. He lurched at her and she stepped aside. He stumbled into the wall and thudded awkwardly to the floor, unable to use his arms to break his fall.
She crouched down beside him.
“We’ve got a long afternoon ahead, so you may want to save some of that energy.” She gestured to Darlington. “Chains.”
He nodded and started slowly down the hall, still emerging from the stupor of sadness the demon had caused. Alex felt bad for letting Kittscher feed on Darlington, but she had needed the demon smug, distracted. He had to believe he was winning.
She hadn’t recognized what they were dealing with right away, not until “Theo” had set that bowl in front of the old man who wasn’t really an old man.
Then she’d understood that the demon was enjoying himself.
He was making a show of offering food and care, but he knew his captive was too weak to reach for the spoon, to cry out for help.
He was taunting his prisoner. Alex had spent enough time around casual sadists to recognize one.
When Darlington reached the door, he paused, framed by the gray street beyond. Beside him hung a watercolor of a bear snatching a salmon from a stream. “Thank you.”
“I used you as cover.”
His shoulder lifted the barest amount. “It worked.”
This is the danger in keeping company with survivors. He understood now, in a way he hadn’t before he’d been thrust into hell. They would do what they must.
Kittscher had wriggled to his feet again and charged the open door. Alex tripped him easily. This time he landed hard, face down. Blood spurted from his nose.
“Please try again,” Alex said as she hauled him up by his collar and dragged him back to the sunroom. “This is the most fun I’ve had in a while.”
The salt cuffs were weakening him, but it was clear he wasn’t as strong or as fast as Reiter. She tossed him down in the chair and kept an eye on him as she approached the human husk he’d been draining for who knew how long. Carefully, she pulled his collar aside. No puncture marks.
“Not a vampire,” she murmured, turning back to Kittscher. “So what are you?”
He was calm now. Looking for an opening, she suspected, as he stared up at her, eyes partially obscured by his floppy curls.
She sat down beside the wheelchair. “Theo?” she asked.
He drew a deep breath and his lips parted slightly, but all that emerged was a raspy sigh.
“Blink once for yes, twice for no, okay?”
Blink.
“Your name is Theo? You were sent here by the home care company?”
Blink.
“We’re going to try to get you help.”
Blink.
“I know what he did to you and I’m going to hurt him.”
Blink.
“Do you want to watch?”
Blink. Blink.
She couldn’t say she understood, but she could oblige.
When Darlington returned with the chains, Tripp and Dawes were with him.
“What interesting company you keep,” Kittscher said when he caught sight of Tripp.
“What is he?” Tripp asked. “He’s not a vampire.”
Alex was surprised. “You can tell?”
Dawes had already knelt next to the real Theo, checking his pulse. “This is … This is unspeakable.”
“Can you take him in the other room?” Alex asked.
Dawes nodded. “What are you going to do?”
“Ask Not Rudy some questions.”
“And if he doesn’t answer?”
“Do you really want to know?”
She shook her head.
While Darlington and Tripp secured the chains, Dawes wheeled Theo down the hall and into one of the bedrooms, and Alex followed.
“Can you help him?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. He’s … This is very bad. I don’t know if the process can be reversed, even if we brought him back to Il Bastone and used Hiram’s Crucible. Try to learn everything you can about what this is. I thought vampires killed their prey.”
“Theo … I feel like an asshole asking, but I need to know for sure. Did he … Did Kittscher ever drink your blood?”
Blink. Blink.
Tripp was hovering in the doorway. “If Kittscher isn’t a vampire, maybe I don’t have to be one anymore.”
“He might be something worse.”
Tripp nodded slowly, his expression glum. “I don’t like bullies.”
“Me neither.”
“I don’t want to be a bully.”
“We won’t let that happen.”
Tripp looked up then, and his eyes glittered with what might have been desperation or threat. “Why are you so sure you can stop me?”
“Because you’re not a killer, Tripp,” she said with more confidence than she felt. “Your albatross protected some of your soul. I believe that.”
“I let Spenser die.”
“Spenser tried to kill you.”
“But—”
Alex laid her hand on his shoulder. “I was in the real Tripp’s head.
I saw what Spenser did. He hurt your dog.
He tried to kill you. You let him drown, but you didn’t push him off that boat.
You’ve been in my head.” She dropped her voice to a whisper.
“You know I would have. That’s how I know you’re not a killer, Tripp. Because I am.”
He brushed at his damp eyes. “Why is that so comforting?”
Alex shrugged. “Help Dawes. Do what you can for Theo. Okay?”
“Okay.”
In the sunroom, Darlington sat across from a man who looked twenty but was over a century old. Alex righted the chair Kittscher had knocked over and took a seat.
“Let’s start with the easy stuff,” she said. “What did you do to Theo?”
“I let him care for me,” Kittscher said calmly. “He was of service. Why are you here? How did you find me?”
“We found your old papers,” said Alex. “Doubting Thomas. Not much of a front.”
“A bit of play,” Kittscher said. “I wanted my old friends to be able to find me if they had a need.”
“You wanted to show off,” Darlington said. “You wanted someone to know what you accomplished.”
“I see now you really are a man of Lethe.”
“Maybe,” said Darlington. “I certainly was.”
“You walked the Gauntlet.”
“Twice,” said Alex.
Now Kittscher looked confused. “Twice?”
“What? Like it’s hard?”
“But it is hard, isn’t it?” Kittscher said with a small smile, and Alex wondered how they had ever mistaken this creature, even briefly, for something that was human. “The descent always leaves a mark.”
“You’ve been waiting a long time, haven’t you?” said Darlington. “To brag to someone.”
“But it’s not really him,” Alex protested. “It’s his demon.”
Kittscher’s grin turned sly. “Yes and no.”
Alex thought of Tripp waiting in the other room. I don’t want to be a bully.
“The protection spell that…” She hesitated. She didn’t want to use Mercy’s name in front of this predator. “That we used to fight our demons, that gave us our salt guardians. It came from the Lethe library.”
“You had salt guardians,” Darlington said. “You conjured them before you went to hell.”
“Of course,” Kittscher scoffed, the arrogant young man emerging. “You went without protection? Such courage. Such stupidity.”
But Darlington looked thoughtful. “You all had guardians?”
“Little Lionel thought God was enough, but I insisted.”
“A good Christian. A believer. Reiter wasn’t there for plunder,” Darlington mused. “His was a spiritual journey.”
Like Turner, Alex thought. Reiter believed God was on their side, that Bible verses and the righteousness of their mission would keep him safe.
“Rich men can afford their faith,” said Kittscher. He laughed. “You can imagine my befuddlement at the end of it all. What’s an atheist to think when he himself becomes a god?”
“You’re not a god. You’re a sadist,” she said.
“Is there a difference?”
Alex felt exhaustion seeping back into her, the thrill of capturing Kittscher dissipating and leaving only a sense of futility. She didn’t know how much of Rudolph Kittscher was left in this demon, protected by whichever salt guardian had chosen to watch over him, and she wasn’t sure it mattered.
“You liked draining the youth and hope from anyone unlucky enough to cross your threshold.”
“It’s important to enjoy your work,” he said. “I’m a scientist. I’ve been gathering data.”
“What did you to him? How do we reverse it?”
“You can’t. Time flows one way.” He glanced up at Alex through his lashes. “For most of us. I know what you are. I drank your friend’s knowledge along with his hopelessness. It seems our bargain with hell is fulfilled.”
Alex rose. So what if he knew she was a Wheelwalker? She was a lot more concerned about Alban Reed than this bastard.
She set the Voynich Coffin on the floor.
“He has more to tell,” said Darlington warningly.
“I’m not putting him in. I just want him to know we can.”
Kittscher’s eyes fastened on the puzzle box. “Oh my,” he said on a long breath.
Alex reached out with every bit of force she could muster and seized Kittscher’s essence.
The familiar sludge poured into her, cold and heavy, and she grabbed for the back of the chair as the weight tried to buckle her …
but there, at the edges, the gleam of Theo’s youth, bright gold.
She tried to seize hold of that glimmer, but it slid away from her.
Beneath the sludge, something more … His salt guardian, the shape of a bear curled around the memory of the real Rudolph Kittscher, polished mahogany, the sudden, decisive chop of a cleaver.
His father had been a butcher. He had hated him.
The blood on the apron. The smell of death.
He had fought his way free of the stink of the slaughterhouse, with nothing but his own brilliance to see him through, his ambition carrying him to Yale, and then through a door that should have always remained closed.
Alex spat him back out.
“I don’t go down easy, do I?” asked Kittscher, unruffled. “What a gift you have. How did you manage to keep it from Golgarot?”
Alex ignored him. “I thought I could glean enough of Theo to give him back his life, but there’s nothing left.”
“Noble sentiments have no place in this work,” chided Kittscher as if he were actually disappointed in her. He reminded her eerily of Professor Walsh-Whiteley. “You’re going to lose. Do you not understand that?”
“Maybe,” Alex conceded. “I’m not what they call graceful in defeat.”
“Why are you fighting so hard? This isn’t Armageddon. The armies of hell won’t run roughshod over the world. It’s just a little more tragedy, a little more death. Have you read the news lately? Who’s going to notice?”
“How can you be so certain?” Darlington asked, and he sounded genuinely curious.
“Because we know the deal we made.”
“And you trust Golgarot to keep to it?”
“I do. These were bargains made in blood.”
“Spell it out,” said Alex. “I want the specific terms and the names of the other pilgrims.”
Kittscher tsked and shook his head from side to side in a slow, deliberate rhythm. “If you know my kind, you know I’m not interested in making this easy.”
A demon never would.
“Good fortune for Reiter. Knowledge for you. And if a few people lose their souls, you get to live forever, so who cares?” Alex demanded. “One more time Lethe failed to protect the people you swore to watch over.”
“We are the shepherds,” Darlington said.
Something flashed in Kittscher’s eyes, the memory of who he’d been or maybe nothing at all. “You blundered into this. You’re as much to blame as we are. At least we made our plans carefully and prepared for the dangers ahead.”
“Did you, now?” Darlington asked. He looked like the good student, deconstructing a thorny text. He looked like a demon captured by a new puzzle. “Alex, would you be kind enough to join the others and leave us for a while?”
“What are you going to do?” Alex asked.
“Something I’d prefer you didn’t see.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want you to fear me.”
Kittscher’s lips twitched. “Are we playing good cop, bad cop?”
“We left the cop at home,” said Darlington. “Alex?”
Alex glanced between Kittscher and Darlington then made her choice. “Call if you need me.”
But she waited in the hallway, her curiosity getting the best of her.
Darlington walked to the kitchen and took a sponge from the sink. He pulled a vial from his pocket, dousing it in salt water.
In their research they’d found a thesis written in the late 1700s in Auvergne, France, that posited the myth around holy water being used against vampires was really just the demon’s response to the purging effects of simple salt water.
“What is it you plan to do?” said Kittscher. “I don’t fear pain. Chop off my head. Drive a stake through my heart. I’ll go to hell and maybe I’ll slip back through with Golgarot’s armies. Don’t expect me to be afraid.”
Darlington returned to stand before Rudolph Kittscher in his stolen form.
“I don’t think we’ve properly met,” he said, his golden horns emerging, voice mild, though the demon growl lay just beneath the words.
Kittscher lost his smug smile.
“I wasn’t just a pilgrim,” Darlington continued. “I wasn’t just passing through. Hell was my home, Golgarot my liege lord, and I his faithful servant. Queaque ipsa miserrima vidi … I’m sure you know the rest.”
Now Kittscher started to writhe in his bonds.
“I see we’re beginning to understand each other.
I didn’t like torture at first. I had hold of my human self.
My noble sentiments, as you might describe them.
I was shamed by what was asked of me until slowly the shame was eaten away.
I have excelled at everything in my life, and I excelled at this too.
I was one of the best of Golgarot’s torturers.
” He tugged hard on Kittscher’s curls, forced his head back, holding the dripping sponge above the demon’s eyes.
“I learned it was best to work from the outside in.”
Kittscher’s screams followed Alex down the hall.