Chapter 23 #2
“You’re not talking and I’m scared out of my mind. How about you cut me some slack?”
Nell shrugged, then said, “You don’t seem scared.”
“Would it help if I cried?”
Nell shifted uncomfortably, as if the idea of Alex’s fear troubled her.
“Does it bother you?” Alex asked. “That you’re leading me to my death?”
“He’s not going to kill you.”
“No, he’s going to throw me a tea party. What do you think vampires do, exactly?”
They passed a pizza place, a tattoo parlor, a head shop with neon in the window that read, ROAD TO SMOKE. Alex was pretty sure they’d gone demon hunting not too far from here, but she couldn’t be certain. They turned onto a wide main street, the kind that might as well be a highway.
“Who was Captain Thomas?” Alex asked.
“What?”
“That’s the name of this street. Captain Thomas. Who was he and why did he need so many lanes?”
“Maybe Linus just thinks you’re interesting because you’re crazy.”
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold.” Why was Darlington never around when she was ready to quote Shakespeare? “Have you brought Reiter victims before?”
“Offerings,” Nell insisted. “There is no more exquisite way to pass from this world.”
“Spoken like a woman who’s never seen a NASCAR crash.”
Nell looked utterly disgusted, and that somehow felt like a victory.
The area was desolate, a big wide boulevard with run-down houses and condos on the right, huge parking lots and squat buildings on the left, the dark ocean beyond. It didn’t make sense. This was prime waterfront. Why did it feel like it had been hit by a meteor?
They turned left into a vast parking lot and drove past the most depressing park she had ever seen—long stretches of mud punctuated by too-regular intervals of scrawny trees, lonely benches, heaps of dirty snow. Maybe it was more cheerful in the day.
Nell stopped the car where the lot abutted the boardwalk beneath an iron arch that read, SAVIN ROCK PARK.
“Over there,” Nell said.
A little way down the bike path, the pavement gave way to a gray swath of sand and a long narrow pier, little more than a walkway, jutting into the black gap of the sea.
Reiter stood on the weathered slats of the pier in his white wool coat, his colorless hair ruffled by the wind. Could he swim? There was a pool at Sweetwell. And it wasn’t like Alex was going to jump in to paddle away from him. How had he even gotten here so fast?
Of course. Reiter had known she wouldn’t come to Sweetwell. He’d planned to lure her here all along. She felt like an idiot.
Why this place? Empty spaces like these usually repelled Grays, barren and free of any joy or sorrow, of anything human at all.
But there, standing in the water, a boy, maybe ten or eleven.
Alex tugged him toward her, feeling his amazement and dread, then a surge of delight at the experience of being in a body.
Her mouth flooded with the tang of salt water and she knew he’d drowned.
You taste like the grave, Reiter had once said.
He wouldn’t drink from her, not with a Gray inside her.
But that wouldn’t stop him from breaking her neck or crushing her skull.
Alex made herself get out of the car, then just stood beside it.
She heard Nell turn on the radio and wanted to put her fist through the SUV’s window.
This girl shouldn’t be allowed to just sit in a parking lot, singing along to the hits, while Alex marched to her death.
She hated the fear inside her. She hated Reiter for making her feel it.
But she had chosen her people, and Mercy was one of them.
Mercy had begged to be a part of the magic in Alex’s world, to be granted access to the secrets of Lethe.
Alex could say she’d made her own choices but how much choice did someone have when the world cracked open and showed you miracles within reach.
The story never changed and it was not so different from the one Reiter had sold Nell: the serpent, the temptation, the sweetness of the fruit.
Unravel the world for me. Show me something different. Give me something more.
She felt like she was shrinking as she crossed the bike path and stepped onto the pier, as if she could see herself from above, a scrawny girl in second-hand clothes, a lone figure moving through pockets of lamplight, standing at the edge of the great dark sea.
If all Reiter wanted was to kill her, there were easier ways to coax her away from Yale’s wards.
Maybe he wanted to punish her, to make her watch him slaughter Mercy before he murdered her too.
Maybe he was doing Golgarot’s bidding here in the human realm.
Reiter fed on desperation and Alex knew it was pouring off of her right now.
She had felt death waiting. She had thought she could prepare herself to meet it.
But she didn’t want to go this way, alone in the winter night at the hands of this cold white thing.
Her boots sounded loud on the boards of the pier and Reiter turned to look at her, his pale eyes glinting.
“Hello, honey lamb.”