Chapter 26
Turner was out of his car, gun drawn, moving toward the water where Darlington and Reiter had sunk beneath the waves.
“The boots!” Alex shouted. “We have to get to the parking lot!”
But Nell was already standing on the boardwalk. “You let him go or I burn these to ash!”
Dawes emerged from the Subaru, its lights still on.
“Stay over there,” Nell demanded, trying to put more distance between them. “Call off that … whatever that thing with the horns was.”
“I am trying to be sympathetic,” Alex shouted, “but you’re making it really hard.”
“Call him off!” Nell wailed.
“Give us the artifact.”
“He’s killing him!”
Alex didn’t know if that was true, but if it was, she wanted to watch Reiter die. Her bogeyman. The monster that had haunted her nightmares.
“We need the boots,” Turner muttered, keeping one eye on the waves. Neither Reiter nor Darlington had emerged, and Alex wondered if they might both be in danger.
“Nell won’t burn them,” Alex said. “She knows how valuable they are.”
“Look at her. That is not a woman in her right mind.”
Nell’s eyes were wide, her face distended in a grimace. Tears had tracked through her powdery makeup. She looked somewhere between a gargoyle and a child in the middle of a meltdown.
“We may not have a chance like this again,” Alex protested, embarrassed by the whine in her voice. But even as she said it, she wondered why they’d had a chance at all. If Reiter was so vulnerable to salt water, why meet by the sea?
The answer came quickly. He had brought reinforcements. Cars were pulling into the vast parking lot and she could see dark figures emerging from between the buildings along the boardwalk.
Alex reached for more hellfire, and she was glad Darlington was close now. If these were Reiter’s human familiars, she and Turner and Dawes were screwed. Hellfire was useless against anything but demons.
“How many bullets do you have in that gun?” Alex asked Turner.
“Not enough.”
Alex let the ripple of hellfire spread outward. Hopefully these jackasses didn’t know it couldn’t hurt them.
“Let him go!” screamed Nell.
Alex reached out with a tendril of flame, grasping for Darlington, hoping to find him amid the waves.
“Darlington!” she yelled, unsure if he could hear her. And yet she knew he could, that he could feel her terror, her longing for Reiter’s death—and her regret that she couldn’t let this particular monster die. Not tonight.
“Tell them to get back,” Alex said. “Or I’ll burn you and those boots where you stand.”
Dawes made a strange gesture with her arms and the hellfire pulsed outward, stronger and brighter than before. The familiars scuttled back, shadows behind a blue wall. Alex wasn’t going to stop to question it. Dawes always came prepared.
“Well, shit,” said Turner.
Darlington was emerging from the sea, his dark coat drenched and clinging to his shoulders, horns on full display, dragging Reiter behind him by the collar, snarling and soaked.
The vampire’s skin bubbled and hissed, tendrils of steam rising from the popping blisters, and it was clear from the rasping, wheezing sounds he was making that the damage was internal too.
Darlington held Reiter by the nape of his neck while the vampire tried to claw and bite at him.
Alex felt something inside her release. Reiter had seemed, as Nell would say, immortal.
Eternal. Too strong, fast, and agile for Alex to best. But between Turner’s Dodge, Darlington’s demon, and the New Haven Sound, he didn’t seem quite so scary anymore.
“Let him go,” Nell demanded.
“Boots first,” Dawes said, coming up behind her.
“Check the bag,” Alex said. “And get my phone back from her.”
Dawes flinched when Nell opened the shopping bag. “She doused them in lighter fluid! This is an ancient artifact, you … you … fucking clod.”
“She’s bringing out the big guns,” Turner murmured.
Nell shook the bag. “Just take it and let him go!” She was sobbing now.
Alex understood. None of this looked the way it was supposed to, shorn of glamour and drama, magic laid bare. Reiter was meant to be the tonic for the miseries of life, and yet here he was, her savior in a white suit, hissing and spitting, covered in boils.
Darlington tossed him onto the sand. “Come near her again and I’ll make this look like the best day of your life.”
Nell threw the shopping bag at Dawes and raced down to where Reiter knelt.
They could kill him right now. They had the boots.
Alex didn’t think hellfire could destroy a demon, but it was worth a try.
She raised her hands, but as if he had sensed her intentions, Reiter shrieked and hurled himself into the air, leaving Nell behind.
For a moment her eyes tracked him in the sky, and then he was gone, a vanishing white star.
His familiars ran to their cars or crawled back into the shadows.
“We should go after them,” said Turner. “They might have information.”
Alex shook her head. She had risked her life for Mercy, and they needed to get her somewhere safe. Besides, there was no way Reiter had given any of these dimwits vital information. They were cannon fodder.
“You’re all right?” Darlington asked, approaching.
She nodded and felt the embarrassing urge to crumple against him like a heroine in an old movie.
She swallowed the ache in her throat. Darlington was soaked in seawater, and they needed to make sense of everything that had happened tonight.
But she was, in fact, all right. She was tired and damp, her boots were full of sand, and she was still shaking with adrenaline, but Reiter hadn’t gotten her.
They’d come for her. They’d found her. Her whole life she’d been crying out, waiting for someone to hear her. Eventually she’d gone hoarse and stopped trying. But here they were. Dawes biting her lip. Turner reversing his car so Darlington could lift Mercy into the back seat.
It was a beautiful thing, an alarming thing.
Under any other circumstance, she didn’t belong in these people’s lives.
A cop with a conscience. A grad student who had actively tried to avoid her for the first five months of their acquaintance.
And Darlington. Connecticut royalty. A snob with an overdeveloped sense of duty.
A knight in a quality overcoat. What would happen when the battle was over and the blood was spent?
If she managed to stay alive, was there any real place for her with them?
Are you so eager to be cast out of Eden? Golgarot had asked, wearing his Michael Anselm disguise. No, she’d thought at the time, but she had known she would survive it. Now she wasn’t so sure.
“You okay?” she called after Nell, who was snuffling and limping across the sand back to her SUV.
“Fuck you!” Nell shouted over her shoulder.
“She’s okay.”
“Il Bastone?” Turner asked.
“We don’t know if it’s secure,” said Darlington. “Dawes, can you text Tripp? He needs to make sure Reiter didn’t send any of his familiars there. Tell him not to do anything, just…”
“Observe and report,” suggested Turner.
Darlington nodded. “He’ll like that. Observe and report.”
Alex hated the idea that Reiter might have sent someone to the house on Orange. But that wasn’t the only problem. “Even if Il Bastone is clear, I don’t think Mercy is going to want to wake up there. Especially not if Tripp is around.”
She hadn’t liked him as a human. Seeing him slurping on a blood pouch in a corner wasn’t going to help her recover now.
“Black Elm?” asked Dawes.
“You’re welcome,” Darlington said, “but it’s not exactly fit for human occupation, and the heat still isn’t on.”
Alex couldn’t take Mercy back to the dorms, not with Lauren there, and the Hutch was too small.
“I want her to feel safe,” she said. “I want her to be safe.”
The waves lapped the shore. Turner’s engine rumbled steadily. Safe was a promise none of them could make.
“I know a place,” Turner said at last. “I’ll text you the address.”
Alex stared. “Are we actually going to see your apartment?”
“Absolutely not. And you will be on your best behavior or I’ll send you to a supermax.”
“After Yale? That’s easy time.”
“Just try not to behave like a complete degenerate,” Turner said, stepping on the gas.
Alex had never managed it before, but she could certainly try.