Chapter 28
When Darlington emerged from the laundry, he joined Turner and Dawes in the living room with Turner’s mother.
He still couldn’t quite believe that the detective had allowed them into this house, and he had to admit it was distressing.
If Turner was letting down his guard, maybe they really were in the end times.
“Are those Esau’s clothes?” Celeste asked when he entered the living room. “Your brother is not going to appreciate that.”
“Does he have to know?” Turner asked.
“If you tell me why your friend was in wet clothes, I suppose I could hold my tongue.”
“He fell into a snowbank.”
“Yes,” Darlington agreed. “Very embarrassing.”
“For everyone, really,” said Turner.
Celeste rolled her eyes. “Lying is a sin, Abel. Please excuse yourself so that I can fall asleep in front of the television like a respectable woman.”
Turner kissed his mother’s cheek, then hovered beside her, staring at an empty spot on the couch.
“Good night, Mama,” he said.
In the kitchen, they settled at a round breakfast table with teacups and a tin of butter cookies Turner set beside the teapot with a grudging thunk.
“We should have put down Reiter when we had a chance,” he said.
Darlington had to agree. They’d gotten lucky tonight. Reiter easily could have chosen to kill both Alex and Mercy. “He’s physically powerful, much more so than Kittscher.”
“Because he’s fed on so many souls?” Dawes asked.
It was possible. Kittscher had clearly enjoyed feeding on his victims slowly, drawing out the kill.
Reiter had shown no such restraint, but whether that was due to preference or need, Darlington didn’t know.
“Do you think the artifact Reiter gave us is authentic?” he asked. “And what exactly did he give us?”
The shopping bag with the supposed Feet of Clay sat between them. There was no way they were leaving something that valuable in the car.
“Greaves,” Dawes said. “Very old ones. You saw the claim made in the lost catalogue pages about their origin.”
“Is it possible?” Turner asked. “That armor would be thousands of years old.”
“I don’t know.” Dawes gnawed on her lower lip. “Why would Linus Reiter just hand them over?”
“He didn’t just hand them over,” Darlington noted, giving voice to what had been troubling him since he’d had time to really think on it. “He could have had one of his familiars deliver the greaves to our door. Instead, he went to a great deal of trouble to lure Alex out to Savin Rock.”
“He’s a hunter,” said Dawes. “He wanted to feed on her.”
But that felt like a crime of opportunity to Darlington. To his great regret, he understood the workings of a demon’s mind. “Even so, why bring her out to Savin Rock?”
“It’s isolated,” Turner suggested.
“East Rock is more isolated. He could have had Alex meet him at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument or the old clock factory. Why bring her to the seashore, someplace he knew he’d be vulnerable?”
“Are we sure he did know?” Dawes queried.
Darlington considered. “He’s been watching us. He knew Alex would have people looking out for her.”
“People,” Turner said. “But he had no way of knowing how you survived hell or what you became. Michelle Alameddine didn’t have that intel, so she couldn’t share it, and he can’t have any idea what you all got up to inside of Kittscher’s house.”
“True,” Darlington conceded. The last time Alex had faced Reiter, she’d had neither hellfire nor a demon hybrid sworn to protect her. “Look, Savin Rock could mean nothing. But think about the way demons communicate. They love a puzzle.”
“And you believe this is part of the game,” said Dawes.
Turner rotated his teacup in his hands, studying it. “You know I had a drowning turn up there a week ago.”
They waited. Turner did not like when Lethe and his police work overlapped.
“She wasn’t one of Reiter’s kills,” he continued. “She would have shown puncture marks in the autopsy, and there was water in her lungs. She drowned, all right. But I’m not convinced her death was accidental.”
“The prickle?” Dawes asked.
He nodded.
“There are ways to detect if there’s magic involved,” Darlington offered.
“I know.”
“But you didn’t come to us.”
“No.”
“Is it really that hard to trust us?” Dawes asked.
“If I didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t be in my mother’s kitchen.”
Dawes pressed on. “Then why wait?”
Darlington leaned back in his chair. “You think it’s something bigger.”
Turner looked ill at ease. He was cautious by nature, measured in his approach, but tonight Reiter had forced his hand.
He took a sip of his tea. “I’ve been digging through all the missing persons cases I can find that might be related to Reiter.
I started in the Old Greenwich area, but there are an unlikely amount in New Haven proper.
A disproportionate amount. It can be hard to know exactly when someone went missing.
But in a lot of these cases—too many of these cases—the last known sighting lands on a Wednesday, sometimes a late Tuesday night. ”
A heavy quiet settled over the kitchen. Darlington could hear the ticking of a clock, the hum of the refrigerator, the distant sound of voices from Celeste’s television.
“Thursday nights are ritual nights,” Darlington said. “You think the societies are involved.”
“Possibly.”
Dawes pressed her lips together, then said, “The bodies buried in his garden. You don’t think they’re all his victims.”
“It would explain why the Lethe board let him operate for so long.” Turner held up a finger and dipped his chin toward the hallway.
Alex appeared a moment later. In the bright light of the kitchen, her fatigue was obvious, the dark circles beneath her eyes like bruised half-moons. “Dawes, can Mercy take your salt collar? We can put something else together for you at Il Bastone, right?”
“She’s awake?” Dawes asked, reaching beneath the collar of her sweatshirt. She tugged at the velvet ribbon that held the salt lace in place.
“Yeah, she wants to take a car home.”
“Is that a good idea?” Darlington asked.
“No.”
Alex took the collar and disappeared without another word. It seemed forgiveness was in short supply tonight.
They sat in silence and watched through the window as Alex led Mercy down the front path. Darlington noted the way they stood at the curb, the distance between them.
A hatchback pulled up a moment later and Mercy slid into the back seat. Alex raised a hand in farewell. The car pulled away, but Alex remained, her hand suspended in the air, still waiting for someone or something. When she finally let it drop, Darlington felt a terrible sense of defeat.
Dawes cleared her throat. “We might not want to be staring at her through the window when she comes back.”
He knew he should probably let it be but instead he rose and went to the door. She was trudging up the path when he opened it.
“Hurry up,” he called to her. “Dawes made tea.”
He thought he saw her shoulders lift a bit, or maybe that was wishful thinking. But he couldn’t bear the sight of her alone in the cold.
“Turner doesn’t think his drowning victim drowned,” he said as they entered the kitchen.
“I didn’t say that,” Turner corrected. “Not exactly.”
Alex slid into a chair. “You did something back on the beach,” she said to Dawes. “With my hellfire.”
Dawes pinked beneath her freckles. “An exaggeration spell. I call it the Auxesis Working.”
“Thank you. It was right on time.” She set a small black box on the table. “Reiter gave that to Mercy for me.”
“Did you look?” Dawes asked.
She nodded. “It’s a ring.”
Dawes picked up the box. She shrieked.
“And a finger,” Alex amended.
Dawes set the box down. “Is this ever going to end?”
“We all know how it ends,” Alex said. “Someone wins. Someone loses. Someone dies. Someone gets to live.”
Turner’s brows rose. “I’m guessing Mercy didn’t take being kidnapped in stride.”
“She did not.” Alex bumped the box toward him. “Can you … I don’t know, run tests on it or something? DNA or fingerprints?
“Not without alerting the entire New Haven PD.”
“There are scrying spells,” said Darlington. “But this may back up your theory.”
“What theory?” Alex asked.
“Turner thinks the societies may be running unsanctioned rituals, that they’re using Reiter’s house as a…”
“A dumping ground,” Turner finished. “I don’t have much proof, just—”
“A theory,” said Alex.
“Barely that.”
Darlington knew what he was about to suggest might stretch the bounds of Turner’s belief, but he couldn’t help himself. “Savin Rock was where Jennie Cramer washed up.”
“I don’t know that name,” said the detective.
“She’s a New Haven legend. A beautiful working-class girl, daughter of a cigar maker. Two cousins, Walter and James Malley, stood trial for her rape and murder, but they were acquitted.”
Dawes rose to refill the kettle. “You don’t think they were guilty?”
“I do, actually. But there may have been more to it. The Malleys ran a department store and they’re one of the few New Haven families to have enjoyed long-term success.
You know this town. Boom and bust. But their business thrived even as the city changed.
The last Malley’s store didn’t close until 1982.
That’s over a hundred years of prosperity.
What if Jennie wasn’t just a victim? What if she was a sacrifice? ”
“Go on,” said Alex. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
There was, but he didn’t want to sound like a lunatic. “Jennie’s death, even the way she was found, floating near the shore at Savin Rock … It’s a direct echo of another unsolved murder.”
“I know this one,” said Dawes. Darlington wasn’t surprised. It was a case so famous it had inspired a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. “Mary Rogers. They found her body in the shallows at another tourist spot.”
“In New Haven?” Turner asked.
“New York,” said Darlington. “But here’s the thing: One of the chief suspects was John Anderson. She worked in his shop. His son built Il Bastone.”
“Let me guess,” said Alex. “No one was found guilty of that murder either.”
“No,” said Darlington. The murder remained unsolved in Poe’s story as well. “But Anderson’s son deserted Il Bastone two years after it was built. The Lethe legend is he was chased out of town by Mary’s ghost.”
“Maybe,” Alex said. “Or maybe he wanted to put distance between himself and the societies.”
Lethe had been founded to watch over the Houses of the Veil, to keep their potential for harm in check.
But Darlington had said it himself: All magic is transgression.
Once you broke a rule, it became that much easier to break another.
Once you understood your purpose to be greater than the laws that bound you, what could really stand in your way?
If you could violate the very confines of reality, why would you ever think an organization like Lethe should be taken seriously?
“Reiter wants us to know the societies haven’t been playing by the rules,” said Darlington.
“But why?” Dawes pressed. “Why would he do anything to help us?”
“He’s courting us,” Alex said. “He wants us to use the Feet of Clay, and … I think I got it wrong with Michelle Alameddine. He didn’t kill her to scare us. She was an offering. A gift.”
Darlington couldn’t hide his shock. “You can’t mean that.”
Dawes looked ill. “Like a cat with a dead mouse?”
Michelle might have been a traitor, but she was his friend and his mentor.
Reiter had promised her hope in a frightening world and Darlington had long ago forgiven her for grasping at it.
He had accepted that she was a casualty in a war he still didn’t entirely understand.
But the idea that she had died so she could be gifted to them like a bouquet of flowers made him want to drive to Old Greenwich and finish Reiter off for good.
“It’s all part of the demon’s game,” he said bitterly. “The puzzle. The dance. They can’t resist it.”
Turner shook his head. “If Reiter wants us to use those artifacts, that’s a very good reason not to.”
Alex pushed back from the table. Her eyes were black, the forever dark of hiding places, of wells where any sound made an endless echo.
“We stop Golgarot,” she said. “We stop Reiter. Then we find a way to stop all of this. No more dead girls. No more disappearances. No more sham trials.”
“And how do we do all that?” Turner asked.
This at least he knew the answer to. “The Alex Stern way. You take any beating they dish out and then you do your opponent the discourtesy of getting back up.”
Alex grinned and Darlington knew that if he ended up dead, drowned, or simply damned, he had done at least one good thing in this life.