Chapter 32
Darlington was watching her fall. One moment she was Alex in her natural state—vengeful, enlivened by anger, her honesty more intimidating than her rage. Then her eyes rolled backward and her body went slack, as if her strings had been cut, as if the power had simply gone out.
He lunged for her as Dawes stumbled forward, cradling her wounded hand. He caught Alex in an awkward slide, grabbing her up against him. He was startled by her lightness. It was frightening, as if she had no weight to keep her in the world, a wingless bird of hollow bones.
“Darlington!” Dawes cried.
Luis Huilca had yanked the knife from his arm and was bolting for the front door.
But Il Bastone was having none of it. The knob refused to turn in Huilca’s hand. He grabbed the urn off the small rattan table where a bust of Hiram Bingham III had once sat before Dawes used it to bash in Blake Keely’s skull.
“Stop!” Dawes shouted. With a ringing command that was one step shy of a demon’s growl, she snarled, “You break that stained glass window and I swear to every god there is I’ll kill you myself.”
Huilca hesitated. Darlington seized his chance and held up a coin of compulsion. “A token,” he said. “A coin of passage.”
Huilca might be full of ancient blood and wisdom, but he was as susceptible to the shine of gold as anyone else. “What is—?” he had time to ask before his fingers closed over the coin and his face went slack.
Two coins of compulsion used and the year still so far from over. There would be no more from Manuscript. The magic was too challenging to work, and he wasn’t interested in putting Lethe in another society’s debt.
“How long will it hold?” Dawes asked.
“We’ve got roughly two hours before we have to reinforce it. Can you type?” he queried Huilca.
“Not quickly.”
They sat him down at the dining room table with a pen and yellow legal pad.
“Write,” Darlington commanded. “Everything about this order of priests, who’s in it, what they know about Wheelwalkers, what they know about Alex, what resources they have.”
“If Alban Reed is a member,” Dawes added. “And who else we need to look out for.”
Darlington paused, cursing his slowness and giving thanks for the mind of Pamela Dawes. “That’s how he knew she was a Wheelwalker.”
“It could be,” she said, the good academic; a theory was not proof.
Darlington got the first aid kit and bandaged up Huilca’s puncture wound well enough to stop the bleeding.
He’d probably need to see a doctor when he woke up wondering where he’d been and why he had a hole in his shoulder.
Neither he nor Dawes liked the idea of leaving Huilca alone, so they texted Tripp to get him to babysit, though they called it “standing guard.”
“And hurry,” Darlington urged. Alex was losing blood and they needed to get her upstairs. “Dawes, did you replace your salt—”
“I’m not in danger from Tripp,” she scolded, but she pulled her collar down, revealing a less elegant version of the salt lace pearls she’d given to Mercy.
“All the same, maybe we get him a juice box too. I don’t want him eating Huilca.” At least not until they had all the information they needed.
“Smells like blood in here,” Tripp said when he appeared a few minutes later in his salt suit. “Oh shit, did Alex get shot?”
Darlington pointed at Huilca. “Just keep an eye on him, and if he does anything other than scribble, you shout.”
Tripp gave a solemn nod. “I will keep the watch.”
Darlington carried Alex up the stairs to the armory, where they used smelling salts to bring her back around. She was conscious but delirious and so pale she looked nearly green.
“Goat milk,” Dawes instructed, and Darlington raced back down the stairs to get a crate of the stuff. While they were filling the crucible, he called Turner.
The detective picked up instantly. “What happened? Why the hell didn’t you call me back?”
“We had an unexpected visitor.”
“Who?”
“Luis Huilca. Alex’s dad. In the flesh.”
Turner was silent for a moment. He’d been to hell, but Darlington knew he still struggled to accept the magic they dealt with most days. “Then I guess the call went well?”
“Went well is a little too sunny for what just happened in this house, but we know more than we did before, and only three people got stabbed.”
“Seriously?”
“Dawes is cut but okay. Huilca is fine. Alex is … We don’t know yet.” He hated saying it. He hated knowing he’d let it happen.
“If no one’s dead, I’m calling it a win.” Then he asked, “She’ll be okay?”
“I think so. I hope so. Meet us at the house. We’re going to need to get her father out of town quickly.”
Back in the armory, Dawes had gotten Alex out of her jeans and boots and was cutting through her shirt with a huge pair of shears. It was caked with blood.
“She can’t lift her arm,” Dawes explained.
“I liked that shirt,” Alex muttered. Then she looked up at Darlington. “God, you’re pretty.”
“Thank you,” he said stiffly.
Dawes cocked her head. “Are you blushing?”
“No.”
Dawes made a noncommittal noise and murmured. “In blood loss veritas.”
“Leave it.”
She held up her hands in a peace offering, and they eased Alex over the lip of the crucible and into the milk.
It was disconcerting to watch the plume of red from her body turn the goat milk pink.
They would need to stay close to make sure she didn’t lose consciousness and slip under before the magic had a chance to take hold.
“I’m finished,” said Dawes.
Darlington froze. Was this the thing that had pushed her too far? A secret society within the secret societies? A knife in Alex’s shoulder? Dawes’s wound was minor, but the sight of your own blood could be a clarifying thing.
She said nothing, staring at the rim of the crucible. Alex’s head was propped against it, her breathing shallow.
“Dawes,” Darlington began, unsure of what words might bring her back to the fold. He only knew none of them would survive without her on their side. “We can find a way to—”
“I finished my dissertation.”
It took him a beat to understand her meaning. It was like hearing someone say they’d discovered cold fusion. “I … When did you find the time?”
She cast him a dour look. “I’ve had six years.”
“Congratulations. Truly.”
“I still need to submit it,” she said hurriedly. “Defend it, revise it.” She rocked back on her heels looking dazed. “But yeah. I’m done. I’m just not sure it matters.”
“Of course it matters. It’s an incredible accomplishment.”
“Not if we all die.”
Darlington might have argued that death wouldn’t diminish the achievement, but he took her point. “Then we’ll have to do what we can to prevent that.”
“Are we going to make it out of this?”
She sounded scared but also matter-of-fact, a woman who wanted to make plans.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not the way we were.”
Dawes’s teeth worried what might soon become a permanent divot in her lower lip. “I could … look for a way to … put you back.”
“You think you can make me human again?” He had done his own searches in the library, carefully inscribing search terms into the Albemarle Book, but they were cursory at best. There simply hadn’t been time to do more, or so he’d told himself.
“I think Alex might be able to do it.”
At the sound of her name, Alex’s head lolled toward Dawes. “No,” she mumbled. “I don’t want to do things. I’m tired of doing things.”
Dawes laughed, but Darlington couldn’t help thinking of what she’d said about Alex on that train. That she was more fragile than she seemed. The only time she ever let herself rest was when she was too bloody and beaten to stand on her own.
“We can worry about it on the other side of all this,” he said. He didn’t know if Alex could use her gifts to separate his demonic self from the person he hoped he still was. Would she even want to? The demon had proven more useful than the man ever had.
“You don’t have to go back,” Dawes said, studying the beaten gold rim of the crucible. “To what you were. I don’t want to.”
“What was wrong with Past Pammie?”
“She was scared. I was scared all the time.”
“And you’re not scared now that we’re facing down an army of demons?”
“I am. I definitely am. It’s more like … all the things that seemed scary before just seem silly now. I was scared to finish my dissertation, to go on the job market, to drive in heavy traffic. This is … I guess it’s a simpler kind of fear.”
“You’re all blue,” Alex said.
Darlington’s panic returned. “I don’t think it’s working.” Alex’s cheeks had more color in them, her eyes looked clearer, but she wasn’t making sense.
It was only then that he realized the crucible was limned with blue flame—and it wasn’t only the tub. Hellfire was washing over the room in a spreading tide.
“I don’t understand,” Dawes said. “This doesn’t usually happen. Maybe she was hurt too badly and—”
Alex’s eyes rolled back in her head. “If the devil knows what’s good for him, he’ll steer clear,” she said. But it was a man’s voice that emerged from her lips, laughing, boastful. “I’ll knock his block off!”
“Alex?” Dawes gently shook her shoulder, then shrieked as hellfire slid off Alex’s skin and up her arm. She brushed it off as if she were scrabbling at spiderwebs. “Something’s wrong.”
The room around them had blurred, as if seen through foggy glass.
“It’s me,” Darlington said. “My … The demonic impacts magic. It disrupted the St. Elmo’s ritual.
” They should have told Dawes. He should have predicted this could happen.
Il Bastone had no nexus, a check on the potential influence of Lethe.
Besides, it would have been considered a waste.
Lethe were observers, reporters, the scolds of the societies.
They had no need for real power. The presence of a demon changed all that.
“No!” Dawes cried. “Look!”
The flames had gathered around the table where they’d begun to assemble the artifacts beside the blueprints and catalogue pages the first pilgrims had hidden in the staircase.
The breastplate, the greaves they’d gotten from Reiter, the enchanted knuckles from their own cabinets—all were glowing, connected by lines of fire.
“I may be the catalyst,” Darlington said. “If I—”
“It’s everything,” said Dawes. “The crucible. Her blood. The plans the first pilgrims left. Your … you.”
Shapes were emerging in the blur of flame. Darlington heard the bellow of a horn, people calling to each other, and then the familiar ringing of bells. Harkness Tower.
“I think she’s Wheelwalking,” he said.
“In the quadrangle?”
Yes and no. He remembered what Alex’s father had said, So that shamans could walk through those doors in dreams and time.
Dawes was right. This wasn’t only about Alex or the crucible or his demonic nature. It was about those artifacts and the first pilgrims. Kittscher, Reiter, their still-nameless companions.
“I don’t think she’s just in a different place. I think—”
“Hello?” Turner was standing in the doorway to the armory. “What—”
Suddenly Darlington understood.
“Don’t cross the threshold!” he shouted.
But it was too late.
Turner stepped forward.
The world Darlington knew vanished.