Chapter 34
Alex felt arms pulling on her shoulders. Before she could think she was opening her mouth and water rushed in—no, milk. She was in the crucible and she was drowning.
Darlington and Dawes hauled her over the side as she coughed and sputtered. She hit the floor with an ungraceful thump. When she managed to stop gasping, she looked around.
They were all sitting on the floor of the armory, even Turner, as if their legs had given out. For a long moment, they just stared at each other.
“We were there,” Dawes said in wonder. “We were with them.”
“Fuck!” Alex tried to get to her feet and had to sit back down as a wave of nausea engulfed her. “Huilca. How long were we … in that?”
Turner used the doorjamb to pull himself up and called down the stairs. “Tripp?”
“Yeah?”
“We all good?”
Dawes was looking at her watch. “I don’t think we lost any time at all?”
“He’s still writing,” Tripp called from below. “You want me to do something?”
“Just sit tight. I’ll be down in a minute.” Turner rubbed a hand over his face and braced himself against the wall. “We have to go back. We can find a way to reach them, to try to stop them. They’re already having doubts.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible,” said Dawes. “We don’t know if Alex’s power lets us do anything more than observe.”
“We have to try.”
Darlington shook his head. “Even if we could, it won’t matter.”
“What are you talking about?” Turner insisted. “We can stop the descent. We can stop them from bargaining with Golgarot.”
Alex had started to shiver. She was soaked and still in her bra and underwear. “I’ve read enough sci-fi to know that’s a bad idea.”
“Even if we could somehow do it, even if we stopped Kittscher’s crew, it won’t fix anything.
” Darlington’s voice was grim, almost angry.
“You heard what he said about the donors. Harkness, Sterling, Henry Sloane Coffin, who knows how many other alumni of the societies. They didn’t go to the trouble of raising Harkness Tower and building Sterling Library, of infiltrating these projects and carving shadow structures into Yale to let them sit idle.
They’ll just put the journey off for a year and find a new crop of willing fools. ”
“But if they understood the danger—”
“They did understand.” Darlington pushed to his feet. He gripped the side of the crucible, trying to steady himself. “They understood and they didn’t care. Did you see the inscriptions on those beams?”
Alex couldn’t remember all of them. “Purity, Generosity…”
“No, the years: 1492 and 1620. Columbus arrives in America and the landing at Plymouth Rock. Dates of conquest. Kittscher called the room neutral territory. It was built for the pilgrims, and those dates were chosen deliberately because the donors saw them as pioneers, pushing their way beyond all known frontiers to a new world, seeking plunder.”
“We knew they were cocky,” Alex said. “That isn’t—”
“It’s not just arrogance,” he cried. “It’s madness.
” Darlington crossed the room and snatched up the blueprints.
“Don’t you see it? What the donors wanted wasn’t just knowledge.
They wanted power. You heard what Kittscher said: If we bag our quarry.
This isn’t a fail-safe. This is a cage. Harkness Tower.
The quadrangle. They were built to hold a demon. ”
Dawes looked horrified. “They wanted the pilgrims to bring back a demon?”
If we manage this miracle, then we’ll have changed Yale and changed the world. That was why Reiter was asking about what came after the descent. He knew it was only the beginning. And now Hec’s fears made so much more sense. Soldier, your hour draws closer.
“You can’t be serious,” said Turner. “No one is that stupid.”
Alex wasn’t so sure. Maybe no single person was that reckless, but get people together in a group, nodding along, backing each other up? Anything was possible.
Darlington tossed the plans back on the table. “This was always their goal. The power of the societies is directly tied to the nexuses. Without that access to the demonic, what are they?”
“A bunch of losers in fancy robes,” Alex murmured. The sad state of St. Elmo was a testimony to that.
“Those bone chimes we’ve been using to track demons were made to trace magical power in New Haven.
They were always searching for it, trying to understand it.
They had no idea what created a nexus, and that meant their access to real magic was limited.
But remember Kittscher’s arguments in the Daemonologie: All magic is demonic.
If they could pull a demon out of hell, they’d have a direct line to pure, raw power. ”
“No more limits,” Alex said. It was the same reason Alban Reed and Charlie Girard were coming after her.
“They could keep it for themselves,” said Turner. “Or sell it to the highest bidder.”
Alex leaned her head back against the crucible. “This is what all those debates between Kittscher and Ellison Nownes were really about. It wasn’t just theory.”
“I think it was until it wasn’t,” Dawes said. “There are all kinds of theories that were meant to stay in the lab or the library, but they always break free. If someone knows they can, they will.”
“Well, something went wrong,” Turner replied. “No one came out of that journey right, and the societies didn’t get their renewable demon energy source.”
Darlington smoothed his hand over the plans and Alex understood there was something he was holding back. His voice was quiet when he said, “Hell is unpredictable. Demons are not easy prey.”
She thought of Len and his constant scheming, his griping about what he was owed. He couldn’t have been more different from the boys in that room with its carvings and symbols, but the results were the same. “They thought they were setting a trap, but they were walking into one.”
“Then what about the golem? The artifacts?” Turner asked and he sounded less mad than desperate. “Are they just more demon riddles and bullshit?”
“They’re something,” Darlington said. “But we won’t know what until we get our hands on the fourth artifact and bring them together.”
Alex had been in Hector’s head now and she thought she knew exactly what the artifacts were for.
She understood the fear under all that bravado even if she couldn’t quite see the shape of what was to come.
And she still didn’t know why Reiter had been so eager to put the Feet of Clay into their hands.
Her head felt too full. Her father was still downstairs, scribbling away about gatekeeper priests and magical bloodlines, the rules for how power should be parceled out and what to do about accidents like Alex.
She had imagined him as a wanderer, a free spirit, maybe a deadbeat but harmless in his charm.
He was more like the men of Lethe and the societies than she wanted to consider.
A world full of careless adventurers and magical power brokers, but somehow Alex was the defect that had to be eradicated.
“I got a glimpse of Hector’s thoughts,” she said. “He wasn’t happy about becoming a murderer, but that wasn’t going to stop him.”
Dawes nodded. “I got flashes. More feelings than anything. Kittscher’s ambition, his impatience. He hated Hector.”
“He did?” Alex was surprised. Hector hadn’t known, hadn’t even guessed at it.
“Kittscher thought he was stupid. A blunt instrument. That he didn’t deserve his spot in Wolf’s Head.”
A perfect soldier. Football had brought Good Ol’ Hec to Yale the same way Alex’s ability to see the dead had landed her a spot at Lethe. A chance to earn your keep, to prove you could be of use. If you somehow managed to survive.
“I was in Reiter’s head,” said Turner. “But all I got was fear.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Dawes said. “I was with the scholar. Alex was with the soldier.”
Turner shrugged. “Maybe we got it wrong and Reiter was the priest and Nick was the prince. Reiter thought the spell for the salt guardians was sacrilegious. Could be he was the pious one.”
Kittscher’s demon had said as much. Little Lionel thought God was enough.
“What did you get from Nick?” Alex asked Darlington.
“Nothing.”
Turner’s eyes narrowed and Alex knew Darlington was lying. She couldn’t fault him when she wasn’t being entirely honest, but she still didn’t like it.
Alex made herself stand and instantly regretted it.
She knew she should probably feel weirder about being half naked in front of these people, but something about meeting her father, getting stabbed, and traveling through time had rendered her incapable of caring.
She felt like she had the worst hangover of her life.
“I need a hot shower,” she said. “And we need to get rid of the asshole downstairs.”
Dawes nodded. “I have a spell in mind. But I’ll need some soup before I can work it. That was too much hellfire for any of us.”
“Can you wipe Mira from his head too?” Alex asked.
“Probably not,” Dawes said. “Not without risking putting him in a coma.”
“Wouldn’t that be a shame?”
“I’m not going to be party to that,” Turner said, then added, “and it will raise more questions than any of us want.”
“The problem isn’t just removing how he met Mira,” Dawes explained. “Or the time he spent with her. It’s rooting out every time since then that he thought of her.”
“But you can erase tonight?”
“Yes,” she said. “I can do that. Whatever prohibition he put on Mira was built to summon him if someone tried to lift it. I can just make the night vanish.”
“You wipe his memory and get the soup going,” Turner said. “Darlington and I will get him out of here and put him on a plane.”
Darlington turned to Alex. “Do you want to say goodbye?”
“I already did.”
There was nothing more to say. Some part of her wanted to look into his face again, to know who he was and where he came from, to hear about the half brother she’d never met.
Another part of her wanted to stab him again and see the look of pain and fright in his eyes.
She had his name now. She supposed that if she survived all this, she could find him again, stage a less bloody family reunion.
She could be smarter about hiding the fact that she was a Wheelwalker.
Her father could be one more person she lied to.
Or maybe he could just stay a stranger. He hadn’t been any kinder to her than the world had.
What did you do? he’d demanded. Every way she knew to survive seemed to be the wrong one. But she was going to keep doing it just the same.