Chapter 35
Darlington hadn’t been sure how to keep the booking from being traced to them, but Turner had suggested a debit card in Huilca’s name. They had his driver’s license with a Portland address and Turner was able to locate his Social Security number.
“This feels uncomfortably like identity theft,” Darlington observed.
Turner was unimpressed. “You’re preparing to wipe a man’s memories and you’re worried about opening a credit card in his name?”
“I will just note that cops and criminals seem to have similar playbooks.”
“You don’t say. Be grateful you haven’t woken up with a string of bad car loans in your name.”
When they left Il Bastone, Alex was sleeping and the owls were still arrayed on the telephone wires. There had to be at least a dozen. Barn owls, Darlington could see now, their strange white faces glowing like a row of sinister moons in the streetlight.
“We might have to make a break for it,” Turner said.
But the owls showed no interest in Darlington or Turner or Huilca as they headed to the Dodge.
The prohibition Dawes had pulled from the library was actually called the Banks of Lethe and it would obliterate the last twenty to twenty-four hours of Huilca’s memory.
It had a second iteration called the Waters of Lethe that would wipe out far more but could also lead to the subject forgetting vital information like how to tie his shoes or even his own name.
Darlington had to wonder if that would have been the better choice.
Around Hartford, he handed Huilca a water bottle and instructed him to drink half of it.
“What’s in it?”
“Water.” Technically true, though it had been mixed with herbs and a nontoxic derivative of euphorbia sap in Hiram’s Crucible.
Huilca drank, but the fact that he had asked what was in the bottle meant that, despite their reinforcements, the effects of the coin of compulsion were already waning.
It was well after midnight and Darlington felt like he hadn’t slept in a week.
Only a few hours had passed since they had tried to dislodge Mira’s prohibition, but it was as if reality had taken on an entirely different form.
There had been too many revelations, and their weight exerted a new gravity, warping the old and familiar orbits, changing their paths.
Alex had nearly been killed, and while they put their lives in danger with increasing regularity, seeing her blood on his hands, that knife in her shoulder, had brought something furious and unrecognizable to life in him.
Anger would do her no good. The demon had done his part.
Now Darlington needed logic, the steady comfort of reason, the chance to make sense of everything they’d been through.
Besides, he wasn’t ready to think too deeply on what he’d seen in the past or all its implications.
Focusing on Huilca’s notes was a relief.
He read by the light of his cell phone as Turner steered the car north to Boston.
“Dawes was right. Alban Reed is a member.” He turned to look at Huilca. “But you don’t know him?”
“No.”
“And you’ve never been in direct contact?”
“No.”
Turner cast Darlington a wary look. Those one-word answers were another sign the compulsion was wearing off. “Is there anything really useful in there?”
“Huilca’s penmanship is making it a challenge, but yes. A long list of members from all over the country. High concentrations in the East Coast and a few in Chicago and New Orleans. The only reason Reed is mentioned is because he’s descended from a particularly powerful priest line.”
He was Welsh, supposedly related to the priest and sorcerer Huw Llwyd. According to Huilca, Reed hadn’t reached out to him to ask about Alex. That meant there was a good chance he had no idea who her father might be.
“I think Reed found Alex by accident,” Darlington continued, thinking out loud. “By virtue of his membership at Lethe. And I think that’s also why he pushed to become the board’s president.”
“Seems like a conflict of interest,” Turner noted.
He was very right. As a member of Lethe, Reed would have considered a girl who could see Grays an interesting recruit and a potentially vital conduit to the world beyond the Veil.
But his membership in Huilca’s order meant she should have been a target, an abomination to be eradicated. He clearly had different plans.
“Why doesn’t Lethe know about these people?” Turner asked. “Isn’t that part of the job?”
The world is large and magic is larger. “Maybe,” Darlington said. “But I’m beginning to understand how they stayed secret.”
“I’m assuming bribes and spells are involved.”
“No doubt. But there’s no central governing body. It’s not so much an order or an organization as an information network. I thought Huilca was using community as a euphemism, but it makes some sense.”
“A community of magicians who keep their identities secret and hunt down people who disrupt their all-important worldview? You think we don’t have guys like this in the department? That’s not a community. It’s a brotherhood.”
“I don’t like that word,” Huilca said from the back seat.
Turner glanced at him in the mirror. “What you like or don’t like is not my problem.
The entire police force is a kind of brotherhood.
It has to be to function. You are entrusting your life to the person beside you.
But you put a gun and a badge in someone’s hand, he can start to think of himself as different from the people he’s supposed to protect.
When he meets someone who feels the same way, it gets even stickier.
There was a case out west, an actual gang operating within the LAPD, but there’s something like it in every police force.
” Again his eyes flicked to Huilca. “Sound familiar?”
“Do you ever think about leaving?” Darlington asked Turner. “Doing something else?”
“No.”
A long moment passed. The lights of Willington slid by. Darlington didn’t know Turner well, had barely seen the man during his first three years at Lethe, but he suspected he’d overstepped. Turner loved his city and his job was the way he showed that love.
Then Turner said, “I think about it all the time. I’ve watched good men and women decide it just isn’t worth it anymore. But then who’s left? My mother would be happy, though.”
“You could tell her you plan to hunt demons full time.”
“Finally she can brag to her book club.” Turner tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. “I believe the department can get better, just like you believe Lethe can be better.”
“I’m not sure I think that anymore.”
Turner shot him a look. “You really mean that?”
“Lethe has no memory. None of the societies do. They have records and archives and rituals. They have vast repositories of arcane knowledge. But as institutions they aren’t built to remember, and if you don’t know what you’ve done or who you’ve wronged, what then?
” He hadn’t expected to speak these words aloud, but he was haunted by what he’d seen and heard in that strange, overdecorated room dedicated to conquest and capture, by all that had been erased from Lethe’s memory.
“If we win this fight against Golgarot, everything changes but nothing changes. The societies march on. Lethe serves as cover. Everyone forgets, as surely as if Dawes put them under a spell.”
“I don’t think I can let that happen,” Turner said. “Not if I’m right about what’s happening with these disappearances and what’s buried on Reiter’s estate.”
Darlington wasn’t sure they could stop it. Not when the societies, the trusts, the alumni, and Yale itself all needed the flow of magic to continue. Their power might be different from Golgarot’s, but it was just as real.
He looked back at Huilca. “Have you found other Wheelwalkers?”
“No.”
“Have the other members located Wheelwalkers?”
“Two,” he said, then reluctantly added, “that I know of.”
“Who were they?” Silence. Darlington turned in his seat and pushed the coin of compulsion more firmly into Huilca’s palm. “Who were they?” he repeated.
“A boy of six in Uruguay. A woman of forty in the Kyushu region of Japan.”
“What happened to them?”
“They were eliminated.”
“Your brotherhood murdered them,” Turner said, the detective seeking a confession.
“It was necessary,” Huilca admitted. “They were dangerous.”
“But your order allows portal magic,” Darlington said. “You aren’t averse to punching a hole in the universe if you’re in control. You haven’t gone around closing nexuses.”
“We don’t know how.”
Now, that was interesting. It set this priesthood in direct opposition to the Houses of the Veil and to any of the people throughout the world using a nexus to attempt magic.
He supposed that was why Reed was permitted, maybe even encouraged to join Lethe, to keep an eye on what the societies were up to.
According to Huilca’s notes, most of the members of his brotherhood held ordinary jobs.
They raised families. But the work they did blurred the line between science and the occult—astrology and astronomy, alchemy and chemistry.
Alex’s father ran what amounted to a hedge fund for marijuana growers in Oregon, but he had a lucrative side hustle in hallucinogens and herbal cures.
He didn’t think Huilca had lied to Alex about how little he engaged with this brotherhood.
They were a resource and not much else. The only obligation their members seemed to have was to make sons to perpetuate their magical lines, and marriages were frequently arranged between different families to ensure that—and to prevent the creation of a Wheelwalker.
“They have members in the remnants of the Knights Templar and the Hung Mun,” Darlington said as his eyes scanned the page. “They’re active in the Bohemian League here in the States and supposedly connected to the Nine Unknown Men in India.”
Turner made a disgusted sound. “Is there any country that doesn’t have a bunch of delusional weirdos trying to work magic?”
“If it works, they’re not the delusional ones. And to answer your question, no. We’re everywhere.”