Chapter 36
Alex woke briefly at dawn, thought about trying to get dressed, then rolled over and fell back asleep.
She woke again sometime in the afternoon.
When she looked outside she saw two men repairing the windshield of the Subaru.
She was famished and Dawes had left her a thermos of soup and a plate of bread, still warm beneath a kitchen towel.
The previous night she had showered in scalding water until it started to cool, then tossed the bloody wreck of her torn black T-shirt into the trash, put on a pair of Lethe sweats, and burrowed under the covers in the Dante room.
Now she drank down the soup—chicken and dumpling—and slathered three pieces of bread with butter. She knew she should go back to the dorms. Lauren would worry. Maybe Mercy would too. But the routine of her life had unraveled so thoroughly she couldn’t find a thread to follow back to normal.
What have you done? Her father’s words, less a question than an accusation. He had looked into her face and seen his own eyes staring back at him. Then he’d pulled a knife. Alex realized that for the first time in a very long time she wanted to be high.
She went back to bed.
It was night again when she woke. The room was dark and warm, the heavy curtains blocking out everything but a sliver of light from the streetlamps below.
Her body felt easy and pliable. Healing in Hiram’s Crucible had that effect.
It wasn’t the guilty, heady rush she’d experienced with Theo, but it took away the bruises and aches.
No amount of magic and goat milk could fix the rest—not the fight with her father or the drop into the past or the revelation of the pilgrims’ true ambitions.
She wanted to hide in the dark and let someone else sort it all out.
She heard footsteps on the stairs and realized she must have been woken by Darlington returning to Il Bastone.
The door of the Virgil bedroom opened and closed.
His room was stacked directly above the Dante bedroom.
She stared up at the coffered ceiling, listening to the sounds of him preparing for sleep.
She shouldn’t climb the stairs. She knew that, even as she laid her hand on the banister.
She shouldn’t knock on his door. She knew that too, but she did it anyway.
As it turned out, one person could be plenty reckless on her own.
“Come in,” he said.
She was surprised to find him still fully dressed in his boots and overcoat.
“I’m going to Black Elm,” he said. “Will you come with me?”
“Okay.” She had, in fact, reached the limits of how much she could sleep.
“Bring your coat. There’s still no heat.”
Alex went back to the Dante bedroom and retrieved her coat and boots and a beanie embroidered with the Lethe hound for good measure. In the kitchen, she filled her thermos with soup and slid half a pan of Parker House rolls into a plastic bag.
“We aren’t going over the Donner Pass, Stern,” Darlington said from the doorway. “We don’t need provisions.”
“Tell me there’s something to eat in the Black Elm pantry.”
“Probably some stale cereal.”
“A girl needs sustenance. What is that?” she asked, gesturing to the remnants of a lumpy cake beneath a glass dome.
It was frosted white and the word Congrats!
had been scrawled across it in crooked red icing.
For Alex’s birthday, Dawes had baked a multilayered gingerbread cake sandwiched between thick clouds of mascarpone frosting and decorated with sugared cranberries.
It had looked like it belonged on the cover of a magazine. “There’s no way Dawes made that.”
“I think it’s Tripp’s handiwork. Dawes finished her dissertation.”
Alex nearly dropped the bag of rolls. “She did what?”
“I’m not sure I was supposed to tell you, so when she mentions it, act surprised.”
“That will not be a problem. She really did it? Now what happens?”
Darlington shrugged, and they headed out the front door to the Subaru. “I don’t think she knows. It’s hard to think about the future when—”
“We all may die?”
“In the face of so much uncertainty.” He cranked up the heat and they turned onto Elm.
She watched the campus slide by. They hadn’t been alone together since the ritual at Wolf’s Head.
It had all seemed easy, maybe even unimportant, when they were bustling around Il Bastone, but now, in the quiet of the car, the shape between them felt like it had changed.
She had wanted to do anything but stay stuck in the Dante bedroom tormented by thoughts of her dad trying to kill her.
Only now she was stuck in this car tormented by thoughts of Darlington’s mouth on her neck.
If she did end up damned, her version of hell was going to be an odd one.
“What happened in Hartford?” she asked, both because she needed to know and because she was desperate to crack the silence.
“We took Huilca to Logan instead. It seemed the safer choice.”
Driving him into Canada and leaving him in the woods seemed even safer, but she bit her tongue. “I need to read through what he wrote down.”
“I took a look on the drive. I’m not sure how helpful any of it is, but we at least know more about who to watch out for.”
“Alban Reed?”
Darlington nodded. “He’s one of them. And there’s at least one professor here who’s a member as well.”
“Charlie Girard.”
“You know him?”
“He knows me. He threatened me. Made Reed sound like some all-powerful supervillain.”
“I think that’s an overstatement, but there’s no question Reed is connected. The order is sprawling. There are members in every country, all from different local bloodlines.”
“But what is it they do?”
“Make more priests.” He hesitated, then said, “Find Wheelwalkers.”
“And?”
“They’re supposed to eliminate them.”
“But that’s not what Alban Reed wants, is it? This is good.”
“Enlighten me.”
“If he and Girard want to use me to make a nexus, he won’t have told his other priest buddies, because then it would be their holy duty to put me down.
” The way her father had tried to. She gave her head a shake.
Luis Huilca no longer remembered he had a daughter and Reed wasn’t going to spread the word.
One less thing to worry about. For now. “Are you going to tell me what you saw in Nick Zanca’s mind? ”
For a long while, Darlington said nothing. The shops that lined Broadway were closed this late, their windows still brightly lit, full of things she wanted but didn’t need.
“Before me,” he said, “the Arlington men went to Penn, not Yale. I probably would have too, if not for Lethe.”
Alex wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything, but she was curious. “Why?”
“It was a point of pride. To leave New Haven and return. To show loyalty to the city, to the company, to Black Elm. I always thought my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather went to Penn. But why did I think that?”
Framed diplomas didn’t seem in keeping with Arlington style. “Someone told you.”
“I don’t remember who, but yes. It was just a known thing. Until you stop knowing and start asking. I did a little research this afternoon. It turns out Daniel Arlington II didn’t graduate from Penn. I don’t think he graduated from anywhere at all. But he went to Yale.”
Alex stared at him. She knew where this was headed. “You recognized him.”
“I recognized his tie pin. A tiny golden elm. It’s sitting in a dish atop my dresser.”
“You don’t know for sure. It could—”
“I knew Nick was a reference to Pope Nicholas. I assumed he was the priest, but Nicholas was corrupt, guilty of simony. In Inferno, he was punished for selling off the Church, for behaving as a worldly prince, a man of temporal rather than spiritual influence.”
“But we know Reiter was Henry III.”
“Except Henry is in purgatory because he was a devout man but a rotten ruler. More priest than prince.”
Alex was struggling to follow. “Why does it matter that Reiter was the priest and Nick was the prince?”
“Not Nick, remember? That was just a silly code name along with Doubting Thomas and Prince Henry and Good Ol’ Hec.
Nick was really Daniel, my great-grandfather.
I couldn’t figure out why he was called Nick Zanca, but it was a joke meant to put him in his place.
Remember, Pope Nicholas III is buried alive in the Inferno, headfirst, legs waving around.
It’s a ghastly fate. Dante says, Sì mi giunse al rotto di quel che si piangeva con la zanca.
Now, zanca might just be translated as legs, or even slippers.
But it can also refer to the boots worn by Roman soldiers.
Alex, how did my family make their money? ”
From Arlington rubber boots. The factory had employed hundreds until they were put out of business by better technology.
“Darlington,” she said carefully, “you’re down a rabbit hole here.”
“Do you remember what Kittscher’s demon said to me?”
“He said a lot of things.”
“Nice boots. The demon knew. As soon as it saw me.”
“Okay, let’s say it’s true. Let’s say your great-grandfather was one of the original pilgrims. It doesn’t change anything.” But even as she said it, she wasn’t sure that was so.
“Daniel Arlington II didn’t go to Penn. He didn’t finish college anywhere.
He worked at the factory, then he ran the factory, and near as I can tell, he never left New Haven.
But how? He went to hell. He came back. And then what?
He lived a long life, had children, and died at a normal age.
What happened to his demon? How did he best it when none of the others did? ”
“We don’t know what happened to Hector.”
“Yes, we do. Dawes found him. Once we knew he was a football player and that he had to be Wolf’s Head, it wasn’t hard. Hec didn’t graduate either.”
“He left school?”
“He killed himself. He filled his pockets with rocks and drowned himself in the Sound.”
Alex didn’t want to imagine that. The dark and the cold. The loneliness of it. “That’s a shitty way to go.”
“But I get it,” said Darlington. “He didn’t want whatever demon he brought back from hell to claim him.”
Maybe. Or something else had driven Hector beneath the waves. She couldn’t say she was surprised, but some part of her had hoped he had found a way through.
She looked out at the passing dark, the pockets of light and warmth that vanished too quickly. “Why didn’t they take care of each other? Why didn’t Lethe and the other societies take care of them?”
“I don’t know. I … I’m not sure this is a place that tolerates mistakes.”
“I’ve made enough of them.”
“But you can do things no one else can. Yale loves the exceptional. Kittscher, Reiter, Hector, my great-grandfather—what was special about them?”
Hector had believed that Ned Harkness saw the potential for greatness in him.
But the trait all the pilgrims had in common was just that they were willing to die.
That was the truth of it. They were willing to sacrifice themselves to other men’s ambition.
Except Alex wasn’t sure they had ever really believed they were in danger.
They hadn’t known enough about the world to believe in their own mortality.
They were the best and the brightest, certain of their own exceptionalism, confident that the people in charge saw them as something more than cannon fodder.
She was nothing like long-dead Hector, but they were both soldiers, both brought to Yale for gifts that made them valuable—at least for a while.
A talent for football. A view behind the Veil.
And Hector had ended up walking into the waves.
“Honestly?” Alex said. “I’m amazed they didn’t try again.”
“A vampire, a nighteater, a suicide, and a dropout who became a shut-in?”
“I mean the donors, the men who recruited the pilgrims. If those people … those boys were so expendable, why not just order up another round?”
“We don’t know how many of the society alumni were in on this, but we know it wasn’t all of them.
It’s possible the donors were found out and they had to shut the whole thing down.
But I think it’s something simpler. I think those pilgrims ended up in hell and they had no way to get out.
I think Golgarot extracted a promise from them.
He’d keep the flow of magic through the nexuses open if the Gauntlet was left in place.
I think those mysterious donors were afraid of what he might demand if they sent anyone else through. ”
“Until we stumbled in.”
“That’s right. But if you hadn’t been a Wheelwalker, we all would have been trapped too. We all would have had to find a bargain to strike or we would have lost our souls.”
Golgarot had certainly tried. He’d wanted to place that yoke on Alex’s neck, to seat her leashed upon a throne, less queen than faithful hound.
“If I hadn’t been a Wheelwalker,” she noted, “Golgarot wouldn’t have been so determined to keep me there.”
“True,” Darlington said. “And if Sandow hadn’t sent a hellbeast after me, you never would have bothered to uncover the Gauntlet in the first place.”
“Sometimes I think Turner is right.”
“That this is a holy war?”
“That we’ve been called,” Alex said. “That there’s a reason it was us.”
“Kittscher said as much. Men of destiny and all that.”
“Kittscher was making it up as he went along.”
He laughed. “And we aren’t?”
“You said we wouldn’t have survived if I weren’t a Wheelwalker, if I couldn’t do what other people can’t do.
But has it occurred to you that all of us can do things no one else can?
Turner is some mystical combination of a lie detector and a weather vane.
Dawes has mastered just about every spell in the Lethe library and invented a few new ones of her own.
You survived being eaten by a hellbeast by becoming a demon. ”
“Part demon,” he corrected.
“Enough demon. Maybe it isn’t all coincidence.”
“Maybe.”
“Who’s the umpire?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Who decides which souls go to hell and which pass behind the Veil? Who makes the call?”
“We don’t know.”
“And that doesn’t scare you?”
“I guess I’d rather wonder than find out there’s no one there at all.”
They’d reached the stone pillars that marked the entrance to Black Elm and the driveway seemed to unspool out of nothing before them, a bright ribbon between the trees.
Darlington was silent as they approached the house. He killed the engine.
“I wanted to be destined for greatness,” he said.
He didn’t sound matter-of-fact anymore. The philosopher was gone.
The debate concluded. There was only the boy and the great shadow that was this house, this impossible legacy.
“I wanted to be chosen. I don’t think I had any idea what that might mean. ”