Chapter 43
Darlington was shocked to see Tripp coming down the stairs.
“Were you in Alex’s room?” he asked.
Tripp scoffed unconvincingly. “Of course not.”
“What are you doing up here?”
“Running an errand.”
“For Dawes?”
“Why are you giving me a hard time?” Tripp said. “I’m always in the house.”
“Please don’t act as if that’s something I approve of even if I agreed to it.”
“Why can’t you just treat me like a person?”
“Because you’re not a person.”
“Are you?”
The question took Darlington aback.
“Most of the time,” he managed. “I try to be.”
“So do I!” Tripp nearly shouted, as if that explained everything.
Darlington took a deep breath. “It’s possible my suspicion was unwarranted. But I haven’t tried to eat anyone, Tripp. You have.”
Tripp looked down at his scuffed sneakers. “I know I’m not me. Not exactly. But I feel like me. I can’t help being hungry all the time.”
That much Darlington understood. Tripp’s albatross had preserved some part of his soul, a piece that kept his appetites in check, an intercessor between the demon’s needs and Tripp’s human desire to belong.
Maybe Kittscher would have racked up more kills without his salt guardian keeping watch.
And if it hadn’t been for Cosmo, Darlington’s great-grandfather might have ended up just like Reiter, with a field of corpses buried behind Black Elm.
“I get it.”
“I can feel it—him? The thing that ate me. Or the thing that is me? It’s like my stomach is always growling, but it’s like … my cosmic stomach. My mental stomach.”
Darlington did his best not to react to that tortured turn of phrase.
“But it’s … it’s funny too,” Tripp continued. “It’s…”
“Playful.”
“Yeah!”
Always it came back to the game. Demons didn’t want an easy kill any more than they wanted an easy answer, and they would never move in a straight line when they could make a more complicated pattern.
They fed on each other when there was no other sustenance to be found, but human emotion was far more delicious to them.
When Darlington had been consumed by the hellbeast, he had known only fear, but he’d understood quickly that he was not in a portal.
The smell of sulfur had overwhelmed him and he’d been thrown into the memory of his grandfather’s death, the terror and shame of that choice that had shaped the rest of his life, his desperate need to know that he had done the right thing, not just the thing that was asked of him.
In that moment he had seen the yoke before him and Golgarot had made his offer.
He’d given up some part of himself to preserve the rest of his human soul.
He’d become both prisoner and warden. But he wasn’t sure what had been lost, only what had been found: an animal self, an understanding of violence.
For all their love of dances and bargains, there was an ugly turn the demon took when thwarted.
He’d seen it in Golgarot, in Reiter, in Kittscher, a profound cruelty, an urge toward vulgarity.
That was the danger of becoming something that cared only for its belly, only for its own needs and desires. He did not want to be that thing.
“You said you don’t dream.”
“Do you?” Tripp asked.
“I do.” And that gave him hope that he was still more human than monster.
“Are you going to kick me out? When we beat Golgarot?” Tripp spoke the demon prince’s name in the accent of hell, a demon’s voice, guttural and full, completely unlike the dopey, easygoing Tripp who Darlington had become accustomed to.
“Are you so sure we will?”
Tripp looked baffled. “Of course. We’re the good guys.”
“Alex might have some qualms about that description.”
“Dawes wouldn’t be with the bad guys.”
Darlington blinked. “That’s … very true.”
“She wants me here.”
“I can’t make any promises, Tripp. But if we win, and if you swear not to start snacking on the locals, and if we don’t all die, then yes, I’ll make sure there’s a place for you here.”
“Sweet.”
Tripp held up his knuckles for a fist bump, and though Darlington wondered at the depths to which he’d sunk, he obliged.
Darlington met Turner by the front porch and released a low whistle.
A snarling pack of jackals emerged from under the house. Turner stumbled backward, reaching for his gun.
“It’s okay,” Darlington said, holding up the silver ball he’d found neatly tucked away in a cabinet, precisely labeled in Dawes’s tidy handwriting.
Instantly the jackals quieted and sat, their tails wagging. As Alex had learned, summoning the hounds without the means to control them could be disastrous. But with the right constraints in place, they were quite useful and only moderately bloodthirsty.
Turner placed his hands on his hips. “When this is all over, I am taking a week off and going to the most normal, magic-free place I can find.”
“Lovington, Iowa.”
“What?”
“It has the lowest concentration of magic anywhere in the United States.”
Turner stared at him. “Maybe I’ll take two weeks off.”
Darlington removed the ghost lead from his pocket and held it beside the ball. One of the jackals slinked forward and ducked its head into the loop. He waved off the other Lethe hounds.
“This will work?” Turner asked.
“It should. If there’s some remnant of Kylie in that tomb, the hound should find it.” He hesitated. “But it might not be pleasant.” The Bonesmen sometimes kept viscera from their rituals, and the jackal might well return with one of her kidneys or a spleen.
“I’m not taking that thing in my car.”
“Not a dog person?”
“I don’t like mess.”
“It’s a phantom hound from the temple at Asyut,” Darlington noted. “It isn’t going to pee on your upholstery.”
“It better not.”
He glanced up at Alex’s window. He didn’t like leaving her but hovering by her door wasn’t going to do anyone any good. It was only then that he saw the owls perched on the roof of Il Bastone, a line of them silhouetted against the late-morning sky.
When he and Turner arrived at Bones, they didn’t bother with the main entrance—the delegates never did.
Darlington coaxed the jackal out of the back seat, and they cut through a narrow alley to the side door that led to the lower level of the tomb and the kitchens.
They were only a block from the quadrangle, where the pilgrims had made their plans.
Darlington kept the lead tight to his leg. The jackals weren’t visible beyond the boundaries of Il Bastone, but a leash hanging from his hand was bound to raise questions.
Montrose Gallo opened the door with a beaming smile.
He was a tenor who sang with the Whiffenpoofs and who had already performed at Carnegie Hall.
He was handsome, but his charm had a glib polish to it, like a 1940s film star who was always cast as the fiancé the heroine ended up jilting for the rugged hero.
“Hello, Montrose. I hope we’re not early.” They were, deliberately so.
“Not at all!” He called over his shoulder, “Our visitors are here, everyone. Get out the good wine!”
He was sounding the alarm of their premature arrival under the guise of a warm welcome. And he was still blocking the door.
“We’re going to need to have a conversation with the delegates,” Darlington said. “We’ll be out of your way just as soon as possible.”
“And this is?” Montrose inquired. Darlington had told him that he needed to address minor security concerns with the Bonesmen before the end of the semester, but he hadn’t mentioned they would have company.
“Turner.”
“Are you Lethe?”
“I’m New Haven PD and rapidly losing patience. You knew we were coming.”
Montrose paled. “I knew Virgil was coming. If you’ll just wait a moment—”
“I won’t.”
Turner somehow stepped directly past Montrose without making any contact.
“This isn’t…” Montrose sputtered. “You can’t—”
Darlington offered him a sheepish look. “I’m sorry. But this is only a formality. Just a few things to get sorted.”
Montrose had never met Darlington, did not know how different this was from his usual manner.
The downside of a short institutional memory.
The previous delegations could have warned him that this Virgil did not simper.
But he and Turner had agreed that tonight he would play the deferential man of Lethe.
Montrose scrambled after Turner, leaving Darlington behind in the empty kitchen. He knelt and laid a hand on the jackal’s silken head. The Lethe hounds looked more like the jackals painted on the walls of ancient tombs than their modern cousins, sleek and black, long of ear and snout.
He pulled the photo Turner had given him from his pocket, not the image of Kylie Sanz in death but one her mother had provided to the department—sunburned shoulders, an open-mouthed smile, her fingers held up in a peace sign. A girl alive. He hoped it would be enough.
When he released the lead, the jackal became as invisible to him as it was to anyone else. He heard its paws patter down the hall.
Darlington hurried to catch up to Turner and Montrose, passing through the frescoed anterooms and a dining room crowded with animal heads and portraits of past members.
He joined them in the Firefly Room, named for a time when delegates had gathered here to smoke cigars, their tips glowing like fireflies in the gloom.