Chapter 44
Alex felt grateful that nothing could spoil her appetite, because Dawes had outdone herself.
“Isn’t it so good?” Tripp asked as they sat down to roast duck with figs and rosemary and heaps of confit potatoes.
“You can’t even eat it,” grumbled Turner.
“But I can smell it, and that’s almost as good.”
She listened as Turner and Darlington related what they thought had happened to Kylie Sanz.
She did her best to concentrate, but she was tired and her head was too crowded with problems. She had dozed for a while and dreamed that her grandmother was sitting by her bed, humming as she braided Alex’s hair with rosemary.
When she woke, for a long moment, she had felt safe and unafraid, and then reality hit like a bomb blast. There was no way she was getting back to sleep.
The demon on the playground had spooked her as nothing had since her first run-in with Reiter.
Now she nodded along gamely as Darlington, Dawes, and Turner talked about the trouble they’d made at Skull and Bones and acquiring the helm from Scroll and Key, while Tripp sniffed happily at their plates.
But she felt a little like a broken appliance.
She didn’t have any of their skills or smarts, but she could trap demons.
As wearied and bruised as she’d been, she had liked being the closer, the one who could get the dirty work done.
Only, when the toaster stopped making toast, what was it good for?
There was a joy-hungry demon loose on the streets, a vicious one, and she had no idea how to stop it.
“Reiter set us down this path,” Turner was saying. “He pointed us to the missing. He gave us one of the artifacts. What does he want?”
Alex remembered what Reiter had said on the pier at Savin.
I can’t claim credit for everything that blooms in my garden.
The garden he so wanted to show to her again.
Was his demon courting their favor by feeding them information about the societies?
Or did some fragment of the boy who had been Lionel Reiter remain, guiding them back to the crimes of the very society he’d once belonged to?
“He wants us to build the golem,” Dawes said. “But why? And what was its real purpose? Was the golem meant to serve as a zookeeper when they brought back the demon?”
“I’ve been exploring various versions of Osiris Machines,” Darlington offered. “The options are limited by the ingredients we have. Many were also site-specific—linked to particular temples or altar sites. The blueprints might refer to where the pieces are supposed to be brought together.”
“We need a plan, some kind of containment for it if this is all a trap,” said Turner. “We already know none of those young idiots were thinking about consequences. We have to be better. If Reiter wants the golem built, that’s not a good sign.”
“He told Alex he wanted it as a bodyguard,” Dawes recalled.
“He was lying,” Alex said. She had used the time when she was supposed to be sleeping to set her own plan in motion and she couldn’t dodge the truth anymore. “There is no golem. There never was.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Turner demanded.
“I was in Hector’s head.”
“I got flashes of what Reiter felt when we were back in time, but—”
“It was different for the soldier.” And it was different for her.
She was the Wheelwalker. This wasn’t the first time she’d ridden shotgun with another soul.
“When I was in Hector’s mind, something kept bothering me.
The way he was talking, the way he felt when he was bragging about beating the devil.
He wasn’t afraid of the adventure or the fight, but his thoughts kept brushing up against the prospect of what came next. ”
“After they captured the demon?” asked Dawes.
“That’s right. It meant something more to him. Because he’s the soldier. Because he would be the one called into battle if something went wrong.”
“No,” said Darlington. “No. That can’t…” He threw back his head, an expression of utter dismay on his face. “Greaves. Helm. How did I miss it?”
“I don’t get it,” said Tripp.
“Go on,” said Darlington. “Tell them.” He sounded angry, but she suspected he was just mad at himself.
“The artifacts aren’t pieces of a golem. They’re armor,” Alex said. “Armor for the soldier.”
It hadn’t come as a surprise, not really. The golem had seemed too good to be true because it was. A magical monster to fight your battles? To face your worst enemy? Magic was never that kind.
“You cannot go back to hell,” said Dawes. “Golgarot will be ready. You won’t make it out again.”
“Then what are we supposed to do?” Turner objected. “We’re out of time. That thing in the playground was too much for all of us.”
Suddenly everyone was talking at once. She held up her hands and to her shock, they all went silent. Now this was power: getting a table full of know-it-alls to shut up.
“I can get us answers,” she said. “I’ve set a meeting.”
“With Reiter?” Turner asked.
“With Hector.”
“How?” Darlington pressed. She could have told him what she planned, but she hadn’t wanted him to stop her.
“I reached out to the Bridegroom and I brought him Hector’s old helmet so he could find him.”
“Alex,” Dawes cried. “You’re already too tightly tied to that Gray!”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters!”
“It doesn’t. Those things can’t matter anymore. The prohibitions against associating with Grays are peacetime rules. We’re at war now. Turner is right—Golgarot isn’t sending ordinary grunts anymore, and if something happens to one of us, that’s it. It’s all over.”
“Wait,” said Darlington. “Where did you get Hector’s helmet from?”
“Payne Whitney,” Tripp replied.
They all stared at him.
Dawes’s voice was stern. “You helped her do this?”
He lifted his hands in an elaborate shrug. “Alex and I go way back. We’re buds.”
“That’s right.” Alex held her knuckles up for a bump and Tripp grinned.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Turner.
But Darlington was watching her closely. “So you stole his football helmet from the gym?”
“There’s a display there with all kinds of vintage stuff,” Alex said.
“Reiter finished out his time at Yale. So did Kittscher. But Nick and Hector didn’t.
They disappeared from the books, more victims of society overreach.
They wiped Good Ol’ Hec from the student body records.
They scrubbed him from the Wolf’s Head rolls.
But they forgot about his time with the Yale Bulldogs. ”
“He was a fullback,” said Tripp. “We don’t really have those anymore.”
She had texted Tripp that morning, when Darlington and the others had been chatting in the kitchen. “I made contact with the Bridegroom and I asked him to use the helmet to locate Hec’s ghost behind the Veil.”
After Alex’s battle with Daisy at the Dean’s house, the Bridegroom had made himself scarce.
She’d never been sure if he was angry or hurt or simply grieving.
He’d been searching for his murdered fiancée for decades, only to discover she was alive and well and a killer.
Because of Alex, he’d found her and lost her in less than an hour.
So she hadn’t been sure he would come when she called to him, but she’d filled the sink in the Dante bathroom and dropped a little of her blood into the water for good measure.
“Bertram Boyce North,” she’d said, feeling like an ex leaving a voice message. “Knock, knock. I need your help.”
His face had appeared in the water—mournful, brooding, a mopey poet in a cravat. “Miss Stern.”
“I need a favor.”
“As always I can rely upon you to dispense with any pleasantries.”
“Sorry,” she said. “How’s being dead?”
“What do you want, Galaxy Stern?”
She’d explained what she needed and he’d agreed to bring Hector to Grove Street Cemetery that afternoon—assuming he could be found.
“This creates a debt between us,” he had said. “I hope you understand that.”
Alex understood, but since there was a good chance she was going to die tomorrow, she figured this was the perfect time to put her books in the red.
“So,” Alex asked, looking around the table at her very angry, very baffled friends. “Who wants to party at the cemetery?”