Chapter 46
Darlington and Tripp were waiting outside the cemetery gates.
“You were supposed to stay home,” Alex said, but she just wanted to burrow into his coat and breathe in clean wool and all the mysterious components that made Darlington smell like Darlington.
“I blame Tripp,” he said.
“For what?” Tripp squeaked.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Should we go home?” asked Dawes.
They all knew she meant Il Bastone.
Turner took a long breath. “I’m trying to be respectful of whatever the hell that was, but I just heard half a conversation and none of it sounded good.”
Alex wished she had more hope to offer, but at this point they should be used to bad news.
“You were right,” she said to Darlington. “Harkness and the Memorial Quadrangle were built as a mirror of Sterling. The tower is the ascent.”
“To heaven?” Tripp asked hopefully.
“It’s a way to open another door to hell without entering it, to pull Golgarot through to our world the way we once entered his.”
“Why would we want to do that?” Turner asked.
“Because I can’t beat him in hell,” said Alex.
Turner threw up his hands. “But he wants to come through.”
“Only when he’s ready,” Alex said, and she hoped it was true. “Only with his legions. I threatened to bring him through before, when he was trying to keep me in hell. He fought me. He knew he wasn’t strong enough.”
“No,” said Dawes. “Impossible. We have no idea what might be waiting at the top of that tower.”
“I’m not excited about it, believe me.” She remembered walking the Gauntlet. They’d all been with her, taking their places, until she’d left Dawes at the scholar’s door. It was up to the soldier to make the final walk alone. It always would be.
Turner scowled. “The soldier was meant to be some kind of prison guard? Wear the armor, tend to the pet demon, send it back to hell if it couldn’t be housebroken?”
“That was the plan. They were supposed to have one tame demon to deal with, a captive, and they thought all the alumni would be clapping them on the back and singing their praises for it. Instead, they came back empty-handed and afraid. They became something the donors wanted to sweep under the rug.”
“Another Lethe cleanup job,” muttered Turner.
“That’s right. And the pilgrims were being hunted.
Remember what that was like?” Their demons had followed them out of hell, disguised themselves as the people they’d loved, the people they’d wronged.
Alex still remembered how good it had felt to be close to Hellie again, how hard it had been to push her away even when the monster turned cruel, even when she knew it was feeding on her shame and helplessness.
“They didn’t have a Dawes to explain it all. ”
“They had Kittscher,” said Dawes.
“You saw what he was like. Cruel. Mocking. Would they have felt safe going to him? Would he have admitted he was scared too? We all know what it feels like when a demon gets you alone. And…”
“What?” Turner pushed.
“I don’t think the pilgrims liked each other very much. They weren’t … They weren’t all Lethe.”
It was more than that, but she wasn’t sure how to put it into words.
The donors had selected those original pilgrims. They’d plucked them from four different societies for their intelligence or their piety or their pliability.
Alex, Dawes, Turner, Tripp, and then Darlington—they had all chosen to make the descent together.
They had chosen to save each other and then do it all over again.
Turner shook his head. “Then the golem was a lie and Reiter let us believe it, but we still don’t know why.”
“Maybe he wanted us distracted,” Dawes suggested. “Focused on the objects to buy time for Golgarot.”
“I got the feeling he was scared of Golgarot,” Alex said. “Reiter was supposed to help bring a Wheelwalker to the Gauntlet. I don’t think he wants to answer for failing.”
“Demons seek patterns,” Darlington said. “That isn’t the same as thinking ahead.”
Alex nodded. “And now he’s worried because Daddy’s coming home.”
“If we’re right,” Turner speculated, “and he doesn’t want Golgarot to come through, it makes sense he would want the soldier to have the armor. It’s Alex’s chance to use Harkness to shut the door to hell for good.”
Darlington’s eyes flashed gold. “It’s also Golgarot’s chance to drag Alex into hell and keep the door open forever.
Hector knew that if Golgarot got the best of him, he’d just pull him back into hell.
And he can do the same to you, Alex. Then he has everything he wants: the door to hell wide open and Wheelwalker blood to keep it that way. ”
Alex held out her hands. “I know. I know that. I don’t want to go, okay? I don’t want to do this. But this is it. This is what they left us.”
“You cannot make that climb alone.”
“Then I go,” said Turner. “Or you do.”
“It won’t work,” Alex said. “It has to be the soldier.”
Darlington’s face was bleak and she could tell he was fighting the demon’s anger. “Hector should have done what he promised to. He never should have taken the mantle of soldier if he couldn’t.”
“But he wasn’t really a soldier,” Dawes argued. “He was a kid. He needed the scholar to back him up.”
They were all kids, Alex realized, young men of great promise, barely out of their teens, raised on stories of war and valor.
Alex had seen more life and more heartache and more bloodshed before she got to Yale than any person let alone an Ivy League undergrad should.
Dawes had killed a man to save her. Turner was a seasoned detective.
Darlington had been tortured and survived it.
Only Tripp had been like the first pilgrims, a boy of good fortune and an easy life.
And only Tripp had succumbed to his demon.
“It wasn’t just the scholar who abandoned Hector,” Alex said as gently as she could. “Nick Zanca was supposed to be his second.”
“The prince?” Turner asked, but Alex’s eyes were on Darlington. Only he knew what that really meant. “Why?”
“Because he offered. Because someone had to.”
We need Danny. He can fence. He can fight.
But then Daniel Arlington hadn’t answered the door. He had disappeared into the belly of Black Elm. His demon had won.
Maybe his great-grandson would finish the job. Or maybe they would fail as the first pilgrims had. They were an echo of an old song, and now it was up to them to change the tune or die trying.