Chapter 51
Alex was grateful to blow off her classes and spend the afternoon with the others at Il Bastone.
Dawes was making a roast and stuffed Japanese sweet potatoes with crème fra?che.
Darlington had insisted they open one of the most expensive bottles of wine in the Il Bastone cellar to properly toast her finished dissertation and what might be their last night on earth.
Alex let it all wash over her—the smells from the kitchen, Turner and Darlington arguing over how to set a perimeter without drawing the attention of campus security, the frost on Il Bastone’s windows, and the fire roaring in the grate.
There was little they could do to prepare her for the climb because they had no idea what it might require, but they went over the plan to secure Harkness.
They would be armed with salt swords and chains, and a variety of complex knot patterns.
If Reiter’s familiars decided to show up, a series of repulsion and obfuscation spells would keep them at bay.
The carillonneurs would finish playing and leave the tower after six thirty, when it would already be full dark.
Darlington suspected that the original pilgrims had planned to use the conquest room as a staging area, but now that it was part of the dean’s apartments, there was no access.
They agreed the simplest thing was to take Turner’s Dodge and the Subaru and park on High Street.
They had considered trying to clear the whole quadrangle, but it was an impossible undertaking without creating some kind of massive emergency.
So she’d go to meet a prince of hell while Yale slept on.
Alex would start her climb from the chapel at the base of the tower, and Darlington would remain behind with the others and the overstuffed Voynich Coffin.
If Alex made it to the top, if she managed to beat Golgarot, then she would call to her second, and this time Daniel Arlington would be ready.
They’d send the puzzle box and all the demons in it back to hell with Golgarot.
“You can’t hesitate to call out to me, do you understand?” Darlington asked. “If it looks like it’s going wrong—”
“I will,” Alex reassured him. But she wasn’t sure she meant it.
She didn’t know what she might find at the top of the tower, but if they failed, if Golgarot and his legion came through, if Alex and Darlington both ended up in hell, who would be left to stop them?
She didn’t much care about what happened to the rest of the world, but she wanted the people she loved to survive.
“How many stairs?” she asked, trying to parse the elevation of the tower Darlington had pulled from the Lethe archives.
“Two hundred and eighty-four,” Darlington said.
“Great.”
“I told you to go to the gym.”
“You’ve blessed me with so much wisdom. It can be hard to keep it all straight.”
“Let’s start at the bottom and work our way to the top.
Harkness is built on a square foundation, and the first set of stairs is enclosed.
It’s very narrow, a spiral.” His hand corkscrewed upward.
“The exterior of that level is largely unadorned. It’s strange, now that I think about it.
There’s almost nothing at eye level or where anyone on the ground could see it.
Everything changes when you get to the clock level. ”
Darlington talked her through the levels of the tower, the stonework Lawrie had created, statues, symbols, layer upon layer of history and meaning. It was too much.
“Will any of this make a difference?” Alex asked. Her mind was swimming with details she knew she couldn’t retain.
“It’s hard to tell what might help when you’re in it.”
Alex knew they were all thinking the same thing: that it should be Darlington taking on this battle, that he knew the history of Yale and its magic better than anyone. But it had to be the soldier.
“All of the ornamentation is arranged in patterns of four or eight,” Darlington said.
“And this bit is truly weird.” He searched through the papers, then drew out a sheet of four photographs.
“Almost everything on the tower is historical or allegorical—famous authors and inventors, personifications of war, law, death, and so on. But there are also four students.”
“These are supposed to be students?” Turner asked incredulously.
They were wildly creepy and distorted, unlike any of the other figures Darlington had shown them.
“They’re grotesques,” Darlington conceded. “But you have to remember that they’re barely visible unless you’re hundreds of feet in the air. Lawrie and Rogers had names for them: the scholar, the athlete, the literary man, and the socialite.”
“Almost a match for the pilgrims,” said Turner.
He was right. Kittscher the scholar, Hector the athlete. She could imagine Daniel Arlington II as the pretentious literary man and eager Lionel Reiter as the socialite.
“And who gets top billing?” Alex asked, tapping the crown of the tower.
Now Darlington smiled. “Dante and Virgil.”
“That feels less coincidental,” Turner said.
“Shakespeare and Homer are up there too.”
Again, the pattern of four.
Tripp scuttled in, cupping his hand beneath a spoon. “Dawes wants someone to try the sauce.”
“This is my right and sacred duty,” said Alex, raising her hand to taste.
“How is it?”
“Since I might die tomorrow, can I just have a pitcher of it?”
Tripp grinned. He had the faintest smattering of freckles across his nose. Alex had never noticed them before.
“You guys need to set the table,” he instructed and vanished back into the kitchen.
They cleared the plans away and set out silverware and glasses. The routine was simple, welcome, but it all felt too final. A ritual for parting.
She could feel the current of fear beneath the chatter of dinner, a crackle of static.
Dawes barely ate, and now that she really looked, Alex could see she had lost weight.
Darlington did his best but mostly pushed the food around on his plate.
Only she and Turner managed to do justice to Dawes’s cooking.
“You feel it too, don’t you?” he murmured when the others were once again discussing how to protect the entrance to Branford and Harkness.
Alex nodded. Yes, she was afraid, and a hard stone of regret had settled in her gut.
She had finally found the peace she had longed for, people who valued her, a life worth holding on to.
But she also felt what she suspected Turner was feeling too: relief.
The time for talking and planning and speculating was over. They were both better in a fight.
When dinner was over, Alex asked Tripp to help her clear.
Dawes tried to wave them off. “You don’t need to bother with that.”
“If I die tomorrow, I’m not leaving you with a sink full of dirty dishes.”
“Stop joking about dying. It’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny,” Alex said. “Besides, I need to keep busy.”
When Tripp joined her by the sink, she turned on the radio. She didn’t want the others to hear this.
“Take off your cap,” she said.
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
Tripp’s lip jutted out, but he obliged her, plucking the Yale sailing team cap from his head. His dirty blond hair shone copper.
Red hair, freckles. There was no denying it. “You’re feeding on her.”
Tripp’s jaw dropped. He looked like a cartoon of a bewildered puppy. “I’m not!”
“You’ve seen how exhausted she is.”
“You’re all exhausted!”
“But you’re not.”
“That’s different.”
“You’re healthy, happy, full of life. Dawes’s life.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I would never hurt Dawes. I would never want her to be unhappy.”
“It’s not what you want, Tripp. It’s what you are.”
“I never bit her. I wouldn’t do that.”
“But you drank those blood pouches she prepared so thoughtfully for you. You ate up all her love and care. Kittscher didn’t need to bite his victims either.”
Dawes hadn’t nourished Tripp with desperation or fear.
That wasn’t what he was hungry for. He longed for attention, affection, warmth—the things he hadn’t had enough of in life—and Dawes liked nothing better than someone to take care of.
She would give and give until she dropped.
Maybe she’d only finished her dissertation because she’d found a new vampire to drain her soul away.
“I didn’t know,” he pleaded. “I didn’t mean to.”
But you didn’t have to want to hurt someone to do it, to use someone up, kill a dream, change a life. “I know, Tripp. But you find a way to stop. Or I’ll stop you.”
Tripp looked at her, his eyes calculating. “But what happens if you don’t survive? Who will stop me then?”
A chill skittered over Alex. It was too easy to forget Tripp was a predator.
She made herself hold his gaze. “Then Darlington will. Or Turner. Whoever makes it will add you to their list of chores. So find a way to stop hurting her.”
“I will,” he said, nodding fiercely. “I promise I will.”
If only people kept promises as easily as they made them.
They finished the dishes together in silence. At some point, Alex realized Tripp was crying, and she handed him a tissue.
“Splash a little water on your face,” she said. “So she won’t see.”
“Thanks,” he said.
But she stopped him before he could push through the door to the dining room. She wanted to hear what the others were saying.
“What happens if she doesn’t make it?” Practical Turner. It was a reasonable question.
“She’ll make it,” Dawes replied angrily.
“I’m her second,” Darlington said. “If we fail, we fail together.”
Someone—Dawes, Alex suspected—slammed her hand against the table. “Stop talking that way.”
“We’re not making predictions,” Turner said, “just contingencies. If I didn’t think we had a chance tomorrow, I wouldn’t be a part of this. But if things turn ugly—”
“Then it’s up to you to hold the line,” said Darlington. “If Golgarot opens the door, you use the alumni network, use the societies. Gather all their magic to try to stop the flood. The Praetor can help.”
“You think that will be enough?”
“I don’t know,” Darlington said. “Reiter told Alex that they didn’t want to claim the world. The problem with hunger is that no one ever just stays full.”
Alex pushed through the doors. “It’s not enough.
” But she had an idea of what might be. She’d been around plenty of magic and she knew that disrupting a ritual could mean disaster for those involved.
“If it really goes wrong, you have to break the enchantment, interrupt it. The bells mark the beginning and the end. So if we fail, find a way to stop the tolling of the final bell.”
“You could both die!” Dawes objected.
“That’s right,” said Darlington as he understood Alex’s meaning. “But so will Golgarot.”
Dawes curled her fists into the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “I don’t think I can do that.”
“I know,” Alex said. “But Turner can.”
She met his eyes and he gave a single nod. It was something they’d always had in common. Turner was better at choosing the right thing, but they could both do the hard thing.
Alex took one last look at all of them gathered around the table, maybe for the last time. Everyone had their tasks. They knew the risks, knew their roles, and they would march on, even if no one was happy about it. Figuring out how to die wasn’t much different from learning how to live.