Chapter 52
Alex waited for the house to go quiet before she slipped out of the Dante bedroom.
She nearly leapt out of her skin when Dawes said, “You don’t have to sneak around.” She was standing in the doorway to the armory.
Alex paused with her hand on the banister. “I thought it might be … I don’t know, a violation of Lethe rules.”
“It is. But I’m the closest thing Lethe has to an HR department.” She waved her hand through the air as if she were holding a wand. “There. All good.”
Alex knew she should probably leave it at that, but she couldn’t. “And we’re okay? Early on, I thought…” She had no idea how to finish that sentence. I thought that you were in love with him. I thought you belonged to each other and to Lethe.
“I love you both,” said Dawes. “But you are two of the last people I would ever want to be in a relationship with.”
“You’re best friends with a vampire!”
She shrugged. “I’ve lived a frightened life. I don’t want to be scared of happiness too.”
“Dawes, I’ve seen you take on frat boys, demons, and my rotten dad. If this is you scared, I don’t want to see you brave.”
“If the scholar had to make the climb…” She dug the toe of her Teva into the carpet. “I would run.”
Alex didn’t believe that. Every one of them would climb that tower. Full of dread, sure of failure, they would still climb.
“You could still run,” Dawes said. “I can get you money. There’s a whole world to hide in.” Her voice hitched. “I can’t lose you both.”
Alex crossed the hallway and wrapped her arms around Dawes. She stiffened, then hugged Alex back. She smelled faintly of rosemary and the cleaning polish they used in the armory.
“You won’t,” Alex promised, and she wanted to believe it was true.
Dawes released a little sob, then drew back and wiped her eyes. “See? Not brave at all.”
That was a lie. The movies loved cold-eyed assassins and flinty lone wolves.
But the world needed people who wept and fought on, saps and suckers and fools who had their hearts broken but kept loving anyway, women who knew how to work magic with nothing but water and flour, a little salt, and a will that could grind iron to dust.
“You aren’t just the bridges and roads of Lethe, Dawes. You’re the battlements too.”
“And still I can’t keep you safe tomorrow night.”
“But you managed better than anyone else ever has.”
“It’s not enough.”
Maybe not, but it was more than Alex had ever hoped for.
Later that night, curled against Darlington beneath the heavy covers in the Virgil bedroom, they lay awake, unable to sleep.
“What were you reading when I came in?” she asked, her cheek pressed against his chest, listening to the steady thud of his heart. He had been propped against the pillows, a book in his hands, more beautiful than ever in the gold wash of lamplight. “Please don’t say the Divine Comedy.”
“Too on the nose. At Scroll and Key I was up to my ears in Tennyson. I kept thinking about the inscription on the back of that photo of the first pilgrims.”
“The Praetor quoted him too.”
“Sir Alfred has been out of fashion a long time.”
“Professor Raymond Walsh-Whiteley is not a fashionable guy.”
“I didn’t really think I liked Tennyson, but…” He closed his eyes and recited, “And this gray spirit yearning in desire / To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”
“You’re thinking of Kittscher.”
“I can’t help it. He dared. Probably for the wrong reasons. Definitely without thinking. But he dared more than most ever do. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. All very heroic. If they’d been reading Auden, they might have been a little more cautious.”
It was the donors Alex kept thinking of—Anna Harkness, who had lost her son.
Ned Harkness, who had lost his brother and sent Hector into the abyss.
Sterling, who had never gotten to live the life he wanted despite his heaps of money.
All the faceless men who had lost friends and family to the First World War or disease or just the creeping hand of time, driven by fear and grief and most likely greed, a dream of being unbound by mortality.
“You have to call on me tomorrow,” he said. “When the time comes, don’t wait. Let me fight.”
“I will. I’m not looking to die.” He was quiet so long she pushed herself up on her elbow. “You don’t believe me?”
“You throw yourself into the fray. This time I need you to think twice.”
“If I thought twice, I’d steal your Mercedes and drive to Key West.”
He laughed. “Why Key West?”
“I like that ‘Key Largo’ song.”
“That’s what I mean. That’s not a plan.”
“The pilgrims had a plan. They had all kinds of plans.”
“True,” he said. “Maybe I just hate being afraid.”
“You get used to it.”
“Do you?”
“No, that’s the whole point to fear. It keeps you alert, keeps you awake, keeps you safe.”
“I’m not sure that it does.”
He wasn’t wrong. But Alex had kept her fists up for so long, she’d forgotten how to stand any other way.
“I’m like Achilles,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Good in wartime. Not so great when the dust settles.”
“Do you even hear yourself? Achilles never really got to see peace. No one knows who he might have become.”
“Maybe it’s better not to know.”
“Meaning?”
“You belong with someone smooth and shiny.”
“Someone like Penny?”
“That’s not what I said.”
He waited, watching her.
“Okay, yes,” she admitted. Alex hadn’t meant to wander down this path, but here she was.
“Someone like Penny. Someone who makes sense in…” She gestured to the splendor of the Virgil bedroom, the stained glass, the polished wood, the velvet coverlet.
“All of this. I get it. You don’t need to feel bad about it. ”
“I don’t.”
“Good.” She could say it, even if she didn’t mean it.
“Because it isn’t true.” He snagged her arm and drew her to him. “Don’t roll your eyes. As much as I appreciate you letting me off the hook the night before we both face near-certain death, you’re going to have to accept that I actually like you.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
But he wouldn’t stop. “I grew up in an empty mansion with no one but a cat for a friend and I killed my own grandfather. Do you really think I belong with someone like Penny?”
Alex lifted a shoulder. “Yes.”
“Because I’m boring?”
“Because you belong in places like this. Because you’re welcome in any room you walk into. Because you’ve never seen the inside of a cell. I’m not like that.”
“No, you’re prickly and strange and vexing and foul-mouthed and weird. It’s thrilling.”
“Would you please stop talking?”
“Do you not like me?”
“Of course I like you.” What wasn’t there to like? He was handsome and brave and dangerous and he smelled fantastic and what was she supposed to do with all of that? With kindness and laughter and orgasms in abundance? “Doom I can handle. I just don’t like … hope.”
“Too bad.”
I will break this, she thought. I will ruin it.
I don’t know how, but I will. And it would be so much worse to lose him once she’d gotten used to him, to his weight in the bed beside her, to the warmth in the crook of his arm, once he had become her shelter.
But the truth was she was already used to leaning on him.
She’d done it even when he wasn’t there.
Her phone pinged and she seized it.
Darlington nipped her shoulder. “You are a coward.”
It was a text from her mother. No big decisions tomorrow! Mercury in retrograde.
Alex’s heart gave a funny squeeze. This might be the last text she ever got from her mom.
“Put your T-shirt on,” Alex said.
“Are you kicking me out of bed?”
“Just oblige me.”
He did, and she tugged on her tank. Then she held out her phone and took their picture. She looked anxious, her smile slightly crazed. He was dazzling. Before she could think better of it, she sent the photo to her mother.
Immediately Mira pinged back: WHO IS THAT???
My boyfriend.
Her phone rang. Alex turned it to silent.
Darlington was beaming.
“Don’t get cocky,” she said, curling into him again. “When I go missing, you’re going to be suspect number one.”
“It’s always the boyfriend, isn’t it?”
“Always.”
“We’ll go over the layout of Harkness again tomorrow.”
“If you think it will help.”
He twined a strand of her hair through his fingers. “It’s all I have. All this useless knowledge. I want to believe it can mean something, that it can protect you somehow.”
“It might. Tell me another Harkness Tower fun fact.”
He peered up at the canopy. “It was inspired by St. Botolph’s in Lincolnshire, England.”
“Saint who?”
Darlington laughed. “It’s where Boston got its name. Botolph’s Town.” He paused. “He was the patron saint of travelers and boundaries.”
“Well, I hope he’s paying attention tomorrow night. And I promise if I die, I’ll haunt the shit out of you.”
“We can haunt Il Bastone together.”
“Oh God,” she said with real sorrow. “I won’t be able to come back to Il Bastone. The wards will keep me out.”
“I love that you’re going to miss the house more than me.”
“It’s a really nice house.”
“Dawes thinks you could fix me, pull out the demon self.”
“Make you the gentleman of Lethe again? Is that what you want?”
“It was.”
“That would be the safer path,” Alex said. “The easy road.”
“Are you trying to provoke me?”
“I can’t help it if you find the truth provocative.”
He barked a laugh and drew her closer.
To Alex’s surprise, she felt sleep stealing in. She couldn’t let it. She still had more to do.
“Ready to die with me?” she murmured in the deep quiet.
“It would be my honor.”
“’Til the end of days,” she said, smiling against his skin.
“And after. Alex, do you know the word that Dante used to finish all three parts of the Divine Comedy?”
“Never had a taste for the classics.”
“You read the Iliad.”
“Boring and overrated. One star.”
“Heathen.”
She kissed his neck. “Snob.”
“It’s stars, Galaxy,” he said softly as he drifted into sleep. “The last word is always stars.”
While Darlington slept, she crept to the bathroom and gently shut the door. Then she filled the sink with water and whispered the Bridegroom’s full name.
“Bertram Boyce North.”
He appeared almost instantly, as if he’d been on the other side of the Veil awaiting her summons. “Miss Stern. It’s late for a call.”
“Sorry, did I wake you?” she asked, and he scowled. The dead didn’t sleep. “I need a favor. A big one.”
“Another errand? Do you really wish to multiply your debt?”
“There’s a good chance I’m going to die tomorrow night.” He was silent. “So the bad news is you’re probably not going to get to collect.”
“And the good news?”
“Short on good news these days.”
“What is it you want?”
“Help me find my way to the other side. Hell is going to try to claim me. I need you to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
He studied her from the basin, the image of his face blurred with her own reflection in the water. He knew what she feared, the same thing all the dead feared, the thing that had driven Theo to choose oblivion over the chance that he might find himself at the mercy of another demon.
“I’m not sure that’s something I can prevent,” North said.
“But you can try, right?”
“I could.”
She held up her hands, a magician with nothing up her sleeves. “I don’t have anything to bargain with. I’m out of cards to play.”
“You think you can stop this … demon?” She understood he did not want to speak Golgarot’s name. To name a Gray was to know it, to remember it, to be bound to it. Maybe the same was true for the creatures who preyed upon the dead as well.
“I’m going to do what I can.”
“Then let that be your offering. Many of the dead have loved ones whom they watch and worry over. They do not wish to see them made food for demons. If you give your life to stop him, I will do all I can to make sure you stay free in death.”
“Sold,” Alex said, relief unspooling inside her.
“But if you live—”
“I know, I know. If I live, I owe big. Do you even know what you want from me?”
“No,” he admitted. “But a favor from the living is a precious thing.”
Alex decided not to think too much on that. Don’t buy trouble, Mira always said. Especially when Alex was so good at finding it for free.
“I guess we can’t shake on it.”
“The deal is made, Galaxy Stern. The bell once rung cannot be unrung.”
“North,” she asked, “what is it like on the other side?”
“Lonely,” he said, already fading from view. “Just like life.”