Page 116 of Hell Bent

Mercy nodded. “I saw her too. In our Shakespeare lecture.”

Dawes’s face was troubled. Without a word they followed her out of the library and down the hall to the Dante bedroom, to the windows overlooking Orange Street.

The demons were still there, a pack of them in the shadows between the streetlamps.

Hellie’s golden hair looked black, her eyes dark. Her clothes … all black.

“She looks like you, Alex,” Dawes said. And she was right.

Alex took in the warm hue of Blake Keely’s hair, something like the bright red of Dawes’s bun. Detective Carmichael had been wearing a cheap suit when she’d first glimpsed him, but now that suit looked sharp, the lines more elegant, the tie a deep lilac, something Turner might wear. And did Spenser look a bit more hapless, a bit less tough and rugged?

What had Alex thought when she’d gazed at Not Hellie across the street from Il Bastone? That she didn’t have Hellie’s easy, athletic grace. That she looked wary, taut. Because she was looking at herself. That live-wire anger was Alex’s own.

Alex pulled the heavy blue curtains closed. She’d learned to love this room, the patterns the stained glass made in the late afternoon, the claw-foot tub she still hadn’t worked up the courage to use. “I think I know what happened to Linus Reiter.”

“Who?” asked Tripp.

“He’s a vampire I tangled with out in Old Greenwich. It’s … it’s how I lost the Mercedes.”

Dawes drew in a sharp breath.

“A vampire?” Mercy sounded terrified and thrilled all at once.

“For fuck’s sake,” said Turner.

“Linus Reiter was a student here at Yale,” Alex continued. “But he had a different name then. He was a Bonesman. And I think he’s one of the people who used that Gauntlet back in the thirties. I think Linus—or really Lionel Reiter—went to hell.”

“We can’t be sure of—”

“Come on, Dawes. Why build it if they didn’t intend to use it? Why kill off an architect—”

“They killed an architect?” Mercy squeaked.

“No one killed Bertram Goodhue!” Dawes snapped. Then she bit her lip. “At least … I don’t think anyone killed Bertram Goodhue.”

Alex found herself pacing. She couldn’t stop seeing the creature on the sidewalk. Hellie-not-Hellie. Alex-not-Alex.

“They offed the original architect,” Alex said. “They built this insane puzzle into a giant cathedral. Why? Just to see if they could? As some kind of grand gesture?”

“They’ve done crazier shit,” said Turner.

He wasn’t wrong. And she could imagine these careless, daring, terrible boys making just this kind of trouble. On a lark, Bunchy might say. But she didn’t think that was what had happened this time.

“They built the Gauntlet,” she said, “and then they went to hell. Lionel Reiter, member of Skull and Bones, was one of the pilgrims.”

Tripp took off his cap, ran a hand through his sandy hair. “And he brought a demon back?”

“I think he did. And I think it got the best of him. Literally. I think it drained away his hope and stole his life.”

“But you said Reiter was, uh … a vampire.” Tripp whispered the word, as if he knew how unlikely it sounded.

“Vampires are demons,” Dawes said quietly. “At least that’s one theory.”

It made damn good sense to Alex. Reiter fed on misery; blood was just the vehicle. And of course he wasn’t Reiter at all. He was a demon who had fed on the real Reiter until he walked like him, spoke like him, looked like him. Just like the demons down on the sidewalk.

Lionel Reiter had been the son of a wealthy Connecticut family. They made boilers. They built a gracious home. They sent their son and heir off to New Haven to practice his Latin and Greek and make business connections. And Lionel had done well for himself, even made it into the school’s most prestigious society. He’d made friends with young men whom he brought home for horseshoes and tennis on the lawn in the summer, sledding and carols in the winter. Young men with names like Bunchy and Harold.

He’d been ushered into a world of the arcane and he’d felt safe, even as he’d watched men cut open and their insides jostled by the hands of a haruspex. He’d stood in his robe and made his recitations, and he’d felt the thrill of all that power and known he was protected by his wealth, by his name, by the mere fact of not being the man on the table. He’d joined the members of Bones, and Scroll and Key, and maybe Lethe one fateful night. He’d walked the Gauntlet and seen … what? Unless Alex was very wrong about these merry wanderers of the night, they weren’t murderers. So where had they gone in hell? What corner of the underworld had they visited and what had they seen there? And what had they brought back with them when they returned?