Page 12 of Hell Bent

“Right now?” Alex looked around the parlor, at the dusty rugs, the summer light turned soft by the rain-spattered windowpanes. She heard the ice maker rumble from the fridge in the kitchen. Later she’d go make a sandwich with the bread and lunch meat Dawes had ordered when she discovered how much of Alex’s diet consisted of chicken fingers, and that arrived every week as if by magic. “Crashing with friends in Topanga Canyon. I’ll come this weekend.”

“Not Saturday. Come tomorrow. Friday before five.”

Eitan kept kosher and kept the Sabbath holy. Killing and extortion were for the other six days of the week.

“I’ve got work,” she said. “I can come Sunday.”

“Good girl.”

She hung up and clutched the phone to her chest, staring up at the coffered ceiling. The lights flickered, and she knew the house was picking up her fear. She reached down and pressed her palm against the polished floorboards. The night Alex had almost bled to death in the hallway above, Il Bastone had been wounded too, one of its lovely windows smashed, its carpets ruined with blood. Alex had helped to clean it all up. She’d hovered beside the man Dawes had hired to restore the window. She’d steamed and scrubbed the blood from the floors and the carpets in the hallway. Her blood, Dean Sandow’s, Blake Keely’s. Both of them dead but not Alex. Alex had survived, and so had Il Bastone.

She couldn’t tell if the vibration through the floor was real or imagined, but she felt calmer for it. This had been her safe place as the campus emptied—warded, dark, and cool. She ventured out only occasionally, went for walks up the hill and out to the covered bridge by the Eli Whitney Museum, its red barn spanning the river like something out of a painting Mercy would laugh at. She took her new bike down to Edgerton Park, rode through the flower beds and looked at the old gatehouse, and every other morning, she rode all the way to Black Elm, fed Cosmo, wandered the overgrown hedge maze. But always she returned to the house on Orange, to Il Bastone. She’d thought she would feel lonely here, without Dawes or Darlington, but instead she’d sipped sodas straight from the old-fashioned icebox, napped in the fancy bedroom with its moon-and-sun stained glass, snooped around the armory. The house always had something new to show her.

Alex didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to go back to her mother’s miserable apartment in Van Nuys. And she didn’t want to talk to Eitan. Did he have unfinished business with Len that had been put on hold for a year? Or did he somehow know what Alex had done? Had he connected her to his cousin’s death?

It didn’t much matter. She had to go. She toggled through the numbers on her phone and found Michael Anselm. He was the Lethe board member who had stepped into the authority-shaped hole left by Dean Sandow. He’d graduated fifteen years before, and Alex and Dawes had looked up his Lethe Days Diary but found it particularly boring. Names and dates of rituals and little else. That was how he seemed on the phone too. Dry, dull, eager to get back to his job in finance or banking or whatever passed for printing money. But he’d gotten Alex a bike and a laptop, so she wasn’t going to complain.

Anselm picked up on the second ring. “Alex?” He sounded worried and she couldn’t blame him. She might very well be calling to tell him that the law school library had caught fire or an undead army was amassing in Commons. She didn’t know much about Anselm but she pictured him wearing striped ties and going home to a yellow Lab, two kids involved with Habitat for Humanity, and a wife who stayed in shape.

“Hi, Michael, sorry to bother you in the middle of the day—”

“Is everything okay?”

“Everything is fine. But I need to go home for the weekend. To see my mom.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, as if she’d told him her mother was ill. Which Alex had been perfectly prepared to do.

“Can you, I mean, can Lethe help me out with the fare?” Alex knew she was supposed to be embarrassed, but since nearly dying in this house, she hadn’t hesitated to ask Lethe for anything and everything she might need. They owed her, and Dawes, and Darlington. Dawes wasn’t asking and Darlington sure as hell wasn’t going to collect, so it was up to Alex to clear the ledger.

“Of course!” Michael said. “Whatever you need. I’ll put you on with my assistant.”

And that was that. Anselm’s assistant arranged for a car to the airport and the return flight. Alex wondered if she would be on it or if she would die at the top of Mulholland Drive. She packed underwear and a toothbrush in her backpack, and made a stop in the armory, but then realized she had no idea what to bring with her. She felt like she was walking into a trap, but Lethe didn’t traffic in the kinds of objects that could stop men like Eitan. At least not anything she could bring on a plane.

“I’ll be back,” she murmured to the house as the front door locked behind her. She paused to listen to the soft whining of the jackals beneath the porch and she hoped it was true.

Alex had made good on that promise. She’d even finished that Ray Bradbury paperback. She just hadn’t known she would return with fresh blood on her hands.

The Coat of Many Foxes

Provenance: Goslar, Germany; 15th century

Donor: Scroll and Key, 1993

Believed to be the work of Alaric Förstner, who was subsequently burned at the stake for his decimation of the local fox population. The coat changed hands multiple times, and there are records that indicate it belonged to an Oxford don around the same time that C. S. Lewis was teaching there, but this has never been fully substantiated. There is speculation that at one time, hanging the coat in a closet, armoire, or wardrobe would create a portal, but whatever magic the coat may or may not have possessed is long gone. Yet another example of the instability of portal magic. See Tayyaara for a rare exception.

—from the Lethe Armory Catalogue as revised and edited by Pamela Dawes, Oculus

5

October

On Friday morning, Alex went to Modern Poets and EE101 with Mercy and did her best to pay attention. It was too early in the year for her to be short on sleep.

She wanted to stay in that night, catch up on rest, finish hanging posters in her room. Mercy’s side was already elaborately turned out in art prints and strips of poetry in Chinese characters collaged with fashion illustrations. She’d created a kind of makeshift canopy over her bed in blue tulle that made the whole place feel glamorous.

But Mercy and Lauren wanted to go out, so they went out. Alex even put on a dress, short and black, held up by cobweb straps, identical in all but color to Mercy’s and Lauren’s. Alex felt like they were a tiny army, three sleepwalkers in dainty nightgowns. Mercy and Lauren wore strappy sandals, but Alex didn’t have any and she stuck to her battered black boots. Easier to run in.

They paused by the swing to take pictures and Alex chose one to send to her mom, the one where she looked happiest, the one where she looked all right. Lauren on her left—thick honey-blond hair and teeth brighter than a flashlight beam. Mercy on her right—hair in a shiny black bob, big vintage earrings in the shape of daisies, caution in her eyes.