Page 140 of Hell Bent

“A lot,” she said, because even she couldn’t sell Nothing. “But you’re out of the business of solving my problems, right?”

“Not if those problems become Lethe’s.” He looked around and rubbed his arms. “But you’re right. We’ll find some other place to talk. This house should be knocked down.”

Boom.

The sound shook the walls, as if someone had detonated a bomb on the second floor.

“What was that?” Anselm cried, gripping the kitchen island like a drowning man.

Alex knew that sound: something banging on a door that should never be opened, trying to get into the mortal world.

Boom.

Anselm was staring at her. “Why don’t you look scared?”

She was scared. But she wasn’t surprised. And she’d made the mistake of letting it show.

“What the hell did you do, Alex?” He was angry now, and he stormed past her, stalking through the dining room, toward the staircase.

“Stop!” Alex said, catching up to him. “We have to go. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“And you do? I have clearly underestimated your ignorance and arrogance.”

“Anselm.” She grabbed his arm and spun him around. It was easy with the Grays inside her, and he blinked at her strength, staring at her fingers gripping his arm.

Boom. Plaster gusted down from the living room ceiling. They were directly beneath the ballroom now, beneath the circle of protection.

“Take your hands off me,” he insisted, but he sounded frightened.

“Anselm, if I have to drag you out of here I will. It’s not safe and we have to go now.”

“You could do it, couldn’t you?” Anselm said, his terrified eyes searching hers. “I outweigh you by what? Nearly one hundred pounds? You could haul me right out of here. What are you?”

Boom.

Alex was saved from answering by the ceiling caving in.

KITTSCHER: There’s a theory that all magic is essentially demonic, that every ritual both summons and binds a demon’s powers.

Have you never wondered why magic takes such a toll? Our brushes with the uncanny are encounters with these parasitic forces. The demon is feeding even if its powers are contained. The bigger the magic, the more powerful the demon. And the nexuses are little more than doorways through which demons may, for a brief time, pass.

NOWNES: What you suggest is perverse in every way.

KITTSCHER: But you do not say I am wrong.

—Kittscher’s Daemonologie, 1933

36

Alex and Anselm fell backward as the ballroom floor collapsed from above in a cascade of plaster and wood. Darlington crouched in the wreckage, his horns glowing, his golden eyes like searchlights. He looked bigger than he had before, his back broader.

He growled, and in the sound she heard a word, maybe a name, but she couldn’t make sense of it.

Alex put herself between Darlington and Anselm. “Darlington—”

Darlington roared, the sound like the thunder of a subway train. He slashed at the floor, leaving deep trenches in the wood. She thought of the claw marks in his parents’ chests.

“Run!” she shouted at Anselm. “I can hold him off!”