Page 173 of Hell Bent

He woke at noon, his body aching. Sluggish and miserable, he showered and dressed in the jeans and sweater he’d packed in his grandfather’s old leather bag. He couldn’t seem to get warm.

“Hell hangover,” Alex explained when she saw him. She was sitting in the parlor, one leg curled beneath her, still in Lethe sweats, a book of Hart Crane’s poetry open in her lap—reading for one of her classes, he presumed. It pleased him too much to see her there, easy on the velvet couch, hair tucked behind her ears. “Dawes made breakfast soup.”

From scratch, of course. The perfect cure. He ate two bowls of changua with fresh cilantro, little toasts topped with poached egg floating in the milky broth. His mind was beginning to clear enough to think of something other than survival. He supposed he’d have to reenroll. Lethe would help him. Assuming he was still considered a member of Lethe.

“Where’s Mercy?” he asked.

Alex kept her eyes on her book. “I walked her back to JE this morning.”

“Is she okay?”

“She wanted to talk to her pastor and have lunch with Lauren. She needs a little normal.”

Unfortunately, normal was in very short supply.

After breakfast, he went to the armory and spent an hour digging through the drawers and cabinets. They needed to deal with the bodies in the Black Elm basement. He considered trying the library, but he couldn’t quite bear to find the right phrase for the Albemarle Book. How to dispose of a body. How to dispose of your mother’s remains. It was all too bleak. What he really needed to know was how to grieve for people he had done his best to stop loving years ago. His parents had come and gone from his life like unexpected gaps in the clouds, and if he had spent his days waiting for those brief hours of sunlight, he would have withered and died.

Briefly he considered the Tayyaara, a “magic carpet” that really could take you anywhere by simply opening a portal beneath it. But the destination had to be woven into the design, and anyone who had the skill for such things was long gone, so the weave had remained unchanged, and the carpet could take you only one place: a catacomb beneath Vijayanagar. For several hundred years, it had served as a kind of unofficial dumping ground for unwanted objects and people. He didn’t know if what he felt for his parents was duty or love or the memory of love, but he couldn’t toss them on some ancient garbage pile.

Alex and Dawes found him sitting on the floor of the armory, surrounded by glittering artifacts and bits of ephemera, stuck. The boy with the rock in his hand, forever trying to build something that had long ago been lost. They helped him put everything back in its proper place, and then they drove to Black Elm.

The whole house was beginning to smell. Or maybe he just knew what was waiting for them as they shuffled the door to the basement aside and stared down into the dark.

“Do you … want to say anything?” Alex asked.

He wasn’t sure. “Is my grandfather here?”

“He’s in the kitchen with Dawes.”

Darlington glanced over his shoulder, the kitchen empty to his eyes except for Dawes clutching a wooden spoon like a weapon. Golgarot had offered him a life of revelation, of knowledge, the unseen made seen. That would never be.

“You can talk to him, you know,” said Alex.

“I know you liked Stevenson’s ‘Requiem,’” he said, hoping his grandfather was listening, feeling foolish all the same. “But I’m afraid it doesn’t suit.”

If Darlington was honest, his grandfather wouldn’t like any of it. A eulogy was nothing but death words.

“Go on,” he told Alex.

She took a step down the stairs, then another. Darlington followed. The smell was worse here.

“That’s enough,” he said, and he saw her shoulders slump in relief. The heaps of his parents’ bodies were visible now, the scraps that had been Anselm, Eitan Harel slumped against the wall. How could this be his life? His home? What had he allowed for want of skill or knowledge or grit? “I am struck by the profound depth of my failure.”

Alex looked back at him from her place on the stairs. “You didn’t let the demon in the door. Sandow did. The societies did. When the time came, you stood between the living and the dead. Hoplite, hussar, dragoon, remember?”

“You’ve been paying attention. I’m both delighted and unnerved.” There was nothing for this but to see it done.

He laid his hand on Alex’s shoulder and reached for the demon. It was an easy thing, like flexing a muscle, like taking a deep breath. He felt his body change, a rush of strength. All fear dropped away; his grief and confusion faded. He felt the curve of Alex’s shoulder beneath his palm. If he curled his fingers, his claws would sink deeper. He would hear her gasp. He restrained himself.

Blue flame had blossomed over her body. She glanced back again, looking for a signal from him. He saw the will in her gaze, the way she had shoved her fear down. I will serve you ’til the end of days.

He nodded once and she lifted her arm. Blue fire spun from her hands, an arc of flame that became a river, coursing down the stairs and over the bodies. He’d been prepared to speak, a quote from … His demon mind couldn’t manage it. He remembered Alex with her book of poems. Hart Crane. He grasped at the words.

“And if they take away your sleep sometimes they give it back again.” It was the best he could do. He watched the bodies burn.

Part of him wanted to tell Alex not to stop there, to let the whole house burn down to nothing, to let them burn with it too. Instead they stood together in the dark shadows of Black Elm, until there was nothing left but ashes and the old stones that might stand forever but would never mourn.

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