Page 76 of Hell Bent

In attendance:

The participants were listed by society, and there, under Skull and Bones: Lionel Reiter.

He’d been there. Under a different name, but he’d been in this house, under Lethe’s roof. Maybe he’d been mortal then. But maybe there had been a demon in one of the societies, inside Il Bastone, and no one had been the wiser. And what about the date? 1933. A year after Sterling had been built. Did that mean there really had been a first pilgrimage to hell? Was that the subtext here? Who had known about the Gauntlet, and was this less a heated argument about philosophic hypotheticals than a very real debate about the possibility of traveling to the underworld?

And if demons fed on humans, on their happiness or their pain, even their blood, was there another variable she had to consider? She remembered Marjorie Stephen, old before her time, eyes milky and gray. What if there hadn’t been any poison? Could Reiter be involved? Or some other demon having his fun? Taunting them with scripture? Turner would have told her if they’d found neck wounds on Professor Stephen or Dean Beekman, but before tonight, Alex hadn’t known vampires were real. What else might be lurking out there in the dark?

Alex felt panic rising up to choke her. She thought of all those studious young men from well-to-do families debating morality and immortality, arguing semantics, while a monster enjoyed their hospitality. Because we’re all a bunch of amateurs. Lethe pretended they knew the score when they didn’t even know the game. But this house, this library, could still protect her.

After three more searches, she had regained some small sense of calm, and she had a list of recommendations culled from the few books she could find in English that covered repelling demons and vampires, most of them involving weapons made of salt. According to the books she skimmed, stakes, beheading, and fire all worked because they killed just about anything. Crosses and holy water were dependent on the faith of the user, since they lent courage, not real protection. Garlic was only effective as a repellent toward a particular type of succubus. And the wards worked. That was what mattered. In the armory, she located a wide lacy collar made of tiny salt pearls that dated back to colonial times and that she could tuck neatly under her shirt. She lay down in the Dante bedroom, beneath the velvet blue canopy, and dreamed she was playing croquet on Linus Reiter’s lawn. She was barefoot and the grass was wet. She could see blood seeping up between her toes.

“Intriguing,” he whispered, but in the dream, he was Darlington, in a white suit with glowing golden horns. He smiled at her. “Hello, honey lamb. Have you come to be devoured?”

The house behind him was no longer Sweetwell but Black Elm, covered in ivy, somehow lonelier than even a vampire’s castle on a hill.

Alex drifted inside; she knew the way, that same strange sense of compulsion drawing her on. The rooms seemed bigger, their shadows deeper. She climbed the stairs to the ballroom, and Darlington was there, in the circle, but he was her Darlington, just as she remembered him the night he’d disappeared from Rosenfeld Hall, handsome, human, dressed in his long dark coat, his weathered jeans.

Through the windows she could see the demon with his curling horns, standing amid the discarded croquet set on the lawn, gazing up at her with golden eyes.

“There are two of you,” Alex said.

“There have to be,” Darlington replied. “The boy and the monster. I am the hermit in the cave.”

“I saw everything. In your grandfather’s memories. I saw you try to survive this place.”

“It wasn’t all bad.”

Alex felt her lips twist. “Of course it wasn’t. If it was all bad, you could just let go.”

“When did you get so wise, Stern?”

“When you went on sabbatical to purgatory.”

“I could hear them,” he said, eyes distant. They were dark brown, tea left to brew too long. “My parents. When they were yelling at the front door.”

“Should I have let them in?”

His gaze snapped to hers, and in his rage she could see the echo of the demon. “No. Never. They turned the power off, after I inherited this place. They thought they could freeze me out.” His shoulders lifted, dropped. His anger fell away from him like an ill-fitting garment. He looked so tired. “I don’t know how to not love them.”

How many times had Alex wished she could feel only resentment toward Mira? Or nothing at all? That was the problem with love. It was hard to unlearn, no matter how harsh the lesson.

“Is this real?” she asked.

But Darlington only smiled. “This isn’t the time for philosophy.”

“Tell me how to reach you.”

“Come closer, Stern. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

Was she afraid? Was this the real Darlington, or was he the monster waiting in the garden? Some part of her didn’t care. She stepped forward.

“Was it you that night?” She could see the circle of protection was fraying, dissolving into sparks. He is dangerous. He is not what you think. “At Book and Snake? Did you use the corpse to spell my name?”

“Galaxy Stern,” Darlington said, his eyes flashing gold, “I have been crying out to you from the start.”

When Alex woke, the sheets were soaked with sweat, and the wound at her neck was leaking pale pink rivulets of blood.

It is interesting to contemplate which of Aesop’s fables were chosen for illustration in Bonawit’s very fine glasswork. Is there a lesson in the choices? That may depend on how each fable is read. Take “The Wolf and the Crane”: In the course of eating too quickly, a greedy wolf gets a bone stuck in his throat. To the crane he says, “Use your slender beak to pull it out and I will give you a fine reward.” The crane obliges, placing his head inside the wolf’s jaws and extracting the bone, but when the work is done, the wolf grants the crane no prize. Isn’t it enough that he has let such a fool escape his bite? Traditionally, we are told the moral is “There is no reward for serving the wicked.” But we might just as well understand the story to posit this question: “Isn’t it a merry thing to cheat death?”