Page 104 of Dead Beat

—Notes from the Grimoire of Pamela Dawes (unpublished)

36

Alex woke briefly at dawn, thought about trying to get dressed, then rolled over and fell back asleep. She woke again sometime in the afternoon. When she looked outside she saw two men repairing the windshield of the Subaru. She was famished and Dawes had left her a thermos of soup and a plate of bread, still warm beneath a kitchen towel. The previous night she had showered in scalding water until it started to cool, then tossed the bloody wreck of her torn black T-shirt into the trash, put on a pair of Lethe sweats, and burrowed under the covers in the Dante room.

Now she drank down the soup—chicken and dumpling—and slathered three pieces of bread with butter. She knew she should go back to the dorms. Lauren would worry. Maybe Mercy would too. But the routine of her life had unraveled so thoroughly she couldn’t find a thread to follow back to normal.

What have you done? Her father’s words, less a question than an accusation. He had looked into her face and seen his own eyes staring back at him. Then he’d pulled a knife. Alex realized that for the first time in a very long time she wanted to be high.

She went back to bed.

It was night again when she woke. The room was dark and warm, the heavy curtains blocking out everything but a sliver of light from the streetlamps below. Her body felt easy and pliable. Healing in Hiram’s Crucible had that effect. It wasn’t the guilty, heady rush she’d experienced with Theo, but it took away the bruises and aches. No amount of magic and goat milk could fix the rest—not the fight with her father or the drop into the past or the revelation of the pilgrims’ true ambitions. She wanted to hide in the dark and let someone else sort it all out.

She heard footsteps on the stairs and realized she must have been woken by Darlington returning to Il Bastone. The door of the Virgil bedroom opened and closed. His room was stacked directly above the Dante bedroom. She stared up at the coffered ceiling, listening to the sounds of him preparing for sleep.

She shouldn’t climb the stairs. She knew that, even as she laid her hand on the banister.

She shouldn’t knock on his door. She knew that too, but she did it anyway.

As it turned out, one person could be plenty reckless on her own.

“Come in,” he said.

She was surprised to find him still fully dressed in his boots and overcoat.

“I’m going to Black Elm,” he said. “Will you come with me?”

“Okay.” She had, in fact, reached the limits of how much she could sleep.

“Bring your coat. There’s still no heat.”

Alex went back to the Dante bedroom and retrieved her coat and boots and a beanie embroidered with the Lethe hound for good measure. In the kitchen, she filled her thermos with soup and slid half a pan of Parker House rolls into a plastic bag.

“We aren’t going over the Donner Pass, Stern,” Darlington said from the doorway. “We don’t need provisions.”

“Tell me there’s something to eat in the Black Elm pantry.”

“Probably some stale cereal.”

“A girl needs sustenance. What is that?” she asked, gesturing to the remnants of a lumpy cake beneath a glass dome. It was frosted white and the word Congrats! had been scrawled across it in crooked red icing. For Alex’s birthday, Dawes had baked a multilayered gingerbread cake sandwiched between thick clouds of mascarpone frosting and decorated with sugared cranberries. It had looked like it belonged on the cover of a magazine. “There’s no way Dawes made that.”

“I think it’s Tripp’s handiwork. Dawes finished her dissertation.”

Alex nearly dropped the bag of rolls. “She did what?”

“I’m not sure I was supposed to tell you, so when she mentions it, act surprised.”

“That will not be a problem. She really did it? Now what happens?”

Darlington shrugged, and they headed out the front door to the Subaru. “I don’t think she knows. It’s hard to think about the future when—”

“We all may die?”

“In the face of so much uncertainty.” He cranked up the heat and they turned onto Elm.

She watched the campus slide by. They hadn’t been alone together since the ritual at Wolf’s Head. It had all seemed easy, maybe even unimportant, when they were bustling around Il Bastone, but now, in the quiet of the car, the shape between them felt like it had changed. She had wanted to do anything but stay stuck in the Dante bedroom tormented by thoughts of her dad trying to kill her. Only now she was stuck in this car tormented by thoughts of Darlington’s mouth on her neck. If she did end up damned, her version of hell was going to be an odd one.

“What happened in Hartford?” she asked, both because she needed to know and because she was desperate to crack the silence.