The silence was soft against her ears. When Alex opened her eyes, she saw that the candles had bloomed to light again, bathing everything in a gentle glow. As if nothing had happened, as if it had all been a grand illusion—except for the pebbles of broken glass littering the floor.

Amelia and Josh were both on their knees, sobbing. Dawes was huddled on the floor with her hands clasped over her mouth. Michelle Alameddine paced back and forth, muttering, “Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit.”

Wind gusted through the shattered windows, the smell of the night air cold and sweet after the thick tang of sulfur. Sandow stood staring up at where the beast had been. His dress shirt was soaked through with sweat.

Alex forced herself to stand and make her way to Dawes, boots crunching over glass.

“Dawes?” she said, crouching down and laying a hand on her shoulder. “Pammie?”

Dawes was crying, the tears making slow, silent tracks down her cheeks. “He’s gone,” she said. “He’s really gone.”

“But I heard him,” Alex said. Or something that sounded very much like him.

“You don’t understand,” Dawes said. “That thing—”

“It was a hellbeast,” said Michelle. “It was talking with his voice. That means it consumed him. Someone let it into our world. Left it like a cave for him to walk into.”

“Who?” said Dawes, wiping the tears from her face. “How?”

Sandow put his arm around her. “I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.”

“But if he’s dead, then he should be on the other side,” said Alex. “He isn’t. He—”

“He’s gone, Alex,” Michelle said. Her voice was harsh. “He’s not on the other side. He’s not behind the Veil. He was devoured, soul and all.”

It’s not a portal. That was what Darlington had said that night in the Rosenfeld basement. And now she knew what he had meant to say, what he had tried to say, before that thing had taken him. It’s not a portal. It’s a mouth.

Darlington had not disappeared. He had been eaten.

“No one survives that,” said Sandow. His voice was hoarse. He took off his glasses and Alex saw him wipe at his eyes. “No soul can endure it. We summoned a poltergeist, an echo. That’s all.”

“He’s gone,” Dawes said again.

This time Alex didn’t deny it.

They collected Aurelian’s bells and Dean Sandow said he would make calls to have the windows of the ballroom boarded up the next morning. It was starting to snow, but it was too late in the evening to do anything about it now. And who was there left to care? Black Elm’s keeper, its defender, would never return.

They made their slow way out of the house. When they entered the kitchen, Dawes began to cry harder. It all looked so impossibly stupid and hopeful: the half-full glasses of wine, the tidily arranged vegetables, the pot of soup waiting on the stove.

Outside, they found Darlington’s Mercedes smashed into Amelia’s Land Rover. That was the crash Alex had heard, Darlington’s car possessed by whatever echo they’d drawn into this world.

Sandow sighed. “I’ll call a tow truck and wait with you, Amelia. Michelle—”

“I can take a car to the station.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“It’s fine,” she said. She seemed distracted, confused, as if she couldn’t quite make the numbers tally, as if she’d only now realized that in all her years at Lethe she’d been walking side by side with death.

“Alex, can you see Dawes home?” Sandow asked.

Dawes wiped her sleeve across her tearstained face. “I don’t want to go home.”

“To Il Bastone, then. I’ll join you as soon as I can. We’ll …” He trailed off. “I don’t know exactly what we’ll do.”

“Sure,” said Alex. She used her phone to request a ride, then put her arm around Dawes and herded her down the driveway after Michelle.

They stood in silence by the stone columns, Black Elm behind them, the snow gathering around them.

Michelle’s car came first. She didn’t offer to share it, but she turned to Alex as she got in.

“I work in gifts and acquisitions in the Butler Library at Columbia,” she said. “If you need me.”

Before Alex could reply, she ducked inside. The car vanished slowly down the street, cautious in the snow, its red taillights dwindling to sparks.

Alex kept her arm around Dawes, afraid that she might pull away. Until this moment, until this night, anything had been possible and Alex had really believed that somehow, inevitably, maybe not on this new moon but on the next, Darlington would return. Now the spell of hope was broken and no amount of magic could make it whole.

The golden boy of Lethe was gone.

26

Winter

“You’ll stay, won’t you?” Dawes asked as they entered the foyer at Il Bastone. The house sighed around them as if sensing their sadness. Did it know? Had it known from the start that Darlington would never come back?

“Of course.” She was grateful Dawes wanted her there. She didn’t want to be alone or to try to put on a cheerful face for her roommates. She couldn’t pretend right now. And yet she couldn’t stop reaching for some scrap of hope. “Maybe we got it wrong. Maybe Sandow screwed up.”

Dawes switched on the lights. “He’s had almost three months to plan. It was a good ritual.”

“Well, maybe he got it wrong on purpose. Maybe he doesn’t want Darlington back.” She knew she was grasping at smoke, but it was all she had. “If he’s involved in covering up Tara’s murder, you think he really wants a crusader like Darlington around instead of me?”

“But you are a crusader, Alex.”

“A more competent crusader. What did Sandow say to stop the ritual?”

“Your tongues are made stone—he used that to silence the bells.” “And the rest?”

Dawes shucked off her scarf and hung her parka on the hook. She kept her back to Alex when she said, “Hear the silence of an empty home. No one will be made welcome.”

The thought of Darlington being forever banned from Black Elm was horrible. Alex rubbed her tired eyes. “The night of the Skull and Bones prognostication, I heard someone—something—pounding on the door to get in right at the moment Tara was murdered. It sounded just like tonight. Maybe it was Darlington. Maybe he saw what was happening to Tara and he tried to warn me. If he—”

Dawes was already shaking her head, her loose bun unwinding at her neck. “You heard what they said. It … that thing ate him.” Her shoulders shook and Alex realized she was crying again, clutching her hanging coat as if without its support she might topple. “He’s gone.” The words like a refrain, a song they’d be singing until the grief had passed.

Alex touched a hand to Dawes’s arm. “Dawes—”

But Dawes stood up straight, sniffled deeply, wiped the tears from her eyes. “Sandow was wrong, though. Technically. Someone could survive being consumed by a hellbeast. Just no one human.”

“What could, then?”

“A demon.”

Far above our pay grade.

Dawes took a long, shuddering breath and pushed her hair back from her face, re-fastening her bun. “Do you think Sandow will want coffee when he gets here?” she asked as she retrieved her headphones from the parlor carpet. “I want to work for a while.”

“How’s it going?”

“The dissertation?” Dawes blinked slowly, looked down at the headphones in her hand as if wondering how they’d gotten there. “I have no idea.”

“I’ll order pizza,” said Alex. “And I’m taking first shower. We both reek.”

“I’ll open a bottle of wine.”

Alex was halfway up the stairs when she heard the knock at the door. For a second, she thought it might be Dean Sandow. But why would he knock? In the six months she’d been a part of Lethe, no one had knocked at Orange.

“Dawes—” she began.

“Let me in.” A male voice, loud and angry through the door.

Alex’s feet had carried her all the way to the base of the stairs before she realized it. Compulsion.

“Dawes, don’t!” she cried. But Dawes was already unlocking the door.

The lock clicked and the door slammed inward. Dawes was thrown back against the banister, headphones flying from her hand. Alex heard a loud crack as her head connected with the wood.

Alex didn’t stop to think. She snatched up Dawes’s headphones and shoved them down over her ears, using her hands to keep them tight to her head as she ran up the stairs. She glanced back once and saw Blake Keely—beautiful Blake Keely, the shoulders of his wool coat dusted with snow as if he’d emerged from the pages of a catalog—step over Dawes’s body, his eyes locked on Alex.

Dawes will be okay, she told herself. She has to be okay. You can’t help her if you lose control.

Blake was using Starpower or something like it. Alex had felt the pull of it in his voice through the door. It was the only reason Dawes had flipped the lock.