Darlington looked at her. Undine with her slick black hair, the center part like a naked spine, her devouring eyes.
“You killed them,” he said. “All of them. Leonard Beacon. Mitchell Betts. Helen Watson. Hellie.”
The silence stretched. The dark sheen of her eyes seemed to harden. Hadn’t he wanted magic, a doorway to another world, a fairy girl? But faeries were never kind. Tell me to fuck off, he thought. Open that vulgar mouth and tell me I’m wrong. Tell me to go to hell.
But all she said was, “Not Hellie.”
Darlington could hear the rush of wind through the portal, the ordinary groans of the building settling above them, and somewhere, distantly, the sound of a siren.
He’d known. The first day he met her, he’d known there was something wrong with her, but he never could have guessed the depth of it. Murderer.
But who had she killed, really? No one who would be missed. Maybe she’d done what she had to. Either way, the Lethe board had no idea who they were dealing with, what they’d brought into the fold.
“What are you going to do?” Alex asked. Those hard black eyes, stones in the river. No remorse, no excuses. Her only drive was survival.
“I don’t know,” said Darlington, but they both knew that was a lie. He would have to tell Dean Sandow. There was no way around it.
Ask her why. No, ask her how. Her motive should matter more to him, but Darlington knew it was the how that would obsess him, and probably the board as well. But they could never let her continue at Lethe. If something happened, if Alex hurt someone again, they would be liable.
“We’ll see,” he said, and turned toward the deep shadow in the corner. He didn’t want to keep looking at her, to see the fear in her face, the knowledge of all she was about to lose.
Was she ever really going to make it anyway? A cold part said she’d never really had what it took to be Lethe. To be Yale. This girl of the West, of easy sunshine, plywood, and Formica.
“Someone was here before us,” he said, because it was easier to talk about the work in front of them rather than the fact that she was a killer. Leonard Beacon had been beaten unrecognizable. Mitchell Betts’s organs had been nearly liquefied, pummeled into pulp. Two men in the back rooms had holes in their chests that indicated they’d been staked in the heart. The bat had been left in fragments so small it had been impossible to lift fingerprints. But Alex had been clean. No blood on her. The crime techs had even checked the drains.
Darlington gestured to the dark blot in the corner. “Someone opened a portal.”
“Okay,” she said. Cautious, unsure. The camaraderie and ease they’d earned over the last months gone like passing weather.
“I’ll ward it,” he said. “We’ll go back to Il Bastone and talk this out.” Did he mean that, he wondered? Or did he mean, I’ll learn what I can before I turn you in and you go quiet. Tonight, she’d still be looking to barter—a trade of information for his silence. She was his Dante. That should matter. She’s a killer. And a liar. “This isn’t something I can keep from Sandow.”
“Okay,” she said again.
Darlington drew two magnets from his pocket and traced a clean sign of warding over the portal. Doorways like this were strictly Scroll and Key magic, but it was a ridiculous risk for the Locksmiths to try to open a portal away from their tomb. Nevertheless, it was their own magic he would use to close it.
“Alsamt,” he began. “Mukhal—” The breath was sucked from his mouth before he could finish the words.
Something had hold of him, and Darlington knew he’d made a terrible mistake. This was not a portal. Not at all.
He realized in that last moment how few things he had to tether him to the world. What could keep him here? Who knew him well enough to keep hold of his heart? All of the books and the music and the art and the history, the silent stones of Black Elm, the streets of this town. This town. None of it would remember him.
He tried to speak. A warning? The last gasp of a know-it-all? Here lies the boy with all the answers. Except there would be no grave.
Danny was looking at Alex’s old young face, at her dark well eyes, at the lips that remained parted, that did not move to speak. She did not step forward. She cast no words of protection.
He ended as he had always suspected he would, alone in the dark.
19
Last Summer
Alex couldn’t trace where the trouble began at Ground Zero that night. It all went too far back. Len had been trying to move up, to get Eitan to let him take on more weight. Weed paid the bills, but the private school kids at Buckley and Oakwood wanted Adderall, Molly, oxy, ketamine, and Eitan just didn’t trust Len with more than dime bags of green, no matter how much he kissed up.
Len loved to bitch about Eitan, called him an oily Jewish prick, and Alex would squirm, thinking of her grandmother lighting the prayer candles on Shabbat. But Eitan Shafir had everything Len wanted: money, cars, a seemingly endless line of aspiring models on his arm. He lived in a mega mansion in Encino with an infinity pool that overlooked the 405 freeway surrounded by a crazy amount of muscle. The problem was that Len didn’t have anything Eitan wanted—until Ariel came to town.
“Ariel,” Hellie had said. “That’s an angel’s name.”
Ariel was Eitan’s cousin or brother or something. Alex was never sure. He had wide-set eyes with heavy lids, a handsome face framed by perfectly groomed stubble. He made Alex nervous from moment one. He was too still, like a creature hunting, and she could sense the violence in him waiting. She saw it in the way even Eitan deferred to him, the way the parties at the house in Encino grew more frantic, desperate to impress him, to keep him entertained, as if boring Ariel might be a very dangerous thing. Alex had the sense that Ariel, or some version of him, had always been there, that the messy clockwork of men like Eitan and Len could not operate without someone like Ariel looming above it all, leaning back in his seat, his slow blink like a countdown.
Ariel got a kick out of Len. Len made him laugh, though somehow Ariel never seemed to smile when he was laughing. He loved to wave Len over to his table. He’d slap him on the back and get him to freestyle.
“This is our in,” Len said the day Ariel invited himself to Ground Zero.
Alex couldn’t understand how Len didn’t see that Ariel was laughing at him, that he was amused by their poverty, excited by their want. The survivor in her understood that there were men who liked to see other people grovel, liked to push to see what humiliations the needs of others would allow. There were rumors floating around Eitan’s place, passed from one girl to the next: Don’t end up alone with Ariel. He doesn’t just like it rough; he likes it ugly.
Alex had tried to make Len see the danger. “Don’t mess around with this guy,” she’d told him. “He’s not like us.”
“But he likes me.”
“He just likes playing with his food.”
“He’s getting Eitan to level me up,” Len said, standing at the chipped yellow counter at Ground Zero. “Why do you have to shit on anything good that happens to me?”