“That’s what our TA said, but I guess this guy is left-handed, so he went off on how people used to force lefties to write with their right hands.”
“Being left-handed was seen as a sign of demonic influence. The sinister hand and all
that.”
“Was it?”
“Was it what?”
“A sign of demonic influence.”
“Not at all. Demons are ambidextrous.”
“Do we ever have to fight demons?”
“Absolutely not. Demons are confined to some kind of hellscape behind the Veil, and
the ones that do manage to push through are far above our pay grade.”
“What pay grade?”
“Precisely.”
There, in the corner, the dark looked deeper than it should—a shadow that was not a shadow. A portal. In the basement of Rosenfeld Hall. Where it had no business being.
Darlington felt relieved. What he’d thought was breathing must be the rush of air through the portal, and though its presence here was a mystery, it was one he could solve.
Someone had clearly been in the basement trying to capture the power of the old St.
Elmo’s nexus for some kind of magic. The obvious culprit was Scroll and Key. They’d canceled their last rite, and if their previous attempt to open a portal to Hungary had been
any indication, the magic at their own tomb was on the wane. But he wasn’t going to go
making accusations without evidence. He would cast a containment and warding spell to
render the portal unusable, and then they’d have to return to Il Bastone to get the tools he’d need to close this thing permanently. Alex wouldn’t like that.
“I don’t know,” she was saying. “Maybe they just tried to curb all those lefty devil kids
because it’s messy as hell. I could always tell when Hellie had been journaling, because she had ink all over her wrist.”
He supposed he could manage closing the portal on his own. Give her a break so she
could go write some tiresome paper about tiresome Spenser. Modes of Travel and Models
of Transgression in The Faerie Queene.
“Who’s Hellie?” he asked. But the moment he did, the name clicked into place for him.
Helen Watson. The dead girl who overdosed, the one Alex had been found beside.
Something in him stuttered like a flashbulb. He remembered the ferocious pattern of blood
spatter, repeated again and again over the walls of that miserable apartment, like some gruesome textile. A left-handed swing.
But Helen Watson had died earlier that night, hadn’t she? There’d been no blood on her. Neither girl had been a credible suspect. They were both high out of their minds and too small to have done that kind of damage, and Alex wasn’t left-handed.
But Helen Watson was.
Hellie.
Alex was looking at him in the dark. She had the cautious look of someone who knew
she’d said too much. Darlington knew he should pretend a lack of concern. Act natural.
Yes, act natural. Standing in a basement crackling with storm magic, beside a portal to who knows where, next to a girl who can see ghosts. No, not just see ghosts.
Maybe let them in.
Act natural. Instead, he stood stock still, staring into Alex’s black eyes, his mind rifling through what he knew about possessions by Grays. There had been other people Lethe had
followed, people who could supposedly see ghosts. Many had lost their minds or become
“no longer tenable” as candidates. There were stories of people going mad and destroying
their hospital rooms or attacking their caretakers with unheard-of strength—the kind of strength it might take to wield a bat against five grown men. After the outbursts, the subjects were always left in a catatonic state that made them impossible to question. But
Alex wasn’t ordinary, was she?
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.