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