“I know how to build a ritual, Alex. When I want to.” Hadn’t Darlington told her that
Sandow was a brilliant Lethe delegate? That some of the rites he’d fashioned were still in
use?
“You killed her for money.”
“For a great deal of money.”
“You took the payoff from the board of St. Elmo’s. You told them you could control the
location of the coming nexus.”
“That I would prepare a site. I thought all I had to do was wait for the cycle to run its
course. But it didn’t happen. No one died. No new nexus formed.” He shook his head in
frustration. “They were so impatient. They … they said they would demand their money
back, that they would go to the Lethe board. They had to be appeased. I created a ritual I
knew would work. But I needed an offering.”
“And then you found Tara.”
“I knew her,” Sandow said, his voice almost fond. “When Claire was sick, Tara got her marijuana.”
“Your wife?”
“I nursed her through two bouts of breast cancer and then she left me. She … Tara was
in my house. She heard things she probably shouldn’t have. I was not focused on discretion. What did it matter?”
What did it matter what some town girl knew? “And Tara was nice, wasn’t she?”
Sandow looked away guiltily. Maybe he’d fucked her; maybe he’d just been happy to
have someone to talk to. That was what you did. You made nice with clients. Sandow had
needed a sympathetic shoulder and Tara had provided it.
“But then Darlington found the pattern, the trail of girls.”
“The same way I did. I suppose it was inevitable. He was too bright, too inquisitive for
his own good. And he always wanted to know what made New Haven different. He was
trying to make a map of the unseen. He brought it up to me just in passing, an academic
exercise, a wild theory, a possible subject for his graduate work. But by then—”
“You’d already planned on killing Tara.”
“She’d taken what she’d heard at my house and built a nice little business on it, dealing
to the societies. She was in too deep with Keys and Manuscript. The drugs. The rituals. It
was all going to come crashing down. She was nineteen, a drug user, a criminal. She was
—”
“An easy mark.” Just like me. “But Darlington would have figured it out. He knew about the girls that had come before. He was smart enough to connect them to Tara. So you sent the hellbeast to consume him that night.”
“Both of you, Alex. But it seems Darlington was enough to sate the beast’s appetite. Or
maybe he saved you in some final, foolish act of heroism.”
Or maybe the monster hadn’t wanted to consume Alex. Maybe it had known she might
burn going down.
Sandow sighed. “Darlington liked to talk about how New Haven was always on the
brink of success, always about to tip over into good luck and good fortune. He didn’t understand that the city walks a tightrope. On one side, success. On the other, ruin. The magic of this place and the blood shed to retain it is all that stands between the city and the end.”
This town has been fucked from the start.
“Did you do it yourself?” Alex asked. “Or did you not have the balls?”
“I was once a knight of Lethe, you know. I had the will.” He actually sounded proud.
Isabel had said that Sandow was sleeping off too much bourbon in Belbalm’s study the
night Tara died, but he could have slipped out somehow or even used the same portal
magic she’d suspected Colin of using. He still would have had to manage a glamour—but of course that was no problem for Sandow. Alex thought of the compact she’d used to get
into Tara’s apartment and then the jail. When she’d taken it from the drawer, there had been a smudge on it. But Dawes never would have put it away dirty. Someone had used it
before Alex.
“You put on Lance’s face. You got Tara high so she wouldn’t hurt and then you
murdered her. Did you send the gluma after me?”
“I did. It was risky, maybe foolish. I have no talent for necromancy. But I didn’t know