back in a neat twist. Turner was there too, but he gave her the barest nod. He wasn’t happy
with her.
“You left me a body to find?” he’d growled at her when she’d agreed to meet him at Il Bastone.
“Sorry,” Alex had said. “You’re really hard to shop for.”
“What happened at that party?”
Alex had leaned against the porch column. It felt like the house was leaning on her too.
“Sandow killed Tara.”
“What happened to him?”
“Heart attack.”
“Like hell. Did you kill him?”
“I didn’t have to.”
Turner had looked at her for a long moment, and Alex had been glad that for once she
was telling the truth.
They hadn’t spoken since, and Alex suspected that Turner wanted to be done with her
and all of Lethe. She couldn’t blame him, but it felt like a loss. She’d liked having one of
the good guys in her corner.
The service was long but dry, a recitation of the dean’s accomplishments, a statement
from the president, a few words from a slender woman in a navy dress that Alex realized
was Sandow’s ex-wife. There were no Grays at the cemetery today. They didn’t like funerals, and there wasn’t enough emotion at this graveside to overcome their revulsion.
Alex didn’t mind the quiet.
As the dean’s coffin was lowered into the earth, Alex met Michelle Alameddine’s eyes
and gave a brief bob of her head—an invitation. She and Dawes drifted away from the graveside, and Alex hoped Michelle would follow.
They took a winding path to the left, past the tomb of Kingman Brewster, planted with
a witch hazel tree that bloomed yellow every year in June—almost always on his birthday
—and that lost its leaves in November at the time of his death. Somewhere in this cemetery, Daisy’s first body was buried.
When they reached a quiet corner between two stone sphinxes, Dawes said, “Are you
sure about this?” She’d worn mom slacks and pearl earrings to the funeral, but her red bun
had slid gently to one side.
“No,” admitted Alex. “But we need all the help we can get.”
Dawes wasn’t going to argue. She’d been full of apologies once Lethe had reached her
at her sister’s house in Westport and she’d heard the real story of what happened at the president’s party from Alex. Besides, she wanted this quest, this mission, as much as Alex
did. Maybe more.
Alex saw Michelle headed their way through the grass. She waited for her to join them,
then dove right in. “Darlington isn’t dead.”
Michelle sighed. “That’s what this is about? Alex, I understand—”
“He’s a demon.”
“Excuse me?”
“He didn’t die when he was eaten by the hellbeast. He was transformed.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“Listen,” said Alex. “I’ve spent some time in the borderlands recently—”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Every time I heard … well, I don’t know what they were—Grays? Monsters? Some
kind of creature that wasn’t quite human on the darker shore. They were saying something
I couldn’t quite make out. I thought it was a name at first, Jonathan Desmond or Jean Du
Monde. But that wasn’t it at all.”
“And?” Michelle’s expression was rigidly impassive, as if she was fighting to appear open-minded.
“Gentleman demon. That’s what they were saying. They were talking about Darlington.
And I think they were scared.”
Darlington was a gentleman. But this isn’t a time for gentlemen. Alex had barely registered the dean’s words at the time. But when she’d played back the recording of their
conversation, they’d stuck in her head. Darlington: the gentleman of Lethe. People had always described him that way. Alex had thought of him like that herself, as if he’d somehow stepped into the wrong time.
But it had still taken her a while to put it together, to realize that the creatures on that
dark shore had always muttered those strange sounds when Alex mentioned Darlington or
even thought about him. They hadn’t been angry, they’d been frightened, the same way the Grays had been frightened the night of the prognostication. It had been Darlington who had spoken “murder” at the new-moon rite, not just some echo—but it was Sandow