Page 10 of Hell Bent

“Dawes, trust me. Whoever this guy is, he’s not going to sanction a field trip to hell.”

She lit the censer filled with cedar and palo santo and stepped under the water, using verbena to wash away the stink of the uncanny.

In their months of searching, she and Dawes had found exactly one clue to the location of the Gauntlet, a cramped bit of text in the Lethe Days Diary of Nelson Hartwell, DC ’38.

Bunchy got drunk and tried to convince us some of Johnny and Punter’s friends built a Gauntlet so they could open a door to the fiery furnace, if you please. Naturally I demanded proof. “No, no,” says Bunch. “Far too chancy to leave any record.” They swore each other to secrecy and all they let slip was that it was built on hallowed ground. A bit too convenient, I say. Bet they all just skipped chapel and ended up well sauced in a crypt somewhere.

Hallowed ground. That was all she and Dawes had to go on, a single paragraph about a drunk named Bunchy. But that hadn’t stopped them from trying to visit every graveyard, cemetery, synagogue, and church built before 1938 in New Haven, hunting for signs. They’d come up empty, and now they’d have the new Praetor looking over their shoulder.

“What if we say fuck the Gauntlet and try Sandow’s hound-dog casting instead?” she called over the rush of the water.

“That didn’t go very well last time.”

No, it hadn’t. They’d almost been eaten by a hellbeast for their trouble.

“But Sandow wasn’t really trying, was he?” Alex said, rinsing the soap from her hair. “He thought Darlington was gone forever, that there was no way he could survive a trip to hell. He thought the casting would just prove Darlington was dead.”

It had been a horrible night, but the ritual had brought back Darlington, or at least his voice, to accuse Sandow.

Alex turned off the water and grabbed a towel off the rack. The apartment seemed impossibly quiet.

She almost thought she imagined it when she heard a faint “Okay.”

Alex paused, wringing the water from her hair. “What?”

“Okay.”

Alex had expected Dawes to protest, start throwing up obstacles— it wasn’t the right time, they needed to plan, it was too dangerous. Had she spread her tarot cards out in front of her in the living room? Was she reading something other than calamity?

Alex pulled on a clean pair of shorts and a tank top. Dawes was in the same spot on the floor, but she’d pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

“What do you mean, ‘okay’?” Alex asked.

“Do you know what the Greeks called the Milky Way?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Galaxias.”

Alex sat down on the edge of the couch, trying to ignore the sliver of cold in her gut.

Galaxias. Galaxy. Was that the word the corpse had been spelling out again and again?

“He was trying to reach you,” said Dawes. “To reach us.”

“You don’t know that.” But it had happened before. During the prognostication ritual the night that Tara was murdered, and again during the new moon ritual when Darlington had tried to warn them about Sandow. Was that what he was trying to do now? Warn her? Blame her? Or was he crying out to her from the other side of the Veil, begging for her help?

“There’s … something … we could try.” Dawes’s words came in stutter stops, Morse code, a distress signal. “I have an idea.”

Alex wondered how many catastrophes had begun with those words. “I hope it’s a good one.”

“But if the Lethe board finds out—”

“They won’t.”

“I can’t lose this job. And neither can you.”

Alex didn’t intend to think about that right now. “Do we go to Black Elm?”