Page 14 of Hell Bent

“That’s right,” Alex said, surreptitiously wiping her palms before she shook his hand. “This is Oculus. Pamela Dawes.”

“Cool. What is it you guys wanted to see?”

Alex regarded Robbie coolly. “Give me the keys. You can wait outside.”

Robbie hesitated. He was the new delegation president, a senior, eager to get everything right. A perfect mark really.

“I don’t know if—”

Alex glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “Is this how you want to start the year?”

Robbie’s mouth popped open. “I … No.”

“Your fellow Locksmiths’ callous disregard for the rules nearly got me and Oculus killed last year. Two deputies of Lethe. You’re lucky all of your privileges weren’t suspended.”

“Suspended?”

It was as if he’d never even considered it, as if such a thing were impossible.

“That’s right. A semester, maybe a whole year missed. I advocated for leniency, but…” She shrugged. “Maybe that was a mistake.”

“No, no. Definitely not.” Robbie fumbled with his keys. “Definitely not.”

Alex almost felt bad for him. He’d had his first taste of magic when he was initiated the previous semester, his first glimpse at the world beyond the Veil. He’d been promised a year of wild journeys and mystery. He would do anything he could to keep his supply coming.

The heavy door opened on an elaborate stone entry, the cool dark a welcome relief from the heat. A Gray in pin-striped trousers hummed happily to himself in the hallway, gazing at a glass case full of black-and-white photos. The interior of Scroll and Key was strangely heavy in contrast to its graceful exterior, rough rock punctuated by elaborate Moorish arches. It felt as if they’d stepped into a cave.

Alex snatched the keys from Robbie’s hand before he could reconsider. “Wait outside, please.”

This time he didn’t protest, just said an eager “Sure! Take your time.”

When the door was closed behind them, Alex expected a lecture or at least a disapproving scowl, but Dawes only looked thoughtful.

“What is it?” Alex asked as they headed down the hall to the sanctum.

Dawes shrugged, and it was as if she were still wearing one of her heavy sweatshirts. “You sound like him.”

Had Alex been doing her Darlington act? She guessed she had. Every time she spoke with the authority of Lethe, it was with his voice really—assured, confident, knowledgeable. Everything she wasn’t.

She opened the door to the ritual room. It was a vast star-shaped chamber at the heart of the tomb, a statue of a knight in each of its six pointed corners, a circular table at its center. But the table wasn’t really a table at all; it was a doorway, a passage to anywhere you wanted to go. And some places you didn’t.

Alex smoothed her hand over the inscription on its edge. Have power on this dark land to lighten it, and power on this dead world to make it live. Tara had stood at this table before she’d been murdered. She’d been an intruder here, just like Alex.

“Is this going to work?” Alex asked. “The nexus has a wobble.” It was why the Locksmiths had resorted to psychedelics, why they’d had to rely on a town girl and her drug dealer boyfriend to mix up a special concoction that would help open portals and ease their passage to other lands. “We don’t have any of Tara’s special sauce.”

“I don’t know,” Dawes said, chewing on her lip. “I … I don’t know what else to try. We could wait. We should.”

Their eyes met over the big round table, supposedly made from planks of the same table where King Arthur’s knights had once gathered.

“We should,” Alex agreed.

“But we’re not going to, are we?”

Alex shook her head. More than three months had passed since Sandow’s funeral, since Alex had shared her theory that Darlington wasn’t dead but trapped somewhere in hell, the gentleman demon who had so terrified the dead and whatever monsters gathered beyond the Veil. Nothing Alex and Dawes had learned in the time since had given them cause to believe that it was anything more than wishful thinking. But that hadn’t stopped them from trying to piece together a way to reach him. Galaxias. Galaxy. A cry from the other side of the Veil. What would it mean to be an apprentice once more? To be Dante again? Months of seeking clues to the Gauntlet had added up to nothing, and this might too, but they at least had to try. Anselm had been an absentee parent, checking in dutifully from New York but leaving them to their own devices. They couldn’t count on the new Praetor doing the same.

“Let’s set the protections,” Alex said.

She and Dawes worked together, pouring out salt in a Solomon’s Knot formation—an ordinary circle wouldn’t do. They were, in theory, opening a portal to hell, or at least a corner of it, and if Darlington was more demon than man these days, they didn’t want him cavorting all over campus with his demon buddies.