Page 160 of Hell Bent

Alex hesitated, the phone in her hand. The next call might save her or quite literally damn her.

Eitan picked up on the first ring. “Alex! How are you? You go to see Reiter?”

Alex kept her eyes on the glass moon. “This is a courtesy call. I’m done being your errand girl. I’m going to work for Linus Reiter.”

“Don’t be silly. Reiter is no good. He—”

“You can’t stop him. You don’t have a weapon in your arsenal that can.”

“What you say is very serious, Alex.”

“I’m going to tell him every last thing about your organization and your associates.”

“Your mother—”

“Mira is under his protection.” Or she could be.

“I’m in New York. Come see me. We talk. We make a new deal.”

Alex had no doubt she would not return from that meeting.

“No hard feelings, Eitan.”

“Alex, you—”

She hung up. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. Shakespeare again. One of the strippers back at the King King Club had the quote tattooed above her pubic bone. Alex had been jumping to do Eitan’s bidding for months. It was time for him to be afraid. It was time for him to come running. Reiter was the devil the other devils couldn’t best, the one they warned each other about.

“You’re up to something, Stern,” Darlington said as they packed for the wolf run later that night. “I can tell.”

“Just keep your head down and don’t let anything try to kill me.”

“It’s my price to pay,” he warned her.

“It’s Sandow’s price. You didn’t end up in hell because you did something wrong.”

“But I did.”

Alex took stock of the contents of the duffel: salt, silver rings, and a silver dagger for good measure. “We can debate this when we’re done. Dawes will take notes. We can bind them up and put them in the Lethe library. Stern’s Daemonologie.”

“Arlington’s Daemonologie. Aren’t you going to valiantly offer to stay in hell in my place?”

“Fuck off.”

“I did miss you, Stern.”

“Did you?” She hadn’t meant to ask, but the words were out before she could stop them.

“As much as an unholy fiend without human feeling could.”

That almost made her laugh.

No, Alex wasn’t about to volunteer for an eternity of anguish. She didn’t have the makings of a hero. But she wasn’t leaving Darlington down there again. Hell’s price must be paid. All that meant was hell was no different from any other place. There was always a price and someone to pay it. And someone was always on the take.

When they left Il Bastone to meet with the Wolf’s Head delegation at Sleeping Giant, she felt a kind of ease, as if the thread that bound them now had drawn tight, as if no demon would dare to face them together.

I will serve you ’til the end of days. Had that been a dream or some kind of prediction? Had Alex, like her grandmother, somehow looked into the future to this moment? Even if she had, that gave her no greater insight into what it meant, or those golden shackles at Darlington’s wrists, or the disturbing comfort it brought her to know she could call and he would come running. Gentleman demon. A creature even the dead had feared.

A ship sailed from New Haven,