Page 172 of Hell Bent

Alex had warned them that there would be a moment when she needed their defense, when she would ask them to fight for her without question. They’d done it—because they were desperate, and because for all their noble protestations, none of them wanted to suffer for eternity. Mercy had been eager to go along with the plan, to wear her salt armor, to face a very human monster. Maybe she regretted that now.

But this was not the time to be gentle.

“It’s not over,” he said. “There are more demons left to kill.”

Maybe there always would be.

Alex was weak from all the blood she’d lost, so Dawes applied balm to the wound Anselm had left at her wrist, then took her upstairs to drop her into a bath of goat milk in the crucible. They had a kind of easy routine of caretaking that Darlington didn’t quite understand and that made him feel like a child left out of a game. So he would make himself useful instead.

He went with Turner back to Black Elm.

“I can’t believe I’m a wheelman for a demon,” Turner muttered as he pulled out of the Il Bastone lot.

“Part demon,” Darlington corrected. They drove without talking for a while, but eventually he asked, “How did Alex get you to go along with this anyway?”

“She came to see me last night,” said Turner. “I didn’t want to do it. She was asking me to use my badge to set up a murder. Then I took a look at Eitan Harel’s record.”

“That convinced you?”

He shook his head. “No. I’m actually very fond of due process. But you know Alex—she sees an opening, she’s going to wiggle through it like a window.”

“An apt description.” We do what we have to. That’s the only job of a survivor.

“She told me Eitan was a soldier for evil.”

Darlington cast Turner a disbelieving glance. “That doesn’t sound like Alex Stern.”

“She was quoting me. Soldiers for good, soldiers for evil. I know you won’t agree, but as far as I’m concerned, this was always about keeping the devil down. She kept telling me it was bullshit. Until last night.”

“And then?”

“Then she said, ‘But what if I’m wrong?’”

Now Darlington laughed. “That’s Alex Stern.”

Turner tapped the steering wheel as he navigated the near empty streets. “I’m going to be honest with you. That’s not really what changed my mind either.”

Darlington waited. He didn’t know Turner well, but it was easy to see he wasn’t a man who liked to be rushed.

“I picked her up in Darien,” Turner went on at last, “the night Harel sent her to take on Linus Reiter. She was … I’ve seen her trade punches with a guy twice her size. I’ve seen her nearly get her skull split by a frat boy looking for revenge. But I’ve never seen her scared like that.”

When they reached Black Elm, Darlington unlocked the kitchen door and they rolled Eitan’s body down the stairs into the basement. The home he loved had become a tomb. He wondered what his grandfather made out of the carnage, or the fact that his grandson had abandoned this noble pile of rock. For the time being, at least. He wasn’t sure what they were going to do with all of those corpses, or what kind of burial he owed his parents. What would it mean if they just disappeared? And what about Anselm’s family?

It was too easy to vanish. He’d done it himself. And who had there been to seek him out? Dawes and Alex, Turner and Tripp. What life could he put together from what was left?

Darlington called to Cosmo, hoping the cat would make an appearance and he could offer some gift of gratitude, tribute in the form of tuna fish. But it seemed he would just have to be patient. Like all cats, Cosmo would arrive when he wanted to and not a moment before.

Turner helped Darlington lean the basement door against the jamb once more. Then there was nothing to do but turn their backs on the dead.

Darlington slept for the first time since he had been restored to this world, for the first time in over a year. He had never been allowed to sleep in hell or to dream. No rest for the wicked had turned out to be a very literal proposition.

He dreamed he was back in hell, a demon once more, a creature of appetite and nothing else. He knelt again at Golgarot’s throne, but this time, when he raised his head, it was Alex who gazed down at him, her naked body bathed in blue flames, a crown of silver fire at her brow.

“I will serve you ’til the end of days,” he promised.

In the dream she laughed. “And love me too.”

Her eyes were black and full of stars.