Page 1 of Dead Beat

PART IInserviam Tibi

Early Spring

Alex knew she had a talent for mistakes, a way of turning error into outright disaster. Gift became curse, opportunity became some fresh chance at horror. There were violin prodigies, people who could pick up a language after hearing it once. Alex had mastered the art of the fuckup—elaborate, operatic, inevitable. But nothing in her long, pathetic résumé compared to the mess she had made of this moment.

She could hear the chorus of demon and human voices, though whether they were cheering or booing or groaning in dismay, she couldn’t be sure.

“Darlington,” she pleaded. “Danny.”

But the monster before her did not understand. The bands at his wrists and neck had turned black. His gaze was flat and inhuman. If he recognized her, if he cared, there was no sign of it in the dark sheen of his eyes.

He snarled, stalking toward her, his head lowered, his curved horns gleaming. She had seen him crush a body with those horns, felt the prick of his claws sink into her hips.

At some point in the grim march of her life she had started to believe she might make something of it, that she could coax it into a less perilous shape. She had spent years balanced above a chasm and she had bobbed and weaved and shuffled and grunted her way across, always finding a way to regain her footing, to keep her many failures from turning into a permanent fall. But now? The final blunder.

She had known she might die tonight. She had believed she was ready. Her plans were made, her house in order. She could save the others and keep herself from the worst of it. At least that was the idea. But she was a two-bit criminal, a bottom dweller. She hadn’t been made for grand quests or hero’s work.

And here she was in this dark place, at this late hour, and she saw it would be her last. Deep down she had known she couldn’t keep walking the tightrope. She wasn’t fast enough, smart enough, or rich enough to right herself in any permanent way. A bobble, a dip, the world swayed. The only surprise was that she had managed this feat of balance for so long, that she would not die in a filthy bathroom in Santa Cruz, or a run-down apartment in Van Nuys, or even in the arms of an overdressed vampire, but at Yale, its gargoyles and stone scholars watching in silent judgment, and at the hands of the one person who wasn’t ever meant to hurt her, the man she had gone to hell and back to save.

Death was here at last and he was beautiful.

Wind chimes; screech owl bones, twine

Provenance: Lethe; 1899

Note: These chimes were wrongly categorized as Scottish prognostication bones and miscatalogued.

Records from Lethe House’s earliest days are sparse, but these chimes were assembled in an attempt to monitor the flow of magic in New Haven, a goal bolstered by the hope of finding a new nexus. The ritual was created by Edmund Lazenbee (’01) and poetically titled the Sighing of the Elms (text and particulars available in volume three of the Lethe Compendium under “Original Incantations”), and it is notable for the short list of commonplace ingredients required—a boon at the time, given the cost of shipping and travel. While other trees can be used, the ritual was built around New Haven’s elms, which hold a particular sensitivity to magic, a trait which unfortunately also renders them acutely vulnerable to disease.

The chimes were watched over by Dantes and by volunteers from the other societies, but when a new nexus failed to materialize, the practice gradually died out. It seems the chimes were left in place and forgotten. In 1952, when a new nexus (over which the Manuscript tomb would be built) appeared, a short news item appeared in the New Haven Register regarding a disturbance near the intersection of Elm and Broadway (clipping attached): A curate at Christ Church ran into traffic where he was struck by a Peter Paul Candy delivery truck. When questioned by authorities, he claimed he’d been trying to find the source of a “most peculiar sound.” He survived his injuries, but according to Lethe records, he was eventually removed from office because he spent the majority of his days standing in the street, head cocked, waiting to hear that peculiar sound again. When pushed to describe it further, the curate answered, “It was angelic. I hope.”

—from the Lethe Armory Catalogue as revised and edited by Pamela Dawes, Oculus

1Winter

When he had been a man only and not both man and monster, Darlington had understood his city and the bad bargains it had made. He knew the changing shape of its harbor, the scars carved into its old neighborhoods by a deluge of federal cash that had seemed inexhaustible—as most floods do, until the drought arrives. He’d loved this tidy square named for a revolutionary general, its steepled church, its row of brownstones with their welcoming stoops. He had marveled at the strangeness of New Haven that could take a pocket neighborhood nestled against the noise and fumes of a highway and make it so desirable. The man he had been noted these things. He considered the branches of each cherry tree, black bones that would soften with pink in the spring.

The demon thought only of bodies. Human hearts tucked safely away in their houses.

He could feel their longings—sharp spikes of ambition, the grind of simple appetite, lust like the heavy pull of a riptide. Their greed was everywhere, a buffet of gluttony. He hungered after their hunger, and it was maddening.

He forced his focus back to the golden windows of the brownstone before them. He was standing with Turner and Alex in the deep shadows of Wooster Square Park, waiting for a sign that they were in the right place. Turner remained motionless, a stone sentinel in a fashionable overcoat. Alex rocked back and forth on her heels, trying to keep warm, her black hair gleaming in the lamplight, her hands jammed into the pockets of her cheap wool jacket.

It was hard not to keep looking at her, at the ruthless slice of her cheekbone, the grim set of her mouth. A pulse of desire passed through him, another thought he leashed, his own longing an unwanted companion, dogging his steps since they’d returned from hell. He would master this thing in him. He would become the man he’d been again. He would do it the way he had managed everything in his careful life, with the Arlington discipline his grandfather had taught him: Manners, might, and know-how. One always did the trick. For now there was the task at hand.

Through the glass he could see a family seated at dinner: a man in his thirties, a little boy rolling a tiny toy truck back and forth over the tablecloth beside his plate, a woman who looked sick and sad as she picked at her food.

“He’s feeding on her,” Turner said, shaking his head in disgust.

Sometimes the demons they’d been hunting showed enough restraint that their victims could be challenging to spot. But not tonight. The man—Ron Keep, thirty-four, associate professor of anthropology—split his attention between his meal and his son, but his eyes never strayed too long from his wife. Those glances might have indicated concern, or they might be watchfulness, a predator tracking his prey, making sure she didn’t attempt escape.

Of course, she wouldn’t run, not when he’d fed so well from her. She wouldn’t have the will. And she wouldn’t even know what he was doing as he drained the substance of her away, consuming her soul bit by bit, feeding on her fear or her love or her sadness. Every demon had its own appetites. That was what made them so hard to identify.

“I don’t see signs of change,” Turner conceded, the plume of his breath dissolving in the winter air.

But Darlington knew better than to hope. “We have no idea what he looked like before.”

As demons fed, they took on the appearance of their hosts until eventually they assumed their lives and identities entirely. It had happened to Linus Reiter, the ghoul lurking in his mansion miles away in Old Greenwich. It had happened to Tripp Helmuth, who was waiting back at Il Bastone and who was not really Tripp any longer, only the demon who had consumed him.