Page 107 of Dead Beat

“That we’ve been called,” Alex said. “That there’s a reason it was us.”

“Kittscher said as much. Men of destiny and all that.”

“Kittscher was making it up as he went along.”

He laughed. “And we aren’t?”

“You said we wouldn’t have survived if I weren’t a Wheelwalker, if I couldn’t do what other people can’t do. But has it occurred to you that all of us can do things no one else can? Turner is some mystical combination of a lie detector and a weather vane. Dawes has mastered just about every spell in the Lethe library and invented a few new ones of her own. You survived being eaten by a hellbeast by becoming a demon.”

“Part demon,” he corrected.

“Enough demon. Maybe it isn’t all coincidence.”

“Maybe.”

“Who’s the umpire?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Who decides which souls go to hell and which pass behind the Veil? Who makes the call?”

“We don’t know.”

“And that doesn’t scare you?”

“I guess I’d rather wonder than find out there’s no one there at all.”

They’d reached the stone pillars that marked the entrance to Black Elm and the driveway seemed to unspool out of nothing before them, a bright ribbon between the trees.

Darlington was silent as they approached the house. He killed the engine.

“I wanted to be destined for greatness,” he said. He didn’t sound matter-of-fact anymore. The philosopher was gone. The debate concluded. There was only the boy and the great shadow that was this house, this impossible legacy. “I wanted to be chosen. I don’t think I had any idea what that might mean.”

37

When Darlington shut the kitchen door, the copper pans that hung above the stove swayed slightly, as if trying to remind these visitors that they were still here and wanted to be put to use.

Alex followed him through the vast dining room, the living room, and then on to the study. She had thought of this house as a shipwreck, a bombed-out church, a hundred haunted things. But she remembered the first time Darlington had brought her here, when she had believed it belonged to him rather than the other way around. It had seemed so grand, shabby in the best ways, a secret castle defended by its only knight.

“I used to hate my father for abandoning this place,” Darlington said as he took in the study’s still-cluttered desk, the window behind it. From the back he could be his grandfather, his great-grandfather, any of the Arlingtons who had made deals and fretted over the fortunes of New Haven in this room. “Maybe he had the right idea.” Then he winced. “That was a foolish thing to say after—”

“My dad tried to murder me roughly twenty minutes after he learned I existed?”

“Yes. Precisely that.”

“There are all kinds of bad fathers. We don’t have to play ‘who has the longest scar.’”

Alex didn’t know what else to say about it. She wished her father could be more than he was. She wished she could be something more too. She studied the perfect line of Darlington’s profile, lit by nothing but the moon and its reflection in the snow. This was the prince. This was the golden boy. What did it mean if he was just as lost as she was?

“I keep coming back here,” he said, looking out over the grounds. “I’m not sure what I think will change.”

“Like going back to the refrigerator, hoping you’ll find something to eat?”

He laughed and she felt a rush of relief. “Not everything is about your stomach, Stern.”

“Not everything. Just the important things.” She stood beside him. What was it like to look out at the land, at the march of the trees, and know they belonged to you? That there was no mortgage to pay, or Alban Reed to please, that even if the roof fell in and you couldn’t afford to keep the heat on, it was still all yours? “Maybe it’s not the place you hope will change.”

“Probably not.” The corner of his mouth tugged up. “You told me I was pretty.”