Page 21 of Dead Beat

“Well?” Turner said. But Dawes was already opening her backpack, beaming.

She pulled out a stack of papers. “I got almost everything copied and took photos of the rest. Rudolph Kittscher’s Lethe Days Diary and the diary of his Dante, Francis Woolery. There was also a different version of his Daemonologie with a few additional pages.”

“Where was it all?” Alex asked, reaching for one of the copied pages.

“In the library annex. The enchantment was specific but not powerful.”

“Interesting,” Darlington said. “Anything stronger might have drawn the attention of one of the societies. But still a risk.”

“I’m not sure,” said Dawes. “Everyone who knows about the first descent is dead.”

Certainly the major players were long gone: James Gamble Rogers, an architect from Wolf’s Head; John Sterling of Skull and Bones, whose money had paid for it all. And of course, the original pilgrims. But no matter who had been involved, almost a hundred years had passed since they’d tried to bury the evidence of the Gauntlet.

“I wasn’t sure it would work,” Dawes said, pulling the compact they’d used to capture Alban Reed’s image from her bag and carefully wrapping it in a soft cloth.

“Are the names there?” Alex asked, and she couldn’t hide her desperation.

“Sort of?” The glee had disappeared from Dawes’s voice. “Maybe it’s code? There’s a photo.”

She held up the portrait of four unsmiling young men, all in dark suits. A silence settled around them. Here at last were the original pilgrims. The first to travel the Gauntlet back in 1933. Their names and any record of the journey had been scrubbed from the library at Il Bastone and the vast bunker of books that housed the full Lethe collection beneath a mansion in Danbury. Alex had been certain Rudolph Kittscher and the others would destroy any documentation of what they’d done. But Darlington had been just as sure they would never eliminate something so valuable.

“It was a failed experiment,” he’d said as they debated the issue in the parlor. “Something they didn’t want on the books. But if we’re right and Kittscher and Reiter and the others really did get to hell and back, that diary would be too valuable an artifact to destroy. I’m certain they would keep it.”

“Because that’s what you would do,” Alex had observed.

“Precisely.”

But where to look? It was possible the papers were in a private collection—but that seemed too easy to reach, vulnerable to investigation by curious heirs or theft. They might be in a foreign vault like the one buried in the rock atop the Katskhi Pillar, but that felt too inaccessible in case of need. The pilgrims would want someplace local, warded, open to little traffic, and where Yale students wouldn’t attract attention coming and going. They also wouldn’t have had much time to hide the evidence of their journey, not if they’d brought their own demons back from hell with them—and Reiter’s fate indicated they had.

The Yale Club library was the obvious answer. But if the documents were there, how were Darlington or any of them supposed to get access without alerting the Lethe board to what they were doing?

“Are we sure we shouldn’t just tell the board?” Dawes had asked when they’d hatched their scheme. “We need help, resources. They might know—”

But Alex had shut down the idea immediately. “There’s nothing I’d like better than to call Mom and Dad and let them take care of this so I can get back to barely passing my classes—”

“Then why don’t we? We aren’t equipped for any of this.”

“Are we going to explain that Darlington wasn’t just resting comfortably in a pocket dimension for a year? Or tell them we activated a pathway to hell? You think they won’t start asking questions about how Darlington survived or how Anselm went missing?”

“They have connections we don’t,” Dawes had argued, “a network of people all over the world, experts in … well, in everything. They could help.”

“But would they? Or will they just find a way to make sure this all goes away? They’ll find a stopgap or a scapegoat or a sacrifice and you know it will be one of us.”

That had ended the debate. Darlington had loved Lethe. He’d been honored to be one of its delegates. He’d taken its promises seriously. And he felt like a fool for it. Michelle Alameddine had laughed at him for his sense of duty. Sandow had been bemused by his desire to serve as knight. But it had taken a trip to hell and a haunted girl with stars in her hair to show him Lethe was not a master worth serving.

They still needed the board for the plan to work. Turner had balked at stepping into his role as Centurion to get their attention. He would have preferred they simply forget about him. But Lethe had to be prodded into any type of action, even an emergency meeting of the board, and hearing that Reiter’s kills had been noted by the New Haven PD would do the trick.

Their next move was more of a gamble than Darlington would have liked. Getting into the Yale Club library was easy, but there would doubtless be a protection spell on the documents. There was no way the original pilgrims could anticipate who would seek out their papers. They couldn’t grant access to any old Dante or Virgil or Oculus with a curious bent. But the president of the Lethe board was another story. He was the person best suited to dealing with the Gauntlet if anyone managed to rediscover it. And if any of them had trusted the man or the institution, they would have done just that.

Alex had instantly suggested the compact from the armory, an old gift from Manuscript that she’d apparently used multiple times to change her appearance. Darlington hadn’t dug too deeply into what she’d gotten up to with it. They’d slipped it, already open, into Dawes’s backpack and prayed Reed’s chivalry would make him reach for it when she dropped her things. They’d been able to use a simple digital recorder to capture Reed’s voice, and Alex had deployed her talent for rudeness to get him to repeat both his name and title clearly. Alban Reed. I’m the Lethe board president.

Now Darlington took the photograph of the four pilgrims from Dawes. On the back, someone had hopefully inscribed a line from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset.

He couldn’t help but recall the way that particular line of poetry concluded: For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die.

Alex gestured to the names scrawled beneath the quote. “What are these supposed to mean?”

Doubting Thomas