Page 27 of Dead Beat

“I’ll figure it out eventually,” he promised the house.

He headed downstairs to meet the others.

Turner had to work a drowning out at Savin Rock but told them to check in when they arrived at Kittscher’s. He wanted regular updates. “If anything goes wrong, you call. If it even starts to feel wrong, you call. I can have local PD out there fast.”

“And tell them what?” Alex asked as they packed up salt and something called the Asphodel Torch. The torch just looked like a dried branch of slate-colored flowers, but when whispered to in Greek and shaken roughly, it produced a gout of flame that startled all of them—and utterly petrified Tripp. Demons didn’t seem to like fire in the human realm. Darlington felt natural fear but no powerful aversion, and he had decided that meant he was still mostly human; the logic was wobbly but comforting.

“Noise complaint,” Turner said. “Reports of shots fired.”

“Mayhem in a seaside town!” Alex cried, imitating an old news broadcast.

Turner ignored her. “Just leave that part to me.”

They were bringing Dawes along to act as lookout and to contact Turner if they couldn’t. Or to call the Praetor if things went really sideways.

Tripp was waiting outside next to the open front door like a dog hoping it was time for a walk. Il Bastone wouldn’t let him so much as set foot in the foyer if he wasn’t wearing his salt shroud.

“I told you no,” Darlington said before Tripp could start in again.

“Come on, I can be helpful, and I’m so bored.”

“Read something.”

“There’s nothing good to read.”

Darlington considered putting a stake through his heart. He wasn’t sure it would do much, but that level of stupidity was a personal affront.

“He’s just antsy,” Dawes said, retrieving a small cooler from the kitchen. “It would be nice to have someone else there.”

“He’s not going to be much use in a fight,” Darlington noted. Parsing truth from fiction where vampires were concerned had proved challenging, but there was no question they were stronger and more at ease in the dark and in close proximity to their nests. Out in Rhode Island Tripp would be at a disadvantage.

“Come on,” Tripp whined. “I can help.”

Alex was walking up the path with a backpack slung over her shoulder. “We don’t know what we’re heading into. Couldn’t hurt to have an extra body.”

“I get to go?” Tripp practically leapt toward the gate, the movement so fast and so startling Darlington snarled before he could think better of it, instinctively placing his body between Alex and the threat. “Oh shit,” Tripp said, holding his hands up. “My bad.”

But they were all staring at Darlington.

“Apologies,” he managed. Tripp Helmuth had never been a threat in any incarnation. But the demon didn’t think. It acted. And sometimes it brought ceilings down on their heads.

“Can I still come?” Tripp pleaded.

“Sure,” Alex said. “You’re our backup.”

Darlington threw up his hands in frustration. “I spend one year in hell and I lose all authority.” He jabbed his finger at Tripp. “Behave yourself.”

Tripp executed a bizarre little dance, and Darlington had to amend his thinking. Tripp Helmuth was certainly a threat to both rhythm and good taste.

They packed into the Subaru with the heater cranked up and the radio tuned to a local talk station to keep their minds off the mission ahead. Dawes didn’t like to drive on the highway, so she sat in back with Tripp; Alex took the passenger seat, fingers drumming restlessly on the worn thighs of her black jeans.

Darlington didn’t know what to make out of their little army. Cabot Collins, self-appointed poet of Lethe, had written copious ballads dedicated to the mission of the Ninth House. But there was no chance that Lethe’s founders had envisioned such a peculiar crew standing “hoplite, hussar, dragoon” against the strange forces at work in this city. A beleaguered graduate student. A failed third-generation Yale legacy who had become a vampire. A New Havener with a demon riding shotgun in his head. And Alex Stern: Wheelwalker, multiple murderer, and sophomore.

Even so, Lethe had never been quite so noble as he had hoped, and none of those descriptions really added up to the truth of the people making small talk as they hurtled north on 95. It wasn’t the truth for Dawes, who had braved hell beside Alex to save him and mastered skills most Lethe delegates could only dream of. Nor for Tripp, who was not really Tripp but who had somehow retained his hapless, hopeful nature. Certainly not for Alex, who Darlington had so easily dismissed as a lost cause with a lucky gift but who had become the greatest soldier in this secret war.

And he could admit that he was not who he had imagined himself to be. He was neither the hero nor the knight and only time would tell if he was the beast to be slain. If Lethe was a lie, then maybe he was too.

“I suspect it’s meaningful that, if this is Rudolph Kittscher, he lives so far from New Haven,” Darlington said as they exited to Highway 2.