Page 70 of Dead Beat

“Alex?” Dawes frowned. “I don’t think she meant to call.”

“Wait,” Darlington said, stopping her before she could disconnect, though he wasn’t sure why. He gestured for Dawes to turn up the volume.

Two voices, both female. Beyond that, he couldn’t make out much more. Alex might have simply made a mistake, but something in him said there was more to this.

Dawes muted their side of the call. “Are they in a car?”

He couldn’t tell. They stood hunched over the phone, two codebreakers listening to a fractured signal, trying to make sense of what might be nothing at all. He had the feeling the house was listening too.

Then there was Alex’s voice—louder and clearer than it had been—“How far is it to Savin Rock?”

“Get your keys,” Darlington told Dawes, already striding to the entry and grabbing their coats.

“It might be nothing—”

“Then it will be nothing,” he said. And he’d feel like a fool chasing after her. He was still reeling from the embarrassment he’d felt at Wolf’s Head. They’d gotten through the rest of the ritual barely looking at each other, then spirited the golden breastplate outside where Dawes and Tripp were waiting in the alley. He’d been grateful for their presence, a buffer against the fevered thoughts careening through his head.

He had wanted to hurl himself into the deepest trench in the darkest ocean, to find a cave and commit to living like a hermit so he would never have to feel that searing shame again. More than anything, he had wanted to drag Alex Stern up the stairs to the Virgil room, lay her down on the canopy bed, and use his mouth, his fingers, and every trick he’d manage to glean in his short, ill-spent life to make her come against his tongue. He still wasn’t sure what was stronger in him—that maddening, consuming desire or his profound regret that he might have ruptured the fragile connection between them by acting on it.

The demon said she’d wanted him, that she’d liked the feel of his teeth, the promise of what might come next. And then she’d withdrawn. He’d felt it through that tether of hellfire. As sure as he’d been of her desire, he’d been just as certain the moment it receded, the slight stiffening in her body, the way the urgency inside her had banked. His own need had collapsed instantly. He had wanted her, but he needed her to want him too.

None of it mattered. It couldn’t matter. They had the first artifact, and that meant that they were that much closer to defeating Golgarot. That was where his attention needed to remain, and by the time they had reached Il Bastone, he had been himself again: Daniel Arlington V, Yale student, heir to Black Elm, Virgil of Lethe House. And if he felt the urge to put his horned head through a wall, run twenty miles, and hurl himself into an ice-cold lake, well, hopefully the madman was successfully hidden beneath layers of expensive wool and Connecticut blue blood determination.

Now, listening to the crackle of those voices over the speaker, all he felt was fear. He and Dawes raced down the stairs and into the car. He was meant to protect his Dante, and he knew she was in danger tonight. Let it be nothing, he pleaded as he dialed Turner on his own phone. He would gladly look the lovesick idiot if she was okay.

“Alex is in trouble,” he said when Turner picked up. He kept his voice low in case Dawes could hear any more clues on the other line. “We think she’s headed to Savin Rock.”

There was a brief pause, and Turner said, “I had a drowning there last week. Where are you?”

“Getting onto the highway.”

“What are we dealing with?”

“I don’t know. Just get there.”

“I’m on my way.”

Darlington hung up. “Anything more?” he asked Dawes.

“I think she mentioned Center Street. I couldn’t catch the rest.”

Why would Alex be headed to Savin Rock after dark? Who would want to take her there? And what did it mean that someone had drowned there a week ago? Turner had mentioned the victim, a young woman, only twenty-four. It might be a coincidence, but coincidences were rare in New Haven.

He restrained the urge to shout at Dawes to go faster. He should have insisted on driving, but he’d been too focused on Alex’s muffled voice and the alarm bell ringing in his head.

Darlington had grown up obsessed with the city’s scars, the neighborhoods where blight had taken hold or where development was supposed to take the place of blight but had left something worse instead: empty places, dead spots. His preoccupation with Savin Rock had begun when he was eleven, when he’d stood at Lighthouse Point, looking across the Sound, when he’d learned there were people who could see things he couldn’t—ghosts. Not the ghosts of people, but phantom places. Darlington had gone looking for the roller coaster another boy had claimed to see and he’d found the Thunderbolt—but only in old books and newspaper clippings. The ride had been part of the amusement park at Savin Rock until it was destroyed by a hurricane in 1938.

That was his first research project, and he’d discovered a world full of phantoms: old attractions like the Laughing Lady, the Devil, the Jitterbug, the Seaplane Swing; the Victorian spires of the Sea View Hotel, with its gracious lawn dotted by women picnicking beneath parasols. Like everything in this city he loved, it had fallen to ruin. A fire destroyed the pier. Then the hurricane had its way. The hotel had been abandoned, then demolished. For a while there had still been hot dog and lemonade stands, fun houses and the occasional ride rattling along valiantly by the waterside. And then the city had come along with their money and their promises of thriving community spaces. They’d knocked it all down, cleaned out the old haunts, blasted away half the rock that had given the park its name. They’d built a convention center and a grotesque block of senior housing that was turned at a bizarre angle so that none of the residents’ apartments faced the sea. They’d erased something old and strange and seedy in the name of progress, but they’d left nothing in its place. He’d seen a photograph of the rain forest once, swaths of it obliterated by clear-cutting. That was what the park at Savin Rock looked like to him.

Suddenly he felt her, the thread of fire alight between him and Alex, her fear a blazing signal sent over the wire. He seized the dashboard, the bands at his wrists and neck glowing, his claws digging into the plastic.

“Darlington!” Dawes squeaked.

“Dawes,” he said, summoning his most reasonable tone, the rumble of the demon barely detectable beneath it. “I’m going to need you to drive faster.”

“I—”

“She’s scared. Terrified. I can feel it.”