Page 95 of Dead Beat

“In the quadrangle?”

Yes and no. He remembered what Alex’s father had said, So that shamans could walk through those doors in dreams and time.

Dawes was right. This wasn’t only about Alex or the crucible or his demonic nature. It was about those artifacts and the first pilgrims. Kittscher, Reiter, their still-nameless companions.

“I don’t think she’s just in a different place. I think—”

“Hello?” Turner was standing in the doorway to the armory. “What—”

Suddenly Darlington understood.

“Don’t cross the threshold!” he shouted.

But it was too late.

Turner stepped forward.

The world Darlington knew vanished.

33

She was back on campus, heading home to JE. The sky was thick with clouds, heavy and gray-bellied with rain. The trees looked like slender flames in their autumn colors. Except it wasn’t autumn. It was winter and those branches should have long since shed their leaves. Had she slept at Il Bastone? Why didn’t she remember walking back to campus? She felt wobbly. She’d lost too much blood. And what about her father? Had they gotten rid of him? Why couldn’t she remember?

Three students decked out in newsboy caps and white sweaters emblazoned with the Yale Y rode past on vintage bicycles, their trousers tucked into their socks. It had to be a theater thing or a corny singing group stunt.

She grabbed the cool iron of the Branford gate, trying to stay upright. She loved this gate with all its tiny figures and symbols, beautiful for no reason, complicated for no reason. This was one of the entrances to the quadrangle. She remembered the plans glowing blue, Darlington’s voice saying, It creates a kind of mirror.

“You all right, Hec?”

Her stomach settled. Her head stopped spinning. She made herself open her eyes. Something was off—the scale of the place, the colors. The metal fence and corkboard at the entrance to the Old Campus gate were gone. Was she dreaming? Even the sounds of traffic were strange, dimmer, more sparse. Why were the trees so small? The boy holding open the gate was handsome, dark-haired. He was wearing a suit. Everyone was wearing a suit.

“Too much tipple,” she heard herself say. Except it wasn’t her voice; those weren’t her words. That same sense of vertigo struck.

“Hec can’t hold his drink!” shouted another young man, and Alex had to bite back a scream.

Linus Reiter was pushing past her into the courtyard. His pale blond hair was slicked back from his elegant profile. He seemed buoyant and his face had a loose elasticity in it. He looks human.

No white suit either. He wore the same variation on a uniform they all wore: dark suit, white shirt, neatly knotted tie. For a moment she thought she saw Dawes beckoning to her from a doorway that she knew led to the Branford dean’s apartment, then Alex blinked and a bespectacled boy was standing in the shadows—Rudolph Kittscher.

Then this was Lionel Reiter, not Linus, the boy the demon had consumed.

“Come on, you cards,” Kittscher said, waving them all forward. He winked. “Devil won’t wait.”

She followed him, less because she wanted to than her body was simply moving. Beside her, the other young men climbed in a jostling pack, a tide of gamboling energy heading up the stairs. Briefly they seemed to flicker. She glimpsed Turner’s grim face, Darlington’s expression a mix of fear and fascination. They were all riding shotgun, each with one of the original pilgrims. Here was Hector, the soldier, at last.

She could feel his thoughts bumping up against hers, anxious, preoccupied. She had drawn souls into her before, the dead, and then Darlington and Theo, the living. Belbalm had forced her own soul into the body of her maid. It was how she had survived, stealing another woman’s life, then consuming souls to sustain it. Abomination. Marguerite Belbalm, Wheelwalker and serial killer. Was that what her father and his secret club had been trying to prevent? All worlds are open to us, she had said. If we are bold enough to enter.

Alex—Hector—stumbled, and together they took a deep breath. Hec gave himself a shake. Just what did Buggs put in that punch? I’m going to be no good at practice.

Alex had been in the Branford dean’s apartment once before, when she’d attended a section for a philosophy lecture. But these didn’t look like the public rooms she’d seen. They were more like dorm rooms: a big Yale Bulldogs banner hanging over a fireplace, a desk laden with the remnants of a loaf of bread beside a stack of books, a tidily made bed. They passed through a small door and into a seminar room with a long oval table. Alex realized they were standing above the entrance to the college courtyard. This room connected the dorms directly to Harkness Tower.

“Hair of the dog, Hec?” Kittscher asked, already mixing himself a drink at an elaborate bar cart parked beside one of the windows.

“You’re a mind reader,” she said in the voice that was not her voice.

Bootleg whiskey, Hec’s fleeting thoughts supplied. Brought to campus by Reiter’s chauffer. Well, really, it’s his ma’s chauffeur, but can you imagine? Alex felt like she was standing in a swift running river, dipping her hand in, catching fragments of thought like wriggling fish that slipped away in an instant.

She remembered that, thanks to James Gamble Rogers, Lethe was supposed to have rooms and safehouses built all over campus. Was this one of them? Every surface was bizarrely detailed, even for Yale, the roof peaked and set with thick beams heavily carved with symbols: an hourglass, scales, and there—a wheel. Carved figures of students ascended to the apex of the ceiling, then descended with graduation caps on and diplomas in hand. At the base of the four biggest beams, stone inscriptions read, PURITY, GENEROSITY, NOBILITY, FORTITUDE.