Page 101 of Dead Beat

“Huilca’s penmanship is making it a challenge, but yes. A long list of members from all over the country. High concentrations in the East Coast and a few in Chicago and New Orleans. The only reason Reed is mentioned is because he’s descended from a particularly powerful priest line.”

He was Welsh, supposedly related to the priest and sorcerer Huw Llwyd. According to Huilca, Reed hadn’t reached out to him to ask about Alex. That meant there was a good chance he had no idea who her father might be.

“I think Reed found Alex by accident,” Darlington continued, thinking out loud. “By virtue of his membership at Lethe. And I think that’s also why he pushed to become the board’s president.”

“Seems like a conflict of interest,” Turner noted.

He was very right. As a member of Lethe, Reed would have considered a girl who could see Grays an interesting recruit and a potentially vital conduit to the world beyond the Veil. But his membership in Huilca’s order meant she should have been a target, an abomination to be eradicated. He clearly had different plans.

“Why doesn’t Lethe know about these people?” Turner asked. “Isn’t that part of the job?”

The world is large and magic is larger. “Maybe,” Darlington said. “But I’m beginning to understand how they stayed secret.”

“I’m assuming bribes and spells are involved.”

“No doubt. But there’s no central governing body. It’s not so much an order or an organization as an information network. I thought Huilca was using community as a euphemism, but it makes some sense.”

“A community of magicians who keep their identities secret and hunt down people who disrupt their all-important worldview? You think we don’t have guys like this in the department? That’s not a community. It’s a brotherhood.”

“I don’t like that word,” Huilca said from the back seat.

Turner glanced at him in the mirror. “What you like or don’t like is not my problem. The entire police force is a kind of brotherhood. It has to be to function. You are entrusting your life to the person beside you. But you put a gun and a badge in someone’s hand, he can start to think of himself as different from the people he’s supposed to protect. When he meets someone who feels the same way, it gets even stickier. There was a case out west, an actual gang operating within the LAPD, but there’s something like it in every police force.” Again his eyes flicked to Huilca. “Sound familiar?”

“Do you ever think about leaving?” Darlington asked Turner. “Doing something else?”

“No.”

A long moment passed. The lights of Willington slid by. Darlington didn’t know Turner well, had barely seen the man during his first three years at Lethe, but he suspected he’d overstepped. Turner loved his city and his job was the way he showed that love.

Then Turner said, “I think about it all the time. I’ve watched good men and women decide it just isn’t worth it anymore. But then who’s left? My mother would be happy, though.”

“You could tell her you plan to hunt demons full time.”

“Finally she can brag to her book club.” Turner tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. “I believe the department can get better, just like you believe Lethe can be better.”

“I’m not sure I think that anymore.”

Turner shot him a look. “You really mean that?”

“Lethe has no memory. None of the societies do. They have records and archives and rituals. They have vast repositories of arcane knowledge. But as institutions they aren’t built to remember, and if you don’t know what you’ve done or who you’ve wronged, what then?” He hadn’t expected to speak these words aloud, but he was haunted by what he’d seen and heard in that strange, overdecorated room dedicated to conquest and capture, by all that had been erased from Lethe’s memory. “If we win this fight against Golgarot, everything changes but nothing changes. The societies march on. Lethe serves as cover. Everyone forgets, as surely as if Dawes put them under a spell.”

“I don’t think I can let that happen,” Turner said. “Not if I’m right about what’s happening with these disappearances and what’s buried on Reiter’s estate.”

Darlington wasn’t sure they could stop it. Not when the societies, the trusts, the alumni, and Yale itself all needed the flow of magic to continue. Their power might be different from Golgarot’s, but it was just as real.

He looked back at Huilca. “Have you found other Wheelwalkers?”

“No.”

“Have the other members located Wheelwalkers?”

“Two,” he said, then reluctantly added, “that I know of.”

“Who were they?” Silence. Darlington turned in his seat and pushed the coin of compulsion more firmly into Huilca’s palm. “Who were they?” he repeated.

“A boy of six in Uruguay. A woman of forty in the Kyushu region of Japan.”

“What happened to them?”