Page 13 of Dead Beat

Daemonologie wasn’t an accurate title but a semantic joke gesturing to James I’s compendium of demons and their behavior. Kittscher’s Daemonologie was really just a transcript of a series of debates between two young men who thought they understood the world. Darlington had read them because he was uniquely fascinated by the history of the Ninth House and Kittscher’s theories on magic, but it had never been considered required reading for Lethe, just a dry academic exercise—a lot of talk and no real substance. The debates between Ellison Nownes and Rudolph Kittscher took on new meaning when you understood that they weren’t merely hypothesizing but trying to decide whether or not to mount an exploratory expedition to hell.

“What were your impressions?” he asked, calm, Socratic, no hint of the terror he felt at the idea forming in his head.

“This feels like a test.”

“It’s a conversation, Stern. I’m asking what you thought.”

Alex shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “They were showing off. I got the feeling Kittscher was having fun. I’m less sure about Nownes.”

Nownes was a devout Christian and divinity school student. Kittscher was an avowed atheist and a smart-ass.

“Kittscher ran circles around Nownes,” Darlington said. “He was smart. Maybe too smart for his own good.”

“Sensing a kindred spirit?”

He’d had the thought more than once. “Fiction and folklore give us a Manichaean view of magic. Good versus evil. Darkness versus light. But we’ve never had any indication that magic operates that way in the real world. All magic is transgression, a violation of the rules that seem to govern matter and behavior. Kittscher posited that all magic was demonic.”

“I remember. Nownes didn’t like that.”

“No. The unofficial motto of the university is For God. For Country. And for Yale. If all magic requires the demonic, then what does it say about the men of Yale and the societies who toy with it?”

“That they like bending the rules like everyone else.”

He found himself smiling. Nothing was sacred to Alex Stern, certainly not the pretensions of the Ivy League. “Fair enough.” He didn’t want to continue, but he had to. “I think Kittscher was right.”

For a long moment, Alex said nothing. A car passed on York, the thump of bass from its speakers rising and falling.

“You think that’s why the ritual worked tonight,” she said. “Why the Weathermen managed to make more than a lot of noise. They didn’t need a nexus. They needed a demon.”

He nodded slowly. Reason was a lifeline, a way to remember he wasn’t lost, not yet. He’d survived hell. Maybe somehow he’d find a way out of this, but only if he could understand, if he could make logic his bulwark against his baser nature.

“We know that magic eddies around the nexuses, that without one, most major workings are both impossible and dangerous. But what if a nexus is less a magical lightning rod—”

“Too soon.”

“And more like a portal. A door through which a demon might pass temporarily and become a catalyst for magic.”

“But we’ve worked new rituals at Il Bastone and we don’t have a nexus.”

“Never without an object from the armory or from one of the societies. Aurelian managed magic once they left their nexus but only because of the objects they retained—quills, bells, parchment, all trappings created by rites performed at the lip of these magical doorways.”

She ducked her chin, curling into herself.

“What?”

The silence stretched so long he started to think she wouldn’t answer.

“Something Hellie said.” Her voice was barely audible, scratchy as an old phonograph. “Or thought, really. When I was seeing through her eyes. When she looked at me she saw … a doorway. She looked through me. She said she could see the stars.”

He hesitated, unsure what boundary he might be crossing. “I saw it too. At the Manuscript party, when I was drugged.”

“You looked through me?”

“No. I … saw the night around you. You were…” He felt too foolish to say it. You were Queen Mab. You had stars in your hair, and the night was yours to command. He had known then that she wasn’t what she seemed. But what did that really mean? “You were at the center of it.”

He knew it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Alex had spent her life chasing normal with the same fervor he’d spent pursuing the arcane. But they couldn’t afford to look away from the truth, not with an army of demons standing at the ready.

“The nexuses were created by a Wheelwalker,” he said, “by the act of her devouring living souls. Your blood is what Golgarot used to hold open the door to hell. These things have to be connected. We can keep chasing the identities of the original pilgrims. Maybe we’ll get answers at our meeting with the Lethe board. But we need to know what your mother knows.”