Page 132 of Dead Beat

Darlington had always loved this tomb. It was whimsical in a way that none of the others were, solid without being funereal, graceful in its proportions. It looked as if it had been lifted from some secret hilltop in Andalusia, and that had always appealed to his sense of symmetry with their magic. Here was a way to travel even without a portal, a little piece of another world plunked down onto the university campus. It didn’t hurt that it sat across from the Music School, another of his favorites, a tiny palace of ornamentation better suited to a Venetian canal.

“Darlington,” Penny said as they climbed the stairs and she took out her key, “I just want to say how nice it was to see you and … I hope you understand that once you graduate … things are different.”

He had no idea how to reply to that. Did Penny think he’d made this request to see the Scroll and Key treasure room as a pretext for trying to get back together? If that notion hid his true purpose, his ego could handle the hit.

“I’m sure it is,” he said noncommittally.

“There’s no net. You really have to take opportunities where you find them.”

He had been to Penny’s family home on Meadow Lane, a sprawling beachfront property in Southampton worth roughly fifty million dollars. He wasn’t sure what other safety net she might need, but this was one of the conventions of Yale and places like it: the elaborate pantomime of pretending that the roommate whose parents rented him an apartment in Lenox Hill for the summer so that he could take a poorly paid internship at the Frick weathered the same indignities as the student working at the laundry who had to stay in the dorms over spring break.

She unlocked the door and led him inside the stone entryway. The interior of the tomb didn’t make good on the promise of the exterior. There were no graceful columns or elaborate scrollwork walls. It was more like a cave punctuated by striped keyhole arches.

“Wait here,” Penny said at the door to the ritual room, a star-shaped chamber with stone knights in each corner and a round table at the center, said to be made from the wood of the very table around which Arthur’s knights had once gathered.

Darlington let his fingers brush over the inscription: Have power on this dark land to lighten it, and power on this dead world to make it live. In his years at Lethe, he’d thought little of those words. Now he remembered the moment when he’d glimpsed Alex and Dawes, heard their voices, and tried to follow them out of hell. They’d used this table to open a portal and bring him home. The door had closed too swiftly, but in that moment, briefly, he had known hope. It had been beautiful and terrible, a winged serpent, soaring one moment, and in the next, a low and burrowing thing that would not let him rest.

He still couldn’t quite reconcile what he had become to survive Golgarot’s rule. The demon had not just tortured him but made him a torturer as well, and the unpleasant truth was that he had come to see bringing pain to others as a respite from the endless march of his own misery. He had been good at it too. Demons looked for the worst moments a soul could remember, the most desperate, the most shaming. But he had gone seeking sparks of happiness, the bright scraps of joy he could twist into something both horrid and new. Would a time have come when he forgot he had ever been human? What would have happened if Alex hadn’t found a way to reclaim his soul?

Back when he had been ushered into Lethe by Sandow and Michelle Alameddine, he had tried to learn everything he could about the societies and their lore. He had forced himself to wade through the entirety of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and he knew the words on this table were not quite what they seemed because of the lines that preceded them:

But were I joined with her,

Then might we live together as one life,

And reigning with one will in everything

Have power on this dark land to lighten it,

And power on this dead world to make it live.

Arthur was speaking of Guinevere and his want for her, of the love he believed would help him change the world for the better, when really it would bring about the end of his rule.

“Do you think the nexus can be restored?”

Darlington startled. Alban Reed was standing in the doorway to the ritual room. He smiled and entered with his hand outstretched. Darlington had to fight the demon impulse to simply rip his arm off.

They shook and Reed said, “I hope you’ll forgive the subterfuge. Penny has done some work for my company and I asked if she could help set a meeting.”

More like an ambush. So this was what Penny had meant about taking opportunities where one found them.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” Darlington said smoothly. His grandfather’s emphasis on manners made a ready substitute for diplomacy. “But why not just come to Il Bastone? We’d love to host you, and Oculus is a tremendous cook.”

“I wanted the opportunity to speak to you in private. I understand that your senior year didn’t go exactly as planned. A year in a pocket dimension must have been quite an ordeal.”

“Candidly?”

“Please,” said Reed.

“I know that Dean Sandow and my Dante were in a panic, but for me, it’s as if it never happened. I wish it had been more of an ordeal,” Darlington said with a laugh that he hoped sounded natural. “I could have gotten a good article on portal magic out of it at least.”

Reed smiled. “Sometimes a little adventure can be good for the soul.”

“Exactly.”

“You plan to reenroll for the fall semester?”

“Absolutely.”