Page 14 of Dead Beat

“Okay.”

“What does okay mean?”

Her jaw set. “It means if you keep pushing you’re not going to like what comes after okay.”

At least with Alex, you never had to wonder where you stood.

“I’m taking first shower,” she said, opening her car door.

“It’s all yours,” he said. “I’m going back to Il Bastone.” Alex couldn’t return to the dorms with the stink of the uncanny on her and he wasn’t going to sit patiently on a badly sprung sofa in the Hutch imagining her naked beneath a stream of rapidly diminishing hot water while the room filled with steam. He could posit theories about magic all night long. The demon wanted her. And maybe the man did too. Maybe the man always had. But he had seen enough of her miserable past to know what she’d been through. He wouldn’t be one more person in the long line of people who had let her down. He would be better. He had to be.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“That magic comes from demons. We know some of them feed on joy and happiness instead of pain. So maybe there’s some balance, good demons and bad demons.”

A comforting thought, but a lie like that was a threat to both of them.

“No, Stern,” he said, hearing the rumble in his voice, feeling her flinch away. Good. She needed to keep her distance. She needed to remember what he was. “Demons are only one thing. Appetite.”

He waited for the door to the Hutch to close safely behind Alex and then steered the Subaru out of the alley. He meant to go to Il Bastone, but he found himself headed west, toward Black Elm. The roads were near empty at this time of night and grew emptier as he headed away from campus. The usual landmarks felt like ghosts of themselves: Lyric Hall, which had been everything from a stop on the vaudeville circuit to an antique store to a florist shop that sold weed on the second floor. Then, on his right, the familiar rise of the stone wall that once marked the edges of Donald Grant Mitchell’s sprawling farm. His grand mansion had been built to look like an old hunting lodge, though now it was divided into apartments.

The hill sloped gently downward and there on the left, the entrance to Black Elm. The grounds were covered in snow and the bare trees stood like an army of gaunt soldiers, weary from the march.

He let the car idle in the drive. The lights were set on a timer to give the illusion of occupation, but they had long since switched off. The house was a black mass of brick and stone, the peaks of its roofline barely discernible against the late sky.

He had loved this place, but he didn’t know how to keep loving it. Golgarot had made him rebuild Black Elm, stone by stone, unkillable hope dogging every moment, each brick laid with the desperation of a doctor on some hack TV show performing chest compressions. Breathe, damn you. But he hadn’t been able to laugh at the time, hadn’t seen or understood the futility of his task. He’d been so sure that each stone would get him closer, that somehow he would save this place and himself with it.

He turned off the engine, braced his body for the cold, and made himself cross the drive and unlock the kitchen door. He avoided looking at the entry to the basement, the place where they had burned the bodies of a stranger and the husk that had been Michael Anselm alongside his parents. Michelle Alameddine was buried on these grounds, her grave marked with a single smooth disc of marble. But Harper Harris Arlington and Daniel Arlington IV had vanished into nothing, leaving no ripple. He had been sure there would be questions to answer, excuses to make, maybe even a call for an alibi. But no one had reached out with concern or worry or accusation. Not his parents’ friends or business partners, not his mother’s distant relatives. Why would they? Darlington had never been a real part of his parents’ lives. He hadn’t even been a story they told.

Do you miss them? Not the way he should. There was only Black Elm. That was all there had ever been. He should sell. He knew that. He couldn’t live in a place burdened by so much tragedy. Contractors, workmen, cleaning crews—some made it down the driveway, a few even crossed the threshold, but there they stopped, unwilling to take another step. There was something wrong in this house.

And yet it was still his home. Bernadette had made him waffles in this kitchen—at the same stove where he’d prepared the elixir that had nearly killed him and that had opened his path to Lethe. He had done his schoolwork at the long shining table in the dining room—the table now covered in sheets like a cadaver. There was the den with the old television and record player. The sunroom where he’d napped in the winter. His grandfather’s study that he’d never had the heart to truly make his own. Here, the formal entrance to the house, where guests were once welcomed, the big empty foyer set with black and white tiles, the ceiling still cratered by a gaping hole, the floor still littered with debris from when he and Alex had faced Golgarot in his Michael Anselm disguise.

She had brought him back from hell. She had carried his soul cradled against her own. He didn’t know how to think about that kind of rescue or what to make of the golden bands at his wrists and neck. What did it mean to owe someone your freedom? What did it mean about him that he didn’t mind this state of fealty? He only knew he wished she were here.

He entered his grandfather’s study and poured himself a small glass of sherry. He took a sip, then set the glass down, unfinished. It was too damn cold and the house felt too empty. It always had, but he’d told himself it wouldn’t always be so. He sat in the old desk chair in the dark and looked out at the dim shapes of the hedge maze. It was starting to snow again. He should get back on the road before it became hard to navigate.

He startled as Cosmo leapt onto his lap.

“I was wondering if you’d come say hello,” he murmured.

The big white cat had a few leaves in his fur from his rambles but looked otherwise unbothered by winter.

“You could come back to Il Bastone with me,” he suggested in the quiet of the room. “The house would be happy to have you.” Cosmo meowed plaintively. The cat would never leave Black Elm. “Between the two of us, you seem to be the more loyal creature.”

He remembered playing with Cosmo as a boy, chasing him from room to room, being presented with dead mice as gifts. That would make Cosmo a very old cat, but he didn’t act like a very old cat at all.

“I won’t sell,” he promised. “Not while you’re here.”

He didn’t know if he meant it. He was mad to cling to this place. Even if he could work some type of magic and restore the crumbling house in an instant, fix the broken windows, the wiring in the walls, the water damage in the ballroom, what was the point? Was he meant to live here on his own? Find a wife and bring her home to raise a family here? Play Bluebeard when she asked why certain doors remained locked, why not all places were permitted?

He could live temporarily at Il Bastone and use the Virgil apartment as it had been intended. He could rent himself a place near the Green. He could move to Manhattan. He wanted none of those things, but he didn’t know what he wanted anymore. Who would he be without Black Elm? Through the whole of his life he had never wondered where he belonged, because he belonged here. This was his Eden, so why, sitting in the middle of it, did he feel as if he’d been cast out of the garden?

Knowledge had always been the cure, the key to open every door, the lantern to illuminate the proper path. What if, finally, he knew just a little too much to ever be happy?

Darlington sat in the quiet of a house that had once been his home, listening to the wind creep in through the boarded-up windows. He wondered if his grandfather’s ghost was watching or maybe some other long-dead Arlington. It didn’t matter. For him, the ghosts of Black Elm had always failed to speak. There was only the house. His marvel, his monastery, his mausoleum. He could set fire to it tonight and be free. He could pick up a hammer and start rebuilding.