Page 123 of Dead Beat

Montrose slammed the door in their faces.

“Think he’s calling the alumni?” Darlington asked.

“No, I do not.”

Only when they were inside the car did Darlington turn back to the jackal and give its ears a scratch. “What did you find?”

Its mouth popped open. A tiny bit of silver sat on its lolling pink tongue.

Darlington extracted it, then used his handkerchief to wipe away the drool.

“It’s an airplane,” he said with some disappointment. He hadn’t been sure what the hound would retrieve, but he had certainly hoped for more. “Maybe they never brought her to the tomb.”

Turner’s expression was troubled in the overhead light. Silently he drew Kylie’s file from his briefcase and flipped it open to the back page: an evidence log. It listed Kylie’s clothes, the barrettes that had still been in her hair, the imitation-diamond earrings in her ears—and a silver charm bracelet.

“She was there,” said Turner. “She was there and then she was dead.”

Darlington held the little airplane in his palm. He couldn’t know why Kylie had chosen it. Maybe it was a gift from a friend. Or maybe it was a bit of hope she’d bought for herself, a promise of travel, a broader world, a better life. He didn’t believe the Bonesmen had meant to kill her. The prognostication had gone wrong. They panicked. They didn’t have a chance to take her to Reiter, so they’d dropped her into the Sound. Careless or cruel? He wasn’t sure he knew the difference anymore.

How many dead? How many drifters and dealers and vagrants and runaways? How many lonely old women and friendless men? Reiter was a predator, and in a way that was more pure. He ate anguish because he was hungry for it. He needed human blood and desperation to prolong his own wretched life. But the other victims in his garden had not been food. They’d been sacrifices, grist for the society mill that turned out money, power, and influence on demand.

The golem might best Golgarot. They might push back the legions of hell. But apparently all the devils were here.

Ball; leather, twine, silver thread

Bowl; ceramic

Lead; linen, leather

Provenance: Asyut, Egypt; Middle Kingdom

The species of the Lethe Hounds is unknown, but they are commonly understood to be jackals due to both their physical appearance and their discovery at the ruins of a temple dedicated to Upuaut in Asyut (though under Greek rule it was known as Lycopolis, which rather begs the question of what else might be hiding in their DNA).

The pups were found by Lethe Delegate Clayton James (’22), who smuggled them back to the States aboard the RMS Majestic, and they were bound to Il Bastone shortly after (for the specifics of the ritual of St. Roch, please see Guillote’s Compendium of Heresies).

The ball, lead, and bowl were acquired from Henry Wellcome through a secret sale to the Lethe board in 1924 and are believed to come from the same area centered around Upuaut’s cult in Upper Egypt. The ball is said to have originally been a reliquary and the lead was most likely woven from leather and some type of sacred garment. Unfortunately, the bowl was broken during a retrieval training exercise in 1967, during which Raymond Wilkin lost a finger. The finger was coaxed back from the hounds in return for a plate of bratwurst, but the bowl could not be repaired.

—from the Lethe Armory Catalogue as revised and edited by Pamela Dawes, Oculus

44

Alex felt grateful that nothing could spoil her appetite, because Dawes had outdone herself.

“Isn’t it so good?” Tripp asked as they sat down to roast duck with figs and rosemary and heaps of confit potatoes.

“You can’t even eat it,” grumbled Turner.

“But I can smell it, and that’s almost as good.”

She listened as Turner and Darlington related what they thought had happened to Kylie Sanz. She did her best to concentrate, but she was tired and her head was too crowded with problems. She had dozed for a while and dreamed that her grandmother was sitting by her bed, humming as she braided Alex’s hair with rosemary. When she woke, for a long moment, she had felt safe and unafraid, and then reality hit like a bomb blast. There was no way she was getting back to sleep. The demon on the playground had spooked her as nothing had since her first run-in with Reiter.

Now she nodded along gamely as Darlington, Dawes, and Turner talked about the trouble they’d made at Skull and Bones and acquiring the helm from Scroll and Key, while Tripp sniffed happily at their plates. But she felt a little like a broken appliance. She didn’t have any of their skills or smarts, but she could trap demons. As wearied and bruised as she’d been, she had liked being the closer, the one who could get the dirty work done. Only, when the toaster stopped making toast, what was it good for? There was a joy-hungry demon loose on the streets, a vicious one, and she had no idea how to stop it.

“Reiter set us down this path,” Turner was saying. “He pointed us to the missing. He gave us one of the artifacts. What does he want?”

Alex remembered what Reiter had said on the pier at Savin. I can’t claim credit for everything that blooms in my garden. The garden he so wanted to show to her again. Was his demon courting their favor by feeding them information about the societies? Or did some fragment of the boy who had been Lionel Reiter remain, guiding them back to the crimes of the very society he’d once belonged to?

“He wants us to build the golem,” Dawes said. “But why? And what was its real purpose? Was the golem meant to serve as a zookeeper when they brought back the demon?”