Page 96 of Dead Beat

She would need to eat before practice and again after. She could meet up with Buggs and they’d sort it out, but no more late nights. Not until the Game was behind them. She wanted to make a good showing. More wriggling fish, Hec’s thoughts bleeding into hers, all football and the future. He’s distracted, she realized. None of this is quite real to him. Not the way football and his friends and his fraternity are.

Alex caught a glimpse of herself—of Hec—in the window, little more than an outline, but she could see, even feel, that she was built differently than these other boys, broader in the shoulders, thick with muscle. A perfect soldier. Reiter fidgeted at the table, carefully arranging papers—the same blueprints of the quadrangle and Harkness they’d found hidden in the staircase. He wants something to do with his hands. Reiter, wealthy and handsome, heir to Sweetwell, but he was jittery, maybe a little shy. Beside him sat the young man who she now knew had been labeled Nick Zanca in the photo. He was long-limbed, neatly dressed, a gold pin glinting on his tie. He seemed preternaturally poised beside Reiter’s restlessness.

The Wheel had spun and she’d led them there, walking along a new spoke to another time. Yale in the fall of 1933, when the doors to the Memorial Quadrangle had first opened, when the pilgrims had met to contemplate their Halloween descent. How was she supposed to bring them back to their own time? Alex caught a glimpse of Turner’s strained face. He had just begun to accept magic, and only by shoving it into a framework of superheroes and villains, of the righteous and the depraved. How would he make this bizarre moment fit his moral model?

“Should we start?” Nick asked. “I have a paper for Smith that won’t wait.”

Kittscher dropped into one of the big leather chairs. “I can write it for you if you’re so worried. You know I’ll get you a better mark.”

Reiter laughed nervously.

The gaze Nick fixed on Kittscher was cool and unruffled. “I can manage.”

Kittscher rolled his eyes theatrically. “Oh, very well. We meet here on neutral territory. All present agree that we are acting of our own free will and that any injury resulting from the actions we take are the fault of none but ourselves.” Then he set down his glass and clapped his hands together. “One week until All Hallows’ Eve, lads. On Tuesday we bloody our hands. On Thursday I’ll welcome you to Il Bastone and we’ll summon our salt guardians. Come Friday, we walk the Gauntlet.”

“Are we sure…” Reiter began. “That is to say, are we certain—”

“God help us all, we’re not going through this again. We were the men chosen and there’s no reason to delay.”

“There are countless reasons,” said Nick.

“Come on!” This was Hector now, and Alex felt his voice boom through her chest. “If we don’t have the courage, who will?” He was saying it for Kittscher’s sake, for his approval. That longing didn’t have the fully formed shape of language, but Alex could feel it just the same. Rudy Kittscher was smarter than all of them put together. He had the steady hand that would see them through.

“Boys,” Kittscher crooned, “it is not mere good luck that construction on the library finished when it did. It is not mere happenstance.”

Nick released a disbelieving huff and pulled a pack of Chesterfields from his pocket. “You don’t believe in God, but you believe in fate?”

“I believe that there are moments when great men are chosen and that if they shy away from the destiny laid before them, they choose the path of cowardice—or worse, mediocrity.”

“Neither fate nor God chose us,” Nick argued. “The donors did, and I think it’s worth remembering that our lives are on the line, not theirs.”

“Then walk out the door and let them choose some other mere mortal to raise up to Olympus. We won’t have trouble filling your spot.”

Rudy was right. The donors weren’t ordinary men; they were titans. Hec hadn’t worked up the courage to say more than a How do you do, sir? when he’d been ushered into the Harkness mansion on the Upper East Side. Ned Harkness was a Wolf’s Head man, just like Hec, but that was the only thing they had in common. Later, after he’d agreed to the mad scheme Harkness had outlined, after he’d understood the special role he was to play, he had been introduced to the other donors and the other pilgrims. All of it had seemed like a lark until now.

“It’s a quest,” Kittscher continued. “Don’t pretend you haven’t been dreaming of just such a thing since your mother was pinning up your didies.”

Nick lit his cigarette and took a long drag. “I’m not going to welch. I’ll make the trip the way I said I would. We all will.”

That’s the way. What Hec wouldn’t give for a little of that surety, but he could play the part as well as anyone else.

“Think of what’s waiting for us,” Kittscher said. “Knowledge. Revelation in its truest sense. The answer to all that is unknown.”

Again Reiter released a high, nervous laugh. “But what else is waiting for us?”

“Treasure!” boomed Hec, then realized he’d blundered. Rudy wasn’t rich like the others, but it never seemed to vex him the way it troubled Hec.

Kittscher lifted a shoulder. “If there’s gold to be had, then yes, I’ll take it. Some of us must seek our fortunes if we haven’t had them handed to us.”

Reiter squirmed and Alex remembered what Darlington had said, that he was wealthy, an American aristocrat. But Kittscher had needed to scrape his way into Yale and the societies.

“I’ll fill my pockets,” crowed Hector, better to push on. “Stuff your pockets too and carry you out of hell like a sack of potatoes.”

“See that?” Kittscher said. “Hec is ready. He fears neither demon nor man!”

“The devil hasn’t met my one-two,” Hector said, and punched the air with a swift combination.

“You talk like this is all going to be a good time,” said Nick. “I wonder if you’ll be so merry on Tuesday night.”