Chapter 22

Alex returns to Il Bastone after confronting Linus Reiter, tending to her healing bite and injuries. Shaken by true fear, she contrasts beatable foes with the predatory power of Reiter and the leverage of Eitan. Seeking answers, she raids Darlington’s closet for clothes and turns to the Lethe library.

Using the Albemarle Book, Alex narrows her search to Linus Reiter and finds materials on the Reiter family and Sweetwell. A scrapbook photo places Linus among Yale men at Mory’s decades earlier. In Kittscher’s Daemonologie, she reads a 1933 debate proposing that demons feed on human emotions and that vampires are such demons taking seductive or terrifying forms.

Alex connects Reiter’s drug trade to feeding on desperation rather than profit. Investigating further, she discovers meeting minutes listing “Lionel Reiter” under Skull and Bones attendance at Il Bastone in 1933, implying Reiter’s presence and suggesting Lethe once debated real underworld travel soon after Sterling’s construction.

Fearing wider demonic predation—perhaps even tied to rapid aging cases—Alex compiles practical defenses: salt-based protections, and the effectiveness of stakes, beheading, and fire; she notes crosses rely on faith and garlic is mostly irrelevant. She equips a collar of salt pearls and tries to rest.

Alex dreams she is on Reiter’s lawn, then inside Black Elm. She sees horned Darlington outside and human Darlington within the circle. He admits there are two versions of him—the boy and the monster—and speaks of his parents and love he cannot unlearn. When Alex asks if he called to her, Darlington declares he has been crying out to her from the start. Alex wakes sweating, her neck wound bleeding anew.