Page 75 of What Happens at Nightfall

“I’ve only done it twice!” Ingrid turned a deep beet red as the implication of her words set in. She looked like a teenager caught sneaking in after curfew.

“How old are you?” Jess asked.

“None of your business! Twenty-seven,” Ingrid mumbled. “Almost twenty-seven.”

Jess could vaguely remember what that was like. The rounding up so you’d seem older before you hit the point when you started rounding down, or forgetting your age entirely because one year blurred into another.

“And you’ve been a grad student for how long?”

“Five years.” Which meant Ingrid had gone to grad school straight out of college.

Jess could remember striding around in her suit and black heels, telling much-older executives how to reorder their companies during her time as a consultant fresh out of college. She’d been so convinced she knew everything, that she could handle anything.

Like summoning a demon.

Misinterpreting her expression, Ingrid said defensively, “Five years isn’t long. Most history PhDs take at least seven years. There’s the original research for the dissertation—and the teaching. That slows you down.”

“And the demon hunting?”

Ingrid twisted the end of her braid. “Demon hunting isn’t usually part of it. I just—once I figured it out, I couldn’t leave it out there.”

Jess suspected there was more to it than that, but the other woman was as prickly as she was. “So today—you summoned it again?”

“I found this new spell—you try to cast the demon back into the nether realm using St. John’s wort, lavender, and a bowl of purified water. But before I could complete the ritual—you know what happened! You were there. But you’re probably going to say I’m lying.”

Jess knew what it was to be accused of lying. For the first time, she wondered exactly how it had looked to the people on the other side. How it would look to Adam when he googled her name.

“Look,” said Jess slowly. Her temples ached abominably. “We found a weird murder wall in your apartment. You were stalking Adam’s daughter. You keep summoning demons—”

“One demon! Twice!”

“—you have a closet full of ritual robes and a strange horn-handled knife on your counter. You showed up at a tomb on the autumn solstice with a parrot and a parasol. What am I supposed to think?”

“I don’t know! I never planned for any of this. I’m making this up as I go along—I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m a historian, not a wizard!” Ingrid’s cheeks were very flushed. “I was raised Lutheran. Sort of. We went to church for Christmas and Easter and that was kind of it. I’ve been trying to piece it all together from Renaissance texts and modern books on practical witchcraft, but none of it seems to be working the way it’s supposed to. I thought it was going to be easier. Like, how hard could it be?”

The battle cry of all the worst choices: How hard could it be?

How hard could it be to blow the whistle on her money-laundering employer? The right and wrong had been so clear. Until they’d pointed the finger back at her.

“At first,” said Ingrid feverishly, “it was a cool puzzle. Follow the demon. It was—it was a fun intellectual game, turning everything on its head and proving Bel—that he was real and not just a metaphor or a malady or however else you want to explain the early modern preoccupation with demons.”

Like it had been a cool puzzle figuring out what really happened to the art Rent the Gallery was buying. Sometimes, cool puzzles were dangerous.

Ingrid flapped her hands. “It was really exciting tracking him down across the centuries to here. It’s kind of crazy how many historical disasters he had a hand in. I just wanted to follow the trail to the end, you know? But then—he got out. He was never meant to get out.”

Jess remembered that night, with the wind howling around her as she and Ben ran hand in hand down the alley of flaming trees, the stone bear growling at her from his plinth. “Did you let him out?”

“No! I don’t think so. I don’t see how I would have.” Ingrid’s face crumpled. “I just want to go back to working on my dissertation. I’ve lost nearly two years to this thing now. Although some of last year was grading papers and dealing with students complaining because I gave them a B plus.”

Jess could totally believe that Ingrid had gone on a demon hunt to avoid working on her dissertation—she’d seen what Kimmy had done to avoid hers—but there were still some things that didn’t line up. “Why did you take all those pictures of Melinda? And that urn?”

Ingrid curled her legs under herself. “The girl—Melinda—she’s the oldest surviving child of the direct line. So she’s the heir of the demon. If there was any demon activity, I figured it would center around her. But there wasn’t, which meant the demon was still contained.”

“Okay.” There was a strange sort of logic to it. “And the urn?”

“It’s all over Cornelia Vanderwilt’s stuff. You’ve seen that portrait, right? The urn is in it. And she’s got it as a repeated motif in her dressing room. At first I thought maybe she’d stored the demon in the urn after it escaped from the Piatti monument. But it wasn’t. So I’m still not sure what the urn was about.”

What do I have to do, hit you over the head with the truth?