The Mephisto Club

altered her view of the world. Changed it to an unfamiliar country where monsters walked.
Daniel,
she thought,
I need you now. I need your touch and your hope and your faith in the world. This man is all darkness, and you are the light.
    “Do you know how my father died?” he asked.
    She frowned at him, startled by the question. “I’m sorry?”
    “Believe me, it’s relevant. My whole family history is relevant. I tried to walk away from it. I spent thirteen years teaching at Boston College, thinking I could live a normal life like everyone else, convinced that my father was just a cranky eccentric, like
his
father, that all the bizarre stories he told me when I was growing up were quaint family lore.” He glanced at her. “I believed it about as much as you do right now, which is to say, not at all.”
    He sounds so rational. Yet he isn’t. He can’t be.
    “I taught history, so I’m familiar with the ancient myths,” he said. “But you’ll never convince me that there were once satyrs or mermaids or flying horses. Why should I believe my father’s stories about Nephilim?”
    “What changed your mind?”
    “Oh, I knew
some
of what he told me was true. The death of Isabella, for instance. In Venice, I was able to find the record of her imprisonment and death in church documents. She
was
burned alive. She
did
give birth to a son, just prior to her execution. Not everything that was passed down in Sansone family lore was fantasy.”
    “And the part about your ancestors being demon hunters?”
    “My father believed it.”
    “Do you?”
    “I believe there are hostile forces who would bring down the Mephisto Foundation. And now they’ve found us. The way they found my father.”
    She stared at him, waiting for him to explain.
    “Eight years ago,” said Sansone, “he flew out to Naples. He was going to meet an old friend, a man he’d known since his college days in New Haven. Both of them were widowers. Both of them shared a passion for ancient history. They planned to visit the National Archaeological Museum there and catch up on each other’s lives. My father was quite excited about the visit. It was the first time I’d heard any animation in his voice since my mother died. But when he got to Naples, his friend wasn’t there at the airport. Or at the hotel. He called me, told me that something was terribly wrong, and he planned to return home the next day. I could hear he was upset, but he wouldn’t say much more about it. I think he believed our conversation was being monitored.”
    “He actually thought the phone was tapped?”
    “You see? You have the same reaction I did. That it was just dear eccentric old Dad imagining his goblins again. The last thing he said to me was, ‘They’ve found me, Anthony. They know who I am.’”
    “They?”
    “I knew exactly what he was talking about. It was the same nonsense I’d been hearing since I was a kid. Sinister forces in government. A worldwide conspiracy of Nephilim, helping one another into positions of power. And once they assume political control, they’re able to hunt to their hearts’ content, without any fear of punishment. The way they hunted in Kosovo. And Cambodia. And Rwanda. They thrive on war and disorder and bloodshed. They feed off it. That’s what Armageddon means to them: a hunter’s paradise. It’s why they can’t wait to make it happen, why they look forward to it.”
    “That sounds like the ultimate paranoid delusion.”
    “It’s also a way to explain the unexplainable: how people can do such terrible things to one another.”
    “Your father believed all that?”
    “He wanted
me
to believe it. But it took his death to convince me.”
    “What happened to your father?”
    “It could easily have been taken for a simple robbery gone wrong. Naples is a gritty place, and tourists do have to be careful there. But my father was on Via Partenope, alongside the Gulf of Naples, a street almost always crowded with tourists. Even so, it happened so quickly, he had no time to call for help. He simply collapsed. No one saw his assailant. No one saw what happened. But there was my father, bleeding to death on the street. The blade entered just beneath his sternum, sliced through the pericardium, and pierced the right ventricle.”
    “The way Eve Kassovitz died,” she said softly. A brutally efficient killing.
    “The worst part for me,” he said, “is that he died thinking I’d never believe him. After our last phone