Ninth House

⁷ Winter

There had to be a Lethe protocol for murder, a series of steps she should follow, that Darlington would have known to follow.

He probably would have told her to enlist Dawes’s help. But Alex and the grad student had never managed to do much more than politely ignore each other. Like almost everyone else, Dawes had loved shiny-penny Darlington. He’d been the only person who seemed totally at ease talking to her, who had managed it without any of the awkwardness that hung over Dawes like one of her bulky, indeterminately colored sweatshirts. Alex was pretty sure Dawes blamed her for what had happened at Rosenfeld Hall, and though Dawes had never said much to Alex, her silence had taken on a new hostility of slammed cupboards and suspicious glares. Alex didn’t want to talk to Dawes any more than she had to.

So she would consult the Lethe library instead. Or you could just leave this whole thing alone, she thought as she climbed the steps to the mansion on Orange. A week from now, Darlington might be back beneath this very roof. He might emerge from the new-moon rite whole and happy and ready to turn his magnificent brain to the problem of Tara Hutchins’s murder. Or maybe he’d have other things on his mind.

There was no key to get into Il Bastone. Alex had been introduced to the door the first day Darlington brought her to the house, and now it released a creaky sigh as she entered. It had always hummed happily when Darlington was with her. At least it hadn’t sicced a pack of jackals on her. Alex hadn’t seen the Lethe hounds since that first morning, but she thought about them every time she approached the house, wondering where they slept and if they were hungry, if spirit hounds even needed food.

In theory, Dawes had Fridays off, but she could almost always be counted on to be burrowed into the corner of the first-floor parlor with her laptop. That made her easy to avoid. Alex slipped down the hall to the kitchen, where she found the plate of last night’s sandwiches Dawes had left covered with a damp towel on the top shelf of the fridge. She shoveled them into her mouth, feeling like a thief, but that just made the soft white bread, the cucumber coins, and thinly sliced salmon spiked with dill taste better.

The house on Orange had been acquired by Lethe in 1888, shortly after John Anderson abandoned it, supposedly trying to outrun the ghost of the cigar girl his father had murdered. Since then, Il Bastone had masqueraded as a private home, a school run by the Sisters of St. Mary’s, a law office, and now as a private home perpetually awaiting renovation. But it had always been Lethe.

A bookcase stood in the second-floor hallway beside an antique secretary and a vase of dried hydrangea. This was the entry to the library. There was an old panel in the wall beside it that supposedly controlled a stereo system, but it only worked about half the time and sometimes the music coming through the speakers sounded so tinny and far away, it made the house feel more empty.

Alex drew the Albemarle Book from the third shelf. It looked like an ordinary ledger bound in stained cloth, but its pages crackled slightly as she opened it, and she swore when a low thrum of electricity jolted through her. The book retained echoes of a user’s most recent request, and as Alex flipped to the last page of entries, she saw Darlington’s scrawl and the words Rosenfeld Hall schematics. The date was December 10. The last night Daniel Arlington had been seen alive.

Alex took a pen from the top of the secretary, wrote out the date and then Lethe House protocols. Homicide. She slid the book back onto the shelf between Stover at Yale and a battered copy of New England Cookery, Vol. 2. She’d never seen any sign of volume one.

The house gave a disapproving groan and the shelf shook slightly. Alex wondered if Dawes was too deep in her work to notice or if she would be turning her eyes to the ceiling, speculating on what Alex might be up to.

When the bookcase stopped rattling, Alex gripped its right side and pulled. It swung out from the wall like a door, revealing a two-story circular chamber lined with bookshelves. Though it was still afternoon, the sky through the glass dome above her glowed the luminous blue of early dusk. The air felt slightly balmy and she could smell orange blossoms on the air.

Lethe had a limited amount of room, so the library had been rigged with a telescope portal, using magic borrowed from Scroll and Key and deployed by the late Lethe delegate Richard Albemarle when he was still only a Dante. You wrote down the subject you sought in the Albemarle Book, placed it in the bookcase, and the library would kindly retrieve a selection of volumes from the Lethe House collection, which would be waiting for you when you swung open the secret door. The full collection was located in an underground bunker beneath an estate in Greenwich and was heavily weighted toward the history of the occult, New Haven, and New England. It had an original printing of Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum and fifty-two different translations of its text, the complete works of Paracelsus, the secret diaries of Aleister Crowley and Francis Bacon, a spell book from the Zoroastrian Fire Temple in Chak Chak, a signed photo of Calvin Hill, and a first edition of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale along with a spell written on a Yankee Doodle napkin that revealed the book’s secret chapters. But good luck finding a copy of Pride and Prejudice or a basic history of the Cold War that didn’t focus entirely on the faulty magic used in the wording of the Eisenhower Doctrine.

The library was also a little temperamental. If you weren’t specific enough in your request or if it couldn’t find books on your desired subject, the shelf would just keep shaking and eventually start to give off heat and emit a high, frantic whine, until you snatched the Albemarle Book and murmured a soothing incantation over its pages while gently caressing its spine. The portal magic also had to be maintained through a series of elaborate rites conducted every six years.

“What happens if you guys miss a year?” Alex had asked when Darlington first showed her how the library worked.

“It happened in 1928.”

“And?”

“All of the books from the collection crowded into the library at once and the floor collapsed on Chester Vance, Oculus.”

“Jesus, that’s horrible.”

“I don’t know,” Darlington had said meditatively. “Suffocating beneath a pile of books seems an appropriate way to go for a research assistant.”

Alex always approached the library with caution and didn’t get near the bookcase when it was shaking. It was too easy to imagine some future Darlington joking about the delicious irony of ignorant Galaxy Stern being fatally clocked in the jaw by rogue knowledge.

She set her bag down on the circular table at the room’s center, the wood inlaid with a map of constellations she didn’t recognize. It was strange to Alex that the smell of books was always the same. The ancient documents in the climate-controlled stacks and glass cases of Beinecke. The research rooms at Sterling. The changeable library of Lethe House. They all had the same scent as the fluorescent-lit reading rooms full of cheap paperbacks she’d lived in as a kid.

Most of the shelves were empty. There were some heavy old books on New Haven history and a glossy paperback titled New Haven Mayhem! that had probably been sold in tourist shops. It took Alex a minute to realize that one shelf was packed with reprints of the same slender volume—The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House, initially hardbound and then stapled together more cheaply when Lethe lost some of its pretensions and began watching its budget.

Alex reached for the most recent edition, the year 1987 stamped on its cover. It had no table of contents, just pages reproduced crookedly on a copier with the occasional note in the margin, and a ticket stub for Squeeze playing the New Haven Coliseum. The Coliseum was long gone, demolished for apartments and a community-college campus that had failed to materialize. Alex had seen a teen Gray in an R.E.M. T-shirt roaming around the parking lot that had taken the Coliseum’s place, moving in aimless circles as if still hoping to score tickets.

The entry for murder was frustratingly short:

In the event of violent death associated with the activities of the landed societies, a colloquy will be called between the dean, the university president, the active members of Lethe House, the acting Centurion, and the president of the Lethe Trust to decide a course of action. (See “Meeting Protocols.”)

Alex flipped to “Meeting Protocols,” but all she found was a diagram of the Lethe House dining room, along with a guide to seating according to precedence, a reminder of the need for minutes to be kept by the residing Oculus, and suggested menus. Apparently, light fare was prescribed, alcohol to be served only upon request. There was even a recipe for something called minted slush punch.

“Big help, fellas,” Alex muttered. They talked about death like it was a breach of manners. And she had no idea how to pronounce “colloquy” but it was obviously a big-ass meeting she had no intention of calling. Was she really supposed to hit up the president of the university and invite him over for cold meats? Sandow had told her to rest easy. He hadn’t said anything about a colloquy. Why? Because this is a funding year. Because Tara Hutchins is town. Because there’s no indication the societies are involved at all. So let it go.

Instead, Alex returned to the hallway, shut the door to the library, and reopened the Albemarle Book. This time the scent of cigars puffed up from the pages and she heard the clinking of dishes. That was the Lethe memory of murder—not blood or suffering, but men gathered around a table, drinking minted slush punch. She hesitated, trying to think of the right words to guide the library, then she inscribed a new entry: How to speak to the dead.

She slid the book into place and the bookcase shuddered violently. This time when she entered the library, the shelves were packed.

It was hard not to feel that Darlington was somehow looking over her shoulder, the eager scholar restraining himself from interfering in her clumsy attempts at research.

When did you first see them? Alex had told Darlington the truth. She simply couldn’t remember the first time she’d seen the dead. She’d never even called them that in her head. The blue-lipped girl in a bikini by the pool; the naked man standing behind the chain-link fence at the schoolyard, toying lazily with himself as her class ran suicides; the two boys in bloody sweatshirts seated at a booth at the In-N-Out who never ordered. They were just the Quiet Ones, and if she didn’t pay them too much attention, they left her alone.

That had all changed in a Goleta bathroom when she was twelve years old.

By then she’d learned to keep her mouth shut about the things she saw, and she’d been doing pretty well. When it was time to start junior high, she asked her mother to start calling her Alex instead of Galaxy and to fill out her school forms that way. At her old school, everyone had known her as the twitchy kid who talked to herself and flinched at things that weren’t there, who didn’t have a dad and who didn’t look like her mom. One counselor thought she had ADD; another thought she needed a more regular sleep schedule. Then there was the vice principal, who had taken her mother aside and murmured that Alex might just be a little slow. “Some things can’t be fixed with therapy or a pill, you know? Some kids are below average, and there’s room for them in the classroom too.”

But a new school meant a fresh start, a chance to remake herself into someone ordinary.

“You shouldn’t be ashamed to be different,” her mother had said when Alex had summoned the courage to ask for the name change. “I called you Galaxy for a reason.”

Alex didn’t disagree. Most of the books she read and the TV shows she watched told her different was okay. Different was great! Except no one was different quite like her. Besides, she thought, as she looked around their tiny apartment laden with dream catchers and silk scarves and paintings of fairies dancing under the moon, it wasn’t like she was ever really going to be like everyone else.

“Maybe I can work up to it.”

“All right,” Mira said. “That is your choice and I respect it.” Then she’d yanked her daughter into her arms and blown a raspberry on her forehead. “But you’re still my little star.”

Alex had squirmed away, laughing, nearly woozy with relief and anticipation, then started thinking about how she could get her mom to buy her new jeans.

Seventh grade started and Alex wondered if her new name was some kind of magic word. It didn’t fix everything. She still didn’t have the right sneakers or the right scrunchie or bring the right things for lunch. It couldn’t make her blond or tall or prune her thick eyebrows, which had to be vigilantly kept from joining forces to create a unified eyebrow front. The white kids still thought she was Mexican and the Mexican kids still thought she was white. But she was doing okay in class. She had people to eat with at lunchtime. She had a friend named Meagan, who invited her over to watch movies and eat bowls of sugary name-brand cereals shimmering with artificial colors.

On the morning of the Goleta trip, when Ms. Rosales told them to buddy up and Meagan seized Alex’s hand, Alex felt a gratitude so overwhelming, she thought she might vomit the tiny blueberry muffins the teachers had provided. They spent the morning drinking hot chocolate from foam cups, pressed together on the green vinyl seat of the bus. Both of their moms liked Fleetwood Mac, and when “Go Your Own Way” came on the bus driver’s radio, they sang along with it, mostly shouting, giggling and breathless as Cody Morgan pressed his hands to his ears and yelled at them to SHUT UP.

It took nearly three hours to get to the butterfly reserve, and Alex savored every minute of the drive. The grove itself was nothing special: a pretty sprawl of eucalyptus trees lined by dusty paths, and a guide who talked about the eating habits and migration patterns of monarchs. Alex glimpsed a slender woman walking through the grove, her arm hanging from her body by the barest scrap of tendon, and quickly looked away, just in time to see a blanket of orange wings gust up from the trees as the monarchs took flight. She and Meagan ate their lunches shoulder to shoulder on picnic tables near the entrance, and before they got back on the buses, everyone went to use the bathrooms. They were low slab buildings with damp concrete floors, and both Meagan and Alex gagged when they entered.

“Forget it,” said Meagan. “I can hold it until we get back.”

But Alex had to go. She chose the cleanest metal stall, laid toilet paper carefully on the seat, pulled down her jean shorts, and froze. For a long moment, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. The blood was nearly dry and so brown that she had trouble understanding it was blood. She’d gotten her period. Wasn’t she supposed to have cramps or something? Meagan had gotten hers over the summer and had lots of thoughts about tampons and pads and the importance of ibuprofen.

The only important thing was that the blood hadn’t soaked through to her shorts. But how was she supposed to make it through the bus ride home?

“Meagan!” she shouted. But if anyone else was in the bathroom they’d already cleared out. Alex felt her panic rise. She needed to get to Ms. Rosales before everyone was seated and ready to go. She would know what to do.

Alex wound a bunch of toilet paper around her hand and tucked the makeshift pad into her ruined underwear, then pulled up her shorts and shoved out of the stall.

She yelped. A man was standing there, his face a mottled mess of bruises. She was relieved when she realized he was dead. A dead man in the girls’ bathroom was a lot less scary than a living one. She balled her fists and pushed through him. She hated going through them. Sometimes she got flashes of memory, but this time she just felt a blast of cold. She hurried to the sinks and quickly washed her hands. Alex could sense he was still there, but she refused to meet his gaze in the mirror.

She felt something brush the small of her back.

In the next second her face was jammed up against the mirror. Something shoved her hips against the porcelain ledge of the sink. She felt cold fingers tugging on the waistband of her shorts.

Alex screamed, she kicked out, struck solid flesh and bone, felt the grip on her shorts loosen. She tried to shove back from the sink, glimpsed her face in the mirror, a blue barrette sliding from her hair, saw the man—the thing—that had hold of her. You can’t do that, she thought. You can’t touch me. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t allowed. None of the Quiet Ones could touch her.

Then she was facedown on the concrete floor. She felt her hips jerked backward, her panties yanked down, something nudging against her, pushing into her. She saw a butterfly lying in a puddle beneath the sink, one wing flapping listlessly as if it were waving to her. She screamed and screamed.

That was how Meagan and Ms. Rosales found her, on the bathroom floor, shorts crumpled around her ankles, panties at her knees, blood smeared over her thighs and a lump of blood-soaked toilet paper wadded between her legs, as she sobbed and thrashed, hips humped up and shuddering. Alone.

Ms. Rosales was beside her, saying, “Alex! Sweetheart!” and the thing that had been trying to get inside her was gone. She never knew why he stopped, why he fled, but she’d clung to Ms. Rosales, warm and alive and smelling of lavender soap.

Ms. Rosales sent Meagan out of the bathroom. She dried Alex’s tears and helped her clean up. She had a tampon in her purse and told Alex how to put it in. Alex followed her instructions, still shaking and crying. She didn’t want to touch down there. She didn’t want to think about him trying to push in. Ms. Rosales sat beside her on the bus, gave her a juice box. Alex listened to the sounds of the other kids laughing and singing, but she was afraid to turn around. She was afraid to look at Meagan.

On that long bus ride back to school, in the long wait at the nurse’s office, all she had wanted was her mother, to be wrapped up in her arms and taken home, to be safe in their apartment, bundled in blankets on the couch, watching cartoons. By the time her mother arrived and finished her whispered conversation with the principal and the school counselor and Ms. Rosales, the halls had cleared and the school was empty. As Mira led her out to the parking lot through the echoing quiet, Alex wished she were still small enough to be carried.

When they got home, Alex showered as quickly as possible. She felt too vulnerable, too naked. What if he came back? What if something else came for her? What was to stop him, to stop any of them, from finding her? She’d seen them walk through walls. Where could she ever be safe again?

She left the shower running and slipped into the kitchen to burrow through their junk drawer. She could hear her mother murmuring on the phone in her bedroom.

“They think she may have been molested,” Mira said. She was crying. “That she’s acting out now because of it… I don’t know. I don’t know. There was that swim coach at the Y. He always seemed a little off and Alex didn’t like going to the pool. Maybe something happened?”

Alex had hated the pool because there was a Quiet kid with the left side of his skull caved in who liked to hang around the rusted podium where the diving board had once been.

She rooted around in the drawer until she found the little red pocketknife. She took it with her into the shower, setting it on the soap dish. She didn’t know if it would do any good against one of the Quiet Ones, but it made her feel a little better. She washed quickly, dried off, and changed into pajamas, then went out into the living room to curl up on the couch, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. Her mother must have heard the shower turn off, because she emerged from her bedroom a few moments later.

“Hey, baby,” she said softly. Her eyes were red. “Are you hungry?”

Alex kept her eyes on the TV screen. “Can we have real pizza?”

“I can make you pizza here. Don’t you want almond cheese?”

Alex said nothing. A few minutes later, she heard her mother on the phone, ordering from Amici’s. They ate watching TV, Mira pretending not to watch Alex.

Alex ate until her stomach hurt, then ate some more. It was too late for cartoons, and the shows had switched to the bright sitcom stories of teenage wizards and twins living in lofts, that everyone at school pretended they were too old for. Who are these people? Alex wondered. Who are these happy, frantic, funny people? How are they so unafraid?

Her mother nibbled on a piece of crust. Then at last she reached for the remote and hit mute.

“Baby,” she said. “Galaxy.”

“Alex.”

“Alex, can you talk to me? Can we talk about what happened?”

Alex felt a hard burble of laughter pushing at her throat, making it ache. If it got free, would she laugh or cry? Can we talk about what happened? What was she supposed to say? A ghost tried to rape me? Maybe he did rape me? She wasn’t sure when it counted, how far inside he had to be. But it didn’t matter, because no one would believe her anyway.

Alex clutched the pocketknife in her pajama pocket. Her heart was suddenly racing. What could she say? Help me. Protect me. Except no one could. No one could see the things hurting her.

They might not even be real. That was the worst of it. What if she’d imagined it all? She might just be crazy, and then what? She wanted to start screaming and never stop.

“Baby?” Her mother’s eyes were filling with tears again. “Whatever happened, it’s not your fault. You know that, right? You—”

“I can’t go back to school.”

“Galaxy—”

“Mama,” Alex said, turning to her mother, grabbing her wrist, needing her to listen. “Mama, don’t make me go.”

Mira tried to draw Alex into her arms. “Oh, my little star.”

Alex did scream then. She kicked at her mom to keep her away. “You’re a fucking loser,” she shrieked again and again, until her mother was the one crying and Alex locked herself in her room, sick with shame.

Mira let Alex stay home for the rest of the week. She’d found a therapist to take Alex in for a session, but Alex had nothing to say.

Mira pleaded with Alex, tried to bribe her with junk food and TV hours, then at last said, “You talk to the therapist or you go back to school.”

So the following Monday, Alex had gone back to school. No one spoke to her. They barely looked at her, and when she found spaghetti sauce smeared on her gym locker, she knew that Meagan had told.

Alex got the nickname Bloody Mary. She ate lunch by herself. She was never picked for lab partner or field-trip buddy and had to be foisted on people. In desperation, Alex made the mistake of trying to tell Meagan what had really happened, of trying to explain. She knew it was stupid, even as she’d reeled off the things she’d seen, the things she knew, as she’d watched Meagan shift farther away from her, her eyes going distant, twirling a long curl of glossy brown hair around her forefinger. But the more Meagan drew away, the longer her silence stretched, the more Alex talked, as if somewhere in all of those words was a secret code, a key that would get back the glimmer of what she’d lost.

In the end, all Meagan said was, “Okay, I have to go now.” Then she’d done what Alex knew she would and repeated it all.

So when Sarah McKinney begged Alex to meet her at Tres Muchachos to talk to the ghost of her grandmother, Alex had known it was probably a setup, one big joke. But she went anyway, still hoping, and found herself sitting in the food court, trying not to cry.

That’s when Mosh had looked over from the counter at Hot Dog on a Stick and taken pity on her. Mosh was a senior with dyed black hair and a thousand silver rings on her corpse-white hands. She knew all about mean girls, and she invited Alex to hang out with her friends in the parking lot of the mall.

Alex hadn’t been sure how to act, so she stood with her hands in her pockets until Mosh’s boyfriend offered her the bong they were passing around.

“She’s twelve years old!” Mosh had said.

“She’s stressed, I can see it. And she’s cool, right?”

Alex had seen older kids at her school take drags on joints and cigarettes. She and Meagan had pretended to smoke, so she at least knew you weren’t supposed to blow it out like a cigarette.

She clamped her lips on the bong and drew in the smoke, tried to hold it, coughed loud and hard.

Mosh and her friends broke into applause.

“See?” said Mosh’s boyfriend. “This kid is cool. Pretty too.”

“Don’t be a creep,” said Mosh. “She’s just a kid.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to fuck her. What’s your name anyway?” “Alex.”

Mosh’s boyfriend held his hand out; he had leather bracelets on both wrists, a smattering of dark hair on his forearms. He didn’t look like the boys in her grade.

She shook his hand and he gave her a wink. “Nice to meet you, Alex. I’m Len.”

Hours later, crawling into bed, feeling both sleepy and invincible, she realized she hadn’t seen a single dead anything since the smoke first hit her lungs.

Alex learned it was a balance. Alcohol worked, oxy, anything that unwound her focus. Valium was the best. It made everything soft and wrapped her in cotton. Speed was a huge mistake, Adderall especially, but Molly was the worst of all. The one time Alex made that mistake, she not only saw Grays, she could feel them, their sadness and their hunger oozing toward her from every direction. Nothing like the incident in the grove bathroom had happened again. None of the Quiet Ones had been able to touch her, but she didn’t know why. And they were still everywhere.

The beautiful thing was that around her new friends, her high friends, she could freak out and they didn’t care. They thought it was hilarious. She was the youngest kid who got to hang with them, their mascot, and they all laughed when she talked to things that weren’t there. Mosh called girls like Meagan “the blond bitches” and “Mutant Cutes.” She said they were all “sad little fishes drinking their own piss in the mainstream.” She said she’d kill for Alex’s black hair, and when Alex said the world was full of ghosts trying to get in, Mosh just shook her head and said, “You should write this stuff down, Alex. I swear.”

Alex got held back a year. She got suspended. She took cash from her mom’s purse, then little things from around the house, then finally her grandfather’s silver kiddush cup. Mira cried and shouted and set new house rules. Alex broke them all, felt guilty for making her mom sad, felt furious at feeling guilty. It all made her tired, so eventually she stopped coming home.

When Alex turned fifteen, her mother used the last of her savings to try to send her to a scared-straight rehab for troubled teens. By then Mosh was long gone, off at art school, and she didn’t hang with Alex or Len or any of the other kids when she came home for the holidays. Alex had run into her at the beauty supply, still buying black hair dye. Mosh asked how school was, and when Alex just laughed, Mosh had started to offer her an apology.

“What are you talking about?” Alex said. “You saved me.”

Mosh had looked so sad and ashamed that Alex practically ran out of the store. She’d gone home that night, wanting to see her mom and sleep in her own bed. But she woke up to a pair of beefy men shining a flashlight in her eyes and dragging her out of her room as her mom looked on and cried, saying, “I’m sorry, baby. I don’t know what else to do.” Apparently it was a big day for apologies.

They bound her wrists with zip ties, tossed her in the back of an SUV, barefoot in pajamas. They screamed at her about respect and breaking her mother’s heart and that she was going to Idaho to learn the right way to live and she had a lesson coming. But Len had shown Alex how to snap zip ties and it only took her two tries to get herself free, quietly open the back door, and vanish between two apartment buildings before the meatheads in the front seat realized she was gone. She walked seven miles to where Len was working at Baskin-Robbins. After his shift, they put Alex’s blistered feet in a tub of bubble gum ice cream and got high and had sex on the storeroom floor.

She worked at a TGI Fridays, then a Mexican restaurant that scraped the beans off the customers’ plates and reused them every night, then a laser tag place, and a Mail Boxes Etc. One afternoon when she was standing at the shipping desk, a pretty girl with chestnut curls came in with her mother and a stack of manila envelopes. It took Alex a solid minute to realize it was Meagan. Standing there in her maroon apron, watching Meagan chat with the other clerk, Alex had the sudden sensation that she was among the Quiet Ones, that she had died in that bathroom all of those years ago, and that people had been looking straight through her ever since. She’d just been too high to notice. Then Meagan glanced over her shoulder and the skittery, tense look in her eye had been enough for Alex to come back to her body. You see me, she thought. You wish you didn’t, but you do.

The years slid by. Sometimes Alex would put her head up, think about staying sober, think about a book or school or her mom. She’d fall into a fantasy of clean sheets and someone to tuck her in at night. Then she’d catch a glimpse of a biker, the skin scraped from the side of his face, the pulp beneath studded with gravel, or an old woman with her housecoat half open, standing unnoticed in front of the window of an electronics store, and she’d go back under. If she couldn’t see them, somehow they couldn’t see her.

She’d gone on that way until Hellie—golden Hellie, the girl Len had expected her to hate, maybe hoped she would, the girl she’d loved instead—until that night at Ground Zero when everything had gone so very wrong, until the morning she’d woken up to Dean Sandow in her hospital room.

He’d taken some papers out of his briefcase, an old essay she’d written when she still bothered going to school. She didn’t remember writing it, but the title read, A Day in My Life. A big red F was scrawled over the top, beside the words The assignment was not fiction.

Sandow had perched on a chair by the side of her bed and asked, “The things you describe in this essay, do you still see them?”

The night of the Aurelian ritual, when the Grays had flowed into the protective circle, taken on form, drawn by blood and longing, it had all come flooding back to her. She’d almost lost everything before she’d begun, but somehow she’d held on, and with a little help—like a summer job learning to brew the perfect cup of tea in Professor Belbalm’s office, for starters—she thought she could hold on a little longer. She just had to lay Tara Hutchins to rest.

By the time Alex finished in the Lethe library, the sun had set and her brain felt numb. She’d made the initial mistake of not limiting the retrieved books to English, and even after she’d reset the library, there were a baffling number of hard-to-parse texts on the shelf, academic papers and treatises that were simply too dense for her to pull apart. In a way, it made things easier. There were only so many rituals Alex could understand, and that narrowed her options. Then there were the rites that required a particular alignment of the planets or an equinox or a bright day in October, one that demanded the foreskin of a yonge, hende man of ful corage, and another that called for the less disturbing but equally hard to procure feathers of one hundred golden ospreys.

“The satisfaction of a job well done” was one of those phrases Alex’s mom liked. “Hard work tires the soul. Good works feed the soul!” Alex wasn’t sure that what she intended qualified as “good” work at all, but it was better than doing nothing. She copied the text—since her phone wouldn’t work in the annex, even to take a photo—then sealed up the library and trudged down the stairs to the parlor.

“Hey, Dawes,” Alex said awkwardly. No response. “Pamela.”

She was in her usual spot, huddled on the floor by the grand piano, a highlighter shoved between her teeth. Her laptop was set off to one side, and she was surrounded by stacks of books and rows of index cards with what Alex thought might be chapter titles for her dissertation.

“Hey,” she tried again, “I need you to go with me on an errand.”

Dawes shuffled From Eleusis to Empoli under Mimesis and the Chariot’s Wheel.

“I have work to do,” she mumbled around the highlighter.

“I need you to go with me to the morgue.”

Now Dawes glanced up, brow furrowed, blinking like someone newly exposed to sunlight. She always looked a little put out when you spoke to her, as if she’d been on the brink of the revelation that would finally help her finish the dissertation she’d been writing for six years.

She removed the highlighter from her mouth, wiping it unceremoniously on her nubbly sweatshirt, which might have been gray or navy, depending on the light. Her red hair was twisted into a bun, and Alex could see the pink halo of a zit forming on her chin.

“Why?” asked Dawes.

“Tara Hutchins.”

“Does Dean Sandow want you to go?”

“I need more information,” Alex said. “For my report.” That was a problem dear Dawes should be able to sympathize with.

“Then you should call Centurion.”

“Turner isn’t going to talk to me.”

Dawes ran a finger over the edge of one of her index cards. Heretical Hermeneutics: Josephus and the influence of the trickster on the Fool. Her nails were bitten down to the quick.

“Aren’t they charging her boyfriend?” asked Dawes, pulling at her fuzzy sleeve. “What does this have to do with us?”

“Probably nothing. But it was a Thursday night and I think we should make sure. It’s what we’re here for, right?”

Alex hadn’t actually said, Darlington would do it, but she might as well have.

Dawes shifted uncomfortably. “But if Detective Turner—” “Turner can go fuck himself,” Alex said. She was tired. She’d missed dinner. She’d wasted hours on Tara Hutchins and she was about to waste a few more.

Dawes worried her lip as if she was legitimately trying to visualize the mechanics. “I don’t know.”

“Do you have a car?”

“No. Darlington does. Did. Fuck.” For a moment, he was there in the room with them, gilded and capable. Dawes rose and unzipped her backpack, removed a set of keys. She stood in the fading light, weighing them in her palm. “I don’t know,” she said again.

She might have been referring to a hundred different things. I don’t know if this is a good idea. I don’t know if you can be trusted. I don’t know how to finish my dissertation. I don’t know if you robbed me of our golden, destined for glory, perfect boy.

“How are we going to get in?” Dawes asked.

“I’ll get us in.”

“And then what?”

Alex handed her the sheet of notes she’d transcribed in the library. “We have all this stuff, right?”

Dawes scanned the page. Her surprise was obvious when she said, “This isn’t bad.”

Don’t apologize. Just do the work.

Dawes gnawed on her lower lip. Her mouth was as colorless as the rest of her. Maybe her thesis was draining the life right out of her. “Couldn’t we call a car instead?”

“We may need to leave in a hurry.”

Dawes sighed and reached for her parka. “I’m driving.”