Ninth House

⁹ Winter

Alex parted with Dawes near the divinity school, at a sad horseshoe-shaped apartment building in the grad school ghetto. Dawes hadn’t wanted to leave the car in Alex’s care, but she had papers to grade that were already late, so Alex said she would return the Mercedes to Darlington’s home. She could tell Dawes wanted to refuse, papers be damned.

“Be careful and don’t… You shouldn’t…” But Dawes just trailed off, and Alex had the startling realization that Dawes had to defer to her in this situation. Dante served Virgil, but Oculus served them both. And they all served Lethe. Dawes nodded, kept nodding, nodded all the way out of the car and up the walkway to her apartment, as if she was affirming every step.

Darlington’s house was out in Westville, just a few miles from campus. This was the Connecticut Alex had dreamed of—farmhouses without farms, sturdy red-brick colonials with black doors and tidy white trim, a neighborhood full of wood-burning fireplaces, gently tended lawns, windows glowing golden in the night like passageways to a better life, kitchens where something good bubbled on the stove, breakfast tables scattered with crayons. No one drew their curtains; light and heat and good fortune spilled out into the dark as if these foolish people didn’t know what such bounty might attract, as if they’d left these shining doorways open for any hungry girl to walk through.

Alex hadn’t driven much since she’d left Los Angeles and it felt good to be back in a car, even one she was terrified of leaving a scratch on. Despite the map on her phone, she missed the turn into Darlington’s driveway and had to double back twice before she spotted the thick stone columns that marked the entry to Black Elm. The lamps that lined the drive were lit, bright halos that made the bare-branched trees look soft and friendly like a winter postcard. The bulky shape of the house came into view, and Alex slammed her foot down on the brakes.

A light glowed in the kitchen window, bright as a beacon, another up in the high tower—Darlington’s bedroom. She remembered his body curled against hers, the cloudy panes of the narrow window, the sea of black branches below, the dark woods separating Black Elm from the world outside.

Hurriedly, Alex turned off the headlights and the engine. If someone was here, if something was here, she didn’t want to scare it away.

Her boots on the gravel drive sounded impossibly loud but she wasn’t sneaking—no, she wasn’t sneaking; she was just walking up to the kitchen door. She had the keys in her hand. She was welcome here.

It could be his mom or dad, she told herself. She didn’t know much about Darlington’s family, but he had to have one. Another relative. Someone else Sandow had hired to look after the place when Dawes was busy.

All of those things were more likely, but… He’s here, her heart insisted, pounding so hard in her chest she had to pause at the door, make herself breathe more steadily. He’s here. The thought pulled her along like a child who had hold of her sleeve.

She peered in through the window, safe in the dark. The kitchen was all warm wood and patterned blue tiles—the tiles are Delft—a big brick hearth and copper pots gleaming from their hooks. Mail was stacked on the kitchen island, as if someone had been in the middle of sorting it. He’s here.

Alex thought of knocking, fumbled with the keys instead. The second one turned in the lock. She entered, gently shut the door behind her. The merry light of the kitchen was warm, welcoming, reflected back in flat copper pans, caught in the creamy green enamel of the stove that someone had installed in the fifties.

“Hello?” she said, her voice a breath.

The sound of the keys dropping onto the counter made an unexpectedly loud jangle. Alex stood guiltily in the middle of the kitchen, waiting for someone to chastise her, maybe even the house. But this was not the mansion on Orange with its hopeful creaks and disapproving sighs. Darlington had been the life of this place, and without him the house felt huge and empty, a shipwreck hull.

Ever since that night at Rosenfeld Hall, Alex would catch herself hoping that maybe this was all a test, one given to every Lethe House apprentice, and that Dawes and Sandow and Turner were all in on it. Darlington was in his third-floor bedroom hiding out right now. He’d heard the car in the driveway. He’d raced up the stairs and was huddling there, in the dark, waiting for her to leave. The murder could be part of it too. There was no dead girl. Tara Hutchins would come waltzing down the stairs herself when this was all over. They just had to be sure Alex could handle something serious on her own.

It was absurd. Even so, that voice persisted: He’s here.

Sandow had said he might still be alive, that they could bring him back. He’d said all they needed was a new moon, the right magic, and everything would be the way it had been before. But maybe Darlington had found his own way back. He could do anything. He could do this.

She drifted farther into the house. The lights from the driveway cast a yellowy dimness over the rooms—the butler’s pantry, with its white cupboards full of dishes and glasses; the big walk-in freezer, with its metal door so like the one at the morgue; the formal dining room, with its mirror-shine table like a dark lake in a silent glade; and then the vast living room, with its big black window looking out over the dim shapes of the garden, the humps of hedges and skeletal trees. There was another, smaller room off the main living room, full of big couches, a TV, gaming consoles. Len would have wet himself over the size of the screen. It was very much a room he would have loved, maybe the only thing he and Darlington had in common. Well, not the only thing.

Most of the rooms on the second floor were closed up. “This was where I ran out of money,” he’d told her, his arm slung across her shoulders, as she’d tried to move him along. The house was like a body that had cut off circulation to all but the most vital parts of itself in order to survive. An old ballroom had been turned into a kind of makeshift gym. A speed bag hung from the ceiling on a rack. Big metal weights, medicine balls, and fencing foils were stacked on the wall, and heavy machines loomed against the windows like bulky insects.

She followed the stairs to the top floor and wound her way down the hall. The door to Darlington’s room was open.

He’s here. Again, the certainty came at her, but worse this time. He’d left the light on for her. He wanted her to find him. He would be sitting in his bed, long legs crossed, bent over a book, dark hair falling over his forehead. He would look up, cross his arms. It’s about time.

She wanted to run toward that square of light, but she forced herself to take measured steps, a bride approaching an altar, her certainty draining away, the refrain of He’s here shifting from one step to the next until she realized she was praying: Be here, be here, be here.

The room was empty. It was small compared to the lodgings at Il Bastone, a strange round room that had clearly never been meant to be a bedroom and somehow reminded her of a monk’s chamber. It looked exactly as she had last seen it: the desk pushed against one curved wall, a yellowing newspaper clipping of an old roller coaster taped above it, as if it had been forgotten there; a mini-fridge—because of course Darlington wouldn’t want to stop reading or working to go downstairs for sustenance; a high-backed chair placed by the window for reading. There were no bookshelves, only stacks and stacks of books piled at varying heights, as if he had been in the process of walling himself in with colored bricks. The desk lamp cast a circle of light over an open book: Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism.

Dawes. Dawes had come to see to the house, to sort the mail, to take the car out. Dawes had come to this room to study. To be closer to him. Maybe to wait for him. She’d been called away suddenly, left the lights on, assumed she’d be back that evening to take care of it. But Alex had been the one to return the car. It was that simple.

Darlington was not in Spain. He was not home. He was never coming home. And it was all Alex’s fault.

A white shape cut through the dark from the corner of her vision. She leapt backward, knocking over a pile of books, and swore. But it was just Cosmo, Darlington’s cat.

He prowled the edge of the desk, nudging up against the warmth of the desk lamp. Alex always thought of him as Bowie Cat because of his marked-up eye and streaky white fur that looked like one of the wigs Bowie had worn in Labyrinth. He was stupid affectionate—all you had to do was hold your hand out and he would nuzzle your knuckles.

Alex sat down on the edge of Darlington’s narrow bed. It was neatly made, probably by Dawes. Had she sat here too? Slept here?

Alex remembered Darlington’s delicate feet, his scream as he’d vanished. She held her hand down, beckoning to the cat. “Hey, Cosmo.”

He stared at her with his mismatched eyes, the pupil of the left like an inkblot.

“Come on, Cosmo. I didn’t mean for it to happen. Not really.”

Cosmo padded across the room. As soon as his small sleek head touched Alex’s fingers, she began to cry.

Alex slept in Darlington’s bed and dreamed that he was curled behind her on the narrow mattress.

He pulled her close, his fingers digging into her abdomen, and she could feel claws at their tips. He whispered in her ear, “I will serve you ’til the end of days.”

“And love me,” she said with a laugh, bold in the dream, unafraid.

But all he said was, “It is not the same.”

Alex woke with a start, flopped over, gazed at the sharp pitch of the roof, the trees beyond the window striping the ceiling in shadow and hard winter sun. She’d been scared to try fiddling with the thermostat, so she’d bundled herself in three of Darlington’s sweaters and an ugly brown hat she’d found on top of his dresser but that she’d never seen him wear. She remade the bed, then headed downstairs to fill Cosmo’s water dish and eat some fancy nuts-and-twigs dry cereal from a box in the pantry.

Alex took her laptop from her bag and went to the dusty sunroom that ran the length of the first floor. She gazed out at the backyard. The slope of the hill led to a hedge maze overgrown with brambles, and she could see some kind of statue or fountain at its center. She wasn’t sure where the grounds left off, and she wondered just how much of this particular hill the Arlington family owned.

It took her nearly two hours to write up her report on the Tara Hutchins murder. Cause of death. Time of death. The behavior of the Grays at the Skull and Bones prognostication. She’d hesitated over that last, but Lethe had brought her here for what she could see and there was no reason for her to lie about it. She mentioned the information she’d gleaned from the coroner and from Turner in his capacity as Centurion, noting Tripp’s name coming up and also Turner’s belief that the Bonesman was not involved. She hoped Turner wouldn’t mention her visit to the morgue.

At the end of the incident report, there was a section titled “Findings.” Alex thought for a long time, her hand idly stroking Cosmo’s fur as he purred beside her on the old wicker love seat. In the end, she said nothing about the strange feeling she’d had at the crime scene or that she suspected Tara and Lance were probably dealing to other members of the other societies. Centurion will update Dante on his findings, but at this time all evidence suggests this was a crime committed by Tara’s boyfriend while under the influence of powerful hallucinogenics and that there is no connection to Lethe or the Houses of the Veil. She read through twice more for punctuation and to try to make her answers sound as Darlingtonish as possible, then she sent the report to Sandow with Dawes cc’d.

Cosmo meowed plaintively as Alex slipped out the kitchen door, but it felt good to leave the house behind her, breathe the icy air. The sky was bright blue, scrubbed clean of clouds, and the gravel of the drive glittered. She put the Mercedes in the garage, then walked to the end of the driveway and called a car. She could return the keys to Dawes later.

If her roommates asked where she had been, she would just say she’d spent the night at Darlington’s. Family emergency. The excuse had long since worn thin, but there would be fewer late nights and unexplained absences from now on. She’d done right by Tara. Lance would be punished and Alex’s conscience was off the hook, for this at least. Tonight she’d nurse a beer while her roommate got shitfaced on peppermint schnapps via ice luge at Omega Meltdown, and tomorrow she’d spend all day catching up on her reading.

She had the driver drop her in front of the fancy mini-mart on Elm. It wasn’t until she was already inside the store that she realized she was still wearing Darlington’s hat. She slid it off her head, then jammed it back on. It was cold. She didn’t need to be sentimental about a hat.

Alex filled her basket with Chex Mix, Twizzlers, sour gummy worms. She shouldn’t be spending so much money, but she craved the comfort of junk food. She reached into the drinks case, rooting back for a chocolate milk with a better expiration date, and felt something brush her hand—fingertips caressing her knuckles.

Alex yanked her arm back, cradling her hand to her chest as if it had been burned, and slammed the case door closed with a rattle, heart pounding. She stepped back from the case, waiting for something to come crashing through, but nothing happened. She looked around, embarrassed.

A guy sporting little round glasses and a navy Yale sweatshirt glanced at her. She bent to pick up her shopping basket, using the chance to shut her eyes and take a deep breath. Imagination. Sleep deprivation. Just general jumpiness. Hell, maybe even a rat. But she’d pop in at the Hutch. It was right across the street. She could slip behind the wards to gather her thoughts in a Gray-less environment.

She grabbed her basket and stood. The guy with the little glasses had come up next to her and was standing far too close. She couldn’t see his eyes, just the light reflecting off the lenses. He smiled and something moved at the corner of his mouth. Alex realized it was the waving black feeler of an insect. A beetle crawled from the pocket of his cheek as if he’d been keeping it there like chewing tobacco. It dropped from his lips. Alex leapt back, stifling a scream.

Too slow. The thing in the blue sweatshirt seized the back of her neck and slammed her head into the door of the refrigerator case. The glass shattered. Alex felt the shards slice into her skin, warm blood trickling down her cheeks. He yanked her back, threw her to the ground. You can’t touch me. It isn’t allowed. Still, after all these years and all these horrors, that stupid, childish response.

She staggered away. The woman behind the register was shouting, her husband emerging from the back room with wide eyes. The man in glasses advanced. Not a man. A Gray. But what had drawn him and helped him cross over? And why didn’t he seem like any Gray she’d ever seen? His skin no longer looked human. It had a sheer, glasslike quality through which she could see his veins and the shadows of his bones. He stank of the Veil.

Alex dug in her pockets, but she hadn’t replenished her supplies of graveyard dirt. She almost always had some on her—just in case.

“Take courage!” she cried. “No one is immortal!” The death words she’d repeated to herself every day since Darlington had taught them to her.

But the thing showed no sign of distress or distraction.

The shop owners were yelling; one of them had a phone in his hand. Yes, call the police. But they were screaming at her, not at him. They couldn’t see him. All they saw was a girl smashing their drinks case and tearing up their store.

Alex launched to her feet. She had to get to the Hutch. She slammed through the door and out onto the sidewalk.

“Hey!” cried a girl with a green coat as Alex smacked into her. The store owner followed, bellowing for someone to stop her.

Alex glanced back. The thing with glasses glided around the owner and then seemed to leap over the crowd. His hand latched on to Alex’s throat. She stumbled off the lip of the curb, into the street. Horns blared. She heard the screech of tires. She couldn’t breathe.

She saw Jonas Reed on the corner, staring. He was in her English section. She remembered Meagan’s startled face, the surprise giving way to disgust. She could hear Ms. Rosales gasp, Alex! Sweetheart! She was going to get choked out in the middle of the street and no one could see it, no one could stop it.

“Take courage,” she tried to say, but only a rasp emerged. Alex looked around desperately, eyes watering, face suffused with blood. They can’t get to you now, Darlington had promised. She’d known it wasn’t true, but she’d let herself believe that she could be protected, because it had made everything bearable.

Her hands scrabbled against the thing’s skin; it was hard and slippery as glass. She saw something burble up from the clear flesh of its throat, cloudy, dark red. His lips parted. He released her neck and, before she could stop herself, she inhaled sharply, just as he blew a stream of red dust into her face. Pain exploded through her chest in sharp bursts as the dust entered her lungs. She tried to cough, but the thing sat with his knees pressing down on her shoulders as she struggled to buck free.

People were yelling. She heard a siren wail, but she knew the ambulance would be too late. She would die here in Darlington’s stupid hat. Maybe he’d be waiting on the other side of the Veil with Hellie. And Len. And all of the others.

The world fluttered black—and then suddenly she could move. The weight vanished from her shoulders. She released a grunt and shoved to her feet, clutching her chest, trying to find her breath. Where had the monster gone? She looked up.

High above the intersection, the thing with the glasses was grappling with something. No, someone. A Gray. The Bridegroom, New Haven’s favorite murder-suicide, with his fancy suit and silent-movie-star hair. The thing in glasses had hold of his lapels and he flickered slightly in the sun as they careened through the air, slammed into a streetlight that sparked to life and then dimmed, passed through the walls of a building and back out. The whole street seemed to shake as if rumbling with thunder, but Alex knew only she could hear it.

The squeal of brakes cut through the noise. A black-and-white was pulling up on York, followed by an ambulance. Alex took a last look at the Bridegroom’s face, his mouth pulled back in a grimace as he launched his fist at his opponent. She bolted across the intersection.

The pain in her chest continued to unfurl in popping bursts like fireworks. Something had happened to her, something bad, and she didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to stay conscious. She only knew she had to get to the Hutch, upstairs to the safety of Lethe’s hidden rooms. There might be other Grays coming, other monsters. What could they do? What couldn’t they do? She needed to get behind the wards.

She glanced over her shoulder and saw an EMT running toward her. She leapt up on the sidewalk around the corner and then into the alley. He was right behind, but he couldn’t protect her. She would die in his care. She knew this. She dodged left, toward the doorway, out of view.

“It’s me!” she cried out to the Hutch, praying it would know her. The door blew open and the steps rolled toward her, pulling her inside.

She tried to take the stairs on her feet but slid to her knees. Usually the smell of the hall was comforting, a winter smell of burning wood, cranberries cooking slowly, mulled wine. Now it made her stomach churn. It’s the uncanny, she realized. The garbage stink of the alley outside had at least been real. These false smells of comfort were too much. Her system couldn’t handle any more magic. She fastened one hand around the iron railing, the other braced against the lip of the stone step, and pushed herself up. She saw spots on the concrete, black stars blooming in lichen clusters on the stairs. Her blood, dripping from her lips.

Panic reeled through her. She was on the floor in that public bathroom. The broken monarch flapped its one able wing.

Get up. Blood can draw them. Darlington’s voice in her head. Grays can cross the line if they want something badly enough. What if the wards didn’t hold? What if they weren’t built to keep something like that monster out? The Bridegroom had seemed to be winning. And if he won? Who said he’d be any gentler than the thing in glasses? He hadn’t looked gentle at all.

She tapped a message into her phone to Dawes. SOS. 911. There was probably some code she was supposed to use for bleeding from the mouth, but Dawes would just have to make do.

If Dawes was at Il Bastone and not here at the Hutch, Alex was going to die on these stairs. She could see the grad student clearly, sitting in the parlor of the house on Orange, those index cards she used to organize chapters spread out like the tarot before her, all of them reading disaster, failure. The Queen of Pointlessness, a girl with a cleaver over her head. The Debtor, a boy crushed beneath a rock. The Student, Dawes herself in a cage of her own making. All while Alex bled to death a mile away.

Alex dragged herself up another step. She had to get behind the doors. The safe houses were a matryoshka doll of safety. The Hutch. Where small animals went to ground.

A wave of nausea rolled through her. She retched and a gout of black bile poured from her mouth. It was moving on the stairs. She saw the wet, shiny backs of beetles. Scarabs. Bits of iridescent carapace glinting in whatever blood and sludge had erupted from her. She shoved past the mess she’d made, retching again, even as her mind tried to make sense of what was happening to her. What had that thing wanted from her? Had someone sent it after her? If she died, her petty heart wanted to know who to haunt. The stairwell was fading in and out now. She was not going to make it.

She heard a metallic clang and a moment later understood it was the door banging open somewhere above her. Alex tried to cry out for help, but the sound from her mouth was a small, wet whimper. The smack of Dawes’s Tevas echoed down the stairs—a pause, then her footsteps, faster now, punctuated by “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

Alex felt a solid arm beneath her, yanking her upward. “Jesus. Jesus. What happened?”

“Help me, Pammie.” Dawes flinched. Why had Alex used that name? Only Darlington called Dawes that.

Her legs felt heavy as Dawes hauled her up the stairs. Her skin itched as if something was crawling beneath it. She thought of the beetles pouring from her mouth and retched again.

“Don’t vomit on me,” said Dawes. “If you vomit, I’ll vomit.”

Alex thought of Hellie holding her hair back. They’d gotten drunk on Jäger and then sat on the bathroom floor at Ground Zero, laughing and puking and brushing their teeth, then doing it all over again.

“Move your legs, Alex,” Hellie said. She was pushing Alex’s knees aside, slumping down next to her in the big basket chair. She smelled like coconut and her body was warm, always warm, like the sun loved her, like it wanted to cling to her golden skin as long as possible.

“Move your stupid legs, Alex!” Not Hellie. Dawes, shouting in her ear.

“I am.”

“You’re not. Come on, give me three more steps.”

Alex wanted to warn Dawes that the thing was coming. The death words hadn’t affected it; maybe the wards wouldn’t stop it either. She opened her mouth and vomited again.

Dawes heaved in response. Then they were on the landing, through the door, toppling forward. Alex found herself falling. She was on the floor of the Hutch, face pressed to the threadbare carpet.

“What happened?” Dawes asked, but Alex was too tired to reply. She felt herself rolled onto her back, a sharp slap across her face. “Tell me what happened, Alex, or I can’t fix it.”

Alex made herself look at Dawes. She didn’t want to. She wanted to go back to the basket chair, Hellie like a glowing slice of sun beside her.

“A Gray, I don’t know. Like glass. I could see through him.”

“Shit, that’s a gluma.”

Alex needed her flash cards. The word was there, though, somewhere in her memory. A gluma was a husk, a spirit raised from the recently dead to pass through the world, go-betweens who could travel across the Veil. They were messengers. For Book and Snake.

“There was red smoke. I breathed it in.” She heaved again.

“Corpse beetles. They’ll eat you from the inside out.”

Of course. Of course they would. Because magic was never good or kind.

She heard bustling and then felt a cup pressed to her lips. “Drink,” said Dawes. “It’s going to hurt like hell and blister the skin right off your throat, but I can heal that.”

Dawes was tipping Alex’s chin up, forcing her mouth open. Alex’s throat caught fire. She had a vision of prairies lit by blue flame. The pain seared through her and she grabbed Dawes by the hand.

“Jesus, Alex, why are you smiling?”

The gluma. The husk. Someone had sent something after her and there could only be one reason why: Alex was onto something. They knew she had gone to see Tara’s body. But who? Book and Snake? Skull and Bones? Whoever it was had no reason to think she would stop with a visit to the morgue. They didn’t know the choice she’d made, that the report had already been filed. Alex had been right. There was something wrong with Tara’s death, some connection to the societies, the Houses of the Veil. But that wasn’t why she was smiling.

“They tried to kill me, Hellie,” she rasped as she slid into the dark. That means I get to try to kill them.