Ninth House

¹¹ Winter

Alex woke abruptly. She was asleep and then she was conscious and terrified, batting at the hands she could still feel around her neck.

Her throat felt raw and red. She was on the couch of the common room at the Hutch. Night had fallen and the lights burned low in their sconces, casting yellow half-moons against framed paintings of rolling meadows dotted with sheep and shepherds playing their pipes.

“Here,” Dawes said, perching on the cushions, holding a glass full of what looked like eggnog with a little green food coloring in it up to Alex’s lips. A musty smell emanated from the rim. Alex recoiled and opened her mouth to ask what it was, but all that emerged was a faint rasp that made her throat feel like someone had touched a lit match to it.

“I’ll tell you after you drink it,” said Dawes. “Trust me.”

Alex shook her head. The last thing Dawes had given her to drink had set her insides on fire.

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” Dawes asked.

Yes, but right now she wished she were dead.

Alex pinched her nose, took the glass, and gulped. The taste was stale and powdery, the liquid so thick it almost choked her going down, but as soon as it touched her throat, the burning eased, leaving only a faint ache.

She handed the glass back and wiped a hand over her mouth, shuddering slightly at the aftertaste.

“Goat’s milk and mustard seed thickened with spider eggs,” Dawes said.

Alex pressed her knuckles to her lips and tried not to gag. “Trust you?”

Her throat was sore, but she could at least talk and the raging fire inside her seemed to have banked.

“I had to use brimstone to burn the beetles out of you. I’d say the cure was worse than the disease, but given that those things eat you from the inside out, I think that would be lying. They were used to clean corpses in ancient times, to empty bodies so that they could be stuffed with fragrant herbs.”

That crawling sensation returned, and Alex had to clench her fists to keep from scratching at her skin. “What did they do to me? Will there be lasting damage?”

Dawes rubbed her thumb against the glass. “I honestly don’t know.”

Alex pushed up from the pillows that Dawes had placed beneath her neck. She likes taking care of people, Alex realized. Was that why she and Dawes had never gotten along? Because Alex had refused her mothering? “How did you know what to do?”

Dawes frowned. “It’s my job to know.”

And Dawes was good at her job. Simple as that. She seemed calm enough, but if she gripped that glass any harder it was going to break in her hands. Her fingers were stained with rainbow splotches that Alex realized were the pale remnants of highlighter.

“Did anything try to… get in?” Alex wasn’t even sure what that would look like.

“I’m not sure. The chimes have been ringing off and on. Something’s been brushing up against the wards.”

Alex rose and felt the room spin. She stumbled and made herself take Dawes’s solicitous hand.

Alex wasn’t sure what she expected to see waiting outside. The gluma’s face looking back at her, light glinting off its glasses? Something worse? She touched her fingers to her throat and yanked the curtain back.

The street to the left was dark and empty. She must have slept through the entire day. In the alley she saw the Bridegroom, pacing back and forth in the yellow light of the streetlamp.

“What is it?” asked Dawes nervously. “What’s there?” She sounded almost breathless.

“Just a Gray. The Bridegroom.” He looked up at the window. Alex drew the curtain closed.

“You can really see him? I’ve only seen photos.”

Alex nodded. “He’s very tousled. Very mournful. Very… Morrissey.”

Dawes surprised her by singing, “And I wonder, does anybody feel the same way I do?”

“And is evil,” sang Alex quietly, “just something you are or something you do?” She’d meant it as a joke, a way to solidify the bare threads of camaraderie forming between them, but in the eerie lamplit quiet, the words sounded menacing. “I think he saved my life. He attacked that thing.”

“The gluma?”

“Yeah.” Alex shuddered. It had been so strong and seemingly immune to everything she’d thrown at it—which admittedly hadn’t been much. “I need to know how to stop one of those things.”

“I’ll pull whatever we have on them,” said Dawes. “But you shouldn’t form ties with Grays, especially a violent one.”

“We don’t have a tie.”

“Then why did he help you?”

“Maybe he wasn’t helping me. Maybe he was trying to hurt the gluma. I didn’t exactly have time to ask.”

“I’m just saying—”

“I know what you’re saying,” said Alex, then flinched when a low gong sounded. Someone had entered the stairwell.

“It’s okay,” Dawes said. “It’s only Dean Sandow.”

“You called Sandow?”

“Of course,” Dawes said, straightening. “You were nearly killed.”

“I’m fine.”

“Because a Gray interceded on your behalf.”

“Don’t tell him that,” Alex snarled before she could tame her response.

Dawes drew back. “He needs to know what happened!”

“Don’t tell him anything.” Alex wasn’t sure why she was so afraid of Sandow knowing what had gone down. Maybe it was just old habit. You didn’t talk. You didn’t tell. That was how CPS got called. That was how you got locked up “for observation.”

Dawes planted her hands on her hips. “What would I tell him? I don’t know what happened to you any more than I know what happened to Darlington. I’m just here to clean up your messes.”

“Isn’t that what they pay you for?” Empty the fridge. A little light dusting. Save my worthless life. Damn it. “Dawes—”

But Sandow was already pushing open the door. He startled when he saw Alex by the window. “You’re up. Dawes said you were unconscious.”

Alex wondered what else Dawes had said. “She took good care of me.”

“Excellent,” Sandow said, draping his overcoat on a bronze post shaped like a jackal’s head and striding across the room to where the old-fashioned samovar sat in a corner. Sandow had been a Lethe delegate in the late seventies and a very good one, according to Darlington. Brilliant on theory, but just as good on fieldwork. He fashioned some original rites that are still on the books today. Sandow had returned to campus as an associate professor ten years later, and since then he had served as Lethe’s liaison with the university president. Excluding a few alums who had been taps themselves, the rest of the administration and faculty knew nothing about Lethe or the societies’ true activities.

Alex could imagine Sandow happily working away in the Lethe library or fastidiously marking a chalk circle. He was a small, tidy man with the trim build of a jogger and silvery brows that steepled at the center of his forehead, giving him a permanent look of concern. She’d seen little of him since she’d begun her education at Lethe. He’d sent her his contact information and an “open invitation to office hours” that she’d never taken him up on. Sometime in late September, he’d come to a long, awkward lunch at Il Bastone, during which he and Darlington discussed a new book on women and manufacturing in New Haven and Alex hid her white asparagus beneath a bread roll.

And, of course, he was the one Alex texted the night Darlington disappeared.

Sandow had come to Il Bastone that night with his old yellow Labrador, Honey. He made a fire in the parlor grate and asked Dawes for tea and brandy as Alex tried to explain—not what had happened. She didn’t know what had happened. She only knew what she’d seen. She was shaking by the time she finished, remembering the cold of the basement, the crackling smell of electricity on the air.

Sandow had patted her knee gently and set a steaming mug before her.

“Drink,” he’d said. “It will help. That must have been very frightening.” The words took Alex by surprise. Her life had been a series of terrifying things she’d been expected to take in stride. “It sounds like portal magic. Someone playing with something they shouldn’t.”

“But he said it wasn’t a portal. He said—”

“He was scared, Alex,” Sandow had said gently. “Probably panicked. For Darlington to disappear that way, a portal must have been involved. It may have been a kind of anomaly created by the nexus beneath Rosenfeld Hall.” Dawes had drifted into the room, hovering behind the couch with her arms crossed tight, barely holding herself together while Sandow murmured about retrieval spells and the likelihood that Darlington simply had to be pulled back from wherever he’d gone. “We’ll need a new-moon night,” Sandow had said. “And then we’ll just call our boy home.”

Dawes burst out crying.

“Is he… where is he?” Alex had asked. Is he suffering? Is he scared?

“I don’t know,” said the dean. “That will be part of the challenge for us.” He’d sounded almost eager, as if presented with a delicious problem. “A portal of the size and shape you described, stable enough to be maintained without practitioners present, can’t have gone anywhere interesting. Darlington was probably transported to a pocket realm. It’s like dropping a coin between the cushions of a couch.”

“But he’s trapped there—”

“He probably isn’t even aware he’s gone. Darlington will come back to us thinking he was just in Rosenfeld and furious that he’ll have to repeat the semester.”

There had been emails and text chains since then—Sandow’s updates on who and what would be needed for the rite, the creation of the Spain cover story, a flurry of apologetic and frustrated messages when the January new moon had to be scrapped due to Michelle Alameddine’s schedule, followed by profound silence from Dawes. But that night, the night when Darlington had gone from the world, was the last time they’d all been in a room together. Sandow was the fire alarm they weren’t supposed to pull without good cause. Alex was tempted to think of him as the nuclear option, but really, he was just a parent. A proper adult.

Now the dean stirred sugar into his cup. “I appreciate your quick thinking, Pamela. We can’t afford another…” He trailed off. “We just need to see the year out and…” Again he let his sentence dissolve as if he’d dunked it into his tea.

“And what?” Alex nudged. Because she really did wonder what was supposed to come next. Dawes was standing with her hands clasped as if about to sing a choir solo, waiting, waiting.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Sandow at last. He sank down into a wing-backed chair. “We’re ready for the new moon. I’ll pick up Michelle Alameddine from the train station Wednesday night and bring her directly to Black Elm. I have every hope that the rite will work and that Darlington will be back with us soon. But we also need to be prepared for the alternative.”

“The alternative?” said Dawes. She sat down abruptly. Her face was tight, angry even.

Alex couldn’t pretend to understand the mechanics of what Dean Sandow had planned, but she would have bet Dawes did. It’s my job. She was there to clean up the messes that invariably got made, and this was a big one.

“Michelle is at Columbia, working on her master’s. She’ll be with us for the new-moon rite. Alex, I think she could be persuaded to come up on the weekends and continue your education and training. That will reassure the alumni if we have to”—he brushed his finger over his graying mustache—“bring them up-to-date.”

“What about his parents? His family?”

“The Arlingtons are estranged from their son. As far as anyone knows, Daniel Arlington is studying the nexus beneath San Juan de Gaztelugatxe. If the rite fails—”

“If the rite fails, we try again,” said Dawes.

“Well, of course,” said Sandow, and he seemed genuinely distressed. “Of course. We try every avenue. We exhaust every possibility. Pamela, I’m not trying to be callous.” He held out a hand to her. “Darlington would do everything he could to bring one of us home. We’ll do the same.”

But if the rite failed, if Darlington couldn’t be brought back, then what? Would Sandow tell the alumni the truth? Or would he and the board invent a tale that didn’t sound like We sent two college kids into situations we knew they couldn’t handle and one died.

Either way, Alex didn’t like that it would be so easy for Lethe to close Darlington’s chapter. He had been a lot of things, most of them annoying, but he had loved his job and Lethe House. It was cruel that Lethe couldn’t love him back. This was the first time Sandow had even broached the possibility that Darlington wouldn’t return, that he couldn’t just be yanked from between the interdimensional cushions of a cosmic couch. Was it because they were only days away from trying?

Sandow picked up the empty glass coated in film from the vile green milk drink.

“Axtapta? You were attacked by a gluma?”

His voice had been smooth, diplomatic, pensive, while he discussed Darlington—his dean voice. But at the thought of a gluma, a deep crease appeared between his worried brows.

“That’s right,” Alex said solidly, though she still wasn’t entirely sure what that implied. Then she made the leap. “I think someone sent it after me. Maybe Book and Snake.”

Sandow huffed a disbelieving laugh. “Why would they ever have cause to do something like that?”

“Because Tara Hutchins is dead and I think they had something to do with it.”

Sandow blinked rapidly, as if his eyes were defective camera lenses. “Detective Turner says—”

“This is what I think, not Turner.”

Sandow’s gaze snapped to hers, and she knew he was surprised by the surety in her voice. But she couldn’t afford the deferential dance she knew he would prefer.

“You’ve been investigating?”

“I have.”

“That isn’t safe, Alex. You aren’t equipped to—”

“Someone had to.” And Darlington was far away.

“Do you have evidence a society was involved?”

“Book and Snake raises the dead. They use glumas—”

“Glumae,” murmured Dawes.

“Glumae as messengers to talk to the dead. One of them attacked me. Seems like a solid theory.”

“Alex,” he said gently, a faint scold in his voice. “We knew when you came here that someone of your abilities had never been in such a position. It’s possible, likely even, that simply being here has disrupted systems we can only guess at.”

“You’re saying I triggered the gluma attack?” She hated the defensive edge in her voice.

“I’m not saying you did anything,” said Sandow mildly. “I’m just saying by dint of what you are, you may have brought this on.”

Dawes crossed her arms. “That sounds a lot like She was asking for it, Dean Sandow.”

Alex couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. Pamela Dawes disagreeing with Dean Sandow. On her behalf.

Sandow set his mug down with a clatter. “That’s certainly not what I meant to imply.”

“But that is the implication,” said Dawes in a voice Alex had never heard her use before, clear and incisive. Her eyes were cold. “Alex has indicated her own concerns regarding her assault, and instead of hearing her out, you’ve chosen to question her credibility. You may not have meant to imply anything, but the intent and the effect were to silence her, so it’s hard not to think this stinks of victim blaming. It’s the semantic equivalent of saying her skirt was too short.”

Alex tried not to smile. Dawes had leaned back in her chair, legs and arms crossed, head cocked to one side, somehow both angry and at ease. Sandow’s face was flushed. He put his palms up as if trying to gentle a beast—easy now. “Pamela, I hope you know me better than that.” Alex had never seen him so flustered. So Dawes knew how to speak the dean’s language, the threats that counted.

“Someone sent that monster after me,” Alex said, pushing the advantage Dawes had given her. “And it isn’t a coincidence that a girl died just days before. Tara’s phone log showed calls to Tripp Helmuth. That points to Bones. A gluma just tried to murder me in the street. That might point to Book and Snake. Tara was killed on a Thursday night, a ritual night, and if you read my report, you know that at the same time someone was carving her up, I saw two formerly docile Grays completely lose their shit.” Sandow’s brows pinched further together, as if such language pained him. “You—Lethe—brought me here for a reason, and I’m telling you that a girl is dead and there’s a connection to the societies. For a minute just pretend I’m Darlington and try to take me seriously.”

Sandow studied her, and Alex wondered if maybe she’d gotten through to him. Then he shifted his gaze to Dawes. “Pamela, I believe we have a camera facing the intersection at Elm and York.”

Alex saw the way Dawes’s shoulders softened, her head lowering, as if Sandow had spoken the words to break whatever spell she had been under. She rose and retrieved her laptop. Alex felt something twist in her gut.

Dawes struck a few keys on her computer, and the mirror on the far wall brightened. A moment later, the screen showed Elm Street teeming with cars and people, a sea of gray and darker gray. The time stamp in the corner read 11:50 a.m. Alex searched the tide of people moving along the sidewalk, but everyone just looked like a bulky lump in a coat. Then a flash of movement outside the Good Nature Market caught her eye. She watched the crowd part and ripple, instinctively moving away from violence. There she was, fleeing the store, the owner shouting at her, a girl with black hair in a woolly hat—Darlington’s hat. She must have lost it in the fight.

The girl on the screen stepped off the sidewalk and into traffic, all of it in cold silence, a pantomime.

Alex remembered the gluma’s furious grip as it had dragged her into the street, but there was no gluma on the screen. Instead, she saw the dark-haired girl throw herself into the flow of cars, stumbling and wild, screaming and clawing at nothing. Then she was on her back. Alex’s memory said the gluma was on top of her, but the screen showed nothing at all, just her lying at the center of the street as cars swerved to avoid her, her back bowing and flexing, her mouth wide, her hands clawing at nothing, convulsing.

A moment later she was on her feet, lurching toward the alley that ran behind the Hutch. She saw herself look back once, eyes wide, face streaked with blood, mouth open in horror, the corners pulled down like the corners of a sail pulled taut. I was seeing the Bridegroom fight the gluma. Or was I? It was the face of a madwoman. She was back on that bathroom floor, shorts around her ankles, screaming and alone.

“Alex, everything you say may be true. But there is no proof of what attacked you, let alone who might be responsible. If I show this to the alumni… It’s essential that they see you as stable, reliable, particularly given… well, given how precarious things are now.”

Given that Darlington had disappeared. Given that it had happened when she was supposed to be watching his back.

“Isn’t this why we’re here?” asked Alex, a last try, an appeal on behalf of something bigger than herself, something Sandow might value more. “To protect girls like Tara? To make sure the societies don’t just… do whatever they want?”

“Absolutely. But do you really believe you’re equipped to investigate a homicide by yourself? There’s a reason I told you to stand down. I’m trying to keep things as normal as they can be in a world where monsters live. The police are investigating the Hutchins murder. The girl’s boyfriend has been arrested and is awaiting trial. Do you honestly think that if Turner found a connection to one of the societies, he wouldn’t pursue it?”

“No,” admitted Alex. “I know he would.” Whatever she thought of him, Turner was a bloodhound with a conscience that never took the day off.

“If he does, we will absolutely be there to lend him support, and I promise to pass along everything you’ve learned. But right now I need you to focus on getting well and staying safe. Dawes and I will both put our minds to what might have triggered the gluma attack and if there may be other disruptions caused by your ability. Your presence here on campus is an unknown factor, a disruptor. The behavior of those Grays during the prognostication, Darlington’s disappearance, a violent death near campus, now a gluma—”

“Wait,” said Alex. “You think my being here had something to do with Tara getting killed?”

“Of course not,” said the dean. “But I don’t want to give the Lethe board reasons to start drawing those kinds of conclusions. And I cannot afford to let you play amateur detective in a matter this serious. Our funding is up for review this year. We exist by the university’s good graces and we keep our lights on through the continued support of the other societies. We need their good will.” He released a long breath. “Alex, I don’t mean to sound cold. The Hutchins murder is gruesome and tragic and I am absolutely going to monitor this situation, but we have to tread cautiously. The end of last semester… What happened at Rosenfeld changed everything. Pamela, do you want to see Lethe’s funding pulled?”

“No,” Dawes whispered. If she spoke Sandow’s language, Sandow was also fluent in Dawes. Lethe was her hiding place, her bunker. There was no way she was going to risk losing it.

But Alex was only half paying attention to the dean’s speech. She was staring at the old map of New Haven that hung above the mantel. It showed the original nine-square plan for the New Haven colony. She remembered what Darlington had said that first day as they crossed the green: The town was meant to be a new Eden, founded between two rivers like the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Alex looked at the shape of the colony—a wedge of land bracketed by West River and the Farmington Canal, two slender channels of water rushing to meet each other at the harbor. She finally understood why the crime scene had looked so familiar. The intersection where Tara Hutchins’s body had been found looked just like the map: That slab of empty land in front of Baker Hall was like the colony in miniature. The streets that framed that plot of land were the rivers, flowing with traffic, joining at Tower Parkway. And Tara Hutchins had been found in the middle of it all, as if her punctured body lay at the heart of a new Eden. Her body hadn’t just been dumped there. It had been placed there deliberately.

“Honestly, Alex,” Sandow was saying, “what possible motive could any of these people have for hurting a girl like that?”

She didn’t really know. She just knew that they had.

Then someone had found out Alex visited the morgue. Whoever it was thought Alex knew Tara’s secrets—at least some of them—and that she had enough magic at her disposal to learn more. They’d decided to do something about it. Maybe they’d been trying to kill her, or maybe discrediting her was enough.

And the Bridegroom? Why had he chosen to help her? Was he part of this somehow?

“Alex, I want you to thrive here,” said Sandow. “I want us to get through this difficult year and I want all of our attention focused on the new-moon rite and bringing Darlington home. Let’s get through this and then take stock.”

Alex wanted that too. She needed Yale. She needed her place here. But the dean was wrong. Tara’s death hadn’t been the easy ugly thing that Sandow wanted it to be. Someone from the societies was involved, and whoever it was wanted to silence her.

I’m in danger, she wanted to say. Someone hurt me and I don’t think they’re finished. Help me. But what good had that ever done? Somehow Alex had thought this place was different, with all of its rules and rituals and Dean Sandow watching over them. We are the shepherds. But they were children at play. Alex looked at Sandow sipping his tea, one leg crossed over the other, light glinting off his shiny loafer as his knee bounced, and she understood that at some level he truly did not care what harm came to her. He might even be hoping for it. If Alex got hurt, if she vanished, she would take with her all the blame for what had happened to Darlington, and her short, disastrous tenure at Yale would be written off as an unfortunate mistake in judgment, an ambitious experiment gone wrong. He’d get his golden boy back at the new moon and make everything right. He wanted to be comfortable. And wasn’t Alex the same? Dreaming of a peaceful summer and mint in her tea while Tara Hutchins lay cold in a drawer?

Rest easy. She’d been ready to do just that. But someone had tried to hurt her.

Alex felt something dark inside her uncoil. “You’re a flat beast,” Hellie had once said to her. “Got a little viper lurking in there, ready to strike. A rattler probably.” She’d said it with a grin, but she’d been right. All this winter weather and polite conversation had put the serpent to sleep, its heartbeat slowing as it grew lazy and still, like any cold-blooded thing.

“I want us to get through this too,” said Alex, and she smiled for him, a cowed smile, an eager smile. His relief gusted through the room like a warm front, the kind that New Englanders welcome and that Angelenos know means wildfires.

“Good, Alex. Then we will.” He rose and put on his coat, his striped scarf. “I’ll submit your report to the alumni, and I’ll see you and Dawes Wednesday night at Black Elm.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Just a few more days and everything will be back to normal.”

Not for Tara Hutchins, you ass. She smiled again. “See you Wednesday.”

“Pamela, I’ll send you an email on refreshments. Nothing fancy. We’re expecting two representatives from Aurelian along with Michelle.” He gave Alex a wink. “You’re going to love Michelle Alameddine. She was Darlington’s Virgil. An absolute genius.”

“Can’t wait,” said Alex, returning the dean’s wave as he saw himself out. When the door shut, she said, “Dawes, how tough is it to talk to the dead?”

“Not difficult at all if you’re in Book and Snake.”

“They’re last on my list. I try not to ask for help from people who might want to kill me.”

“Limits your options,” Dawes muttered to the floor.

“Aw, Dawes, I like you bitchy.” Dawes shifted uncomfortably and tugged at her murky gray sweatshirt. She closed the laptop. “Thanks for backing me with the dean. And for saving my life.” Dawes nodded at the carpet. “So what are my other options if I need to talk to someone on the other side of the Veil?”

“The only one I can think of is Wolf’s Head.”

“The shapeshifters?”

“Do not call them that. Not if you’re looking for favors.”

Alex crossed to the window, pulled open the curtain.

“Is he still there?” Dawes said from behind her.

“He’s there.”

“Alex, what are you doing? Once you let him in… You know the stories about him, what he did to that girl.”

Open the door, Alex.

“I know he saved my life and he wants my attention. Relationships have been built on less.”

The rules of Lethe House were opaque and convoluted. Catholic, Darlington had said. Byzantine. Still, the big stuff wasn’t tough to remember. Leave the dead to the dead. Turn your eyes to the living. But Alex needed allies, and Dawes wasn’t going to be enough.

She knocked on the window.

Below, on the street, the Bridegroom looked up. His dark eyes met hers in the light from the streetlamp. She did not look away.