Ninth House

¹⁸ Last Fall

Darlington knew Alex resented the call. He could hardly blame her. It wasn’t a Thursday, when rituals took place, or a Sunday, when she was expected to prepare for the next week’s work, and he knew she was struggling to keep up with her classes and the demands of Lethe. He’d been concerned about how the incident at Manuscript might impact their work, but she’d shrugged it off more easily than he had, handling the report so that he wouldn’t have to relive the embarrassment and going right back to complaining about Lethe’s demands. The ease with which she let go of that night, the casual forgiveness she’d offered, unnerved him and made him wonder again at the grim march of the life she’d lived before. She’d even made it smoothly through her second rite with Aurelian—a patent application at the Peabody’s ugly, fluorescent-lit satellite campus—and her first prognostication for Skull and Bones. There’d been a rocky moment when she turned distinctly green and looked like she might vomit all over the Haruspex. But she’d managed, and he could hardly fault her for wavering. He’d been through twelve prognostications and they still left him feeling shaken.

“It will be quick, Stern,” he promised her as they set out from Il Bastone on Tuesday night. “Rosenfeld is causing trouble with the grid.”

“Who’s Rosenfeld?”

“It’s a what. Rosenfeld Hall. You should know the rest.”

She adjusted the strap on her satchel. “I don’t remember.”

“St. Elmo,” he prompted her.

“Right. The electrocuted guy.”

He’d give her the point. St. Erasmus had supposedly survived electrocution and drowning. He was the namesake for St. Elmo’s fire and for the society that had once been housed in Rosenfeld Hall’s Elizabethan towers. The red-brick building was used for offices and annex space now and was locked at night, but Darlington had a key.

“Put these on,” he said, handing her rubber gloves and rubber overboots not unlike the kind once made in his family’s factory.

Alex obliged and followed him into the foyer. “Why couldn’t this wait until tomorrow?”

“Because the last time Lethe let trouble at Rosenfeld go, we had a campus-wide blackout.” As if chiming in, the lights in the upper stories flickered. The building hummed softly. “This is all in The Life of Lethe.”

“Remember how you said we don’t concern ourselves with the non-landed societies?” Alex asked.

“I do,” said Darlington, though he knew what was coming.

“I took your teachings to heart.”

Darlington sighed and used his key to open another door, this one to a huge storage room packed with battered dorm furniture and discarded mattresses. “This is the old dining hall of St. Elmo.” He shone his flashlight over the soaring Gothic arches and cunning stone details. “When the society was cash poor in the sixties, the university purchased the building from them and promised to keep leasing the crypt rooms to St. Elmo to use for their rituals. But instead of a proper contract built by Aurelian to secure the terms, the parties opted for a gentleman’s agreement.”

“Did the gentlemen change their minds?”

“They died, and less gentle men took over. Yale refused to renew the society’s lease and St. Elmo’s ended up in that grubby little house on Lynwood.”

“Home is where the heart is, you snob.”

“Precisely, Stern. And the heart of St. Elmo was here, in their original tomb. They’ve been broke and all but magicless since they lost this place. Help me move these.”

They shoved two old bed frames out of the way, revealing another locked door. The society had been known for weather magic, artium tempestate, which they had used for everything from manipulating commodities to swaying the outcome of essential field goals. Since the move to Lynwood they hadn’t managed so much as a swift breeze. All of the societies’ houses were built at nexuses of magical power. No one was sure what created them, but it was why new tombs couldn’t simply be built. There were places in this world that magic avoided, like the bleak lunar planes of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and places it was drawn to, like Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and the French Quarter in New Orleans. New Haven had an extremely high concentration of sites where magic seemed to catch and build, like cotton candy on a spool.

The staircase they were descending wound down through three subterranean floors, the hum growing louder with every downward step. There was little left to actually see in the lower levels: the dusty stuffed bodies of retired New Haven zoo animals—acquired on a lark by J. P. Morgan in his wilder days; old electrical conductors with pointed metal spires, straight out of a classic monster movie; empty vats and cracked glass tanks.

“Aquariums?” asked Alex.

“Teapots for tempests.” This was where the students of St. Elmo had brewed weather. Blizzards that raised utility prices, droughts that burned away crops, winds high and strong enough to sink a battleship.

The hum was louder here, a relentless electrical moan that raised the hair on Darlington’s arms and reverberated over his teeth.

“What is that?” Alex asked over the noise, pressing her hands to her ears. Darlington knew from experience that would do no good. The hum was in the floor, in the air. Stay in it long enough and you’d start to go mad.

“St. Elmo’s spent years here, summoning storms. For some reason the weather likes to return.”

“And when it does, we get the call?”

He led her back to the old fuse box. It was long since out of use but mostly free of dust. Darlington took the silver weather vane from his bag.

“Hold out your hand,” he said. He set it in Alex’s palm. “Breathe on it.”

Alex gave him a skeptical look, then huffed a breath over the spindly silver arms. It shot upright like a sleepwalker in a cartoon.

“Again,” he instructed.

The weather vane turned slowly, catching the wind, then began to whir in Alex’s palm as if caught in a gale. She leaned back slightly. In the beam of his flashlight, her hair rose around her head, a halo of wind and electricity that made her look as if her face were wreathed in dark snakes. He remembered her at the Manuscript party, shrouded in night, and had to blink twice to shake the image from his mind. It wasn’t the first time the memory had come back to him, and he was always left uneasy, unsure of whether it was the shame of that night that lingered or if he’d seen something real, something he should have had the sense to look away from.

“Set the vane spinning,” he instructed. “Then hit the switches.” He flipped them in rapid succession, all the way down the line. “And always wear gloves.”

His finger hooked the last switch and the hum escalated to a high whine that clawed at his skull, the piercing, frustrated shriek of a cranky child that did not want to be sent to bed. Alex grimaced. A trickle of blood flowed from her nose. He felt wetness on his lip and knew his nose was bleeding too. Then, crack, the room flared with bright light. The weather vane went flying and pinged against the wall in a clatter, and the whole building seemed to sigh as the hum vanished to nothing.

Alex shuddered with relief and Darlington handed her a clean handkerchief to wipe her nose.

“We have to do this every time the weather gets antsy?” she asked.

Darlington dabbed at his own nose. “Once or twice a year. Sometimes less. The energy has to go somewhere and if we don’t give it direction, it will create a power surge.”

Alex picked up the mangled weather vane. The tips of its silver arrows had melted slightly and its spine was bent. “What about this thing?”

“We’ll put it in the crucible with some flux. It should restore itself in forty-eight hours or so.”

“And that’s it? That’s all we have to do?”

“That’s it. Lethe has sensors on all of the lower levels of Rosenfeld. If the weather returns, Dawes will get an alert. Always bring the vane. Always wear gloves and boots. No big deal. And now you can get back to… what are you getting back to?”

“The Faerie Queene.”

Darlington rolled his eyes, steering them toward the door. “My condolences. Spenser is a wretched bore. What’s your paper on?” He was only half paying attention. He wanted to keep Alex calm. He wanted to keep himself calm. Because in the silence left in the wake of the weather hum, he could hear something breathing.

He led Alex back through the aisles of dusty glass and broken machinery, listening, listening.

Dimly, he was aware of Alex talking about Queen Elizabeth and how a kid in her section had wasted a solid fifteen minutes talking about how all of the great poets were left-handed.

“That’s patently false,” said Darlington. The breathing was deep and even, like a creature at rest, so steady it might be mistaken for just another sound in the ventilation system of the building.

“That’s what our TA said, but I guess this guy is left-handed, so he went off on how people used to force lefties to write with their right hands.”

“Being left-handed was seen as a sign of demonic influence. The sinister hand and all that.”

“Was it?”

“Was it what?”

“A sign of demonic influence.”

“Not at all. Demons are ambidextrous.”

“Do we ever have to fight demons?”

“Absolutely not. Demons are confined to some kind of hellscape behind the Veil, and the ones that do manage to push through are far above our pay grade.”

“What pay grade?”

“Precisely.”

There, in the corner, the dark looked deeper than it should—a shadow that was not a shadow. A portal. In the basement of Rosenfeld Hall. Where it had no business being.

Darlington felt relieved. What he’d thought was breathing must be the rush of air through the portal, and though its presence here was a mystery, it was one he could solve. Someone had clearly been in the basement trying to capture the power of the old St. Elmo’s nexus for some kind of magic. The obvious culprit was Scroll and Key. They’d canceled their last rite, and if their previous attempt to open a portal to Hungary had been any indication, the magic at their own tomb was on the wane. But he wasn’t going to go making accusations without evidence. He would cast a containment and warding spell to render the portal unusable, and then they’d have to return to Il Bastone to get the tools he’d need to close this thing permanently. Alex wouldn’t like that.

“I don’t know,” she was saying. “Maybe they just tried to curb all those lefty devil kids because it’s messy as hell. I could always tell when Hellie had been journaling, because she had ink all over her wrist.”

He supposed he could manage closing the portal on his own. Give her a break so she could go write some tiresome paper about tiresome Spenser. Modes of Travel and Models of Transgression in The Faerie Queene.

“Who’s Hellie?” he asked. But the moment he did, the name clicked into place for him. Helen Watson. The dead girl who overdosed, the one Alex had been found beside. Something in him stuttered like a flashbulb. He remembered the ferocious pattern of blood spatter, repeated again and again over the walls of that miserable apartment, like some gruesome textile. A left-handed swing.

But Helen Watson had died earlier that night, hadn’t she? There’d been no blood on her. Neither girl had been a credible suspect. They were both high out of their minds and too small to have done that kind of damage, and Alex wasn’t left-handed.

But Helen Watson was.

Hellie.

Alex was looking at him in the dark. She had the cautious look of someone who knew she’d said too much. Darlington knew he should pretend a lack of concern. Act natural. Yes, act natural. Standing in a basement crackling with storm magic, beside a portal to who knows where, next to a girl who can see ghosts. No, not just see ghosts.

Maybe let them in.

Act natural. Instead, he stood stock still, staring into Alex’s black eyes, his mind rifling through what he knew about possessions by Grays. There had been other people Lethe had followed, people who could supposedly see ghosts. Many had lost their minds or become “no longer tenable” as candidates. There were stories of people going mad and destroying their hospital rooms or attacking their caretakers with unheard-of strength—the kind of strength it might take to wield a bat against five grown men. After the outbursts, the subjects were always left in a catatonic state that made them impossible to question. But Alex wasn’t ordinary, was she?

Darlington looked at her. Undine with her slick black hair, the center part like a naked spine, her devouring eyes.

“You killed them,” he said. “All of them. Leonard Beacon. Mitchell Betts. Helen Watson. Hellie.”

The silence stretched. The dark sheen of her eyes seemed to harden. Hadn’t he wanted magic, a doorway to another world, a fairy girl? But faeries were never kind. Tell me to fuck off, he thought. Open that vulgar mouth and tell me I’m wrong. Tell me to go to hell.

But all she said was, “Not Hellie.”

Darlington could hear the rush of wind through the portal, the ordinary groans of the building settling above them, and somewhere, distantly, the sound of a siren.

He’d known. The first day he met her, he’d known there was something wrong with her, but he never could have guessed the depth of it. Murderer.

But who had she killed, really? No one who would be missed. Maybe she’d done what she had to. Either way, the Lethe board had no idea who they were dealing with, what they’d brought into the fold.

“What are you going to do?” Alex asked. Those hard black eyes, stones in the river. No remorse, no excuses. Her only drive was survival.

“I don’t know,” said Darlington, but they both knew that was a lie. He would have to tell Dean Sandow. There was no way around it.

Ask her why. No, ask her how. Her motive should matter more to him, but Darlington knew it was the how that would obsess him, and probably the board as well. But they could never let her continue at Lethe. If something happened, if Alex hurt someone again, they would be liable.

“We’ll see,” he said, and turned toward the deep shadow in the corner. He didn’t want to keep looking at her, to see the fear in her face, the knowledge of all she was about to lose.

Was she ever really going to make it anyway? A cold part said she’d never really had what it took to be Lethe. To be Yale. This girl of the West, of easy sunshine, plywood, and Formica.

“Someone was here before us,” he said, because it was easier to talk about the work in front of them rather than the fact that she was a killer. Leonard Beacon had been beaten unrecognizable. Mitchell Betts’s organs had been nearly liquefied, pummeled into pulp. Two men in the back rooms had holes in their chests that indicated they’d been staked in the heart. The bat had been left in fragments so small it had been impossible to lift fingerprints. But Alex had been clean. No blood on her. The crime techs had even checked the drains.

Darlington gestured to the dark blot in the corner. “Someone opened a portal.”

“Okay,” she said. Cautious, unsure. The camaraderie and ease they’d earned over the last months gone like passing weather.

“I’ll ward it,” he said. “We’ll go back to Il Bastone and talk this out.” Did he mean that, he wondered? Or did he mean, I’ll learn what I can before I turn you in and you go quiet. Tonight, she’d still be looking to barter—a trade of information for his silence. She was his Dante. That should matter. She’s a killer. And a liar. “This isn’t something I can keep from Sandow.”

“Okay,” she said again.

Darlington drew two magnets from his pocket and traced a clean sign of warding over the portal. Doorways like this were strictly Scroll and Key magic, but it was a ridiculous risk for the Locksmiths to try to open a portal away from their tomb. Nevertheless, it was their own magic he would use to close it.

“Alsamt,” he began. “Mukhal—” The breath was sucked from his mouth before he could finish the words.

Something had hold of him, and Darlington knew he’d made a terrible mistake. This was not a portal. Not at all.

He realized in that last moment how few things he had to tether him to the world. What could keep him here? Who knew him well enough to keep hold of his heart? All of the books and the music and the art and the history, the silent stones of Black Elm, the streets of this town. This town. None of it would remember him.

He tried to speak. A warning? The last gasp of a know-it-all? Here lies the boy with all the answers. Except there would be no grave.

Danny was looking at Alex’s old young face, at her dark well eyes, at the lips that remained parted, that did not move to speak. She did not step forward. She cast no words of protection.

He ended as he had always suspected he would, alone in the dark.