Ninth House

²⁹ Early Spring

The next morning when Alex set out for class, determined to at least try to make a good show of it, North was still there. He seemed agitated, cutting in and out of her path, hovering in her field of vision so that she couldn’t see the board in Spanish.

I know you’re not around, Alex texted Dawes when she got out of section. But did you ever find anything about severing connections to Grays? I’ve got a Bridegroom situation.

Temper fraying, she cut into the bathroom in the entryway to Commons and waved North inside.

“Just tell me one thing,” she said to him. “Did you find Tara behind the Veil?”

He shook his head.

“Then I’m going to need you to fuck off for a good long while. The deal is off. The case is solved and I don’t want to hang with your girl-murdering ass.” Alex didn’t really believe North had been responsible; she just wanted him to leave her alone.

The Bridegroom jabbed a finger at the sink.

“If you think I’m going to run a bath in there so we can have a chat, you’re wrong. Take a break.”

She thought about ditching lecture and just going back to the quiet of her warded dorm room. But she’d gone to the trouble of putting on clothes. She might as well make the most of it. At least it was Shakespeare and not Modern British Novels.

She crossed Elm to High Street and Linsly-Chittenden Hall, and took a seat on the aisle, tucking herself into a desk. Whenever the Bridegroom swooped into her view, she shifted her focus. She hadn’t done the reading, but everyone knew The Taming of the Shrew, and she liked this bit they were covering about the sisters and music.

Alex was looking at a slide of Sonnet 130 when she felt her head split open with a sudden bolt of pain. A deep wash of cold gusted through her. She saw flashes of a street lit by gas lamps, a smokestack belching dark clouds into the gray sky. She tasted tobacco in her mouth. North. North was inside her and she hadn’t invited him in. She had time to feel a flash of rage and then the world went black.

In the next second she was looking down at her paper. The professor was still talking but Alex couldn’t quite understand what she was saying. She could see the trail of the pen where her notes had left off. Three dates had been scrawled across the page in wobbly handwriting.

There was blood spattered across the page.

Alex reached up and nearly smacked herself in the face. It was as if she’d forgotten how long her arm was. Hastily, she wiped her sleeve across her face. Her nose was bleeding.

The girl to her right was staring at her. “You okay?”

“I’m great,” Alex said. She pinched her nostrils with her fingers, trying to get the bleeding to stop, as she hastily shut her notebook. North hovered just in front of her, his face stubborn. “You son of a bitch.”

The girl beside her cringed, but Alex couldn’t be bothered with putting on a good front. North had possessed her. He’d been inside her. He might as well have shoved his hand up her ass and used her as a puppet.

“You fucking bastard,” she snarled beneath her breath.

She shoved her notebook into her satchel, seized her coat, and hurried down the aisle, out of the lecture hall, and through the back door of L-C. She headed straight for Il Bastone, texting Dawes furiously: SOS.

Alex was limping by the time she reached the green, the pain in her side making it hard to breathe. She wished she’d brought some Percocet with her. North was still following a few feet behind. “Now you’re keeping a respectful distance, you disembodied fuck?” she barked over her shoulder.

He looked grim, but he sure as hell didn’t look sorry.

“I don’t know what bad shit you can do to a ghost,” she promised him. “But I’m going to figure it out.”

All of her bluster was cover for the fear rattling around in her heart. If he’d gotten in once, could he get in again? What could he make her do? Hurt herself? Hurt someone else? She’d used North in pretty much the same way when Lance had attacked her, but her life had been in danger. She hadn’t been bullying him into going on a fact-finding mission.

What if other Grays found out and came barging through? It had to be the result of the bond she’d formed with him. She’d invited him in twice. She knew his name. She’d called him by it. Maybe once that door was open, it couldn’t be locked again.

“Alex?”

Alex whirled, then caught her side, the pain from her wound splintering through her. Tripp Helmuth stood on the sidewalk in a navy sailing-team windbreaker and a backward cap.

“What do you want, Tripp?”

He held up his hands defensively. “Nothing! I just… Are you okay?”

“No, I’m really not. But I will be.”

“I just wanted to thank you for, y’know, keeping that stuff with Tara quiet.”

Alex had done no such thing, but if Tripp wanted to think she had, that was fine. “You bet, buddy.”

“That’s crazy about Blake Keely, though.”

“Is it?” said Alex.

Tripp lifted his cap, ran a hand through his hair, settled it back on his head. “Maybe not. I never liked him. Some guys are just made mean, y’know?”

Alex looked at Tripp in surprise. Maybe he wasn’t quite as useless as he seemed. “I do know.”

She cast a warning glance at North, who was pacing back and forth, passing through Tripp again and again.

Tripp shivered. “Shit, I think I’m coming down with a flu.”

“Get some rest,” said Alex. “There’s something bad going around.”

Something that looks like a dead Victorian.

Alex hurried down Elm to Orange, eager to be behind the wards. She pulled herself up the three porch steps to Il Bastone, a sense of ease flowing through her as soon as she opened the door and crossed the threshold. North was hovering in the middle of the street. She slammed the door and, through the window, saw a gust of air knock him backward—as if the whole house had given a great harumph. Alex rested her forehead against the closed door. “Thanks,” she murmured.

But what would stop him the next time he tried to push his way into her? Would she have to return to the borderlands to sever the connection? She’d do it. She’d throw herself on Salome Nils’s mercy to be let back into Wolf’s Head. She’d let Dawes drown her a thousand times.

Alex turned, keeping her back against the door. It felt like safe harbor. Afternoon light filtered through the remaining stained-glass window in the foyer. The other had been boarded up, the pebbles and shards of shattered glass lying dull in the deep shadow. There was blood on the old wallpaper where Dawes had hit her head. No one had made an attempt to clean it.

Alex peered through the archway to the parlor, half-expecting to see Dawes there. But there was no sign of her or her binders or her index cards either. The house felt empty, battered and wounded. It put a hollow ache in Alex’s heart. She’d never had to return to Ground Zero. And she’d never loved Ground Zero. She’d been happy to turn her back on it and never look into the face of the horrors she’d done there.

But maybe she did love Il Bastone, this old house with its warm wood and its quiet and its welcome.

She pushed away from the door and got a dustpan and broom from the pantry. It took her a long while to sweep up the broken glass. She poured it all into a plastic bag, sealed it with a strip of tape. She just wasn’t sure if she should throw it out. Maybe they could put the broken pieces in the crucible with some goat’s milk, make it whole.

It was only when she went to wash her hands in the little powder room that she realized there was dried blood all over her face. No wonder Tripp had asked if she was okay. She rinsed it off, watching the water swirl in the basin before it vanished.

There was bread and cheese that hadn’t spoiled yet in the refrigerator. She made herself eat lunch, though she wasn’t hungry. Then she went upstairs to the library.

Dawes hadn’t replied to her text. She probably wasn’t even looking at her phone. She’d gone to ground too. Alex couldn’t blame her, but that meant she would have to find a way to block her connection to the Bridegroom on her own.

Alex yanked the Albemarle Book from the shelf but hesitated. She’d recognized the first date North had forced her to scrawl in her notebook instantly: 1854, the year of his murder. The others had been meaningless to her. She owed North nothing. But Darlington had thought the Bridegroom murder was worth investigating. He would want to know what those dates meant. Maybe Alex wanted to know too. It felt like giving in, but North didn’t have to find out he’d snagged her curiosity.

Alex unslung her satchel and took out her Shakespeare notebook, opening it to the blood-spattered page: 1854 1869 1883. If she did some kind of search for all those years, the library would go mad. She had to find a way to narrow the parameters.

Or maybe she just needed to find Darlington’s notes.

Alex remembered the words he’d written in the carriage catalog: the first? If he’d actually done any research on North’s case, she hadn’t found it in the Virgil bedroom or at Black Elm. But what if his notes were here, in the library? Alex opened the Albemarle Book and looked at Darlington’s last entry—the schematic for Rosenfeld. But right above it was a request for something called the Daily New Havener. She copied the request exactly and returned the book to the shelf.

When the bookcase stopped shaking, she pried it open and entered the library. The shelves were filled with stack after stack of what looked less like newspapers than flyers packed with tiny type. There were thousands of them.

Alex stepped outside and opened the Albemarle Book again. Darlington had been working in the library the night he’d disappeared. She wrote out a request for the Rosenfeld schematics.

This time when she pulled the door open, the shelves were empty except for a single book lying flat on its side. It was large and slender, bound in oxblood leather, and completely free of dust. Alex set it on the table at the center of the room and let it fall open. There, between elevations of the third and fourth subterranean levels of Rosenfeld Hall, was a sheet of yellow legal paper, folded neatly and covered in Darlington’s tiny, jagged scrawl—the last thing he’d written before someone sent him to hell.

She was afraid to unfold the page. It might be nothing. Notes on a term paper. A list of repairs needed at Black Elm. But she didn’t believe that. That night in December, Darlington had been working on something he cared about, something he’d been picking at for months. He’d been distracted as he worked, maybe thinking of the night ahead, maybe worried about his apprentice, who never did the damn reading. He hadn’t wanted to bring his notes with him, so he’d stashed them someplace safe. Right here, in this book of blueprints. He’d thought he would be back soon enough.

“I should have been a better Dante,” she whispered.

But maybe she could do better now.

Gently, she unfolded the page. The first line read: 1958-Colina Tillman-Wrexham. Heart attack? Stroke?

A series of dates followed—coupled with what seemed to be women’s names. The last three dates on the list matched those North had forced her to write in her notebook.

The first? Darlington had believed that Daisy was the first, but the first what? Daisy had been shot, Paoletta had been stabbed, but the others had died of natural causes.

Or someone had gotten smarter about killing girls.

I’m seeing things, thought Alex. I’m making connections that aren’t there. According to every single TV show she’d ever watched, serial killers always had a modus operandi, a way they liked to kill. Besides, even if a murderer had been operating in New Haven, if these dates were right, this particular psychopath had been preying on girls from 1854 to 1958—over one hundred years.

But she couldn’t say it was impossible, not when she’d seen what magic could do.

And there was something about the way the dates clustered that felt familiar. The pattern matched the way the societies had been founded. There’d been a flurry of activity in the 1800s—and then a new tomb hadn’t been built for a very long time, not until Manuscript in the sixties. An unpleasant shiver crawled over Alex’s skin. She knew Skull and Bones had been founded in 1832 and that date didn’t line up with any of the deaths, but it was the only year she could remember.

Alex took the notes and padded down the hall to the Dante room. She grabbed a copy of The Life of Lethe from the desk drawer. Scroll and Key had been founded in 1842, Book and Snake in 1865, St. Elmo in 1889, Manuscript in 1952. Only the founding date of Wolf’s Head matched up with 1883, but that could be coincidence.

She ran her finger down the list of names.

She hadn’t seen Daisy’s name hyphenated anywhere else. She’d always just been Daisy Fanning Whitlock.

Because it wasn’t a hyphen. None of them were hyphens. Rhinelander. Stone. Phelps. Kingsley. Russell. Wrexham. They were the names of the trusts, the foundations and associations that funded the societies—that paid for the construction of their tombs.

Alex ran back to the library and slammed the shelf shut; she yanked the Albemarle Book free again but made herself slow down. She needed to think about how to phrase this. Russell was the trust that funded Skull and Bones. Carefully, she wrote out: Deed for land acquired by Russell Trust on High Street, New Haven, Connecticut.

A ledger was waiting for her on the middle shelf. It was marked with the Lethe spirit hound, and there, one after another, were deeds of acquisition for land all over New Haven, the locations that would one day house each of the eight Houses of the Veil, each one built over a nexus of power created by some unknown force.

But Darlington had known. The first. 1854: The year the Russell Trust had acquired the land where Skull and Bones would build their tomb. Darlington had pieced together what had created those focal points of magic that fed the societies’ rituals, that made all of it possible. Dead girls. One after another. He’d used the old editions of the New Havener to match the places they’d died to the locations of the societies’ tombs.

What had been special about these deaths? Even if all these girls had been murdered, there had been plenty of homicides in New Haven over the years that hadn’t resulted in magical nexuses. And Daisy hadn’t even died on High Street, where Skull and Bones erected their tomb, so why had the nexus formed there? Alex knew she was missing something, failing to connect the dots Darlington would have.

North had given her the dates; he had seen the connections too. Alex sprinted back to the bathroom and filled the basin of the sink.

“North,” she said, feeling like a fool. “North.”

Nothing. Ghosts. Never there when you needed them.

But there were plenty of ways to get a Gray’s attention. Alex hesitated, then took the letter opener from the desk. She slashed it across the top of her forearm and let the blood drip into the water, watching it plume.

“Knock knock, North.”

His face appeared in the reflection so suddenly she jumped.

“Daisy’s death created a nexus,” she said. “How did you find out?”

“I couldn’t find Tara. It should have been easy with that object in hand, but there was no sign of her on this side of the Veil. Just like Daisy. There’s no sign of Gladys O’Donaghue either. Something happened that day. Something bigger than my death or Daisy’s. I think it happened again when Tara died.”

Daisy had been an aristocrat, one of the city’s elite. Her death had started it all. But the other girls? Who had they been? Names like DeLauro, Mazurski, Mishkan. Had they been immigrant girls working in the factories? Housemaids? Daughters of freed slaves? Girls who would have no headlines or marble headstones to mark their passing?

And was Tara meant to be one of them too? A sacrifice? But why had her murder been so gruesome? So public? And why now? If these really were killings, it had been over fifty years since the last girl died.

Someone needed a nexus. One of the Houses of the Veil was in need of a new home. St. Elmo’s had been petitioning to build a new tomb for years—and what good was a tomb without a nexus beneath it? Alex remembered the empty plot of land where Tara’s body had been found. Plenty of room to build.

“North,” she said. “Go back and look for the others.” She read their names to him, one after another: Colina Tillman, Sophie Mishkan, Effie White, Zuzanna Mazurski, Paoletta DeLauro. “Try to find them.”

Alex plucked a towel from the rack and pressed it against her bleeding arm. She sat down at the desk, looked out the window onto Orange Street, trying to think. If Darlington had uncovered the cause of the nexuses, the first person he would have told was Sandow. He’d probably been proud, excited to have made a new discovery, one that would shed new light on the way that magic worked in his city. But Sandow had never mentioned it to her or Dawes, this final project Darlington had been pursuing.

Did it matter? Sandow couldn’t be involved. He’d been violently attacked only a few feet from where she was sitting. He’d almost died.

But not because of Blake Keely. Blake had hurt Dawes, had nearly killed Alex, but he hadn’t hurt the dean. It had been the snarling half-mad hounds of Lethe that had come to Alex’s defense. She remembered Blake’s clenched fist. He’d struck her with that hand but then he’d kept it closed.

She walked back to the hallway at the top of the stairs. Ignoring the dark stains on the rug, the lingering scent of vomit, she got down on her knees and began to search—the slats of the floor, under the runner. It wasn’t until she peered beneath an empty wicker planter that she saw a glint of gold. She wrapped her hand in the sleeve of her shirt and carefully pulled it into the light. A coin of compulsion. Someone had been controlling Blake. Someone had given him very specific orders.

This is a funding year.

Darlington had brought his theory of the girls and the tombs to Sandow. But Sandow had already known. Sandow, who was strapped for cash after his divorce and hadn’t published in years. Sandow, who wanted so desperately to keep Darlington’s disappearance quiet. Sandow, who had delayed the ritual to find him until after that first new moon and who had used that ritual to bar Darlington from ever returning to Black Elm. Because maybe Sandow had been the one to set a trap for Darlington in the Rosenfeld basement in the first place. Even then, he’d been planning for Tara Hutchins to die—and he’d known only Darlington would comprehend what her murder really meant. So he got rid of him.

Sandow had never intended to bring Darlington back. After all, Alex was the perfect patsy. Of course everything had gone wrong the year they’d brought in an unknown as a Lethe delegate. It was to be expected. They’d be more cautious in the future. Next year, brilliant, competent, steady Michelle Alameddine would come back to see to educating their wayward Dante. And Alex would be in Sandow’s debt, forever grateful thanks to that grade bump.

Maybe I’m wrong, she thought. And even if she was right, that didn’t mean she had to speak up. She could stay quiet, keep her passing grades, get through her calm, beautiful summer. Colin Khatri would graduate in May, so she wouldn’t have to make nice with him. She could survive, bloom, in Professor Belbalm’s care.

Alex turned the coin of compulsion over in her hand.

In the days after the massacre at the apartment in Van Nuys, Eitan had run all over Los Angeles, trying to find out who’d killed his cousin. There were rumors it was the Russians—except the Russians liked guns, not bats—or the Albanians, or that someone back in Israel had made sure Ariel would never return from California.

Eitan had come to see Alex in the hospital, despite the police officer posted at her door. Men like Eitan were like Grays. They found a way in.

He’d sat by her bed in the chair Dean Elliot Sandow had occupied only a day before. His eyes were red and the stubble on his chin was growing out. But his suit was as slick as ever, the gold chain at his neck like some throwback to the seventies, as if it had been handed down by another generation of pimps and panderers, the passing of the torch.

“You almost die the other night,” he’d said. Alex had always liked his accent. She’d thought it was French at first.

She hadn’t known how to reply, so she licked her lips and gestured to the pitcher of ice chips. Eitan had grunted and nodded.

“Open your mouth,” he’d said, and spooned two ice chips onto her tongue.

“Your lips are very chapped. Very dry. Ask for Vaseline.”

“Okay,” she’d croaked.

“What happen that night?”

“I don’t know. I got to the party late.”

“Why? Where were you?”

So this was an interrogation. That was fine. Alex was ready to confess.

“I did it.” Eitan’s head shot up. “I killed them all.”

Eitan slumped back in his chair and ran a hand over his face. “Fucking junkies.”

“I’m not a junkie.” She didn’t know if that was true. She’d never gotten into the hard stuff. She’d been too afraid of what might happen if she lost too much control, but she’d kept herself in a carefully modulated haze for years now.

“You kill them? Tiny little girl. You were pass out, full of fentanyl.” Eitan cut her a sidelong glance. “You owe me for the drugs.”

The fentanyl. It had come into her blood from Hellie somehow, left enough in her system to make it look like she’d almost overdosed too. A last gift. A perfect alibi.

Alex laughed. “I’m going to Yale.”

“Fucking junkies,” Eitan repeated in disgust. He rose and dusted off his perfectly tailored trousers.

“What are you going to do?” Alex asked.

He glanced around the room. “You have no flowers. No balloons or anything. That’s sad.”

“I guess it is,” said Alex. She wasn’t even sure if her mother knew she was in the hospital. Mira had probably been waiting for that call a long time.

“I don’t know what I will do,” said Eitan. “I think your asshole boyfriend got into debt with the wrong person. He rip someone off or piss someone off and Ariel was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He rubbed his face again. “But it doesn’t matter. Once you are chump, is like a tattoo. Everyone can see it. So someone will die for this.” Alex wondered if it would be her. “You owe me for fentanyl. Six thousand dollars.”

After Eitan had left, she asked the nurse to move the hospital phone closer. She took out the card Elliot Sandow had left with her and called his office.

“I’ll take your offer,” she told him, when his secretary put her through. “But I’m going to need some money.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” he’d replied.

Later, Alex wished she’d asked for more.

Alex flipped the coin of compulsion once more. She pulled herself to her feet, ignoring the throb of pain that shot through her. She walked back to the desk where she’d spread Darlington’s scribblings beside her bloody Shakespeare notebook.

Once you are chump, is like a tattoo. Everyone can see it.

She took out her phone and called the dean’s house. His housekeeper picked up, as Alex had known she would. “Hi, Yelena. It’s Alex Stern. I have something to drop off for the dean.”

“He is not home,” Yelena said in her heavy Ukrainian accent. “But you can bring package by.”

“Do you know where he went? Is he feeling better?”

“Yes. Went to president’s house for big party. Is welcome back.” Alex had never been to the university president’s house, but she knew the building. Darlington had pointed it out—a pretty stack of red brick and white trim on Hillhouse.

“That’s great,” said Alex. “I’ll be by in a bit.”

Alex texted Turner: We got it wrong. Meet me at the president’s house.

She folded the list of names and placed it in her pocket. She was done being Sandow’s chump. “All right, Darlington,” she whispered, “let’s go play knight.”