Ninth House

³⁰ Early Spring

Alex stopped back at her dorm room to shower and change. She combed her hair carefully, checked her bandages, put on the dress her mother had bought for her. She didn’t want to look out of place. And if something bad went down, she wanted as much credibility as possible. She poured herself a cup of tea and waited for North to appear in the cup.

“Any luck?” she asked, when his pale face emerged in the reflection.

“None of them are here,” he said. “Something happened to those girls. The same thing that happened to Daisy. Something worse than death.”

“Meet me outside the wards. And be ready. I’m going to need your strength.”

“You’ll have it.”

Alex didn’t doubt it. Stray magic had killed North and his fiancée, Alex felt sure of it. But something else had gone on in the aftermath, something Alex couldn’t explain. All she knew was that it had kept Daisy from passing behind the Veil, where she might have found peace.

She took a car to the president’s house. There was a valet out front, and through the windows, she could see people crowding the rooms. Good. There would be witnesses.

Even so, she texted Dawes. I know you’ve gone MIA, but if anything happens to me, it was Sandow. I left a record in the library. Just ask the Albemarle Book.

No reply from Turner yet. Now that he thought his case was solved was he done with her? She was glad of North’s presence beside her as she walked up the path.

Alex had expected someone checking names at the door, but she entered without incident. The rooms were warm and smelled of damp wool and baked apples. She slipped off her coat and hung it on top of two others on a peg. She could hear a piano being played beneath the murmur of conversation. She snatched a couple of stuffed mushroom caps from a passing server. Hell if she was going to die on an empty stomach.

“Alex?” the server asked, and she realized it was Colin.

He looked a little tired maybe, but not distressed or angry.

“I didn’t know you worked for the president too,” Alex said cautiously.

“I’m on loan from Belbalm. I have to drive her home later if you want a ride. You working today?”

Alex shook her head. “No, just dropping something off. For Dean Sandow.”

“I think I saw him by the piano. Come back to the kitchen when you’re done. Someone sent Belbalm a bottle of champagne and she brought it by for us.”

“Nice,” Alex said, feigning enthusiasm.

She found the powder room and darted inside. She needed a moment to compose herself, to make sense of Colin’s easy demeanor. He should be mad. He should hate her for uncovering his connections to Tara, for revealing that Scroll and Key had shared their secrets with outsiders, that they had been using illegal drugs. Even if Sandow had kept her name out of the disciplinary proceedings, she was still a representative of Lethe.

But hadn’t Alex known there would be no real repercussions? A slap on the wrist. A fine. The blood price was for someone else to pay. And yet she’d thought there would be some kind of reckoning.

Alex leaned her hands on the sink, staring into the mirror. She looked exhausted, dark shadows carving trenches beneath her eyes. She’d worn an old black cardigan over the cream wool sheath her mother had bought for her. Now she stripped it off. Her skin looked sallow and her arms had the lean, ropy look of someone who would never be full. She could see pink from her wound seeping through the wool of her dress; her new bandage must have come loose at the edges. She’d meant to look reputable, like a good girl, a girl who tried, someone to be trusted. Instead, she looked like the monster at the door.

Alex could hear the sounds of glasses clinking and civilized conversation in the living room. She had tried so hard to be a part of it all. But if this was the real world, the normal world, did she really want in? Nothing ever changed. The bad guys never suffered. Colin and Sandow and Kate and all of the men and women who had come before them, who had filled those tombs and worked their magic—they weren’t any different than the Lens and Eitans and Ariels of the world. They took what they wanted. The world might forgive them or ignore them or embrace them, but it never punished them. So what was the point? What was the point of her passing GPA and her bargain cashmere sweaters when the game was rigged from moment one?

Alex remembered Darlington placing the address moths on her skin in the dim light of the armory. She remembered watching her tattoos fade, believing for the first time that anything might be possible, that she might find a way to belong to this place.

Be careful in the throes, he’d said. Saliva could reverse the magic.

Alex made her hands into fists. She ran her tongue along the knuckles of her left hand, did the same to the right. For a moment nothing happened. Alex listened to the faucet drip.

Then ink bloomed dark over the skin of her arms. Snakes and peonies, cobwebs and clusters of stars, two clumsy koi circling each other on her left biceps, a skeleton on one forearm, the arcane symbols of the Wheel on the other. She still had no idea what those symbols meant. She’d pulled that card from Hellie’s tarot deck moments before they’d walked into a tattoo shop on the boardwalk. Alex watched in the mirror as her history spilled over her skin, the scars she had chosen for herself.

We are the shepherds. The time for that was done. Better to be a rattler. Better to be a jackal.

Alex stepped out of the powder room and let herself be absorbed into the crowd, the clouds of perfume, the suits and St. John knitwear. She saw the nervous glances cast her way. She did not look right. She did not look wholesome. She did not belong.

She glimpsed Sandow’s salt-and-pepper hair in a cluster of guests by the piano. He was balanced on a pair of crutches. She was surprised he hadn’t healed himself, but she also couldn’t imagine him dragging a dozen cartons of goat’s milk up the stairs at Il Bastone without help.

“Alex!” he said in some confusion. “What an unexpected pleasure.”

Alex smiled warmly. “I was able to find the file you requested and I thought you’d want to know as soon as possible.”

“File?”

“On the land deeds. Dating back to 1854.”

Sandow startled, then laughed unconvincingly. “Of course. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on tight. Excuse us for just a moment,” he said, and led them through the crowd. Alex stayed behind him. She knew he was already calculating what she knew and how to question her, maybe how to silence her. She took her phone out and hit record. She would have liked the protection of the crowd, but she knew the microphone would never be able to pick up his voice in all of the party noise.

“Stay close,” she whispered to North, who hovered at her side. Sandow opened a door to an office—a lovely, perfectly square room with a stone-manteled fireplace and French doors that looked out on a back garden caught between the leavings of snow and the green beginnings of the spring thaw. “After you.”

“You go ahead,” Alex said.

The dean shrugged and entered. He set his crutches aside and leaned against the desk.

Alex left the door open so they would be at least partially visible to the partygoers. She didn’t expect Sandow to pick up a fancy paperweight and club her with it, but he’d already killed one girl.

“You murdered Tara Hutchins.”

Sandow opened his mouth, but Alex stopped him with a hand. “Don’t start lying yet. We’ve got a lot of territory to cover and you’ll want to pace yourself. You killed her—or you had her killed—on a triangle of unused land, one I’m guessing the Rhinelander Trust is going to move to acquire.”

The dean took a pipe from his pocket, then brought out a pouch of tobacco and gently began filling the bowl. He set the pipe down beside him without lighting it.

At last, he folded his arms and met her gaze. “So what?”

Alex wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but that wasn’t it. “I—” “So what, Miss Stern?”

“Did they pay you?” she asked.

He glanced over her shoulder, making sure no one was lingering in the hallway.

“St. Elmo’s? Yes. Last year. My divorce left me with nothing. My savings were gutted. I owed outrageous alimony. But a few dedicated St. Elmo’s alumni wiped all of that trouble away with a single check. All I had to do was provide them with a nexus to build over.”

“How did they know you could create one?”

“They didn’t. I approached them. I’d guessed at the pattern during my days at Lethe. I knew it would repeat. We were so long overdue. I didn’t think I’d actually have to do anything. We simply had to wait.”

“Were the societies involved in the murders of those other girls? Colina and Daisy and the rest?”

Again he glanced behind her. “Directly? I’ve wondered that myself over the years. But if any of the societies had solved the riddle of creating a nexus, why would they have stopped at one? Why not use that knowledge? Barter it?” He picked up his pipe. “No, I don’t think they were involved. This town is a peculiar one. The Veil is thinner here, the flow of magic easier. It eddies in the nexuses, but there is magic in every stone, every bit of soil, every leaf of every old elm. And it is hungry.”

“The town…” Alex remembered the strange feeling she’d had at the crime scene, the way it had mirrored the map of the New Haven colony. Dawes had said that rituals worked best if they were built around an auspicious date. Or an auspicious place. “That’s why you chose that intersection to kill Tara.”

“I know how to build a ritual, Alex. When I want to.” Hadn’t Darlington told her that Sandow was a brilliant Lethe delegate? That some of the rites he’d fashioned were still in use?

“You killed her for money.”

“For a great deal of money.”

“You took the payoff from the board of St. Elmo’s. You told them you could control the location of the coming nexus.”

“That I would prepare a site. I thought all I had to do was wait for the cycle to run its course. But it didn’t happen. No one died. No new nexus formed.” He shook his head in frustration. “They were so impatient. They… they said they would demand their money back, that they would go to the Lethe board. They had to be appeased. I created a ritual I knew would work. But I needed an offering.”

“And then you found Tara.”

“I knew her,” Sandow said, his voice almost fond. “When Claire was sick, Tara got her marijuana.”

“Your wife?”

“I nursed her through two bouts of breast cancer and then she left me. She… Tara was in my house. She heard things she probably shouldn’t have. I was not focused on discretion. What did it matter?”

What did it matter what some town girl knew? “And Tara was nice, wasn’t she?”

Sandow looked away guiltily. Maybe he’d fucked her; maybe he’d just been happy to have someone to talk to. That was what you did. You made nice with clients. Sandow had needed a sympathetic shoulder and Tara had provided it.

“But then Darlington found the pattern, the trail of girls.”

“The same way I did. I suppose it was inevitable. He was too bright, too inquisitive for his own good. And he always wanted to know what made New Haven different. He was trying to make a map of the unseen. He brought it up to me just in passing, an academic exercise, a wild theory, a possible subject for his graduate work. But by then—”

“You’d already planned on killing Tara.”

“She’d taken what she’d heard at my house and built a nice little business on it, dealing to the societies. She was in too deep with Keys and Manuscript. The drugs. The rituals. It was all going to come crashing down. She was nineteen, a drug user, a criminal. She was—”

“An easy mark.” Just like me. “But Darlington would have figured it out. He knew about the girls that had come before. He was smart enough to connect them to Tara. So you sent the hellbeast to consume him that night.”

“Both of you, Alex. But it seems Darlington was enough to sate the beast’s appetite. Or maybe he saved you in some final, foolish act of heroism.”

Or maybe the monster hadn’t wanted to consume Alex. Maybe it had known she might burn going down.

Sandow sighed. “Darlington liked to talk about how New Haven was always on the brink of success, always about to tip over into good luck and good fortune. He didn’t understand that the city walks a tightrope. On one side, success. On the other, ruin. The magic of this place and the blood shed to retain it is all that stands between the city and the end.”

This town has been fucked from the start.

“Did you do it yourself?” Alex asked. “Or did you not have the balls?”

“I was once a knight of Lethe, you know. I had the will.” He actually sounded proud.

Isabel had said that Sandow was sleeping off too much bourbon in Belbalm’s study the night Tara died, but he could have slipped out somehow or even used the same portal magic she’d suspected Colin of using. He still would have had to manage a glamour—but of course that was no problem for Sandow. Alex thought of the compact she’d used to get into Tara’s apartment and then the jail. When she’d taken it from the drawer, there had been a smudge on it. But Dawes never would have put it away dirty. Someone had used it before Alex.

“You put on Lance’s face. You got Tara high so she wouldn’t hurt and then you murdered her. Did you send the gluma after me?”

“I did. It was risky, maybe foolish. I have no talent for necromancy. But I didn’t know what you might have discovered at the morgue.”

She remembered Sandow sitting across from her at the Hutch, his teacup perched on his knee, telling her that her power had brought on the gluma attack, that she was to blame for it, for Tara’s murder. “You told me it was my fault.”

“Well, you weren’t meant to survive. I had to say something.” He sounded so reasonable. “Darlington knew you would be trouble. But I had no idea how much.”

“You still don’t know,” said Alex. “And Darlington would loathe everything about you.”

“Darlington was a gentleman. But this isn’t a time for gentlemen.” He picked up his pipe. “Do you know the terrible thing?”

“That you murdered a girl in cold blood so some rich kids can build a fancy clubhouse? Seems pretty terrible.”

But he didn’t seem to hear her. “It didn’t work,” he said, shaking his head, his steepled brows creasing his forehead. “The ritual was sound. I built it perfectly. But no nexus appeared.”

“So Tara died and you’re still screwed?”

“I would have been if not for you. I’m advocating for Manuscript to be stripped of their tomb. St. Elmo’s will have a new home by the next school year. They’ll get what they want. I’ll get my money. So the question is, Alex, what do you want?”

Alex stared at him. He was actually trying to negotiate with her. “What do I want? Stop killing people. You don’t get to murder a girl and disappear Darlington. You don’t get to use me and Dawes and Lethe because you want to live in a nice neighborhood and drive a nice car. We aren’t supposed to be walking that tightrope. We are the goddamn shepherds.”

Sandow laughed. “We are beggars at the table. They throw us scraps, but the real magic, the magic that makes futures and saves lives, belongs to them. Unless we take a bit of it for ourselves.”

He lifted his pipe, but instead of lighting it, he tapped the contents of the bowl into his mouth. It glittered against his lips—Astrumsalinas. Starpower. Compulsion. He’d given it to Blake to use on Alex that night at Il Bastone. The night Sandow had sent Blake Keely to kill her.

Not this time.

Alex reached out to North and, with a sudden rush, felt him flood into her, filling her with strength. She launched herself toward Sandow.

“Stay right there!” said the dean. Alex’s steps faltered, wanting only to obey. But the drug had no power over the dead.

No, said North, the voice clean and true inside her head.

“No,” said Alex. She shoved the dean down into a chair. His crutches clattered to the floor. “Turner is coming. You’re going to tell him what you did. There isn’t going to be another tomb for St. Elmo’s. This isn’t all going away with fines and suspensions. You’re all going to pay. Fuck the societies, fuck Lethe, and fuck you.”

“Alexandra?” She and Sandow turned. Professor Belbalm hovered in the doorway, a glass of champagne in her hand. “What’s going on here? Elliot… are you all right?”

“She attacked me!” he cried. “She’s unwell, unstable. Marguerite, call campus security. Get Colin to help me subdue Alex.”

“Of course,” said Belbalm, the compulsion taking hold.

“Professor, wait—” Alex began. She knew it was futile. Under the influence of Starpower, there would be no reasoning with her. “I have a recording. I have proof—”

“Alexandra, I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” Belbalm said with a sad shake of her head. Then she smiled and winked. “Actually, I know exactly what’s gotten into you. Bertram Boyce North.”

“Marguerite!” snapped Sandow. “I told you to—”

“Oh, Elliot, stop.” Professor Belbalm shut the door behind her and turned the lock.