Ninth House

³ Winter

Who dies at the gym? After her call with Dawes, Alex backtracked across the plaza. She had been to Payne Whitney Gymnasium exactly once: when she’d let Mercy drag her to a salsa class, where a white girl snugly packed into taut black pants had told her to pivot, pivot, pivot.

Darlington had encouraged her to use the free weights and to “build up her cardio.”

“For what?” Alex had asked.

“To better yourself.”

Only Darlington could say something like that with a straight face. But, then again, he ran six miles every morning and swept into rooms on a cloud of physical perfection. Every time he showed up at the Vanderbilt suite, it was as if someone had run an electric current through the floor. Lauren, Mercy, even silent, frowning Anna, would sit up a little straighter, looking bright-eyed and slightly frantic as a bunch of well-groomed squirrels. Alex would have liked to be immune to it—the pretty face, his lean frame, the easy way he occupied space as if he owned it. He had a way of distractedly brushing the brown hair back from his forehead that made you want to do it for him. But Darlington’s lure was offset by the healthy fear he instilled in her. At the end of the day, he was a rich boy in a nice coat who could capsize her without even meaning to.

That first day at the mansion on Orange, he’d set jackals on her. Jackals. He’d given a sharp whistle and they’d leapt from the bushes near the house, snarling and cackling. Alex had screamed. Her legs had tangled as she’d turned to run and she’d fallen to the grass, nearly impaling herself on the low iron fence. But early on in her time with Len she’d learned to always watch the person in charge. That changed from room to room, house to house, deal to deal, but it always paid to know who could make the big decisions. That was Darlington. And Darlington didn’t look scared. He looked interested.

The jackals were stalking toward her, slavering, teeth bared and backs bent.

They looked like foxes. They looked like the coyotes that ran the Hollywood Hills. They looked like hounds.

We are the shepherds.

“Darlington,” she said, forcing calm into her voice. “Call off your fucking dogs.”

He’d spoken a series of words she didn’t understand and the creatures had slunk back into the bushes, all of their aggression vanishing, bouncing on their paws and nipping at one another’s heels. He’d had the gall to smile at her as he offered her an elegant hand. The Van Nuys girl inside her longed to slap it away, jab her fingers into his windpipe, and make him sorry. But she forced herself to take his hand, let him help her up. It had been the start of a very long day.

When Alex had finally returned home to the dorms, Lauren waited all of sixty seconds before pouncing with, “So does your cousin have a girlfriend?”

They were sitting around the new coffee table, trying to get its legs not to wobble as they pushed in little plastic screws. Anna had vanished off somewhere and Lauren had ordered pizza. The window was open, letting in the bare beginnings of a breeze as twilight fell, and Alex felt like she was watching herself from the courtyard—a happy girl, a normal girl, surrounded by people with futures who assumed she had a future too. She had wanted to hold on to that feeling, to keep it for herself.

“You know… I have no idea.” She’d been so overwhelmed she hadn’t had a chance to be curious.

“He smells like money,” said Mercy.

Lauren threw an Allen wrench at her. “Tacky.”

“Don’t start dating my cousin,” Alex said, because that was the kind of thing these girls said. “I don’t need that mess.”

On this night, with the wind clawing to get into her winter coat, Alex thought of that girl, illuminated in gold, sitting in that sacred circle. It was the last moment of peace she could remember. Only five months had passed but it felt much longer.

She cut left, shadowed by the white columns that ran along the south side of the vast dining hall that everyone still called Commons, though it was supposed to be the Schwarzman Center now. Schwarzman was a Bonesman, class of 1969, and had managed a notoriously successful private equity fund, the Blackstone Group. The center was the result of a one-hundred-fifty-million-dollar donation to the university, a gift and a kind of apology for stray magic that had escaped an unsanctioned ritual and caused bizarre behavior and seizures in half the members of the Yale Precision Marching Band during a football game with Dartmouth.

Alex thought of the Grays in the operating theater, mouths gaping. It had been a routine prognostication. Nothing should have gone wrong, but something most definitely had, even if she was the only one who knew it. And now she was supposed to contend with a murder? She knew Darlington and Dawes had kept an eye on homicides in the New Haven area, just to make sure there was no stink of the uncanny, no chance one of the societies had gotten overeager and stepped beyond the bounds of their rituals.

Ahead of her, Grays formed a thin gruel that shifted over the roof of the law school, spreading and curling like milk poured into coffee, drawn by the grind of fear and ambition. Book and Snake’s towering white tomb loomed on her right. Of all the society buildings, it was the most like a crypt. “Greek pediment, Ionic columns. Pedestrian stuff,” Darlington had said. He saved his admiration for the Moorish screens and scrollwork of Scroll and Key, the severe mid-century lines of Manuscript. But it was the fence surrounding Book and Snake that always drew Alex’s eye: black iron crawling with snakes. “The symbol of Mercury, god of commerce,” Darlington had said.

God of thieves. Even Alex knew that one. Mercury was the messenger.

Ahead of her lay Grove Street Cemetery. Alex glimpsed a cluster of Grays gathered by a grave near the entrance. Someone had probably left cookies for a lost relative or something sugary as a fan offering for one of the artists or architects buried there. But the rest of the cemetery, like all cemeteries at night, was empty of ghosts. During the day, Grays were called to the salt tears and fragrant flowers of mourners, gifts from the living left for the dead. She’d learned they loved anything that reminded them of life. The spilled beer and raucous laughter of frat parties; the libraries at exam time, dense with anxiety, coffee, and open cans of sweet, syrupy Coke; dorm rooms staticky with gossip, panting couples, mini-fridges stuffed with food going to rot, students tossing in their sleep, dreams full of sex and terror. That’s where I should be, Alex thought, in the dorm, showering in the grimy bathroom, not walking by a graveyard in the dead of night.

The cemetery gates had been built to look like an Egyptian temple, their fat columns carved with lotus blossoms, the plinth emblazoned with giant letters: THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED. Darlington called the period at the end of that sentence the most eloquent piece of punctuation in the English language. Another thing Alex had been forced to look up, another bit of code to decipher. It turned out the quote was from a Bible verse:

“Incorruptible.” When she saw that word she understood Darlington’s smirk. The dead would be raised, but as for incorruptibility, Grove Street Cemetery was making no promises. In New Haven, it was best not to hope for guarantees.

The scene in front of Payne Whitney gym reminded Alex of the operating theater, police floodlights illuminating the snow, throwing the shadows of onlookers against the ground in stark lines. It would have been beautiful, carved in white and black like a lithograph, but the effect was ruined by barriers of yellow tape and the lazy, rhythmic whirl of blue and red from patrol cars that had been parked to block off the intersection where the two streets conjoined. The activity seemed to be focused on the triangle of orphaned land at its center.

Alex could see a coroner’s van with its bay doors open; uniformed officers standing at attention along the perimeter; men in blue jackets, who she thought might be forensics based on the television she’d watched; students who had emerged from their dorms to see what was happening despite the late hour.

Her time with Len had left her wary of cops. When she was younger, he’d gotten a kick out of having her help with deliveries, because no uniform—campus security or LAPD—was going to stop a chubby kid in braids looking for her big sister on a high school campus. But as she’d gotten older she’d lost the look of someone who belonged in wholesome places.

Even when she wasn’t carrying, she’d learned to keep well clear of cops. Some of them just seemed to smell the trouble on her. But now she was walking toward them, smoothing her hair with a gloved hand, just another student.

Centurion wasn’t hard to spot. Alex had met Detective Abel Turner exactly once before. He’d been smiling, gracious, and she’d known in an instant that he hated not only her but also Darlington and everything related to Lethe. She wasn’t sure why he’d been chosen as Centurion, the liaison between Lethe House and the Chief of Police, but he clearly didn’t want the job.

He stood speaking to another detective and a uniform. He was a full half head taller than either of them, black, his head shaved in a low fade. He wore a sharp navy suit and what was probably a real Burberry overcoat, and ambition rolled off him like thunder. Too pretty, her grandmother would have said. Quien se prestado se vestio, en medio de la calle se quito. Estrea Stern didn’t trust handsome men, particularly the well-dressed ones.

Alex hovered by the barricade. Centurion was on the scene just as Dawes had promised, but Alex wasn’t sure how to get his attention or what to do once she had it. The societies met on Thursdays and Sundays. No ritual of any real risk was allowed without Lethe House delegates present, but that didn’t mean someone hadn’t gone off script. Maybe word had spread that Darlington was “in Spain” and someone at one of the societies had used the opportunity to mess with something new. She didn’t think they had any real malice in mind, but the Tripps and Mirandas of the world could do plenty of damage without ever meaning to. Their mistakes never stuck.

The crowd around her had dispersed almost immediately and Alex remembered how bad she must smell, but there was nothing she could do about it now. She took out her phone and scrolled through her few contacts. She’d gotten a new phone when she’d accepted Lethe’s offer, erasing everyone from her old life in a single act of banishment, so it was a short list of numbers. Her roommates. Her mom, who texted every morning with a series of happy faces, as if emoji were their own incantation. Turner was in there too but Alex had never texted him, never had cause to.

I’m here, she typed, then added, It’s Dante, on the very good possibility that he hadn’t bothered to add her to his contacts.

She watched as Turner drew his phone from his pocket, read the message. He didn’t look around.

Her phone buzzed a second later.

I know.

Alex waited for ten minutes, twenty. She watched Turner finish his conversation, consult a woman in a blue jacket, walk back and forth near a marked-off area, where the body must have been found.

A cluster of Grays was milling around by the gym. Alex let her eyes skim over them, landing nowhere, barely focused. A few were local Grays who could always be found in the area, a rower who had drowned off the Florida Keys but who now returned to haunt the training tanks, a heavyset man who had clearly once been a football player. She thought she glimpsed the Bridegroom, the city’s most notorious ghost and a favorite of murder nerds and Haunted New England guidebooks; he had reputedly killed his fiancée and himself in the offices of a factory that had once stood barely a mile from here. She didn’t let her gaze linger to confirm it. Payne Whitney was always a beacon for Grays, steeped in sweat and endeavor, full of hunger and fast-beating hearts.

“When did you first see them?” Darlington had asked on the day they’d first met, the day he’d set the jackals on her. Darlington knew seven languages. He could fence. He knew Brazilian jujitsu and how to rewire an electrical box, could quote poetry and plays by people Alex had never heard of. But he always asked the wrong questions.

Alex checked her phone. She’d lost another hour. At this point she probably shouldn’t even bother going to sleep. She knew she wasn’t high on Turner’s list of priorities, but she was in a bind.

She typed, My next call is to Sandow.

It was a bluff, one Alex almost hoped Turner wouldn’t fall for. If he refused to speak to her, she’d happily snitch on him to the dean—but at a more civilized hour. First she’d go home and get two glorious hours of sleep.

Instead, she watched Turner take the phone from his pocket, shake his head, and then saunter over to where she stood. His nose wrinkled slightly, but all he said was, “Ms. Stern, how can I help you?”

Alex didn’t really know, but he’d given her plenty of time to formulate a response. “I’m not here to make trouble for you. I’m here because I was told to be.”

Turner gave a convincing chuckle. “We all have jobs to do, Ms. Stern.”

Pretty sure you wish your job entailed wringing my neck right now. “I understand that, but it’s Thursday night.”

“Preceded by Wednesday, followed by Friday.”

Go ahead and play dumb. Alex would have been happy to turn her back on him, but she needed something to put in her report. “Is there a cause of death?”

“Of course something caused her death.”

This asshole. “I meant—”

“I know what you meant. Nothing definitive yet, but I’ll be sure to write it up for the dean when we know more.”

“If a society is involved—”

“There is no reason to think that.” Like he was at a press conference, he added, “At this time.”

“It’s Thursday,” she repeated. Though the societies met twice a week, rituals were only sanctioned on Thursday nights. Sundays were for “quiet study and inquiry,” which usually meant a fancy meal served on expensive dishes, the occasional guest speaker, and plenty of alcohol.

“Were you out with the idiots tonight?” he said, voice still pleasant. “Is that why you smell like pan-warmed shit? Who were you with?”

That kick-me troublemaking part of her made her say, “You sound like a jealous boyfriend.”

“I sound like a cop. Answer me.”

“The Bonesmen are on tonight.”

He looked bemused. “Tell them to return Geronimo’s skull.”

“They don’t have it,” Alex said truthfully. A few years back, Geronimo’s heirs had brought suit against the society, but it had come to nothing. The Bonesmen did have his liver and small intestine in a jar, but she didn’t feel this was the moment to point that out.

“Where’s Darlington?” Turner asked.

“Spain.”

“Spain?” For the first time, Turner’s mild expression gave way.

“Study abroad.”

“And he left you in charge?”

“Sure did.”

“He must have a lot of faith in you.”

“Sure does.” Alex flashed him her most winning grin, and for a second she thought Detective Turner might smile back, because it took a con to know a con. But he didn’t. He’d had to be careful for too long.

“Where are you from, Stern?”

“Why?”

“Look,” he said. “You seem like a nice girl—”

“No,” said Alex. “I don’t.”

Turner raised a brow, cocked his head to the side, assessing, then nodded, conceding the point. “All right,” he said. “You have a job to do tonight and so do I. You did your part. You talked to me. You’ll let Sandow know a girl died here—a white girl who’s going to get plenty of attention without you getting in our way. We’re going to keep this far from the university and… all the rest.” He gave a wave of his hand as if he were distractedly swatting a fly instead of shooing away a century-old cabal of ancient magics. “You’ve done your bit and you can go home. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Hadn’t Alex just thought that very thing? Even so, she hesitated, feeling Darlington’s judgment heavy on her. “I do. But Dean Sandow will want—”

Turner’s mask slipped, the fatigue of the night and his anger at her presence suddenly visible. “She’s town, Stern. Back the fuck off.”

She’s town. Not a student. Not connected to the societies. Let it go.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “That’s fine.”

Turner smiled, dimples appearing in his cheeks, boyish, pleased, almost a real smile. “There ya go.”

He turned away from her, sauntered back to his people.

Alex glanced up at the gray, Gothic cathedral of Payne Whitney. It didn’t look like a gym, but nothing here looked like what it was. That’s what you want, isn’t it?

Detective Abel Turner understood her in a way Darlington never had.

Good. Better. Best. That was the trajectory that got you to this place. What Darlington and probably all the rest of these eager, effortful children couldn’t understand was that Alex would have happily settled for less than Yale. Darlington was all about the pursuit of perfection, something spectacular. He didn’t know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping until noon, skipped one class, one day of school, lost one job, then another, forgot the way that normal people did things. You lost the language of ordinary life. And then, without meaning to, you crossed into a country from which you couldn’t return. You lived in a state where the ground always seemed to be slipping from beneath your feet, with no way back to someplace solid.

It didn’t matter that Alex had witnessed the delegates of Skull and Bones predict commodities futures using Michael Reyes’s guts or that she’d once seen the captain of the lacrosse team turn himself into a vole. (He’d squealed and then—she could have sworn it—pumped his tiny pink fist.) Lethe was Alex’s way back to normal. She didn’t need to be exceptional. She didn’t even need to be good, just good enough. Turner had given her permission. Go home. Go to sleep. Take a shower. Get back to the real work of trying to pass your classes and make it through the year. Her grades from first semester had been bad enough to land her in academic probation.

She’s town.

Except the societies liked to shop town girls and boys for their experiments. It was the whole reason Lethe existed. Or a big part of it. And Alex had spent most of her life as town.

She eyed the coroner’s van, parked half on and half off the sidewalk. Turner’s back was still to her.

The mistake people made when they didn’t want to get noticed was to try to look casual, so instead she strode toward the van with purpose, a girl who needed to get to the dorms. It was late, after all. When she rounded the back of the vehicle, she shot one quick glance in Turner’s direction, then slipped into the wide V of the open van doors as a uniformed coroner turned to her.

“Hey,” she said. He remained in a half crouch, face wary, body blocking the view behind him. Alex held up one of the two gold coins she kept tucked in the lining of her coat. “You dropped this.”

He saw the glint and without thinking reached out to take it, his response part courtesy, part trained behavior. Someone offered you a boon, you accepted. But it was also a magpie impulse, the lure of something shiny. She felt a little like a troll in a fairy tale.

“I don’t think…” he began. But as soon as his fingers closed over the coin, his face went slack, the compulsion taking hold.

“Show me the body,” Alex said, half-expecting him to refuse. She’d seen Darlington flash one at a security guard before, but she’d never used a coin of compulsion herself.

The coroner didn’t even blink, only backed farther into the van and offered her his hand. She clambered up behind him with a quick glance over her shoulder and shut the doors. They wouldn’t have much time. All she needed was for the driver or, worse, Turner to come knocking on the door and find her there, having a chat over a corpse. She also wasn’t sure how long the compulsion would last. This particular bit of magic had come from Manuscript. They specialized in mirror magic, glamours, persuasion. Any object could be enchanted, the most famous being a condom that had convinced a philandering Swedish diplomat to hand over a cache of sensitive documents.

The coins took tremendous magic to generate, so they were kept in tight supply at Lethe, and Alex had been stingy with her allotted two. Why was she squandering one now?

As Alex joined the coroner in the enclosed space, she saw his nostrils flare at her smell, but his fingers were already on the zipper of the body bag, the coin clutched in his other hand. He was moving too quickly, as if in fast forward, and Alex had the urge to tell him to just stop for a second, but then the moment passed and he was pulling the body bag open, the black vinyl splitting like the skin of a fruit.

“Jesus,” breathed Alex.

The girl’s face was fragile, blue veined. She wore a white cotton camisole, torn and puckered where the knife had entered and retreated—again and again. The wounds were all centered on her heart, and she’d been struck with enough force that it looked as if her sternum had started to give way, the bones fracturing in a shallow, bloody crater. Alex was suddenly sorry she hadn’t taken Turner’s strongly worded advice and gone home. This didn’t look like a ritual gone wrong. It looked personal.

She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat and forced herself to inhale deeply. If this girl had somehow been targeted by a society or was messing with the uncanny, the smell of the Veil should still be on her. But with Alex’s own stink filling the ambulance, it was impossible to tell.

“It’s the boyfriend.”

Alex glanced at the coroner. Compulsions were supposed to make anyone under their power eager to please.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Turner said so. They’ve already picked him up for questioning. He has priors.”

“For what?”

“Dealing and possession. So does she.”

Of course she did. The boyfriend was moving product, and this girl was too. But there was a good long leap from small-time dealing to murder. Sometimes, she reminded herself. Sometimes it’s not far at all.

Alex looked again at the girl’s face. She was blond, a little like Hellie.

The resemblance was superficial, at least on the outside. But underneath? In the cut-open places, they were all the same. Girls like Hellie, girls like Alex, girls like this one, had to keep running or eventually trouble caught up. This girl just hadn’t run fast enough.

There were paper bags over her hands—to preserve the evidence, Alex realized. Maybe she’d scratched her attacker.

“What’s her name?” It didn’t matter, but Alex needed it for her report.

“Tara Hutchins.”

Alex typed it into her phone so she wouldn’t forget it. “Cover her up.”

She was glad when she couldn’t see that brutalized body anymore. This was nasty, ugly, but it didn’t mean Tara was connected to the societies. People didn’t need magic to be terrible to each other.

“Time of death?” she asked. That seemed like the kind of thing she should know.

“Sometime around eleven. Hard to pinpoint because of the cold.”

She paused with her hand on the lever of the van doors. Sometime around eleven. Right around the time two docile Grays who had never given anyone any trouble had opened their jaws like they were trying to swallow the world and something had tried to slam its way into a chalk circle. What if that something had found its way to Tara instead?

Or what if her boyfriend got fucked up enough to think he could stab straight through to her heart? There were plenty of human monsters out there. Alex had met a few. For now she’d “done her part.” More than done it.

Alex cracked the door to the van, scanned the street, then hopped down. “Forget you met me,” she told the coroner.

A vague, confused expression crossed his face. Alex left him standing, dazed, beside Tara’s body and strolled away, crossing the street and keeping to the dark sidewalk, away from the police lights. In a short while, the compulsion would wear off and he’d wonder how he’d ended up with a gold coin in his hand. He would put it in his pocket and forget about it or toss it in the trash without ever realizing the metal was real.

She glanced back at the Grays gathered around Payne Whitney. Was it her imagination or was there something in the bent of their shoulders, the way they huddled together by the gymnasium doors? Alex knew better than to look too closely, but in that fleeting moment she could have sworn they looked frightened. What did the dead have to fear?

She could hear Darlington’s voice in her head: When was the first time you saw them? Low and halting, as if he wasn’t sure whether the question was taboo. But the real question, the right question, was: When was the first time you knew to be afraid?

Alex was glad he’d never had the sense to ask.