Ninth House

¹ Winter

Alex hurried across the wide, alien plane of Beinecke Plaza, boots thudding over flat squares of clean concrete. The giant cube of the rare-books collection seemed to float above its lower story. During the day its panels glowed amber, a burnished golden hive, less a library than a temple. At night it just looked like a tomb. This part of campus didn’t quite fit with the rest of Yale—no gray stone or Gothic arches, no rebellious little outcroppings of red-brick buildings, which Darlington had explained were not actually Colonial but only meant to look that way. He’d explained the reasons for the way Beinecke had been built, the way it was supposed to mirror and slot into this corner of the campus architecture, but it still felt like a seventies sci-fi movie to her, like the students should all be wearing unitards or too-short tunics, drinking something called the Extract, eating food in pellets. Even the big metal sculpture that she now knew was by Alexander Calder reminded her of a giant lava lamp in negative.

“It’s Calder,” she murmured beneath her breath. That was the way people here talked about art. Nothing was by anyone. The sculpture is Calder. The painting is Rothko. The house is Neutra.

And Alex was late. She had begun the night with good intentions, determined to get ahead of her Modern British Novel essay and leave with plenty of time to make it to the prognostication. But she’d fallen asleep in one of the Sterling Library reading rooms, a copy of Nostromo gripped loosely in her hand, feet propped on a heating duct. At half past ten, she’d woken with a start, drool trickling across her cheek. Her startled “Shit!” had gone off like a shotgun blast in the quiet of the library, and she’d buried her face in her scarf as she slung her bag over her shoulder and made her escape.

Now she cut through Commons, beneath the rotunda where the names of the war dead were carved deep into the marble, and stone figures stood vigil—Peace, Devotion, Memory, and finally Courage, who wore a helmet and shield and little else and had always looked to Alex more like a stripper than a mourner. She charged down the steps and across the intersection of College and Grove.

The campus had a way of changing faces from hour to hour and block to block so that Alex always felt as if she were meeting it for the first time. Tonight it was a sleepwalker, breathing deep and even. The people she passed on her way to SSS seemed locked in a dream, soft-eyed, faces turned to one another, steam rising off the cups of coffee in their gloved hands. She had the eerie sense that they were dreaming her, a girl in a dark coat who would disappear when they woke.

Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall was drowsing too, the classrooms closed up tight, hallways cast in energy-saving half-light. Alex took the stairs to the second floor and heard noise echoing from one of the lecture halls. The Yale Social screened movies there every Thursday night. Mercy had tacked the schedule to the door of their dorm room, but Alex hadn’t bothered to study it. Her Thursdays were full.

Tripp Helmuth slouched against the wall beside the doors to the lecture hall. He acknowledged Alex with a heavy-lidded nod. Even in the dim light, she could see his eyes were bloodshot. No doubt he’d smoked before he showed up tonight. Maybe that was why the elder Bonesmen had stuck him on guard duty. Or maybe he’d volunteered.

“You’re late,” he said. “They started.”

Alex ignored him, glanced once over her shoulder to make sure the hallway was clear. She didn’t owe Tripp Helmuth an excuse, and it would look weak to offer one. She pressed her thumb into a barely visible notch in the paneling. The wall was supposed to swing open smoothly, but it always stuck. She gave it a hard nudge with her shoulder and stumbled as it jolted open.

“Easy, killer,” said Tripp.

Alex shut the door behind her and edged down the narrow passage in the dark.

Unfortunately, Tripp was right. The prognostication had already begun. Alex entered the old operating theater as quietly as she could.

The room was a windowless chamber, sandwiched between the lecture hall and a classroom that grad students used for discussion sections. It was a forgotten remnant of the old medical school, which had held its classes here in SSS before it moved to its own buildings. The managers of the trust that funded Skull and Bones had sealed up the room’s entrance and disguised it with new paneling sometime around 1932. All facts Alex had gleaned from Lethe: A Legacy when she probably should have been reading Nostromo.

No one spared Alex a glance. All eyes were on the Haruspex, his lean face hidden behind a surgical mask, pale blue robes spattered with blood. His latex-gloved hands moved methodically through the bowels of the—patient? Subject? Sacrifice? Alex wasn’t sure which term applied to the man on the table. Not “sacrifice.” He’s supposed to live. Ensuring that was part of her job. She’d see him safely through this ordeal and back to the hospital ward he’d been taken from. But what about a year from now? she wondered. Five years from now?

Alex glanced at the man on the table: Michael Reyes. She’d read his file two weeks ago, when he was selected for the ritual. The flaps of his stomach were pinned back with steel clips and his abdomen looked like it was blooming, a plump pink orchid, plush and red at its center. Tell me that doesn’t leave a mark. But she had her own future to worry about. Reyes would manage.

Alex averted her eyes, tried to breathe through her nose as her stomach roiled and coppery saliva flooded her mouth. She’d seen plenty of bad injuries but always on the dead. There was something much worse about a living wound, a human body tethered to life by nothing but the steady metallic beep of a monitor. She had candied ginger in her pocket for nausea—one of Darlington’s tips—but she couldn’t quite bring herself to take it out and unwrap it.

Instead, she focused her gaze on some middle distance as the Haruspex called out a series of numbers and letters—stock symbols and share prices for companies traded publicly on the New York Stock Exchange. Later in the night he’d move on to the NASDAQ, Euronext, and the Asian markets. Alex didn’t bother trying to decipher them. The orders to buy, sell, or hold were given in impenetrable Dutch, the language of commerce, the first stock exchange, old New York, and the official language of the Bonesmen. When Skull and Bones was founded, too many students knew Greek and Latin. Their dealings had required something more obscure.

“Dutch is harder to pronounce,” Darlington had told her. “Besides, it gives the Bonesmen an excuse to visit Amsterdam.” Of course, Darlington knew Latin, Greek, and Dutch. He also spoke French, Mandarin, and passable Portuguese. Alex had just started Spanish II. Between the classes she’d taken in grade school and her grandmother’s mishmash of Ladino sayings, she’d thought it would be an easy grade. She hadn’t counted on things like the subjunctive. But she could just about ask if Gloria might like to go to the discotheque tomorrow night.

A burst of muffled gunfire rattled through the wall from the screening next door. The Haruspex looked up from the slick pink mess of Michael Reyes’s small intestine, his irritation apparent.

Scarface, Alex realized as the music swelled and a chorus of rowdy voices thundered in unison, “You wanna fuck with me? Okay. You wanna play rough?” The audience chanting along like it was Rocky Horror. She must have seen Scarface a hundred times. It was one of Len’s favorites. He was predictable that way, loved everything hard—as if he’d mailed away for a How to Be Gangster kit. When they’d met Hellie near the Venice boardwalk, her golden hair like a parted curtain for the theater of her big blue eyes, Alex had thought instantly of Michelle Pfeiffer in her satin shift. All she’d been missing was the smooth sheaf of bangs. But Alex didn’t want to think about Hellie tonight, not with the stink of blood in the air. Len and Hellie were her old life. They didn’t belong at Yale. Then again, neither did Alex.

Despite the memories, Alex was grateful for any noise that would cover the wet sounds of the Haruspex pawing through Michael Reyes’s gut. What did he see there? Darlington had said the prognostications were no different than someone reading the future in the cards of a tarot deck or a handful of animal bones. But it sure looked different. And sounded more specific. You’re missing someone. You will find happiness in the new year. Those were the kinds of things fortune-tellers said—vague, comforting.

Alex eyed the Bonesmen, robed and hooded, crowded around the body on the table, the undergrad Scribe taking down the predictions that would be passed on to hedge-fund managers and private investors all over the world to keep the Bonesmen and their alumni financially secure. Former presidents, diplomats, at least one director of the CIA—all of them Bonesmen. Alex thought of Tony Montana, soaking in his hot tub, speechifying: You know what capitalism is? Alex glanced at Michael Reyes’s prone body. Tony, you have no idea.

She caught a flicker of movement from the benches that overlooked the operating arena. The theater had two local Grays who always sat in the same places, just a few rows apart: a female mental patient who’d had her ovaries and uterus removed in a hysterectomy in 1926, for which she would have been paid six dollars if she’d survived the procedure; and a male, a medical student. He’d frozen to death in an opium den thousands of miles away, sometime around 1880, but kept returning here to sit in his old seat and look down on whatever passed for life below. Prognostications only happened in the theater four times a year, at the start of each fiscal quarter, but that seemed to be enough to suit him.

Darlington liked to say that dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home. Easier said than done when the only other thing to look at in the room was a man playing with another man’s innards like they were mah-jongg tiles.

She remembered Darlington’s shock when he’d realized she could not only see ghosts without the help of any potion or spell but see them in color. He’d been weirdly furious. She’d enjoyed that.

“What kinds of color?” he’d asked, sliding his feet off the coffee table, his heavy black boots thunking on the slatted floor of the parlor at Il Bastone.

“Just color. Like an old Polaroid. Why? What do you see?”

“They look gray,” he’d snapped. “That’s why they’re called Grays.”

She’d shrugged, knowing her nonchalance would make Darlington even angrier. “It isn’t a big deal.”

“Not to you,” he’d muttered, and stomped away. He’d spent the rest of the day in the training room, working up a cranky sweat.

She’d felt smug at the time, glad not everything came so easily to him. But now, moving in a circle around the perimeter of the theater, checking the little chalk markings made at every compass point, she just felt jittery and unprepared. That was the way she’d felt since she’d taken her first step on campus. No, before that. From the time Dean Sandow had sat down beside her hospital bed, tapped the handcuffs on her wrist with his nicotine-stained fingers, and said, “We are offering you an opportunity.” But that was the old Alex. The Alex of Hellie and Len. Yale Alex had never worn handcuffs, never gotten into a fight, never fucked a stranger in a bathroom to make up her boyfriend’s vig. Yale Alex struggled but didn’t complain. She was a good girl trying to keep up.

And failing. She should have been here early to observe the making of the signs and ensure the circle was secure. Grays as old as the ones hovering on the tiered benches above didn’t tend to make trouble even when drawn by blood, but prognostications were big magic and her job was to verify that the Bonesmen followed proper procedures, stayed cautious. She was playacting, though. She’d spent the previous night cramming, trying to memorize the correct signs and proportions of chalk, charcoal, and bone. She’d made flash cards, for fuck’s sake, and forced herself to shuffle through them in between bouts of Joseph Conrad.

Alex thought the markings looked okay, but she knew her signs of protection about as well as her modern British novels. When she’d attended the fall-quarter prognostication with Darlington, had she really paid attention? No. She’d been too busy sucking on ginger candy, reeling from the strangeness of it all, and praying she wouldn’t humiliate herself by puking. She’d thought she had plenty of time to learn with Darlington looking over her shoulder. But they’d both been wrong about that.

“Voorhoofd!” the Haruspex called, and one of the Bonesmen darted forward. Melinda? Miranda? Alex couldn’t remember the redhead’s name, only that she was in an all-female a cappella group called Whim ’n Rhythm. The girl patted the Haruspex’s forehead with a white cloth and melted back into the group.

Alex tried not to look at the man on the table, but her eyes darted to his face anyway. Michael Reyes, age forty-eight, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Would Reyes remember any of it when he woke? When he tried to tell someone would they just call him crazy? Alex knew exactly what that was like. It could be me on that table.

“The Bonesmen like them as nuts as possible,” Darlington had told her. “They think it makes for better predictions.” When she’d asked him why, he’d just said, “The crazier the victima, the closer to God.”

“Is that true?”

“It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed,” he’d quoted. Then he’d shrugged. “Their bank balances say yes.”

“And we’re okay with this?” Alex had asked Darlington. “With people getting cut open so Chauncey can redecorate his summer home?”

“Never met a Chauncey,” he’d said. “Still hoping.” Then he’d paused, standing in the armory, his face grave. “Nothing is going to stop this. Too many powerful people rely on what the societies can do. Before Lethe existed, no one was keeping watch. So you can make futile bleating noises in protest and lose your scholarship, or you can stay here, do your job, and do the most good you can.”

Even then, she’d wondered if that was only part of the story, if Darlington’s desire to know everything bound him to Lethe just as surely as any sense of duty. But she’d stayed quiet then and she intended to stay quiet now.

Michael Reyes had been found in one of the public beds at Yale New Haven. To the outside world he looked like any other patient: a vagrant, the type who passed through psych wards and emergency rooms and jails, on his meds, then off. He had a brother in New Jersey who was listed as his next of kin and who had signed off on what was supposed to be a routine medical procedure for the treatment of a scarred bowel.

Reyes was cared for solely by a nurse named Jean Gatdula, who’d worked three night shifts in a row. She didn’t blink or cause a fuss when, through what appeared to be a scheduling error, she was slated for two more evenings in the ward. That week her colleagues may or may not have noticed that she always came to work with a huge handbag. In it was stowed a little cooler that she used to carry Michael Reyes’s meals: a dove’s heart for clarity, geranium root, and a dish of bitter herbs. Gatdula had no idea what the food did or what fate awaited Michael Reyes any more than she knew what became of any of the “special” patients she tended to. She didn’t even know whom she worked for, only that once every month she received a much-needed check to offset the gambling debts her husband racked up at the Foxwoods blackjack tables.

Alex wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or if she really could smell the ground parsley speckling Reyes’s insides, but her own stomach gave another warning flutter. She was desperate for fresh air, sweating beneath her layers. The operating theater was kept ice cold, fed by vents separate from the rest of the building, but the huge portable halogens used to light the proceedings still radiated heat.

A low moan sounded. Alex’s gaze shot to Michael Reyes, a terrible image flashing through her mind: Reyes waking to find himself strapped to a table, surrounded by hooded figures, his insides on the outside. But his eyes were closed, his chest rising and falling in steady rhythm. The moan continued, louder now. Maybe someone else was feeling sick? But none of the Bonesmen looked distressed. Their faces glowed like studious moons in the dim theater, eyes trained on the proceedings.

Still the moan climbed, a low wind building, churning through the room and bouncing off its dark-wood walls. No direct eye contact, Alex warned herself. Just look to see if the Grays—She choked back a startled grunt.

The Grays were no longer in their seats.

They leaned over the railing that surrounded the operating theater, fingers gripping the wood, necks craned, their bodies stretching toward the very edge of the chalk circle like animals straining to drink from the lip of a watering hole.

Don’t look. It was Darlington’s voice, his warning. Don’t look too closely. It was too easy for a Gray to form a bond, to attach itself to you. And it was more dangerous because she already knew these Grays’ histories. They had been around so long that generations of Lethe delegates had documented their pasts. But their names had been redacted from all documents.

“If you don’t know a name,” Darlington had explained, “you can’t think it, and then you won’t be tempted to say it.” A name was a kind of intimacy.

Don’t look. But Darlington wasn’t here.

The female Gray was naked, her small breasts puckered from the cold as they must have been in death. She lifted a hand to the open wound of her belly, touched the flesh there fondly, like a woman coyly indicating that she was expecting. They hadn’t sewn her up. The boy—and he was a boy, skinny and tender-featured—wore a sloppy bottle-green jacket and stained trousers. Grays always appeared as they had in the moment of death. But there was something obscene about them side by side, one naked, the other clothed.

Every muscle in the Grays’ bodies strained, their eyes wide and staring, their lips yawning open. The black holes of their mouths were caverns, and from them that bleak keening rose, not really a moan at all but something flat and inhuman. Alex thought of the wasps’ nest she’d found in the garage beneath her mother’s Studio City apartment one summer, the mindless buzz of insects in a dark place.

The Haruspex kept reciting in Dutch. Another Bonesman held a glass of water to the Scribe’s lips as he continued his transcriptions. The smell of blood and herbs and shit hung dense in the air.

The Grays arced forward inch by inch, trembling, lips distended, their mouths too wide now, as if their jaws had unhinged. The whole room seemed to vibrate.

But only Alex could see them.

That was why Lethe had brought her here, why Dean Sandow had grudgingly made his golden offer to a girl in handcuffs. Still, Alex looked around, hoping for someone else to understand, for anyone to offer their help.

She took a step back, heart rabbiting in her chest. Grays were docile, vague, especially Grays this old. At least Alex thought they were. Was this one of the lessons Darlington hadn’t gotten to yet?

She racked her brain for the few incantations Darlington had taught her last semester, spells of protection. She could use death words in a pinch. Would they work on Grays in this state? She should have put salt in her pockets, caramels to distract them, anything. Basic stuff, Darlington said in her head. Easy to master.

The wood beneath the Grays’ fingers began to bend and creak. Now the redheaded a cappella girl looked up, wondering where the creaking had come from.

The wood was going to splinter. The signs must have been made incorrectly; the circle of protection would not hold. Alex looked right and left at the useless Bonesmen in their ridiculous robes. If Darlington were here, he would stay and fight, make sure the Grays were contained and Reyes was kept safe.

The halogens dimmed, surged.

“Fuck you, Darlington,” Alex muttered beneath her breath, already turning on her heel to run.

Boom.

The room shook. Alex stumbled. The Haruspex and the rest of the Bonesmen looked at her, scowling.

Boom.

The sound of something knocking from the next world. Something big. Something that should not be let through.

“Is our Dante drunk?” muttered the Haruspex.

Boom.

Alex opened her mouth to scream, to tell them to run before whatever was holding that thing back gave way.

The moaning dropped away suddenly, completely, as if stoppered in a bottle. The monitor beeped. The lights hummed.

The Grays were back in their seats, ignoring each other, ignoring her.

Beneath her coat, Alex’s blouse clung wetly to her, soaked through with sweat. She could smell her own sour fear thick on her skin. The halogens still shone hot and white. The theater pulsed heat like an organ suffused with blood. The Bonesemen were staring. Next door, the credits rolled.

Alex could see the spot where the Grays had gripped the railing, white slivers of wood splayed like corn silk.

“Sorry,” Alex said. She bent at the knees and vomited onto the stone floor.

When they finally stitched up Michael Reyes, it was nearly 3 a.m. The Haruspex and most of the other Bonesmen had left hours before to shower off the ritual and prepare for a party that would last well past dawn.

The Haruspex might head directly back to New York in the creamy leather seat of a black town car, or he might stay for the festivities and take his pick of willing undergrad girls or boys or both. She’d been told “attending to” the Haruspex was considered an honor, and Alex supposed if you were high enough and drunk enough, it might feel like that was the case, but it sure sounded like being pimped out to the man who paid the bills.

The redhead—Miranda, it turned out, “like in The Tempest”—had helped Alex clean up the vomit. She’d been genuinely nice about it and Alex had almost felt bad for not remembering her name.

Reyes had been transported out of the building on a gurney, cloaked in obfuscation veils that made him look like a bunch of AV equipment piled beneath protective plastic sheeting. It was the most risky part of the whole night’s endeavor as far as the safety of the society went. Skull and Bones didn’t really excel at anything other than prognostication, and of course the members of Manuscript weren’t interested in sharing their glamours with another society. The magic binding Reyes’s veils wobbled with every bump, the gurney coming into and out of focus, the blips and bleeps from the medical equipment and the ventilator still audible. If anyone stopped to take a close look at what was being wheeled down the hallway, the Bonesmen would have some real trouble—though Alex doubted it would be anything they couldn’t buy their way out of.

She would check in on Reyes once he was back on the ward and then again in a week to make sure he was healing without complications. There had been casualties following prognostications before, though only one since Lethe had been founded in 1898 to monitor the societies. A group of Bonesmen had accidentally killed a vagrant during a hastily planned emergency reading after the stock-market crash of 1929. Prognostications had been banned for the next four years, and Bones had been threatened with the loss of its massive red stone tomb on High Street. “That’s why we exist,” Darlington had said as Alex turned the pages listing the names of each victima and prognostication date in the Lethe records. “We are the shepherds, Stern.”

But he’d cringed when Alex pointed to an inscription in one of the margins of Lethe: A Legacy. “NMDH ?”

“No more dead hobos,” he’d said on a sigh.

So much for the noble mission of Lethe House. Still Alex couldn’t feel too superior tonight, not when she’d been seconds from abandoning Michael Reyes to save her own ass.

Alex endured a long string of jokes about her spewed dinner of grilled chicken and Twizzlers, and stayed at the theater to make sure the remaining Bonesmen followed what she hoped was proper procedure for sanitizing the space.

She promised herself she’d return later to sprinkle the theater with bone dust. Reminders of death were the best way to keep Grays at bay. It was why cemeteries were some of the least haunted places in the world. She thought of the ghosts’ open mouths, that horrible drone of insects. Something had been trying to slam its way into the chalk circle. At least that was how it had seemed. Grays—ghosts—were harmless. Mostly. It took a lot for them to take any kind of form in the mortal world. And to pass through the final Veil? To become physical, capable of touch? Capable of damage? They could. Alex knew they could. But it was close to impossible.

Even so, there had been hundreds of prognostications in this theater and she’d never heard of any Grays crossing over into physical form or interfering. Why had their behavior changed tonight?

If it had.

The greatest gift Lethe had given Alex was not the full ride to Yale, the new start that had scrubbed her past clean like a chemical burn. It was the knowledge, the certainty, that the things she saw were real and always had been. But she’d lived too long wondering if she was crazy to stop now. Darlington would have believed her. He always had. Except Darlington was gone.

Not for good, she told herself. In a week the new moon would rise and they would bring him home.

Alex touched her fingers to the cracked railing, already thinking about how to phrase her description of the prognostication for the Lethe House records. Dean Sandow reviewed all of them, and she wasn’t anxious to draw his attention to anything out of the ordinary. Besides, if you set aside a helpless man having his guts rearranged, nothing bad had actually happened.

When Alex emerged from the passage into the hallway, Tripp Helmuth startled from his slouch. “They almost done in there?”

Alex nodded and took a deep breath of comparatively fresh air, eager to get outside.

“Pretty gross, huh?” Tripp asked with a smirk. “If you want I can slip you some of the tips when they get transcribed. Take the edge off those student loans.”

“What the fuck would you know about student loans?” The words were out before she could stop them. Darlington would not approve. Alex was supposed to remain civil, distant, diplomatic. And anyway, she was a hypocrite. Lethe had made sure she would graduate without a cloud of debt hanging over her—if she actually made it through four years of exams and papers and nights like these.

Tripp held his hands up in surrender, laughing uneasily. “Hey, just tryin’ to get by.” Tripp was on the sailing team, a third-generation Bonesman, a gentleman and a scholar, a purebred golden retriever—dopey, glossy, and expensive. He was rumpled and rosy as a healthy infant, his hair sandy, his skin still tan from whichever island he’d spent winter break on. He had the ease of someone who had always been and would always be just fine, a boy of a thousand second chances. “We good?” he asked eagerly.

“We’re good,” she said, though she was not good at all. She could still feel the reverberation of that buzzing moan filling up her lungs, rattling the inside of her skull. “Just stuffy in there.”

“Right?” Tripp said, ready to be pals. “Maybe getting stuck out here all night’s not so bad.” He didn’t sound convinced.

“What happened to your arm?” Alex could see a bit of bandage peeking out from Tripp’s windbreaker.

He shoved the sleeve up, revealing a patch of greasy cellophane taped over the inside of his forearm. “A bunch of us got tattoos today.”

Alex looked closer: a strutting bulldog bursting through a big blue Y. The dudebro equivalent of best friends forevah!

“Nice,” she lied.

“You got any ink?” His sleepy eyes roved over her, trying to peel back the winter layers, no different than the losers who had hung around Ground Zero, fingers brushing her clavicle, her biceps, tracing the shapes there. So what does this one mean?

“Nope. Not my thing.” Alex wrapped her scarf around her neck. “I’ll check in on Reyes on the ward tomorrow.”

“Huh? Oh, right. Good. Where’s Darlington anyway? He already sticking you with the shit jobs?”

Tripp tolerated Alex, tried to be friendly with her because he wanted his belly rubbed by everyone he encountered, but he genuinely liked Darlington.

“Spain,” she said, because that was what she’d been instructed to say.

“Nice. Tell him buenos días.”

If Alex could have told Darlington anything, it would have been, Come back. She would have said it in English and Spanish. She would have used the imperative.

“Adiós,” she said to Tripp. “Enjoy the party.”

Once she was clear of the building, Alex yanked off her gloves and unwrapped two sticky ginger candies, shoving them into her mouth. She was tired of thinking about Darlington, but the smell of the ginger, the heat it created at the back of her throat, brought him even more brightly alive. She saw his long body sprawled in front of the great stone fireplace at Black Elm. He’d taken his boots off, left his socks to dry on the hearth. He was on his back, eyes closed, head resting in the cradle of his arms, toes wiggling in time to the music floating around the room, something classical Alex didn’t know, dense with French horns that left emphatic crescents of sound in the air.

Alex had been on the floor beside him, arms clasped around her knees, back pressed against the base of an old sofa, trying to seem relaxed and to stop staring at his feet. They just looked so naked. He’d cuffed his black jeans up, keeping the damp off his skin, and those slender white feet, hair dusting the toes, had made her feel a little obscene, like some sepia-toned pervert driven mad by a glimpse of ankle.

Fuck you, Darlington. She yanked her gloves back on.

For a moment she stood paralyzed. She should get back to Lethe House and write up her report for Dean Sandow to review, but what she really wanted was to flop down on the narrow bottom bunk of the room she shared with Mercy and cram in all the sleep she could before class. At this hour, she wouldn’t have to make any excuses to curious roommates. But if she slept at Lethe, Mercy and Lauren would be clamoring to know where and with whom she’d spent the night.

Darlington had suggested making up a boyfriend to justify her long absences and late nights.

“If I do that, at some point I’ll have to produce a boy-shaped human to gaze at me adoringly,” Alex had replied in frustration. “How have you gotten away with this for the last three years?”

Darlington had just shrugged. “My roommates figured I was a player.” If Alex’s eyes had rolled back in her head any farther, she would have been facing the opposite direction.

“All right, all right. I told them I was in a band with some UConn guys and that we played out a lot.”

“Do you even play an instrument?”

“Of course.”

Cello, upright bass, guitar, piano, and something called an oud.

Hopefully, Mercy would be fast asleep when Alex got back to the room and she could slip inside to retrieve her basket of shower things and head down the hall without notice. It would be tricky. Anytime you tampered with the Veil between this world and the next, it left a stink that was something like the electrical crackle of ozone after a storm coupled with the rot of a pumpkin left too long on a windowsill. The first time she’d made the mistake of returning to the suite without showering, she’d actually had to lie about slipping in a pile of garbage to explain it. Mercy and Lauren had laughed about it for weeks.

Alex thought of the grimy shower waiting at her dorm… and then of sinking into the vast old claw-foot tub in Il Bastone’s spotless bathroom, the four-poster bed so high she had to hoist herself onto it. Supposedly Lethe had safe houses and hidey-holes all over the Yale campus, but the two Alex had been introduced to were the Hutch and Il Bastone. The Hutch was closer to Alex’s dorm and most of her classes, but it was just a shabby, comfortable set of rooms above a clothing store, always stocked with bags of chips and Darlington’s protein bars, a place to stop in and take a quick nap on the badly sprung couch. Il Bastone was something special: a three-story mansion nearly a mile from the heart of campus that served as Lethe’s main headquarters. Oculus would be waiting there tonight, the lamps lit, with a tray of tea, brandy, and sandwiches. It was tradition, even if Alex didn’t show up to enjoy them. But the price of all that luxury would be dealing with Oculus, and she just couldn’t handle Dawes’s clenched-jaw silences tonight. Better to return to the dorms with the stink of the night’s work on her.

Alex crossed the street and cut back through the rotunda. It was hard not to keep looking behind her, thinking of the Grays standing at the edge of the circle with their mouths stretched too wide, black pits humming that low insect sound. What would have happened if that railing had broken, if the chalk circle hadn’t held? What had provoked them? Would she have had the strength or the knowledge to hold them off? Pasa punto, pasa mundo.

Alex pulled her coat tighter, tucking her face into her scarf, her breath humid against the wool, hurrying back past Beinecke Library.

“If you get locked in there during a fire, all of the oxygen gets sucked out,” Lauren had claimed. “To protect the books.”

Alex knew that was bullshit. Darlington had told her so. He’d known the truth of the building, all of its faces, that it had been built to the Platonic ideal (the building was a temple), employing the same ratios used by some typesetters for their pages (the building was a book), that its marble had been quarried in Vermont (the building was a monument). The entrance had been created so that only one person was permitted to enter at a time, passing through the rotating door like a supplicant. She remembered Darlington pulling on the white gloves worn to handle rare manuscripts, his long fingers resting reverently on the page. It was the same way Len handled cash.

There was a room in Beinecke, hidden on… she couldn’t remember which floor. And even if she could have she wouldn’t have gone. She didn’t have the balls to descend into the patio, touch her fingers to the window in the secret pattern, enter in the dark. This place had been dear to Darlington. There was no place more magical. There was no place on campus she felt more like a fraud.

Alex reached for her phone to check the time, hoping it wasn’t much past three. If she could get washed up and into bed by four, she’d still be able to get three and a half solid hours before she had to be up and across campus again for Spanish. This was the math she ran every night, every moment. How much time to try to get the work done? How much time to rest? She could never quite make the numbers work. She was just scraping by, stretching the budget, always coming up a little short, and the panic clung to her, dogging her steps.

Alex looked at the glowing screen and swore. It was flooded with messages. She’d put the phone on silent for the prognostication and forgotten to switch it back on.

The texts were all from the same person: Oculus, Pamela Dawes, the grad student who maintained the Lethe residences and served as their research assistant. Pammie, though only Darlington called her that.

Call in.

Call in.

Call in.

The texts were all timed exactly fifteen minutes apart. Either Dawes was following some kind of protocol or she was even more uptight than Alex had thought.

Alex considered just ignoring the messages. But it was a Thursday night, the night the societies met, and that meant that some little shit had gotten up to something bad. For all she knew, the shapeshifting idiots at Wolf’s Head had turned themselves into a herd of buffalo and trampled a bunch of students coming out of Branford.

She stepped behind one of the columns supporting the Beinecke cube to shelter from the wind and dialed.

Dawes picked up on the first ring. “Oculus speaking.”

“Dante replies,” Alex said, feeling like a jackass. She was Dante. Darlington was Virgil. That was the way Lethe was supposed to work until Alex made it to her senior year and took on the title of Virgil to mentor an incoming freshman. She’d nodded and matched Darlington’s small smile when he’d told her their code names—he’d referred to them as “offices”—pretending she got the joke. Later, she’d looked them up and discovered that Virgil had been Dante’s guide as he descended into hell. More Lethe House humor wasted on her.

“There’s a body at Payne Whitney,” said Dawes. “Centurion is on site.”

“A body,” Alex repeated, wondering if fatigue had damaged her ability to understand basic human speech.

“Yes.”

“Like a dead body?”

“Ye-es.” Dawes was clearly trying to sound calm, but her breath caught, turning the single syllable into a musical hiccup.

Alex pressed her back against the column, the cold of the stone seeping through her coat, and felt a stab of angry adrenaline spike through her.

Are you messing with me? That was what she wanted to ask. That was what this felt like. Being fucked with. Being the weird kid who talked to herself, who was so desperate for friends she agreed when Sarah McKinney pleaded, “Can you meet me at Tres Muchachos after school? I want to see if you can talk to my grandma. We used to go there a lot and I miss her so much.” The kid who stood outside the shittiest Mexican restaurant in the shittiest food court in the Valley by herself until she had to call her mom to ask her to pick her up because no one was coming. Of course no one was coming.

This is real, she reminded herself. And Pamela Dawes was a lot of things but she wasn’t a Sarah McKinney-style asshole.

Which meant someone was dead.

And she was supposed to do something about it?

“Uh, was it an accident?”

“Possible homicide.” Dawes sounded like she’d been waiting for just this question.

“Okay,” Alex said, because she had no idea what else to say.

“Okay,” Dawes replied awkwardly. She’d delivered her big line and now she was ready to get offstage.

Alex hung up and stood in the bleak, windswept silence of the empty plaza. She’d forgotten at least half of what Darlington had tried to teach her before he’d vanished, but he definitely hadn’t covered murder.

She didn’t know why. If you were going to hell together, murder seemed like a good place to start.