Лей Бардуго - Ninth House

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:

Behold, I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

“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.