Лей Бардуго - Ninth House

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.