Лей Бардуго - Ninth House

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.

Where do we begin to tell the story of Lethe? Does it begin in 1824 with Bathsheba Smith? Perhaps it should. But it would take another seventy years and many more disasters before Lethe would come to be. So instead we point to 1898, when Charlie Baxter, a man with no home and of no consequence, turned up dead with burns to his hands, feet, and scrotum, and a black scarab where his tongue should be. Accusations flew and the societies found themselves under threat from the university. To heal the rift and—let us speak frankly—to save themselves, Edward Harkness, a member of Wolf’s Head, joined with William Payne Whitney of Skull and Bones, and Hiram Bingham III of the now-defunct Acacia Fraternity, to form the League of Lethe as an oversight body for the societies’ occult activities.

From these earliest meetings rose our mission statement: We are charged with monitoring the rites and practices of any senior societies trafficking in magic, divination, or otherworldly discourse, with the express intent of keeping citizens and students safe from mental, physical, and spiritual harm and of fostering amicable relations between the societies and school administration.