Лей Бардуго - Ninth House

“I can do that,” she said, though she wasn’t at all sure she could. “I can do that. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, Alex.” Belbalm looked at her over the red rim of her teacup. “Just do the work.”

Alex felt light as she drifted out of the office and waved to Colin.She found herself in the silence of the courtyard. It was like this sometimes—all of the doors would close, no one passing through on their way to class or a meal, all the windows shut tight against the cold, and you’d be left in a pocket of silence. Alex let it pool around her, imagined that the buildings surrounding her had been abandoned.

What would the campus be like in the summer? Quiet like this? Humid and unpopulated, a city under glass. Alex had spent her winter break holed up at Il Bastone, watching movies on the laptop Lethe had bought for her, afraid Dawes would appear. She’d skyped with her mom and only ventured out for pizza and noodles. Even the Grays had vanished, as if without the students’ excitement and anxiety, they had nothing to draw them to campus.

Alex thought of the stillness, the late mornings that summer might bring. She could sit behind that desk where Colin and Isabel sat, brew tea, update the JE website, do whatever had to be done. She could pick her courses, ones that had syllabi that didn’t change much. She could do the reading ahead of time, take the composition course so she wouldn’t have to lean on Mercy so much anymore—assuming Mercy wanted to room with her next year.

Next year. Magical words. Belbalm had built Alex a bridge to a possible future. She just had to cross it. Alex’s mother would be disappointed when she didn’t go home to California… Or would she? Maybe it was easier this way. When Alex had told her mother she was going to Yale, Mira had looked at her with such sadness that it had taken Alex a long moment to understand her mother thought she was high. Guiltily, Alex snapped a picture of the empty courtyard and texted it to her mom. Cold morning! Meaningless, but evidence that she was okay and here , proof of life.

She popped into the bathroom before she headed to class, ran her fingers through her hair. She and Hellie had loved wearing makeup, spending their rare bits of spare cash on glitter eyeliner and lip gloss. She missed it sometimes. Here, makeup meant something different; it sent a signal of effort that was unacceptable.

Alex endured an hour of Spanish II—dull but manageable because all it required of her was memorization. Everyone was chattering about Tara Hutchins, though no one called her by name. She was the dead girl, the murder victim, the townie who got stabbed. People were talking about crisis lines and emergency therapy for anyone triggered by the event. The TA who led her Spanish class reminded them to use the campus walking service after dark. I was right near there. I was there like an hour before it happened. I walk by there every day. Alex heard the same things repeated again and again. There was worry, some embarrassment—another bit of proof that, no matter how many chain stores moved in, New Haven would never be Cambridge. But no one seemed truly afraid. Because Tara wasn’t one of you , Alex thought, as she packed up her bag. You all still feel safe.

Alex had two hours free after class and she meant to spend them hidden away in her dorm room, eating her pilfered sand-wiches and writing her report for Sandow, then sleeping through the basso belladonna crash before she went to her English lecture.

Instead, she found her feet carrying her back to Payne Whitney. The intersection was no longer blocked off and the crowds were gone, but police tape still surrounded the triangular swath of barren ground across the street from the gym. The students who passed cast furtive glances at the scene and hurried along, as if mortified to be seen gawking at something so lurid in the cold gray sunlight. A police cruiser was parked half on the sidewalk, and a news van sat across the street.

She had to imagine Dean Sandow and the rest of the Yale administration were having plenty of harried meetings about damage control this morning. Alex hadn’t understood the distinctions between Yale and Princeton and Harvard and the cities they occupied. They were all the same impossible place in the same imaginary town. But it was clear from the way that Lauren and Mercy laughed about New Haven that the city and its university were considered a little less Ivy than the others. A murder that close to campus, even if the victim hadn’t been a student, couldn’t be good PR.

Alex wondered if she was looking at the place where Tara had been murdered or if her body had simply been dumped in front of the gym. She should have asked the coroner while he was compelled. But she had to imagine it was the former. If you wanted to get rid of a body, you didn’t drop it in the middle of a busy intersection.

An image of Hellie’s shoe, that pink jelly sandal slipping from her painted toes, flashed through Alex’s mind. Hellie’s feet had been wide, the toes crammed together, the skin thick and callused—the only unbeautiful part of her.

What am I doing here? Alex didn’t want to get any closer to where the body had been. It was the boyfriend. That’s what the coroner had told her. He was a dealer. They’d gotten into some kind of argument. The wounds had been extreme, but if he’d been high, who knew what might have been going on in his head?

Still, there was something bothering her about the scene. Last night she’d approached from Grove Street, but now she was on the other side of the intersection, directly across from the Baker Hall dorms and the empty, icy ground where Tara had been found. From this angle there was something familiar about the way it all looked—the two streets, the stakes driven into the earth where Tara had died or been abandoned. Was it just seeing it in the daylight without the crowds that made it seem different? A false sense of déjà vu? Or maybe the basso belladonna was playing tricks on her as it left her system? The Lethe journals were full of warnings on just how powerful it was.

Alex thought of Hellie’s shoe hanging for a brief moment from her toe, then dropping to the apartment floor with a thunk. Len turned to Alex, struggling with the weight of Hellie’s limp body, his hands cupped beneath her armpits. Betcha had Hellie’s knees tucked against his hip as if they were swing dancing. “Come on,” Len said. “Open the door, Alex. Let us out.”

Let us out.

She shook the memory away and glanced at the cluster of Grays in front of the gym. There were less of them today and their mood—if they’d ever really had a mood—had returned to normal. The Bridegroom was still there, though. Despite her best attempts to ignore him, the ghost was hard to miss—crisp trousers, shiny shoes, a handsome face like something out of an old movie, big dark eyes and black hair swept back from his brow in a soft wave, the effect spoiled only by the big bloody pockmark of a gunshot wound to his chest.

He was an actual haunter, a Gray who could pass through the layers of the Veil and make his presence felt, rattling windshields and setting off car alarms in the parking garage that stood where his family’s carriage factory had once been—and where he’d killed his fiancée and then himself. It was a favorite stop on ghost tours of New England. Alex didn’t let her gaze linger, but from the corner of her eye she saw him drift away from the group, sauntering toward her.

Time to get gone. She didn’t want the interest of Grays, particularly Grays who could take any kind of real physical form. She turned her back on him and hurried toward the heart of campus.

By the time she got back to Vanderbilt, the crash had hold of her. She felt weak, exhausted, as if she’d just emerged from a week of the worst flu of her life. Her report for Sandow could wait. She didn’t have much to say anyway. She would sleep. Maybe she would dream of summer. She could still smell crushed mint on her fingers.