Лей Бардуго: Ninth House

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.