Лей Бардуго - Ninth House

Are you messing with me? That was what she wanted to ask. That was what this felt like. Being fucked with. Being the weird kid who talked to herself, who was so desperate for friends she agreed when Sarah McKinney pleaded, “Can you meet me at Tres Muchachos after school? I want to see if you can talk to my grandma. We used to go there a lot and I miss her so much.” The kid who stood outside the shittiest Mexican restaurant in the shittiest food court in the Valley by herself until she had to call her mom to ask her to pick her up because no one was coming. Of course no one was coming.

This is real , she reminded herself. And Pamela Dawes was a lot of things but she wasn’t a Sarah McKinney-style asshole.

Which meant someone was dead.

And she was supposed to do something about it?

“Uh, was it an accident?”

“Possible homicide.” Dawes sounded like she’d been waiting for just this question.

“Okay,” Alex said, because she had no idea what else to say.

“Okay,” Dawes replied awkwardly. She’d delivered her big line and now she was ready to get offstage.

Alex hung up and stood in the bleak, windswept silence of the empty plaza. She’d forgotten at least half of what Darlington had tried to teach her before he’d vanished, but he definitely hadn’t covered murder.

She didn’t know why. If you were going to hell together, murder seemed like a good place to start.

Daniel Arlington prided himself on being prepared for anything, but if he’d had to choose a way to describe Alex Stern, it would have been “an unwelcome surprise.” He could think of a lot of other terms for her, but none of them were polite, and Darlington always endeavored to be polite. If he’d been brought up by his parents—his dilettante father, his glib but brilliant mother—he might have had different priorities, but he’d been raised by his grandfather, Daniel Tabor Arlington III, who believed that most problems could be solved with cask-strength scotch, plenty of ice, and impeccable manners.

His grandfather had never met Galaxy Stern.

Darlington sought out Alex’s first-floor Vanderbilt dorm room on a sweating, miserable day in the first week of September. He could have waited for her to report to the house on Orange, but when he was a freshman, his own mentor, the inimitable Michelle Alameddine, who had served as his Virgil, had welcomed him to Yale and the mysteries of Lethe House by coming to meet him at the Old Campus freshman dorms. Darlington was determined to do things right, even if everything about the Stern situation had started out wrong.

He hadn’t chosen Galaxy Stern as his Dante. In fact, she had, by sheer virtue of her existence, robbed him of something he’d been looking forward to for the entirety of his three-year tenure with Lethe: the moment when he would gift someone new with the job he loved, when he’d crack the ordinary world open for some worthy but barely suspecting soul. Only a few months before, he’d unloaded the boxes full of incoming freshman applications and stacked them in the great room at Black Elm, giddy with excitement, determined to read or at least skim through all eighteen hundred-plus files before he made his recommendations to the Lethe House alumni. He would be fair, open-minded, and thorough, and in the end he would choose twenty candidates for the role of Dante. Then Lethe would vet their backgrounds, check for health risks, signs of mental illness, and financial vulnerabilities, and a final decision would be made.

Darlington had created a plan for how many applications he’d have to tackle each day that would still free his mornings for work on the estate and his afternoons for his job at the Peabody Museum. He’d been ahead of schedule that day in July—on application number 324: Mackenzie Hoffer, 800 verbal, 720 math; nine APs her junior year; blog on the Bayeux Tapestry maintained in both English and French. She’d seemed promising until he’d gotten to her personal essay, in which she’d compared herself to Emily Dickinson. Darlington had just tossed her folder onto the no pile when Dean Sandow called to tell him their search was over. They’d found their candidate. The alumni were unanimous.

Darlington had wanted to protest. Hell, he’d wanted to break something. Instead, he’d straightened the stack of folders before him and said, “Who is it? I have all of the files right here.”

“You don’t have her file. She never applied. She didn’t even finish high school.” Before Darlington could sputter his indignation, Sandow added, “Daniel, she can see Grays.”

Darlington had paused, his hand still atop Mackenzie Hoffer (two summers with Habitat for Humanity). It wasn’t just the sound of his given name, something Sandow rarely used. She can see Grays. The only way for one of the living to see the dead was by ingesting the Orozcerio, an elixir of infinite complexity that required perfect skill and attention to detail to create. He’d attempted it himself when he was seventeen, before he’d ever heard of Lethe, when he’d only hoped there might be more to this world than he’d been led to believe. His efforts had landed him in the ER and he’d hemorrhaged blood from his ears and eyes for two days.

“She managed to brew an elixir?” he said, both thrilled and—he could admit it—a little jealous.

Silence followed, long enough for Darlington to switch off the light on his grandfather’s desk and walk out to the back porch of Black Elm. From here he could see the gentle slope of houses leading down Edgewood to campus and, far beyond, the Long Island Sound. All of the land down to Central Avenue had once been a part of Black Elm but had been sold off in bits and pieces as the Arlington fortune dwindled. The house, its rose gardens, and the ruined mess of the maze at the edge of the wood were all that remained—and only he remained to tend and prune and coddle it back to life. Dusk was falling now, a long, slow summer twilight, thick with mosquitoes and the glint of fireflies. He could see the question mark of Cosmo’s white tail as the cat wended his way through the high grass, stalking some small creature.

“No elixir,” said Sandow. “She can just see them.”

“Ah,” said Darlington, watching a thrush peck half-heartedly at the broken base of what had once been the obelisk fountain. There was nothing else to say. Though Lethe had been created to monitor the activities of Yale’s secret societies, its secondary mission was to unravel the mysteries of what lay beyond the Veil. For years they had documented stories of people who could actually see phantoms, some confirmed, some little more than rumor. So if the board had found a girl who could do these things and they could make her beholden to them… Well, that was that. He should be glad to meet her.

He wanted to get drunk.

“I’m not any happier about this than you are,” said Sandow. “But you know the position we’re in. This is an important year for Lethe. We need everyone happy.” Lethe was responsible for keeping watch over the Houses of the Veil, but it also relied on them for funding. This was a re-up year and the societies had gone so long without an incident, there were rumblings that perhaps they shouldn’t dip into their coffers to continue supporting Lethe at all. “I’ll send you her files. She’s not… She’s not the Dante we might have hoped for, but try to keep an open mind.”

“Of course,” said Darlington, because that was what a gentleman did. “Of course I will.”

He’d tried to mean it. Even after he read her file, even after he’d watched the interview between her and Sandow recorded at a hospital in Van Nuys, California, heard the husky, broken woodwind sound of her voice, he’d tried. She’d been found naked and comatose at a crime scene, next to a girl who hadn’t been lucky enough to survive the fentanyl they’d both taken. The details of it were all more sordid and sad than he could have fathomed, and he’d tried to feel sorry for her. His Dante, the girl he would gift with the keys to a secret world, was a criminal, a drug user, a dropout who cared about none of the things he did. But he’d tried.