Лей Бардуго - Ninth House

“I’m not a junkie.” She didn’t know if that was true. She’d never gotten into the hard stuff. She’d been too afraid of what might happen if she lost too much control, but she’d kept herself in a carefully modulated haze for years now.

“ You kill them? Tiny little girl. You were pass out, full of fentanyl.” Eitan cut her a sidelong glance. “You owe me for the drugs.”

The fentanyl. It had come into her blood from Hellie somehow, left enough in her system to make it look like she’d almost overdosed too. A last gift. A perfect alibi.

Alex laughed. “I’m going to Yale.”

“Fucking junkies,” Eitan repeated in disgust. He rose and dusted off his perfectly tailored trousers.

“What are you going to do?” Alex asked.

He glanced around the room. “You have no flowers. No balloons or anything. That’s sad.”

“I guess it is,” said Alex. She wasn’t even sure if her mother knew she was in the hospital. Mira had probably been waiting for that call a long time.

“I don’t know what I will do,” said Eitan. “I think your asshole boyfriend got into debt with the wrong person. He rip someone off or piss someone off and Ariel was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He rubbed his face again. “But it doesn’t matter. Once you are chump, is like a tattoo. Everyone can see it. So someone will die for this.” Alex wondered if it would be her. “You owe me for fentanyl. Six thousand dollars.”

After Eitan had left, she asked the nurse to move the hospital phone closer. She took out the card Elliot Sandow had left with her and called his office.

“I’ll take your offer,” she told him, when his secretary put her through. “But I’m going to need some money.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” he’d replied.

Later, Alex wished she’d asked for more.

Alex flipped the coin of compulsion once more. She pulled herself to her feet, ignoring the throb of pain that shot through her. She walked back to the desk where she’d spread Darlington’s scribblings beside her bloody Shakespeare notebook.

Once you are chump, is like a tattoo. Everyone can see it.

She took out her phone and called the dean’s house. His housekeeper picked up, as Alex had known she would. “Hi, Yelena. It’s Alex Stern. I have something to drop off for the dean.”

“He is not home,” Yelena said in her heavy Ukrainian accent. “But you can bring package by.”

“Do you know where he went? Is he feeling better?”

“Yes. Went to president’s house for big party. Is welcome back.” Alex had never been to the university president’s house, but she knew the building. Darlington had pointed it out—a pretty stack of red brick and white trim on Hillhouse.

“That’s great,” said Alex. “I’ll be by in a bit.”

Alex texted Turner: We got it wrong. Meet me at the president’s house.

She folded the list of names and placed it in her pocket. She was done being Sandow’s chump. “All right, Darlington,” she whispered, “let’s go play knight.”

Alex stopped back at her dorm room to shower and change. She combed her hair carefully, checked her bandages, put on the dress her mother had bought for her. She didn’t want to look out of place. And if something bad went down, she wanted as much credibility as possible. She poured herself a cup of tea and waited for North to appear in the cup.

“Any luck?” she asked, when his pale face emerged in the reflection.

“None of them are here,” he said. “Something happened to those girls. The same thing that happened to Daisy. Something worse than death.”

“Meet me outside the wards. And be ready. I’m going to need your strength.”

“You’ll have it.”

Alex didn’t doubt it. Stray magic had killed North and his fiancée, Alex felt sure of it. But something else had gone on in the aftermath, something Alex couldn’t explain. All she knew was that it had kept Daisy from passing behind the Veil, where she might have found peace.

She took a car to the president’s house. There was a valet out front, and through the windows, she could see people crowding the rooms. Good. There would be witnesses.

Even so, she texted Dawes. I know you’ve gone MIA, but if anything happens to me, it was Sandow. I left a record in the library. Just ask the Albemarle Book.

No reply from Turner yet. Now that he thought his case was solved was he done with her? She was glad of North’s presence beside her as she walked up the path.

Alex had expected someone checking names at the door, but she entered without incident. The rooms were warm and smelled of damp wool and baked apples. She slipped off her coat and hung it on top of two others on a peg. She could hear a piano being played beneath the murmur of conversation. She snatched a couple of stuffed mushroom caps from a passing server. Hell if she was going to die on an empty stomach.

“Alex?” the server asked, and she realized it was Colin.

He looked a little tired maybe, but not distressed or angry.

“I didn’t know you worked for the president too,” Alex said cautiously.

“I’m on loan from Belbalm. I have to drive her home later if you want a ride. You working today?”

Alex shook her head. “No, just dropping something off. For Dean Sandow.”

“I think I saw him by the piano. Come back to the kitchen when you’re done. Someone sent Belbalm a bottle of champagne and she brought it by for us.”

“Nice,” Alex said, feigning enthusiasm.

She found the powder room and darted inside. She needed a moment to compose herself, to make sense of Colin’s easy demeanor. He should be mad. He should hate her for uncovering his connections to Tara, for revealing that Scroll and Key had shared their secrets with outsiders, that they had been using illegal drugs. Even if Sandow had kept her name out of the disciplinary proceedings, she was still a representative of Lethe.

But hadn’t Alex known there would be no real repercussions? A slap on the wrist. A fine. The blood price was for someone else to pay. And yet she’d thought there would be some kind of reckoning.

Alex leaned her hands on the sink, staring into the mirror. She looked exhausted, dark shadows carving trenches beneath her eyes. She’d worn an old black cardigan over the cream wool sheath her mother had bought for her. Now she stripped it off. Her skin looked sallow and her arms had the lean, ropy look of someone who would never be full. She could see pink from her wound seeping through the wool of her dress; her new bandage must have come loose at the edges. She’d meant to look reputable, like a good girl, a girl who tried, someone to be trusted. Instead, she looked like the monster at the door.

Alex could hear the sounds of glasses clinking and civilized conversation in the living room. She had tried so hard to be a part of it all. But if this was the real world, the normal world, did she really want in? Nothing ever changed. The bad guys never suffered. Colin and Sandow and Kate and all of the men and women who had come before them, who had filled those tombs and worked their magic—they weren’t any different than the Lens and Eitans and Ariels of the world. They took what they wanted. The world might forgive them or ignore them or embrace them, but it never punished them. So what was the point? What was the point of her passing GPA and her bargain cashmere sweaters when the game was rigged from moment one?

Alex remembered Darlington placing the address moths on her skin in the dim light of the armory. She remembered watching her tattoos fade, believing for the first time that anything might be possible, that she might find a way to belong to this place.