Лей Бардуго - Ninth House

Be careful in the throes , he’d said. Saliva could reverse the magic.

Alex made her hands into fists. She ran her tongue along the knuckles of her left hand, did the same to the right. For a moment nothing happened. Alex listened to the faucet drip.

Then ink bloomed dark over the skin of her arms. Snakes and peonies, cobwebs and clusters of stars, two clumsy koi circling each other on her left biceps, a skeleton on one forearm, the arcane symbols of the Wheel on the other. She still had no idea what those symbols meant. She’d pulled that card from Hellie’s tarot deck moments before they’d walked into a tattoo shop on the boardwalk. Alex watched in the mirror as her history spilled over her skin, the scars she had chosen for herself.

We are the shepherds. The time for that was done. Better to be a rattler. Better to be a jackal.

Alex stepped out of the powder room and let herself be absorbed into the crowd, the clouds of perfume, the suits and St. John knitwear. She saw the nervous glances cast her way. She did not look right. She did not look wholesome. She did not belong.

She glimpsed Sandow’s salt-and-pepper hair in a cluster of guests by the piano. He was balanced on a pair of crutches. She was surprised he hadn’t healed himself, but she also couldn’t imagine him dragging a dozen cartons of goat’s milk up the stairs at Il Bastone without help.

“Alex!” he said in some confusion. “What an unexpected pleasure.”

Alex smiled warmly. “I was able to find the file you requested and I thought you’d want to know as soon as possible.”

“File?”

“On the land deeds. Dating back to 1854.”

Sandow startled, then laughed unconvincingly. “Of course. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on tight. Excuse us for just a moment,” he said, and led them through the crowd. Alex stayed behind him. She knew he was already calculating what she knew and how to question her, maybe how to silence her. She took her phone out and hit record. She would have liked the protection of the crowd, but she knew the microphone would never be able to pick up his voice in all of the party noise.

“Stay close,” she whispered to North, who hovered at her side. Sandow opened a door to an office—a lovely, perfectly square room with a stone-manteled fireplace and French doors that looked out on a back garden caught between the leavings of snow and the green beginnings of the spring thaw. “After you.”

“You go ahead,” Alex said.

The dean shrugged and entered. He set his crutches aside and leaned against the desk.

Alex left the door open so they would be at least partially visible to the partygoers. She didn’t expect Sandow to pick up a fancy paperweight and club her with it, but he’d already killed one girl.

“You murdered Tara Hutchins.”

Sandow opened his mouth, but Alex stopped him with a hand. “Don’t start lying yet. We’ve got a lot of territory to cover and you’ll want to pace yourself. You killed her—or you had her killed—on a triangle of unused land, one I’m guessing the Rhinelander Trust is going to move to acquire.”

The dean took a pipe from his pocket, then brought out a pouch of tobacco and gently began filling the bowl. He set the pipe down beside him without lighting it.

At last, he folded his arms and met her gaze. “So what?”

Alex wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but that wasn’t it. “I—” “ So what , Miss Stern?”

“Did they pay you?” she asked.

He glanced over her shoulder, making sure no one was lingering in the hallway.

“St. Elmo’s? Yes. Last year. My divorce left me with nothing. My savings were gutted. I owed outrageous alimony. But a few dedicated St. Elmo’s alumni wiped all of that trouble away with a single check. All I had to do was provide them with a nexus to build over.”

“How did they know you could create one?”

“They didn’t. I approached them. I’d guessed at the pattern during my days at Lethe. I knew it would repeat. We were so long overdue. I didn’t think I’d actually have to do anything. We simply had to wait.”

“Were the societies involved in the murders of those other girls? Colina and Daisy and the rest?”

Again he glanced behind her. “Directly? I’ve wondered that myself over the years. But if any of the societies had solved the riddle of creating a nexus, why would they have stopped at one? Why not use that knowledge? Barter it?” He picked up his pipe. “No, I don’t think they were involved. This town is a peculiar one. The Veil is thinner here, the flow of magic easier. It eddies in the nexuses, but there is magic in every stone, every bit of soil, every leaf of every old elm. And it is hungry.”

“The town…” Alex remembered the strange feeling she’d had at the crime scene, the way it had mirrored the map of the New Haven colony. Dawes had said that rituals worked best if they were built around an auspicious date. Or an auspicious place. “That’s why you chose that intersection to kill Tara.”

“I know how to build a ritual, Alex. When I want to.” Hadn’t Darlington told her that Sandow was a brilliant Lethe delegate? That some of the rites he’d fashioned were still in use?

“You killed her for money.”

“For a great deal of money.”

“You took the payoff from the board of St. Elmo’s. You told them you could control the location of the coming nexus.”

“That I would prepare a site. I thought all I had to do was wait for the cycle to run its course. But it didn’t happen. No one died. No new nexus formed.” He shook his head in frustration. “They were so impatient. They… they said they would demand their money back, that they would go to the Lethe board. They had to be appeased. I created a ritual I knew would work. But I needed an offering.”

“And then you found Tara.”

“I knew her,” Sandow said, his voice almost fond. “When Claire was sick, Tara got her marijuana.”

“Your wife?”

“I nursed her through two bouts of breast cancer and then she left me. She… Tara was in my house. She heard things she probably shouldn’t have. I was not focused on discretion. What did it matter?”

What did it matter what some town girl knew? “And Tara was nice, wasn’t she?”

Sandow looked away guiltily. Maybe he’d fucked her; maybe he’d just been happy to have someone to talk to. That was what you did. You made nice with clients. Sandow had needed a sympathetic shoulder and Tara had provided it.

“But then Darlington found the pattern, the trail of girls.”

“The same way I did. I suppose it was inevitable. He was too bright, too inquisitive for his own good. And he always wanted to know what made New Haven different. He was trying to make a map of the unseen. He brought it up to me just in passing, an academic exercise, a wild theory, a possible subject for his graduate work. But by then—”

“You’d already planned on killing Tara.”

“She’d taken what she’d heard at my house and built a nice little business on it, dealing to the societies. She was in too deep with Keys and Manuscript. The drugs. The rituals. It was all going to come crashing down. She was nineteen, a drug user, a criminal. She was—”

“An easy mark.” Just like me. “But Darlington would have figured it out. He knew about the girls that had come before. He was smart enough to connect them to Tara. So you sent the hellbeast to consume him that night.”

“Both of you, Alex. But it seems Darlington was enough to sate the beast’s appetite. Or maybe he saved you in some final, foolish act of heroism.”

Or maybe the monster hadn’t wanted to consume Alex. Maybe it had known she might burn going down.