They left the green and he saw tension snap back into her shoulders, though there was still nothing his eyes could see to warrant it. They passed the row of banks clustered along Elm, looming over Kebabian’s, the little red rug store that had somehow thrived in New Haven for over one hundred years, then turned left up Orange. They were only a few blocks from campus proper now, but it felt like miles. The bustle of student life vanished, as if stepping into the city was like falling off a cliff. The streets were a mess of new and old: gently weathered townhouses, barren parking lots, a carefully restored concert hall, the gargantuan high rise of the Housing Authority.
“Why here?” Alex asked when Darlington didn’t answer her previous question. “What is it about this place that draws them?”
The short answer was Who knows? But Darlington doubted that would cast him or Lethe in the most credible light.
“In the early eighteen hundreds, magic was moving from the old world to the new, leaving Europe along with its practitioners. They needed someplace to store their knowledge and preserve its practices. No one’s certain why New Haven worked. They tried in other places too,” Darlington said with some pride. “Cambridge. Princeton. New Haven was where the magic caught and held and took root. Some people think it’s because the Veil is thinner here, easier to pierce. You can see why Lethe is happy to have you on board.” At least, some of Lethe. “You may be able to offer us answers. There are Grays that have been here far longer than the university.”
“And these practitioners thought it would be smart to teach all this magic to a bunch of college kids?”
“Contact with the uncanny takes a toll. The older you get, the harder it is to endure that contact. So each year, the societies replenish the supply with a new tap, a new delegation. Magic is quite literally a dying art, and New Haven is one of the few places in the world where it can still be brought to life.”
She said nothing. Was she scared? Good. Maybe she would actually read the books he assigned instead of skimming them.
“There are over a hundred societies at Yale at this point, but we don’t concern ourselves with most of them. They get together for dinners, tell their life stories, do a little community service. It’s the Ancient Eight that matter. The landed societies. The Houses of the Veil. They’re the ones that have held their tombs continuously.”
“Tombs?”
“I’m betting you’ve already seen some of them. Clubhouses, though they look more like mausoleums.”
“Why don’t we care about the other societies?” she asked.
“We care about power, and power is linked to place. Each of the Houses of the Veil grew up around a branch of the arcane and is devoted to studying it, and each built their tomb over a nexus of power. Except for Berzelius, and no one cares about Berzelius.” They’d founded their society in direct response to the growing magical presence in New Haven, claiming the other Houses were charlatans and superstitious dilettantes, dedicating themselves to investments in new technologies and the philosophy that the only true magic was science. They’d managed to survive the stock market crash of 1929 without the help of prognostication, and limped along until the crash of 1987 when they’d been all but wiped out. As it happened, the only true magic was magic.
“A nexus,” Alex repeated. “They’re all over campus? The… nexes—”
“Nexuses. Think of magic like a river. The nexuses are where the power eddies, and it’s what allows the societies’ rituals to function successfully. We’ve mapped twelve in the city. Tombs have been built on eight of them. The others are on sites where structures already exist, like the train station, and where it would be impossible to build. A few societies have lost their tombs over time. They can study all they want. Once that connection is broken, they don’t accomplish much.”
“And you’re telling me this has all been going on for more than a hundred years and no one has figured it out?”
“The Ancient Eight have yielded some of the most powerful men and women in the world. People who literally steer governments, the wealth of nations, who forge the shape of culture. They’ve run everything from the United Nations to Congress to The New York Times to the World Bank. They’ve fixed nearly every World Series, six Super Bowls, the Academy Awards, and at least one presidential election. Hundreds of websites are dedicated to unraveling their connections to the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group—the list goes on.”
“Maybe if they met at Denny’s instead of giant mausoleums, they wouldn’t have to worry about that.”
They had arrived at Il Bastone, Lethe House, three stories of red brick and stained glass, built by John Anderson in 1882 for an outrageous sum and then abandoned barely a year later. He’d claimed he was being chased out by the city’s high tax rates. Lethe’s records told a different story, one that involved his father and the ghost of a dead cigar girl. Il Bastone didn’t sprawl like Black Elm. It was a city house, bracketed closely on both sides by other properties, tall but contained in its grandeur.
“They’re not worried,” said Darlington. “They welcome all of the conspiracy theories and tinfoil-hat-wearing loons.”
“Because they like feeling interesting?”
“Because what they’re really doing is so much worse.” Darlington pushed open the black wrought-iron gate and saw the porch of the old house straighten slightly, as if in anticipation. “After you.”
As soon as the gate shut, darkness enveloped them. From somewhere beneath the house, a howl sounded, high and hungry. Galaxy Stern had asked what she was in for. It was time to show her.
3
Winter
Who dies at the gym? After her call with Dawes, Alex backtracked across the plaza. She had been to Payne Whitney Gymnasium exactly once: when she’d let Mercy drag her to a salsa class, where a white girl snugly packed into taut black pants had told her to pivot, pivot, pivot.
Darlington had encouraged her to use the free weights and to “build up her cardio.”
“For what?” Alex had asked.
“To better yourself.”
Only Darlington could say something like that with a straight face. But, then again, he ran six miles every morning and swept into rooms on a cloud of physical perfection. Every time he showed up at the Vanderbilt suite, it was as if someone had run an electric current through the floor. Lauren, Mercy, even silent, frowning Anna, would sit up a little straighter, looking bright-eyed and slightly frantic as a bunch of well-groomed squirrels. Alex would have liked to be immune to it—the pretty face, his lean frame, the easy way he occupied space as if he owned it. He had a way of distractedly brushing the brown hair back from his forehead that made you want to do it for him. But Darlington’s lure was offset by the healthy fear he instilled in her. At the end of the day, he was a rich boy in a nice coat who could capsize her without even meaning to.
That first day at the mansion on Orange, he’d set jackals on her. Jackals. He’d given a sharp whistle and they’d leapt from the bushes near the house, snarling and cackling. Alex had screamed. Her legs had tangled as she’d turned to run and she’d fallen to the grass, nearly impaling herself on the low iron fence. But early on in her time with Len she’d learned to always watch the person in charge. That changed from room to room, house to house, deal to deal, but it always paid to know who could make the big decisions. That was Darlington. And Darlington didn’t look scared. He looked interested.
The jackals were stalking toward her, slavering, teeth bared and backs bent.