“She knew better,” said Alex. There was no room for mercy in her. “She just thought her life was more important than all of ours.”
“I didn’t know she was capable of such things,” he said over the clamor of the crowd. “I never knew she had such a heart.”
“You never knew her at all.”
Careful Daisy, who had kept her secrets close, who had seen ghosts, who had longed to see the world. Wild Daisy, cut down before she could even start to live. Cruel Daisy, who had refused her fate and had stolen life after life to keep herself fed.
Alex spoke the final name. “Daisy Fanning Whitlock!”
She thrust out her hand and felt Daisy’s spirit inch toward her, slowly, grudgingly, fighting to hold on to her body like a plant determined to curl its roots in the ground and remain.
Alex took strength from the Grays surrounding her, passing through her. She let her mind form teeth, let them sink into Daisy’s consciousness. She pulled.
Daisy’s soul hurtled toward her. Alex cast it free before it could enter her and seize hold.
For the briefest moment, she glimpsed a dark-haired, pixie-faced girl in wide skirts and ruffled sleeves. Her chest had been blown open by a gunshot; her mouth was stretched in a scream. The Grays surged forward.
North threw himself in front of Daisy. “Please,” he said. “Leave her be!”
But Gladys stepped forward, thin as air. “No.”
“No,” chorused the lost girls. Sophie and Zuzanna, Paoletta and Effie and Colina.
The Grays surged past North. They fell upon Daisy in a whirling horde.
“Mors irrumat omnia,” Alex whispered. Death fucks us all.
The Wheel spun and Alex felt her stomach lurch. She thrust her hands out, trying to find something, anything, to hold on to. She smacked into something solid, fell to her knees. The room went suddenly still.
Alex was on the carpeted floor of the president’s office. She looked up, her head still spinning. The Grays were gone—all but the Bridegroom. She could hear her heart pounding in her chest and, through the door, the sounds of the party. The dean lay dead in the desk chair. When she closed her eyes, an afterimage of the Wheel burned blue against her lids.
Belbalm’s body had collapsed in on itself, her skin dissolving to a powdery husk, her bones crumbling as the weight of a hundred years fell upon them. She was little more than a pile of ash.
The Bridegroom stood staring at the heap of dust that had once been a girl. He knelt and reached out, but his hand passed right through it.
Alex used the edge of the desk to pull herself to her feet. She stumbled to the French doors that led onto the garden. Her legs felt wobbly. She was pretty sure the wound in her side had reopened. She unlocked the door and cold air blew through. It felt clean on her flushed cheeks and scattered Belbalm’s ashes.
Helplessly, North watched them gust up from the carpet.
“Sorry,” Alex muttered. “But you have shit taste in women.”
She looked at the dean’s body and tried to make her mind work, but she felt wrung out, empty. She couldn’t quite keep hold of her thoughts. In the garden, daffodils were just pushing up through the soil of the flower beds.
Turner, she thought. Where was he? Had he gotten her message?
She took out her phone. There was a message from the detective. Working a case. Stay put. Will call when I’m done. DON’T DO ANYTHING STUPID.
“It’s like he doesn’t even know me.”
A burst of laughter floated through the door. She needed to think. If the records from the other deaths ascribed to Daisy were correct, then Sandow’s death would most likely look like a heart attack or stroke. But Alex wasn’t taking any chances. She could sneak out through the garden, but people had seen her going into the office with him. She hadn’t exactly been discreet.
She would have to slip back into the party, try to mingle. If anyone asked, she’d claim she last saw the dean talking to Professor Belbalm.
“North,” she said. He glanced up from where he’d been kneeling. “I need your help.”
It was possible he wouldn’t be willing, that he would blame her for Daisy’s final death. Alex wondered if the Grays would leave any part of her to pass beyond the Veil. North’s presence here, his grief, didn’t make it seem likely.
Slowly, North rose. His eyes were dark and mournful as ever, but there was a new caution in them as he looked at Alex. Is he afraid of me? She didn’t mind the idea. Maybe he’d think twice about jumping into her skull again. Still, she felt for North. She knew loss, and he’d lost Daisy twice—first the girl he loved, and then the dream of who she’d been.
“I need you to make sure there’s nobody in the hall,” Alex said. “No one can see me leave this room.”
North drifted through the door, and for a long moment Alex wondered if he’d just leave her here with a dead body and a carpet covered in powdered evil.
Then he passed back through the wall and nodded the all-clear.
Alex made herself walk. She felt strange, wide open and exposed, a house with all its doors thrown open.
She smoothed her hair, tugged down the hem of her dress. She would have to act normal, pretend nothing had happened. But Alex knew that wouldn’t be a problem. She’d been doing it her whole life.
-
We say “the Veil,” but we know there are many Veils, each a barrier between our world and the beyond. Some Grays remain sequestered behind all of them, never to return to the living; others may be glimpsed in our world by those willing to risk Hiram’s Bullet, and others may pierce still further into our world to be seen and heard by ordinary folk. We know too that there are many borderlands where the dead may commune with the living, and we have long suspected that there are many afterlives. A natural conclusion is that there are also many hells. But if there are such places, they remain opaque to us, unknown and undiscovered. For there is no explorer so intrepid or daring that he would dare to walk the road to hell—no matter how it may be paved.
Cuando ganeden esta acerrado, guehinam esta siempre abierto. While the Garden of Eden may be closed, Hell is always open.
32
Spring
Alex met Dawes at the Hutch and they walked up Elm to Payne Whitney, to the intersection that Sandow had chosen for his murder rite, the place where Tara Hutchins had died. Auspicious. Spring flowers had begun to emerge on the edges of the empty plot of land, pale purple crocus, tiny white bells of lily of the valley on their hesitant bent necks.
It was hard for Alex to be away from the wards. All her life she’d seen Grays—the Quiet Ones, she’d called them. They weren’t keeping quiet anymore. She could hear them now. The dead woman clad in a nightgown singing softly to herself outside the music school. Two young men in coats and breeches, perched on the Old Campus fence, exchanging gossip, the left sides of their bodies charred black from some long-ago fire. Even now she had to actively ignore the drowned rower running wind sprints outside the gym. She could hear his heavy breathing. How was that possible? Why would a ghost need to breathe? Was it just the memory of needing air? An old habit? Or a performance of being human?
She gave her head a little shake. She would find a way to silence them somehow or lose her mind trying.