“What you’re suggesting isn’t possible,” said Michelle.
“I know it sounds that way,” said Dawes. “But humans can become—”
“I know the process. But demons are created one way: the union of sulfur and sin.”
“What kind of sin are we talking about?” said Alex. “Masturbation? Bad grammar?”
“You’re in a graveyard,” chided Dawes.
“Trust me, Dawes. The dead don’t care.”
“There’s only one sin that can make a man into a demon,” Michelle said. “Murder.”
Dawes looked stricken. “He would never, could never—”
“You killed someone,” Alex reminded her. And so have I. “ ‘Never’ is a big word.”
“Darlington?” Michelle said incredulously. “The teacher’s pet? The knight in shining armor?”
“There’s a reason knights carry swords, and I didn’t tag you in so we could argue. You don’t want to help, that’s fine. I know what I know: A hellbeast was sent to kill Darlington. But he survived and that thing shat him out in hell. We’re going to go get him.”
“We are?” said Michelle.
“We are,” said Dawes.
A cold wind blew through the cemetery trees and Alex had to restrain a shiver. It felt like winter trying to hold on. It felt like a warning. But Darlington was on the other side of something terrible, waiting for rescue. Sandow had stolen the golden boy of Lethe from this world, and someone had to steal him back.
“So,” she said as the wind picked up, shaking the new leaves on their branches, moaning over the gravestones like a mourner lost to grief. “Who’s ready to go to hell?”
The Houses of the Veil
Rich or poor, all are equal in death.
Teachings: Extispicy and splanchomancy. Divination using human and animal entrails.
Notable Alumni: William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, John Kerry.
Have power on this dark land to lighten it, and power on this dead world to make it live.
Teachings: Duru dweomer, portal magic. Astral and etheric projection.
Notable Alumni: Dean Acheson, Gary Trudeau, Cole Porter, Stone Phillips.
Everything changes, nothing perishes.
Teachings: Nekyia or nekromanteía, necromancy and bone conjuring.
Notable Alumni: Bob Woodward, Porter Goss, Kathleen Cleaver, Charles Rivkin.
The strength of the pack is the wolf. The strength of the wolf is the pack.
Teachings: Therianthropy.
Notable Alumni: Stephen Vincent Benét, Benjamin Spock, Charles Ives, Sam Wagstaff.
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.
Teachings: Mirror magic and glamours.
Famous Alumni: Jodie Foster, Anderson Cooper, David Gergen, Zoe Kazan.
Teachings: Logomancy—word binding and divination through language.
Notable Alumni: Admiral Richard Lyon, Samantha Power, John B. Goodenough.
Teachings: Tempestate Artium, elemental magic, storm calling.
Notable Alumni: Calvin Hill, John Ashcroft, Allison Williams.
Teachings: None. Founded in the tradition of its namesake, Jöns Jacob Berzelius, the Swedish chemist who created a new system of chemical notation that left the secrecy of alchemists in the past.
Notable Alumni: None.
Acknowledgments
In New York: Many thanks to everyone at Flatiron Books, particularly Noah Eaker, who took a gamble on this book early, Amy Einhorn, Lauren Bittrich, Patricia Cave, Marlena Bittner, Nancy Trypuc, Katherine Turro, Cristina Gilbert, Keith Hayes, Donna Noetzel, Lena Shekhter, Lauren Hougen, Kathy Lord, and Jennifer Gonzalez and her team. Thank you to New Leaf Literary—Pouya Shahbazian, Veronica Grijalva, Mia Roman, Hilary Pecheone, Meredith Barnes, Abigail Donoghue, Jordan Hill, Joe Volpe, Kelsey Lewis, Cassandra Baim, and Joanna Volpe, who championed me and this idea from the start.
In New Haven and at Yale: Professor Julia Adams of Hopper College, Angela McCray, Jenny Chavira if the Association of Yale Alumni, Judith Ann Schief in Manuscripts and Archives, Mark Branch of the Yale Alumni Magazine, David Heiser of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, Michael Morand at the Beinecke, and Claire Zella. Thank you to Rabbi Shmully Hecht for granting me access to the Anderson Mansion and to Barbara Lamb, who shared her extensive knowledge of Connecticut and squired me through many cemeteries. I have taken the occasional liberty with New Haven history and geography. Most notably, Wolf’s Head built their first hall on Prospect Street in 1884. The new hall on High Street was built more than forty years later.
In California: David Peterson for the Latin assists, Rachael Martin, Robyn Bacon, Ziggy the Human Cannonball, Morgan Fahey, Michelle Chihara, Sarah Mesle, Josh Kamensky, Gretchen McNeil, Julia Collard, Nadine Semerau, Marie Lu, Anne Grasser, Sabaa Tahir, Robin LaFevers, Victoria Aveyard, and Jimmy Freeman. Thank you also to my mom, who first sang to me in Ladino, to Christine, Sam, Emily, Ryan, Eric who has somehow kept me laughing, and the manatee.
In the Halclass="underline" Steven Testa, Laini Lipsher, and my own wolf pack of ’97.
Everywhere else: Max Daniel at UCLA and Simone Salmon for their help with Sephardic ballads, Kelly Link, Daniel José Older, Holly Black, Robin Wasserman, Sarah Rees Brennan, Rainbow Rowell, Zoraida Córdova, Cassandra Clare, Ally Carter, Carrie Ryan, Marie Rutkoski, Alex Bracken, Susan Dennard, Gamynne Guillote, and Michael Castro.
Many books helped build the world of Ninth House: Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism by Vincent Scully; Patrick Pinnell’s Yale University: An Architectural Tour; Loomis Havemeyer’s Go to Your Room: A story of undergraduate Societies and Fraternities at Yale; Brooks Mather Kelley’s Yale: A History; Joseph A. Soares’s The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges; David Alan Richards’s Skulls and Keys: The Hidden History of Yale’s Secret Societies; Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities; Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial City by Preston Maynard and Marjorie B. Noyes; New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design by Elizabeth Mills Brown; Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven by Mandi Isaacs Jackson; and The Plan for New Haven by Frederick Law Olmsted and Cass Gilbert. I found the ballad “La Moza y El Huerco” in the article “Sephardic Songs of Mourning and Dirges” by Paloma Díaz-Mas. Thanks also to the Pan-Hispanic Ballad Project.
About the Author