There was a monastery that produced Armagnac so refined, its monks were forced to flee to Italy when Louis XIV joked about killing them to protect their secrets. This is the last bottle. Don’t drink it on an empty stomach, and don’t call unless you’re dead. Good luck, Virgil!
He’d always thought Longfellow was tripe, but he’d treasured the note and the brandy anyway.
Now he watched Alex sweating amid the luxury of his old rooms, rooms that had been rarely used but much beloved—the dark blue walls, the canopied bed with its heavy teal covers, the armoire painted with white dogwood. The stained glass here was more modest, two elegant windows—clouds in shades of blue and violet set atop starry skies—bracketing a fireplace of painted tiles.
Alex stood at the center of it all, her arms wrapped around her middle, turning slowly. He thought again of Undine. But maybe she was just a girl lost at sea.
He had to ask. “When did you first see them?”
She glanced at him, then at the window above her, the moon waxing forever in a stained-glass sky. She picked up the Reuge music box from the desk, touched her finger to the lid, but then thought better of it, set it down.
Darlington was a good talker, but he was happiest when no one was speaking to him, when he didn’t have to perform the ritual of himself and he could simply be left to watch others. Alex had a grainy quality to her, like an old film. He could tell she was making a choice. Whether to reveal her secrets? Whether to run?
She shrugged and he thought she would leave it at that, but then she picked up the music box again and said, “I don’t know. I thought they were people for a while, and it’s not like anyone pays attention to a kid talking to no one. I remember seeing a fat guy in nothing but socks and undershorts, holding a remote control in one hand like a teddy bear and standing in the middle of the street. I remember trying to tell my mom he was going to get hurt. On our trip to the Santa Monica Pier, I saw a woman lying in the water like a picture of…” She gestured as if stirring a pot. “With her hair and the flowers?”
“Ophelia.”
“Ophelia. She followed me home, and when I cried and shouted at her to leave, she just tried to push closer.”
“They like tears. The salt, the sadness, any strong emotion.” “Fear?” she asked. She was so still, as if she were posing for a portrait.
“Fear.” Few Grays were malevolent, but they did love to startle and terrify.
“Why aren’t there more of them? Shouldn’t they be everywhere?”
“Only a few Grays can pass through the Veil. The vast majority remain in the afterlife.”
“I’d see them at the supermarket, around the hot-foods case or those pink bakery boxes. They loved our school cafeteria. I didn’t think about it much until Jacob Craig asked if I wanted to see his thing. I told him I’d seen plenty of them, and somehow it got back to his mom, and she called the school. So the teacher brings me in and asks, ‘What do you mean you’ve seen lots of things?’ I didn’t know to lie.” She plunked the music box down. “If you want to get Child Protective Services called fast, just start talking about ghost dick.”
Darlington wasn’t sure what he’d expected. A dead highwayman lurking romantically at the window? A banshee roaming the banks of the Los Angeles River like La Llorona? There was something so ordinary and awful about her story. About her. Someone had reported Alex’s case to CPS, and one of Lethe’s search algorithms or one of their many contacts in one of the many bureaus that they paid off had caught mention of those notable key words: Delusions. Paranoia. Ghosts. From that point on, she’d probably been watched. “And that night in the apartment on Cedros?”
She frowned and then said, “Oh, you mean Ground Zero. Don’t tell me you haven’t read the file.”
“I have. I want to know how you survived.”
Alex rubbed her thumb over the edge of the windowsill. “So do I.”
Was that enough? Darlington had seen the crime-scene photos, video taken by officers arriving on scene. Five men dead, all of them beaten nearly unrecognizable, two of them staked through the heart like vampires. Despite the carnage, blood spatter indicated it was all the work of one perpetrator—arcs of red, every vicious blow struck from left to right.
Something was off about the whole thing, but Alex was never a suspect. For one thing, she was right-handed, and for another, she was far too small to have wielded a weapon with so much force. Besides, she had enough fentanyl in her system that she was lucky she hadn’t died herself. Her hair had been wet and she’d been found naked as a newborn. Darlington had dug a little deeper, unable to shake his suspicions, but there had been no blood or remains in the drain—if she’d somehow been involved, she hadn’t showered the proof away. So why had the attacker left the girls alone? If the police were right and this was some kind of beef with another dealer, why spare Alex and her friend? Drug dealers who beat people to death with bats didn’t seem like the spare-the-women-and-children type. Maybe the attacker had believed they were dead already from the drugs. Or maybe Alex had tipped someone off. But she knew something more about what had happened than she’d told the police. He felt it in his bones.
“Hellie and I got high,” she said quietly, still brushing her finger against the windowsill. “I woke up in the hospital. She didn’t wake up at all.”
She looked very small suddenly and Darlington felt a stab of shame. She was twenty, older than most freshmen, but she was still just a kid in a lot of ways, in over her head. And she’d lost friends that night, her boyfriend, everything familiar.
“Come with me,” he said. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he felt guilty for prying. Maybe because she didn’t deserve to be punished for saying yes to a bargain no right-minded person would refuse.
He led her back to the gloom of the armory. It had no windows, and its walls were lined in shelves and drawers nearly two stories high. It took him a moment to find the cupboard he wanted. When he rested his hand on the door, the house paused, then let the lock give with a disapproving click.
Carefully, he removed the box—heavy, gleaming black wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
“You’ll probably need to remove your shirt,” he said. “I’ll give Dawes the box and she can—”
“Dawes doesn’t like me.”
“Dawes doesn’t like anyone.”
“Here,” she said. She pulled the shirt over her head, revealing a black bra and ribs shadowed like the furrows of a tilled field. “Don’t get Dawes.”
Why was she so willing to put herself in his hands? Was she unafraid or just reckless? Neither trait boded well for her future at Lethe. But he had the sense that it was neither of those things. It felt like she was testing him now, like she’d laid down another challenge.
“Some propriety wouldn’t kill you,” he said.
“Why take the chance?”
“Usually when a woman takes her clothes off in front of me I have some warning.”
Alex shrugged, and the shadows moved over her skin. “Next time, I’ll light the signal fires.”
“That would be best.”
Tattoos covered her from wrist to shoulder and spread beneath her clavicles. They looked like armor.