He opened the box’s lid.
Alex drew in a sudden breath and skittered backward.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. She’d retreated nearly halfway across the room.
“I don’t like butterflies.”
“They’re moths.” They perched in even rows in the box, soft white wings fluttering.
“Whatever.”
“I’ll need you to stay still,” he said. “Can you?”
“Why?”
“Just trust me. It will be worth it.” He considered. “If it’s not, I’ll drive you and your roommates to Ikea.”
Alex balled her shirt in her fists. “And take us for pizza after.”
“Fine.”
“And dear Aunt Eileen is going to buy me some new fall clothes.”
“Fine. Now come here, you coward.”
She crossed back to him in a kind of sideways shuffle, averting her eyes from the contents of the box.
One by one, he took out the moths and laid them gently on her skin. One at her right wrist, her right forearm, the crook of her elbow, her slender biceps, the knob of her shoulder. He repeated the process with her left arm, then placed two moths at the points of her collarbones where the heads of two black snakes curled, their tongues nearly meeting at the hollow of her throat.
“Chabash,” he murmured. The moths beat their wings in unison. “Uverat.” They flapped their wings again and began to turn gray. “Memash.”
With each beat of their wings, the moths grew darker and the tattoos started to fade.
Alex’s chest rose and fell in jagged, rapid bursts. Her eyes were wide with fear, but as the moths darkened and the ink vanished from her skin, her expression changed, opened. Her lips parted.
She’s seen the dead, he thought. She’s witnessed horrors. But she’s never seen magic.
This was why he had done it, not because of guilt or pride but because this was the moment he’d been waiting for: the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realize that they had not been lied to, that the world they’d been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned, that there really was something lurking in the wood, beneath the stairs, between the stars, that everything was full of mystery.
The moths beat their wings again, again, until they were black, then blacker. One by one they tipped from her arms and dropped to the floor in a faint patter. Alex’s arms were bare, stripped of all sign of the tattoos, though in places where the needle had gone deep, he could still discern faint ridges. Alex held her arms out, breath coming in gasps.
Darlington gathered the moths’ fragile bodies, placing them gently in the box.
“Are they dead?” she whispered.
“Ink drunk.” He shut the lid and placed the box back in the cupboard. This time the lock’s click seemed more resigned. He and the house were going to have to have a discussion. “Address moths were originally used for transporting classified material. Once they drank a document, they could be sent anywhere in a coat pocket or a box of antiques. Then they’d be placed on a fresh sheet of paper and would recreate the document to the word. As long as the recipient knew the right incantation.”
“So we could put my tattoos on you?”
“They might not fit quite right, but we could. Just be careful…” He waved a hand. “In the throes. Human saliva reverses the magic.”
“Only human?”
“Yes. Feel free to let a dog lick your elbows.”
Then she turned her gaze on him. In the shadows of the room, her eyes looked black, wild. “Is there more?”
He didn’t have to ask what she meant. Would the world keep unraveling? Keep spilling its secrets?
“Yes. There’s plenty more.”
She hesitated. “Will you show me?”
“If you let me.”
Alex smiled then, a small thing, a glimpse of the girl lurking inside her, a happy, less haunted girl. That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for. That was what Lethe had done for him. Maybe it could do that for Alex as well.
Months later, he would remember the weight of the moths’ bodies in his palm. He would think of that moment and how foolish he had been to think he knew her at all.
5
Winter
The sky was already fading into gray when Alex finally made it back to Old Campus. She’d stopped at the Hutch to shower with verbena soap beneath a hanging censer filled with cedar and palo santo—the only things that would counter the stink of the Veil.
She had spent so little time in Lethe places by herself. She had always been with Darlington, and she still expected to see him tucked into the window seat with a book, expected to hear him grumble that she’d used all of the hot water. He’d suggested leaving clothes there and at Il Bastone, but Alex already had so little to wear that she couldn’t afford to stash an extra pair of jeans and one of her two bras somewhere other than her ugly school-issue dresser. So when she stepped out of the bathroom into the narrow dressing room, she had to opt for Lethe House sweats—the Lethe spirit hound embroidered at the left breast and right hip, a symbol meaningless to anyone but society members. Darlington’s own clothes still hung there—a Barbour jacket, a striped Davenport College scarf, fresh jeans neatly folded and creased, perfectly broken-in engineer boots, and a pair of Sperry Top-Siders just waiting for Darlington to slip into them. She’d never seen him wear them, but maybe you had to have a pair in case your preppy card got pulled.
Alex left a green desk lamp burning at the Hutch. Dawes wouldn’t like it, but she couldn’t quite bear to leave the rooms in darkness.
She was unlocking the door to the Vanderbilt entryway when a text arrived from Dean Sandow: Have confabbed w Centurion. Rest easy.
She wanted to throw her phone across the courtyard. Rest easy? If Sandow intended to handle the murder directly, why had she wasted her time—and her coin of compulsion—visiting the crime scene? She knew the dean didn’t trust her. Why would he? He’d probably been up with a cup of chamomile tea when he got the news of Tara’s death, his big dog asleep on his feet, waiting by the phone to make sure nothing went horribly wrong at the prognostication and Alex didn’t humiliate herself or Lethe. Of course he wouldn’t want her anywhere near a murder.
Rest easy. Everything else went unsaid: I don’t expect you to handle this. No one expects you to handle this. No one expects you to do anything but keep from drawing unwanted attention until we get Darlington back.
If they could find him. If they could somehow bring him home from whatever dark place he’d gone. In less than a week they’d attempt the new-moon rite. Alex didn’t understand the specifics, only that Dean Sandow believed it would work and that, until it did, her job was to make sure that no one asked too many questions about Lethe’s missing golden boy. At least now she didn’t have a homicide to worry about or a grumpy detective to deal with.
When she entered the common room to find Mercy already awake, Alex was glad she’d stopped to shower and change. She had thought college dorms would be like hotels, long hallways pocked with bedrooms, but Vanderbilt felt more like an old-fashioned apartment building, full of tinny music, people humming and laughing as they went in and out of the shared bathrooms, the slamming of doors echoing up and down the central staircase. The squat she’d shared with Len and Hellie and Betcha and the others had been noisy, but its sighs and moans had been different, defeated, like a dying body.