“And what about all of the years before that?” Alex stood and shoved her chair back. She paced into the breakfast room, her black hair reflecting the lamplight, energy sparking off her. The house gave a warning groan. She wasn’t sad or ashamed or worried. She was mad. “Where were you?” she demanded. “All you wise men of Lethe with your spells and your chalk and your books? Where were you when the dead were following me home? When they were barging into my classrooms? My bedroom? My damn bathtub? Sandow said you had been tracking me for years, since I was a kid. One of you couldn’t have told me how to get rid of them? That all it would take was a few magic words to send them away?”
“They’re harmless. It’s only the rituals that—”
Alex grabbed Darlington’s glass and threw it hard against the wall, sending glass and red wine flying. “They are not harmless. You talk as if you know, like you’re some kind of expert.” She struck her hands against the table, leaning toward him. “You have no idea what they can do.”
“Are you done or would you like another glass to break?”
“Why didn’t you help me?” said Alex, her voice nearly a growl.
“I did. You were about to be buried under a sea of Grays, if you recall.”
“Not you.” Alex waved her arm, indicating the house. “Sandow. Lethe. Someone.” She covered her face with her hands. “Take courage. No one is immortal. Do you know what it would have meant to me to know those words when I was a kid? It would have taken so little to change everything. But no one bothered. Not until I could be useful to you.”
Darlington did not like to think he had behaved badly. He did not like to think that Lethe had behaved badly. We are the shepherds. And yet they’d left Alex to face the wolves. She was right. They hadn’t cared. She’d been someone for Lethe to study and observe from afar.
He’d told himself he was giving her a chance, being fair to this girl who had washed up on his shore. But he’d let himself think of her as someone who had made all of the wrong choices and stumbled down the wrong path. It hadn’t occurred to him that she was being chased.
After a long moment, he said, “Would it help to break something else?”
She was breathing hard. “Maybe.”
Darlington rose and opened a cupboard, then another, and another, revealing shelf after shelf of Lenox, Waterford, Limoges—glassware, plates, pitchers, platters, butter dishes, gravy boats, thousands of dollars’ worth of crystal and china. He took down a glass, filled it with wine, and handed it to Alex.
“Where would you like to start?”
7
Winter
There had to be a Lethe protocol for murder, a series of steps she should follow, that Darlington would have known to follow.
He probably would have told her to enlist Dawes’s help. But Alex and the grad student had never managed to do much more than politely ignore each other. Like almost everyone else, Dawes had loved shiny-penny Darlington. He’d been the only person who seemed totally at ease talking to her, who had managed it without any of the awkwardness that hung over Dawes like one of her bulky, indeterminately colored sweatshirts. Alex was pretty sure Dawes blamed her for what had happened at Rosenfeld Hall, and though Dawes had never said much to Alex, her silence had taken on a new hostility of slammed cupboards and suspicious glares. Alex didn’t want to talk to Dawes any more than she had to.
So she would consult the Lethe library instead. Or you could just leave this whole thing alone, she thought as she climbed the steps to the mansion on Orange. A week from now, Darlington might be back beneath this very roof. He might emerge from the new-moon rite whole and happy and ready to turn his magnificent brain to the problem of Tara Hutchins’s murder. Or maybe he’d have other things on his mind.
There was no key to get into Il Bastone. Alex had been introduced to the door the first day Darlington brought her to the house, and now it released a creaky sigh as she entered. It had always hummed happily when Darlington was with her. At least it hadn’t sicced a pack of jackals on her. Alex hadn’t seen the Lethe hounds since that first morning, but she thought about them every time she approached the house, wondering where they slept and if they were hungry, if spirit hounds even needed food.
In theory, Dawes had Fridays off, but she could almost always be counted on to be burrowed into the corner of the first-floor parlor with her laptop. That made her easy to avoid. Alex slipped down the hall to the kitchen, where she found the plate of last night’s sandwiches Dawes had left covered with a damp towel on the top shelf of the fridge. She shoveled them into her mouth, feeling like a thief, but that just made the soft white bread, the cucumber coins, and thinly sliced salmon spiked with dill taste better.
The house on Orange had been acquired by Lethe in 1888, shortly after John Anderson abandoned it, supposedly trying to outrun the ghost of the cigar girl his father had murdered. Since then, Il Bastone had masqueraded as a private home, a school run by the Sisters of St. Mary’s, a law office, and now as a private home perpetually awaiting renovation. But it had always been Lethe.
A bookcase stood in the second-floor hallway beside an antique secretary and a vase of dried hydrangea. This was the entry to the library. There was an old panel in the wall beside it that supposedly controlled a stereo system, but it only worked about half the time and sometimes the music coming through the speakers sounded so tinny and far away, it made the house feel more empty.
Alex drew the Albemarle Book from the third shelf. It looked like an ordinary ledger bound in stained cloth, but its pages crackled slightly as she opened it, and she swore when a low thrum of electricity jolted through her. The book retained echoes of a user’s most recent request, and as Alex flipped to the last page of entries, she saw Darlington’s scrawl and the words Rosenfeld Hall schematics. The date was December 10. The last night Daniel Arlington had been seen alive.
Alex took a pen from the top of the secretary, wrote out the date and then Lethe House protocols. Homicide. She slid the book back onto the shelf between Stover at Yale and a battered copy of New England Cookery, Vol. 2. She’d never seen any sign of volume one.
The house gave a disapproving groan and the shelf shook slightly. Alex wondered if Dawes was too deep in her work to notice or if she would be turning her eyes to the ceiling, speculating on what Alex might be up to.
When the bookcase stopped rattling, Alex gripped its right side and pulled. It swung out from the wall like a door, revealing a two-story circular chamber lined with bookshelves. Though it was still afternoon, the sky through the glass dome above her glowed the luminous blue of early dusk. The air felt slightly balmy and she could smell orange blossoms on the air.
Lethe had a limited amount of room, so the library had been rigged with a telescope portal, using magic borrowed from Scroll and Key and deployed by the late Lethe delegate Richard Albemarle when he was still only a Dante. You wrote down the subject you sought in the Albemarle Book, placed it in the bookcase, and the library would kindly retrieve a selection of volumes from the Lethe House collection, which would be waiting for you when you swung open the secret door. The full collection was located in an underground bunker beneath an estate in Greenwich and was heavily weighted toward the history of the occult, New Haven, and New England. It had an original printing of Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum and fifty-two different translations of its text, the complete works of Paracelsus, the secret diaries of Aleister Crowley and Francis Bacon, a spell book from the Zoroastrian Fire Temple in Chak Chak, a signed photo of Calvin Hill, and a first edition of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale along with a spell written on a Yankee Doodle napkin that revealed the book’s secret chapters. But good luck finding a copy of Pride and Prejudice or a basic history of the Cold War that didn’t focus entirely on the faulty magic used in the wording of the Eisenhower Doctrine.