We all make mistakes.
Mike wasn’t going to complain to Sandow. He’d have to explain that his delegation had somehow let the secret to Merity slip free and that he’d handed Alex a dose of Starpower. Alex had used Blake’s own phone to send the new video to all of his contacts, and no one at Omega knew her name.
“Alex,” whispered Lauren. “What is this?”
Around them, the dining hall had exploded into pockets of heated conversation, people cackling and pushing their food away in disgust, others demanding to know what was happening. Evan had already moved on to the next table. But Lauren and Mercy were staring at Alex, quiet, their phones placed facedown on the table.
“How did you do it?” asked Lauren.
“Do what?”
“You said you would fix it,” Mercy said. She tapped her phone. “So?”
“So,” said Alex.
The silence eddied around them for a long moment.
Then Mercy dragged her finger over the table and said, “You know how people say two wrongs don’t make a right?”
“Yeah.”
Mercy pulled Alex’s plate toward her and took a huge bite of her remaining cheeseburger. “They’re full of shit.”
-
Whether the magic of Scroll and Key was learned or stolen from Middle Eastern sorcerers during the Crusades is not really a matter of debate—fashions change, thieves become curators—though the Locksmiths still like to protest that their mastery of portal magic was gotten by strictly honest means. The exterior of the Scroll and Key tomb pays homage to the origins of their power, but the interior of the tomb is nonsensically devoted to Arthurian legend, complete with a round table at its heart. There are some who claim the stone comes from Avalon itself, others who swear it comes from the Temple of Solomon, and still others who whisper it was quarried down the road in Stony Creek. Regardless of its origins, everyone from Dean Acheson to Cole Porter to James Gamble Rogers—the architect responsible for Yale’s very bones—has jostled elbows at it.
Sunburn keeping me awake. Andy said we’d be in Miami in time for kickoff no problem, all of it on the books and approved by the S&K board and the alumni. But whatever magic they got cooking went wobbly fast. At least now I’ve seen Haiti?
17
Winter
Alex had spent the rest of Sunday night in the common room with Mercy and Lauren, Rimsky-Korsakov on Lauren’s turntable, and a copy of The Good Soldier in her lap. The dorm seemed particularly raucous that night, and there were repeated knocks at the suite door—all of which they ignored. Eventually Anna came home looking glum and somnolent as ever. She gave them a flat “hey” and vanished into her bedroom. A minute later, they heard her on the phone to her family in Texas and had to cover their mouths, shoulders heaving and tears squeezing from their eyes when they heard her say, “I’m pretty sure they’re witches.”
If you only knew.
Alex slept dreamlessly but woke in the night to find the Bridegroom hovering outside her bedroom window, the wards keeping him at bay. His face was expectant.
“Tomorrow,” she promised. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since her journey to the borderlands. She would get to Tara, but Mercy had needed her first. She owed more to the living than to the dead.
I’m handling this, she thought, as she downed two more aspirin and fell back into bed. Maybe not the way Darlington would have, but I’m managing.
Her first stop on Monday morning was Il Bastone, to pack her pockets with graveyard dirt and to spend an hour skimming the information she could find on glumae. If Book and Snake—or whoever had sent that thing after her—wanted to try again, this was the perfect time to do it. She’d freaked out in public; she was under the gun academically. If she suddenly threw herself in a river or off a building or into traffic, there would be plenty of warning signs to point to.
Did she seem depressed? She was distant. She didn’t make many friends. She was struggling in her classes. All true. But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.
And yet Alex was weirdly comforted by how different her story would be now from what it might have been a year ago. Dying of hypothermia after getting wasted and breaking into a public pool. Overdosing when she tried something new or went too far. Or just vanishing. Losing Len’s protection and disappearing into the long sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, the rows of little houses like stucco mausoleums in their tiny plots.
But if she could avoid dying right now, that would be nice. It’s the principle of the thing, as Darlington would say. After arguing with the library for a few hours, she found two passages on how to combat glumae, one in English, one in Hebrew, which required a translation stone and turned out to be less about glumae than golems. But since both sources mentioned the use of a wrist or pocket watch, the advice seemed sound.
Wind your timepiece tight. The steady tick of a watch confuses any creature made, not born. They perceive a heartbeat in simple clockwork and will look to find a body where there is none.
It wasn’t exactly protection, but distraction would have to do.
Darlington had worn a wristwatch with a wide black leather band and mother-of-pearl face. She’d assumed it was an heirloom or affectation. But maybe it had a purpose too.
Alex entered the armory, where they kept Hiram’s Crucible; the Golden Bowl looked almost bereft for lack of use. She found a pocket watch tangled up in a drawer with a collection of pendulums used for hypnotism, wound it, and tucked it into her pocket. But she had to open a lot of drawers before she found the mirrored compact she wanted, wrapped in cotton batting. A card in the drawer explained the mirror’s provenance: the glass originally fashioned in China, then set into the compact by members of Manuscript for a still-classified Cold War op run by the CIA. How it had made its way from Langley to the Lethe mansion on Orange, the card didn’t say. The glass was smudged, and Alex wiped it clean with a puff of breath and her sweatshirt.
Despite the events of the weekend, she made it through Spanish without her usual sense of blurriness or panic, spent two hours in Sterling powering through the last of her reading for her Shakespeare section, and then ate her usual double-serving lunch. She felt awake, focused the way she was on basso belladonna but without the heart-twitching jitters. And to think, all it had taken was an attempt on her life and a visit to the borderlands of hell. If only she’d known sooner.
That morning, North had been hovering in the Vanderbilt courtyard, and she’d muttered that she wouldn’t be free until after lunch. Sure enough, he was waiting when she emerged from the dining hall, and they set out together up College to Prospect. They were nearly to Ingalls Rink when she realized she hadn’t seen a single Gray—no, that wasn’t quite true. She saw them behind columns, darting into alleys. They’re afraid of him, she realized. She remembered him standing in the river, smiling. There are worse things than death, Miss Stern.