They stood in silence by the stone columns, Black Elm behind them, the snow gathering around them.
Michelle’s car came first. She didn’t offer to share it, but she turned to Alex as she got in.
“I work in gifts and acquisitions in the Butler Library at Columbia,” she said. “If you need me.”
Before Alex could reply, she ducked inside. The car vanished slowly down the street, cautious in the snow, its red taillights dwindling to sparks.
Alex kept her arm around Dawes, afraid that she might pull away. Until this moment, until this night, anything had been possible and Alex had really believed that somehow, inevitably, maybe not on this new moon but on the next, Darlington would return. Now the spell of hope was broken and no amount of magic could make it whole.
The golden boy of Lethe was gone.
26
Winter
“You’ll stay, won’t you?” Dawes asked as they entered the foyer at Il Bastone. The house sighed around them as if sensing their sadness. Did it know? Had it known from the start that Darlington would never come back?
“Of course.” She was grateful Dawes wanted her there. She didn’t want to be alone or to try to put on a cheerful face for her roommates. She couldn’t pretend right now. And yet she couldn’t stop reaching for some scrap of hope. “Maybe we got it wrong. Maybe Sandow screwed up.”
Dawes switched on the lights. “He’s had almost three months to plan. It was a good ritual.”
“Well, maybe he got it wrong on purpose. Maybe he doesn’t want Darlington back.” She knew she was grasping at smoke, but it was all she had. “If he’s involved in covering up Tara’s murder, you think he really wants a crusader like Darlington around instead of me?”
“But you are a crusader, Alex.”
“A more competent crusader. What did Sandow say to stop the ritual?”
“Your tongues are made stone—he used that to silence the bells.” “And the rest?”
Dawes shucked off her scarf and hung her parka on the hook. She kept her back to Alex when she said, “Hear the silence of an empty home. No one will be made welcome.”
The thought of Darlington being forever banned from Black Elm was horrible. Alex rubbed her tired eyes. “The night of the Skull and Bones prognostication, I heard someone—something—pounding on the door to get in right at the moment Tara was murdered. It sounded just like tonight. Maybe it was Darlington. Maybe he saw what was happening to Tara and he tried to warn me. If he—”
Dawes was already shaking her head, her loose bun unwinding at her neck. “You heard what they said. It… that thing ate him.” Her shoulders shook and Alex realized she was crying again, clutching her hanging coat as if without its support she might topple. “He’s gone.” The words like a refrain, a song they’d be singing until the grief had passed.
Alex touched a hand to Dawes’s arm. “Dawes—”
But Dawes stood up straight, sniffled deeply, wiped the tears from her eyes. “Sandow was wrong, though. Technically. Someone could survive being consumed by a hellbeast. Just no one human.”
“What could, then?”
“A demon.”
Far above our pay grade.
Dawes took a long, shuddering breath and pushed her hair back from her face, re-fastening her bun. “Do you think Sandow will want coffee when he gets here?” she asked as she retrieved her headphones from the parlor carpet. “I want to work for a while.”
“How’s it going?”
“The dissertation?” Dawes blinked slowly, looked down at the headphones in her hand as if wondering how they’d gotten there. “I have no idea.”
“I’ll order pizza,” said Alex. “And I’m taking first shower. We both reek.”
“I’ll open a bottle of wine.”
Alex was halfway up the stairs when she heard the knock at the door. For a second, she thought it might be Dean Sandow. But why would he knock? In the six months she’d been a part of Lethe, no one had knocked at Orange.
“Dawes—” she began.
“Let me in.” A male voice, loud and angry through the door.
Alex’s feet had carried her all the way to the base of the stairs before she realized it. Compulsion.
“Dawes, don’t!” she cried. But Dawes was already unlocking the door.
The lock clicked and the door slammed inward. Dawes was thrown back against the banister, headphones flying from her hand. Alex heard a loud crack as her head connected with the wood.
Alex didn’t stop to think. She snatched up Dawes’s headphones and shoved them down over her ears, using her hands to keep them tight to her head as she ran up the stairs. She glanced back once and saw Blake Keely—beautiful Blake Keely, the shoulders of his wool coat dusted with snow as if he’d emerged from the pages of a catalog—step over Dawes’s body, his eyes locked on Alex.
Dawes will be okay, she told herself. She has to be okay. You can’t help her if you lose control.
Blake was using Starpower or something like it. Alex had felt the pull of it in his voice through the door. It was the only reason Dawes had flipped the lock.
She bolted toward the armory, punching Turner’s number into her phone, and slammed her hand against the old stereo panel on the wall by the library, hoping that for once it would oblige. Maybe the house was fighting alongside her, because music boomed through the hallways, louder and clearer than she’d ever heard it before. When Darlington had been around, it would have been Purcell or Prokofiev. Instead, it was the last thing Dawes had listened to—if Alex hadn’t been so frightened, she would have laughed as Morrissey’s warble and the jangle of guitars filled the air.
The words were muted by the headphones, the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears. She hurtled into the armory, throwing open drawers. Dawes was down and bleeding. Turner was far away. And Alex didn’t want to think about what Blake might do to her, what he might make her do. Would it be revenge for what she’d done? Had he figured out who she was and somehow followed her here? Or was it Tara who had brought him to her door? Alex had been so focused on the societies, she hadn’t noticed another suspect right in front of her—a pretty boy with a rotten core who didn’t like the word “no.”
She needed a weapon, but nothing in the armory was made to fight a living, human body hyped up on super charisma.
Alex glanced over her shoulder. Blake was right behind her. He was saying something, but thankfully she couldn’t hear him over the music. She reached into the drawers, grabbing anything heavy she could find to throw. She wasn’t even sure what priceless thing she was hurling at him. An astrolabe. A glittering paperweight with a sea frozen inside it.
Blake batted them aside and seized the back of her neck. He was strong from lacrosse and vanity. He tore the headphones from her ears. Alex screamed as loud as she could and raked her nails across his face. Blake shrieked and she fled down the hall. She’d fought monsters before. She’d won. But not on her own. She needed to get outside, away from the wards, where she could draw on North’s strength or find another Gray to help her.
The house seemed to be humming, buzzing its anxiety. A stranger is here. A killer is here. The lights crackled and flared, the static from the stereo rising.
“Calm down,” Alex told the house as she pounded down the hallway, back to the stairs. “You’re too old for this shit.”
But the house continued to whir and rattle.
Blake tackled her from behind. She hit the floor hard. “Be still,” he crooned in her ear.