Had her mother meant it? Alex didn’t know. When she’d gotten old enough to realize how much the questions hurt her mother and to realize the answers were never going to change, she stopped asking. She decided not to care. If her father couldn’t be bothered with her, she wasn’t going to bother with him.
But now she found herself saying, “Was there anything unusual about him?”
Mira laughed. “How about everything?”
“I mean…” Alex struggled for a way to describe what she wanted to know without sounding crazy. “Did he like the same stuff you did? Tarot and crystals and all that? Did you ever get the sense he could see things that weren’t there?”
Mira looked down Chapel Street. Her gaze turned distant. “Have you ever heard of the arsenic eaters?”
Alex blinked, confused. “No?”
“They would ingest a little bit of arsenic every day. It made their skin clear and their eyes bright and they felt wonderful. And all the while they were just drinking poison.” When Mira turned her eyes back to Alex, they were sharper and steadier than Alex ever remembered them being, free of the usual determined cheer. “That’s what being with your father was like.” Then she smiled and the old Mira was back. “Text me after you see the doctor.”
“I will, Mom.”
Alex closed the door and watched the car drive away. The Bridegroom had stood a respectful distance away, watching the whole exchange, but now he drew closer. Was he ever going to let up? She really didn’t want to go to Il Bastone, but she was going to need the Lethe library to figure out how to break their connection. “No one is immortal,” she snapped at him, and saw him reluctantly shrink back, vanishing through the bricks.
“Your mom okay?” Mercy asked as Alex entered the common room. She’d put on her hyacinth robe and curled up on the couch.
“I think so. She’s just worried about me getting through the rest of the year.”
“And you’re not?”
“Sure,” Alex said. “Of course.”
Mercy snorted. “No, you’re not. I can tell. So continues the mystery of Alex Stern. It’s okay. Mystery is good. I played softball for two years in high school.”
“You did?”
“See? I have secrets too. Did you hear about Blake?”
She hadn’t. She hadn’t heard about anything during the weeks she’d hid at the Hutch. That had been the point. But according to Mercy, Blake Keely had attacked a woman in her home and her husband had fought him off with a golf club. Forensics had matched the knife he’d been carrying with the weapon in the Tara Hutchins murder investigation. There was no mention of Dawes, or the mansion on Orange, or Hiram Bingham III’s fatal marble noggin. No discussion of Merity. Not a single word about the societies. Case closed.
“I could have ended up dead,” said Mercy. “I guess I should be grateful.”
Grateful. The word hung in the air, its wrongness like the sour clang of a bell.
Mercy tilted her head back, letting it flop on the arm of the couch, staring up at the ceiling. “My great-grandmother lived to be one hundred and three years old. She was doing her own taxes and swimming at the Y every morning until she keeled over dead in the middle of a yoga class.”
“She sounds great.”
“She was a total asshole. My brother and I hated going to her house. She served the nastiest-smelling tea and she never stopped complaining. But you always felt a little tougher at the end of a visit. Like you’d endured her.”
Alex figured she’d be lucky if she made it to the end of the semester. But it was a nice sentiment. “I wish my grandmother had made it to a hundred and three.”
“What was she like?”
Alex sat down in Lauren’s ugly recliner. “Superstitious. Religious. I’m not sure which one. But she had a steel spine. My mom told me when she brought my father home, he took one look at my grandmother, turned right around, and never came back.” Alex had asked her grandmother about it once, after her first heart attack. Too pretty, she’d said, waving her hand dismissively. Mal tormento que soplo. He was a bad wind that blew through.
“I think you have to be like that,” Mercy said. “If you’re going to survive to get old.”
Alex looked out the window. The Bridegroom had returned. His face was taut, determined. As if he could wait forever. And he probably could.
What do you want? Belbalm had asked her. Safety, comfort, to feel unafraid. I want to live to grow old, Alex thought as she pulled the curtains closed. I want to sit on my porch and drink foul-smelling tea and yell at passersby. I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.
29
Early Spring
The next morning when Alex set out for class, determined to at least try to make a good show of it, North was still there. He seemed agitated, cutting in and out of her path, hovering in her field of vision so that she couldn’t see the board in Spanish.
I know you’re not around, Alex texted Dawes when she got out of section. But did you ever find anything about severing connections to Grays? I’ve got a Bridegroom situation.
Temper fraying, she cut into the bathroom in the entryway to Commons and waved North inside.
“Just tell me one thing,” she said to him. “Did you find Tara behind the Veil?”
He shook his head.
“Then I’m going to need you to fuck off for a good long while. The deal is off. The case is solved and I don’t want to hang with your girl-murdering ass.” Alex didn’t really believe North had been responsible; she just wanted him to leave her alone.
The Bridegroom jabbed a finger at the sink.
“If you think I’m going to run a bath in there so we can have a chat, you’re wrong. Take a break.”
She thought about ditching lecture and just going back to the quiet of her warded dorm room. But she’d gone to the trouble of putting on clothes. She might as well make the most of it. At least it was Shakespeare and not Modern British Novels.
She crossed Elm to High Street and Linsly-Chittenden Hall, and took a seat on the aisle, tucking herself into a desk. Whenever the Bridegroom swooped into her view, she shifted her focus. She hadn’t done the reading, but everyone knew The Taming of the Shrew, and she liked this bit they were covering about the sisters and music.
Alex was looking at a slide of Sonnet 130 when she felt her head split open with a sudden bolt of pain. A deep wash of cold gusted through her. She saw flashes of a street lit by gas lamps, a smokestack belching dark clouds into the gray sky. She tasted tobacco in her mouth. North. North was inside her and she hadn’t invited him in. She had time to feel a flash of rage and then the world went black.
In the next second she was looking down at her paper. The professor was still talking but Alex couldn’t quite understand what she was saying. She could see the trail of the pen where her notes had left off. Three dates had been scrawled across the page in wobbly handwriting.
1854 1869 1883
There was blood spattered across the page.
Alex reached up and nearly smacked herself in the face. It was as if she’d forgotten how long her arm was. Hastily, she wiped her sleeve across her face. Her nose was bleeding.