The girl to her right was staring at her. “You okay?”
“I’m great,” Alex said. She pinched her nostrils with her fingers, trying to get the bleeding to stop, as she hastily shut her notebook. North hovered just in front of her, his face stubborn. “You son of a bitch.”
The girl beside her cringed, but Alex couldn’t be bothered with putting on a good front. North had possessed her. He’d been inside her. He might as well have shoved his hand up her ass and used her as a puppet.
“You fucking bastard,” she snarled beneath her breath.
She shoved her notebook into her satchel, seized her coat, and hurried down the aisle, out of the lecture hall, and through the back door of L-C. She headed straight for Il Bastone, texting Dawes furiously: SOS.
Alex was limping by the time she reached the green, the pain in her side making it hard to breathe. She wished she’d brought some Percocet with her. North was still following a few feet behind. “Now you’re keeping a respectful distance, you disembodied fuck?” she barked over her shoulder.
He looked grim, but he sure as hell didn’t look sorry.
“I don’t know what bad shit you can do to a ghost,” she promised him. “But I’m going to figure it out.”
All of her bluster was cover for the fear rattling around in her heart. If he’d gotten in once, could he get in again? What could he make her do? Hurt herself? Hurt someone else? She’d used North in pretty much the same way when Lance had attacked her, but her life had been in danger. She hadn’t been bullying him into going on a fact-finding mission.
What if other Grays found out and came barging through? It had to be the result of the bond she’d formed with him. She’d invited him in twice. She knew his name. She’d called him by it. Maybe once that door was open, it couldn’t be locked again.
“Alex?”
Alex whirled, then caught her side, the pain from her wound splintering through her. Tripp Helmuth stood on the sidewalk in a navy sailing-team windbreaker and a backward cap.
“What do you want, Tripp?”
He held up his hands defensively. “Nothing! I just… Are you okay?”
“No, I’m really not. But I will be.”
“I just wanted to thank you for, y’know, keeping that stuff with Tara quiet.”
Alex had done no such thing, but if Tripp wanted to think she had, that was fine. “You bet, buddy.”
“That’s crazy about Blake Keely, though.”
“Is it?” said Alex.
Tripp lifted his cap, ran a hand through his hair, settled it back on his head. “Maybe not. I never liked him. Some guys are just made mean, y’know?”
Alex looked at Tripp in surprise. Maybe he wasn’t quite as useless as he seemed. “I do know.”
She cast a warning glance at North, who was pacing back and forth, passing through Tripp again and again.
Tripp shivered. “Shit, I think I’m coming down with a flu.”
“Get some rest,” said Alex. “There’s something bad going around.”
Something that looks like a dead Victorian.
Alex hurried down Elm to Orange, eager to be behind the wards. She pulled herself up the three porch steps to Il Bastone, a sense of ease flowing through her as soon as she opened the door and crossed the threshold. North was hovering in the middle of the street. She slammed the door and, through the window, saw a gust of air knock him backward—as if the whole house had given a great harumph. Alex rested her forehead against the closed door. “Thanks,” she murmured.
But what would stop him the next time he tried to push his way into her? Would she have to return to the borderlands to sever the connection? She’d do it. She’d throw herself on Salome Nils’s mercy to be let back into Wolf’s Head. She’d let Dawes drown her a thousand times.
Alex turned, keeping her back against the door. It felt like safe harbor. Afternoon light filtered through the remaining stained-glass window in the foyer. The other had been boarded up, the pebbles and shards of shattered glass lying dull in the deep shadow. There was blood on the old wallpaper where Dawes had hit her head. No one had made an attempt to clean it.
Alex peered through the archway to the parlor, half-expecting to see Dawes there. But there was no sign of her or her binders or her index cards either. The house felt empty, battered and wounded. It put a hollow ache in Alex’s heart. She’d never had to return to Ground Zero. And she’d never loved Ground Zero. She’d been happy to turn her back on it and never look into the face of the horrors she’d done there.
But maybe she did love Il Bastone, this old house with its warm wood and its quiet and its welcome.
She pushed away from the door and got a dustpan and broom from the pantry. It took her a long while to sweep up the broken glass. She poured it all into a plastic bag, sealed it with a strip of tape. She just wasn’t sure if she should throw it out. Maybe they could put the broken pieces in the crucible with some goat’s milk, make it whole.
It was only when she went to wash her hands in the little powder room that she realized there was dried blood all over her face. No wonder Tripp had asked if she was okay. She rinsed it off, watching the water swirl in the basin before it vanished.
There was bread and cheese that hadn’t spoiled yet in the refrigerator. She made herself eat lunch, though she wasn’t hungry. Then she went upstairs to the library.
Dawes hadn’t replied to her text. She probably wasn’t even looking at her phone. She’d gone to ground too. Alex couldn’t blame her, but that meant she would have to find a way to block her connection to the Bridegroom on her own.
Alex yanked the Albemarle Book from the shelf but hesitated. She’d recognized the first date North had forced her to scrawl in her notebook instantly: 1854, the year of his murder. The others had been meaningless to her. She owed North nothing. But Darlington had thought the Bridegroom murder was worth investigating. He would want to know what those dates meant. Maybe Alex wanted to know too. It felt like giving in, but North didn’t have to find out he’d snagged her curiosity.
Alex unslung her satchel and took out her Shakespeare notebook, opening it to the blood-spattered page: 1854 1869 1883. If she did some kind of search for all those years, the library would go mad. She had to find a way to narrow the parameters.
Or maybe she just needed to find Darlington’s notes.
Alex remembered the words he’d written in the carriage catalog: the first? If he’d actually done any research on North’s case, she hadn’t found it in the Virgil bedroom or at Black Elm. But what if his notes were here, in the library? Alex opened the Albemarle Book and looked at Darlington’s last entry—the schematic for Rosenfeld. But right above it was a request for something called the Daily New Havener. She copied the request exactly and returned the book to the shelf.
When the bookcase stopped shaking, she pried it open and entered the library. The shelves were filled with stack after stack of what looked less like newspapers than flyers packed with tiny type. There were thousands of them.
Alex stepped outside and opened the Albemarle Book again. Darlington had been working in the library the night he’d disappeared. She wrote out a request for the Rosenfeld schematics.
This time when she pulled the door open, the shelves were empty except for a single book lying flat on its side. It was large and slender, bound in oxblood leather, and completely free of dust. Alex set it on the table at the center of the room and let it fall open. There, between elevations of the third and fourth subterranean levels of Rosenfeld Hall, was a sheet of yellow legal paper, folded neatly and covered in Darlington’s tiny, jagged scrawl—the last thing he’d written before someone sent him to hell.