She took a car to the president’s house. There was a valet out front, and through the windows, she could see people crowding the rooms. Good. There would be witnesses.
Even so, she texted Dawes. I know you’ve gone MIA, but if anything happens to me, it was Sandow. I left a record in the library. Just ask the Albemarle Book.
No reply from Turner yet. Now that he thought his case was solved was he done with her? She was glad of North’s presence beside her as she walked up the path.
Alex had expected someone checking names at the door, but she entered without incident. The rooms were warm and smelled of damp wool and baked apples. She slipped off her coat and hung it on top of two others on a peg. She could hear a piano being played beneath the murmur of conversation. She snatched a couple of stuffed mushroom caps from a passing server. Hell if she was going to die on an empty stomach.
“Alex?” the server asked, and she realized it was Colin.
He looked a little tired maybe, but not distressed or angry.
“I didn’t know you worked for the president too,” Alex said cautiously.
“I’m on loan from Belbalm. I have to drive her home later if you want a ride. You working today?”
Alex shook her head. “No, just dropping something off. For Dean Sandow.”
“I think I saw him by the piano. Come back to the kitchen when you’re done. Someone sent Belbalm a bottle of champagne and she brought it by for us.”
“Nice,” Alex said, feigning enthusiasm.
She found the powder room and darted inside. She needed a moment to compose herself, to make sense of Colin’s easy demeanor. He should be mad. He should hate her for uncovering his connections to Tara, for revealing that Scroll and Key had shared their secrets with outsiders, that they had been using illegal drugs. Even if Sandow had kept her name out of the disciplinary proceedings, she was still a representative of Lethe.
But hadn’t Alex known there would be no real repercussions? A slap on the wrist. A fine. The blood price was for someone else to pay. And yet she’d thought there would be some kind of reckoning.
Alex leaned her hands on the sink, staring into the mirror. She looked exhausted, dark shadows carving trenches beneath her eyes. She’d worn an old black cardigan over the cream wool sheath her mother had bought for her. Now she stripped it off. Her skin looked sallow and her arms had the lean, ropy look of someone who would never be full. She could see pink from her wound seeping through the wool of her dress; her new bandage must have come loose at the edges. She’d meant to look reputable, like a good girl, a girl who tried, someone to be trusted. Instead, she looked like the monster at the door.
Alex could hear the sounds of glasses clinking and civilized conversation in the living room. She had tried so hard to be a part of it all. But if this was the real world, the normal world, did she really want in? Nothing ever changed. The bad guys never suffered. Colin and Sandow and Kate and all of the men and women who had come before them, who had filled those tombs and worked their magic—they weren’t any different than the Lens and Eitans and Ariels of the world. They took what they wanted. The world might forgive them or ignore them or embrace them, but it never punished them. So what was the point? What was the point of her passing GPA and her bargain cashmere sweaters when the game was rigged from moment one?
Alex remembered Darlington placing the address moths on her skin in the dim light of the armory. She remembered watching her tattoos fade, believing for the first time that anything might be possible, that she might find a way to belong to this place.
Be careful in the throes, he’d said. Saliva could reverse the magic.
Alex made her hands into fists. She ran her tongue along the knuckles of her left hand, did the same to the right. For a moment nothing happened. Alex listened to the faucet drip.
Then ink bloomed dark over the skin of her arms. Snakes and peonies, cobwebs and clusters of stars, two clumsy koi circling each other on her left biceps, a skeleton on one forearm, the arcane symbols of the Wheel on the other. She still had no idea what those symbols meant. She’d pulled that card from Hellie’s tarot deck moments before they’d walked into a tattoo shop on the boardwalk. Alex watched in the mirror as her history spilled over her skin, the scars she had chosen for herself.
We are the shepherds. The time for that was done. Better to be a rattler. Better to be a jackal.
Alex stepped out of the powder room and let herself be absorbed into the crowd, the clouds of perfume, the suits and St. John knitwear. She saw the nervous glances cast her way. She did not look right. She did not look wholesome. She did not belong.
She glimpsed Sandow’s salt-and-pepper hair in a cluster of guests by the piano. He was balanced on a pair of crutches. She was surprised he hadn’t healed himself, but she also couldn’t imagine him dragging a dozen cartons of goat’s milk up the stairs at Il Bastone without help.
“Alex!” he said in some confusion. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
Alex smiled warmly. “I was able to find the file you requested and I thought you’d want to know as soon as possible.”
“File?”
“On the land deeds. Dating back to 1854.”
Sandow startled, then laughed unconvincingly. “Of course. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on tight. Excuse us for just a moment,” he said, and led them through the crowd. Alex stayed behind him. She knew he was already calculating what she knew and how to question her, maybe how to silence her. She took her phone out and hit record. She would have liked the protection of the crowd, but she knew the microphone would never be able to pick up his voice in all of the party noise.
“Stay close,” she whispered to North, who hovered at her side. Sandow opened a door to an office—a lovely, perfectly square room with a stone-manteled fireplace and French doors that looked out on a back garden caught between the leavings of snow and the green beginnings of the spring thaw. “After you.”
“You go ahead,” Alex said.
The dean shrugged and entered. He set his crutches aside and leaned against the desk.
Alex left the door open so they would be at least partially visible to the partygoers. She didn’t expect Sandow to pick up a fancy paperweight and club her with it, but he’d already killed one girl.
“You murdered Tara Hutchins.”
Sandow opened his mouth, but Alex stopped him with a hand. “Don’t start lying yet. We’ve got a lot of territory to cover and you’ll want to pace yourself. You killed her—or you had her killed—on a triangle of unused land, one I’m guessing the Rhinelander Trust is going to move to acquire.”
The dean took a pipe from his pocket, then brought out a pouch of tobacco and gently began filling the bowl. He set the pipe down beside him without lighting it.
At last, he folded his arms and met her gaze. “So what?”
Alex wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but that wasn’t it. “I—” “So what, Miss Stern?”
“Did they pay you?” she asked.
He glanced over her shoulder, making sure no one was lingering in the hallway.
“St. Elmo’s? Yes. Last year. My divorce left me with nothing. My savings were gutted. I owed outrageous alimony. But a few dedicated St. Elmo’s alumni wiped all of that trouble away with a single check. All I had to do was provide them with a nexus to build over.”
“How did they know you could create one?”
“They didn’t. I approached them. I’d guessed at the pattern during my days at Lethe. I knew it would repeat. We were so long overdue. I didn’t think I’d actually have to do anything. We simply had to wait.”