“Were the societies involved in the murders of those other girls? Colina and Daisy and the rest?”
Again he glanced behind her. “Directly? I’ve wondered that myself over the years. But if any of the societies had solved the riddle of creating a nexus, why would they have stopped at one? Why not use that knowledge? Barter it?” He picked up his pipe. “No, I don’t think they were involved. This town is a peculiar one. The Veil is thinner here, the flow of magic easier. It eddies in the nexuses, but there is magic in every stone, every bit of soil, every leaf of every old elm. And it is hungry.”
“The town…” Alex remembered the strange feeling she’d had at the crime scene, the way it had mirrored the map of the New Haven colony. Dawes had said that rituals worked best if they were built around an auspicious date. Or an auspicious place. “That’s why you chose that intersection to kill Tara.”
“I know how to build a ritual, Alex. When I want to.” Hadn’t Darlington told her that Sandow was a brilliant Lethe delegate? That some of the rites he’d fashioned were still in use?
“You killed her for money.”
“For a great deal of money.”
“You took the payoff from the board of St. Elmo’s. You told them you could control the location of the coming nexus.”
“That I would prepare a site. I thought all I had to do was wait for the cycle to run its course. But it didn’t happen. No one died. No new nexus formed.” He shook his head in frustration. “They were so impatient. They… they said they would demand their money back, that they would go to the Lethe board. They had to be appeased. I created a ritual I knew would work. But I needed an offering.”
“And then you found Tara.”
“I knew her,” Sandow said, his voice almost fond. “When Claire was sick, Tara got her marijuana.”
“Your wife?”
“I nursed her through two bouts of breast cancer and then she left me. She… Tara was in my house. She heard things she probably shouldn’t have. I was not focused on discretion. What did it matter?”
What did it matter what some town girl knew? “And Tara was nice, wasn’t she?”
Sandow looked away guiltily. Maybe he’d fucked her; maybe he’d just been happy to have someone to talk to. That was what you did. You made nice with clients. Sandow had needed a sympathetic shoulder and Tara had provided it.
“But then Darlington found the pattern, the trail of girls.”
“The same way I did. I suppose it was inevitable. He was too bright, too inquisitive for his own good. And he always wanted to know what made New Haven different. He was trying to make a map of the unseen. He brought it up to me just in passing, an academic exercise, a wild theory, a possible subject for his graduate work. But by then—”
“You’d already planned on killing Tara.”
“She’d taken what she’d heard at my house and built a nice little business on it, dealing to the societies. She was in too deep with Keys and Manuscript. The drugs. The rituals. It was all going to come crashing down. She was nineteen, a drug user, a criminal. She was—”
“An easy mark.” Just like me. “But Darlington would have figured it out. He knew about the girls that had come before. He was smart enough to connect them to Tara. So you sent the hellbeast to consume him that night.”
“Both of you, Alex. But it seems Darlington was enough to sate the beast’s appetite. Or maybe he saved you in some final, foolish act of heroism.”
Or maybe the monster hadn’t wanted to consume Alex. Maybe it had known she might burn going down.
Sandow sighed. “Darlington liked to talk about how New Haven was always on the brink of success, always about to tip over into good luck and good fortune. He didn’t understand that the city walks a tightrope. On one side, success. On the other, ruin. The magic of this place and the blood shed to retain it is all that stands between the city and the end.”
This town has been fucked from the start.
“Did you do it yourself?” Alex asked. “Or did you not have the balls?”
“I was once a knight of Lethe, you know. I had the will.” He actually sounded proud.
Isabel had said that Sandow was sleeping off too much bourbon in Belbalm’s study the night Tara died, but he could have slipped out somehow or even used the same portal magic she’d suspected Colin of using. He still would have had to manage a glamour—but of course that was no problem for Sandow. Alex thought of the compact she’d used to get into Tara’s apartment and then the jail. When she’d taken it from the drawer, there had been a smudge on it. But Dawes never would have put it away dirty. Someone had used it before Alex.
“You put on Lance’s face. You got Tara high so she wouldn’t hurt and then you murdered her. Did you send the gluma after me?”
“I did. It was risky, maybe foolish. I have no talent for necromancy. But I didn’t know what you might have discovered at the morgue.”
She remembered Sandow sitting across from her at the Hutch, his teacup perched on his knee, telling her that her power had brought on the gluma attack, that she was to blame for it, for Tara’s murder. “You told me it was my fault.”
“Well, you weren’t meant to survive. I had to say something.” He sounded so reasonable. “Darlington knew you would be trouble. But I had no idea how much.”
“You still don’t know,” said Alex. “And Darlington would loathe everything about you.”
“Darlington was a gentleman. But this isn’t a time for gentlemen.” He picked up his pipe. “Do you know the terrible thing?”
“That you murdered a girl in cold blood so some rich kids can build a fancy clubhouse? Seems pretty terrible.”
But he didn’t seem to hear her. “It didn’t work,” he said, shaking his head, his steepled brows creasing his forehead. “The ritual was sound. I built it perfectly. But no nexus appeared.”
“So Tara died and you’re still screwed?”
“I would have been if not for you. I’m advocating for Manuscript to be stripped of their tomb. St. Elmo’s will have a new home by the next school year. They’ll get what they want. I’ll get my money. So the question is, Alex, what do you want?”
Alex stared at him. He was actually trying to negotiate with her. “What do I want? Stop killing people. You don’t get to murder a girl and disappear Darlington. You don’t get to use me and Dawes and Lethe because you want to live in a nice neighborhood and drive a nice car. We aren’t supposed to be walking that tightrope. We are the goddamn shepherds.”
Sandow laughed. “We are beggars at the table. They throw us scraps, but the real magic, the magic that makes futures and saves lives, belongs to them. Unless we take a bit of it for ourselves.”
He lifted his pipe, but instead of lighting it, he tapped the contents of the bowl into his mouth. It glittered against his lips—Astrumsalinas. Starpower. Compulsion. He’d given it to Blake to use on Alex that night at Il Bastone. The night Sandow had sent Blake Keely to kill her.
Not this time.
Alex reached out to North and, with a sudden rush, felt him flood into her, filling her with strength. She launched herself toward Sandow.
“Stay right there!” said the dean. Alex’s steps faltered, wanting only to obey. But the drug had no power over the dead.
No, said North, the voice clean and true inside her head.
“No,” said Alex. She shoved the dean down into a chair. His crutches clattered to the floor. “Turner is coming. You’re going to tell him what you did. There isn’t going to be another tomb for St. Elmo’s. This isn’t all going away with fines and suspensions. You’re all going to pay. Fuck the societies, fuck Lethe, and fuck you.”