Hell Bent--A Novel, page 10
Dawes caught her by the elbow.
“Alex, slow down. Here.” She held up soft white tube socks and a pair of Tevas. “I brought these for you. They’re too big, but better than going barefoot.”
Alex sat down on the doormat to pull on the socks and shoes. She wasn’t going back inside. Her head was buzzing. Her body felt alien.
“What were you doing up there?” Dawes asked.
Alex could hear the accusation in her voice and she didn’t quite know how to reply. She thought about lying, but there was too much to explain. Like how she’d ended up at Black Elm in her pajamas.
“I woke up here,” she said, trembling in the cold now that her panic had eased. “I dreamed … I dreamed I was here and then I was.”
“You sleepwalked?”
“I guess so. And then it was like I was still sleepwalking. I don’t quite know how I ended up in the ballroom. But … he talked.”
“He talked to you?” Dawes’s voice was too loud.
“Yeah.”
“I see.” Dawes seemed to close in on herself, the concerned friend receding, the mother hen emerging. “Let’s get you warm.”
Alex let herself be helped to her feet and shepherded into the car, where Dawes cranked the heater up, the faint smell of brimstone emerging as it always had since the night of the new moon ritual. Dawes rested her hands on the wheel as if making a decision.
Then she put the car into gear and they were driving back toward campus. The streets were nearly empty, and Alex wondered who had seen her walking, if anyone had stopped to ask if she needed help, a half-naked girl, barefoot and wandering in the dark, just like that night with Hellie.
It was only once they were back at Il Bastone, with Alex’s feet coated in healing balm and propped on a towel-covered cushion, a cup of tea by her side, that Dawes sat down, opened her notebook, and said, “Okay, tell me.”
Alex had expected more emotion, lip chewing, maybe tears. But Dawes was Oculus now, in research mode, ready to document and investigate, and Alex was grateful for it.
“He said he doesn’t have much time,” Alex began, then did her best to explain the rest, that he had nearly breached the circle, that he’d begged them to find the Gauntlet, but that he didn’t know where it was.
Dawes made a small humming noise.
“He’d have no reason not to tell us,” said Alex.
“He might not be able to. It depends … it depends how much demon he’s become. Demons love puzzles, remember? They never move in a straight line.”
“He talked about Sandow too. He saw him on the other side. He said his host had welcomed him.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Dawes. “He could have named his host, whatever god or demon or hellbeast he’s in service to, but he didn’t. What did he say about the host?”
“Nothing. Just that Sandow had killed for gain. He said greed was a sin in any language.”
“So Darlington may be bound to Mammon or Plutus or Gullveig or some other god of greed. That might help us if we can figure out where the Gauntlet is and how to reveal it. What else?”
“Nothing. He wanted books and I brought him books. He said he was bored.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. He said something about loving books more than his mother.”
Dawes’s lips softened in a smile. “It’s an Egyptian proverb. Suits him well.”
Egyptian. Alex sat up straighter, her feet sliding from the pillow.
Dawes yelped. “Please don’t get that on the rug!”
“When the books didn’t burn, he said stories were immutable.”
“So?” Dawes asked, bustling into the kitchen for a towel.
Alex remembered walking beneath the entry to Sterling with Darlington. There were four stone scribes over the entrance. One of them was Egyptian.
“When was Sterling Library built?”
“1931, I think?” Dawes said from the kitchen. “People really hated it at the time. I think the term used was cathedral orgy. They said it looked too much like…” Dawes halted in the doorway, wet towel in her hands. “They said it looked like a church.”
“Hallowed ground.”
She and Dawes had taken what long-dead Bunchy said too literally. They’d been looking in the wrong places.
Dawes drifted slowly back into the parlor, the towel still dripping in her hands. “John Sterling donated the money for the library.” She sat down. “He was in Skull and Bones.”
“That doesn’t mean much,” Alex said cautiously. “There are a lot of rich guys in Skull and Bones.”
Dawes nodded, still slow, as if she were underwater. “The architect died suddenly and someone else had to take over.”
Alex waited.
“James Gamble Rogers took the job. He was in Scroll and Key. Punter is another word for a gambler.”
Johnny and Punter’s friends built a Gauntlet. On hallowed ground.
Dawes was clutching the towel with both hands now, as if it were a microphone she was about to sing into. “Would that I might make thee love books more than thy mother. That quote is above the entry, above the scribe. It’s written in hieroglyphs.”
Stories were immutable. And what was a library but a house full of stories?
“It’s Sterling,” Alex said. “The library is the portal to hell.”
Erected in memory of
JOHN WILLIAM STERLING
BORN 12 MAY 1844
DIED 5 JULY 1918
B.A. 1864: M.A. 1874
LL.D. 1893: LAWYER
LOYAL FRIEND
TRUSTED ADVISER
AGGRESSIVE LEADER
DEVOTED ALUMNUS
James Gamble Rogers Architect
—Memorial inscription, entrance to Sterling Memorial Library
If I must be a prisoner I would desire to have no other prison than that library.
—James I, engraved above the entrance to the exhibition corridor of Sterling Memorial Library
11
Alex had every intention of helping Dawes research, but the next thing she knew she was waking up in the parlor at Il Bastone, morning light drifting through the windows. A copy of the 1931 Yale Gazette article detailing Sterling’s decoration rested open on her chest as though she’d tried to use the book to tuck herself in.
She felt warm and easy, as if she’d imagined everything at Black Elm, and this morning could just be simple, an ordinary Sunday. She touched her hand to the floorboards and they seemed to hum.
“Did you do that?” she asked Il Bastone, staring up at the coffered ceiling and the pendant lamp that hung high above her from a brass chain. The bulb flickered softly behind its frosted glass globe. The house had known she needed rest. It was looking out for her. At least, that was what it felt like and maybe what Alex needed to believe.
Dawes had left a note on the coffee table: Going to Beinecke. Breakfast on the counter. Call me when you’re up. Bad news.
When wasn’t it bad news? When was Dawes going to leave her a note that said, All good. Go work on that paper so you don’t fall further behind. Left you fresh scones and a couple of puppies?
Alex needed to get home, but she was famished and it would be a shame to waste a breakfast, so she shuffled into the kitchen in Dawes’s giant Tevas.
“Shit,” she said, when she saw the plates of pancakes, the vat of scrambled eggs strewn with chives, heaps of bacon, hollandaise warm in its flowered pitcher, and, yes, a pile of strawberry scones. There was enough food to feed an entire a cappella group if they would stop humming for a minute. Dawes cooked to soothe herself and that meant the news was very bad indeed.
Alex piled her plate with two of everything and called Dawes, but she didn’t answer. You’re freaking me out, she texted. And everything is fucking delicious.
When she was done, she filled a go-cup with coffee and tucked three chocolate chip pancakes into a plastic bag for later. She thought about making a detour to the Lethe library to see if the Albemarle Book could find anything on Turner’s Bible quote or poisons that aged their victims, but that would have to wait. She needed a hot shower and some real clothes. On her way out, she patted the door jamb and briefly wondered if she was making friends with a house or losing her mind.
She had crossed campus and was halfway up the stairs to her room at JE when her phone finally buzzed.
Sterling at noon. We need four murderers.
Alex stared at Dawes’s message and replied, I’ll stop at the store. Should I get half a dozen to be safe?
Her phone rang. “This isn’t a joke.”
“Why four, Dawes?”
“To get into hell. I think that’s why Darlington mentioned Sandow. He was giving us directions. It takes four people for the ritual once the Gauntlet is activated, four pilgrims for the four compass points.”
“Do we really have to—”
“You saw what happened when we tried to cut corners at Scroll and Key. I’m not going to blow up the library. And I think…”
Dawes’s voice trailed off.
“And?” Alex prompted, all the optimism of the morning bleeding out of her.
“If we get this wrong, I don’t think we’re coming back.”
Alex leaned against the wall, listening to the echo of voices up and down the stone stairwell, the sounds of the college waking, the ancient pipes gurgling with water, someone singing an old song about Bette Davis’s eyes. She couldn’t pretend to be surprised. Talk of Gauntlets and boys named Bunchy made it all feel like a game and that was the danger. Power could become too easy. There were too many opportunities to try just because you could.
“I get it, Dawes. But we’re in it now.” From the moment they’d met up in the cemetery and Alex had floated her wild theory of the gentleman demon, they’d known they couldn’t turn their backs on the chance that Darlington was still alive. But the stakes were different than they had been last spring. She remembered her dream, Len saying, Some doors don’t stay locked. Well, they’d blown this door wide open when they’d botched that ritual at Scroll and Key, and now something half man, half monster was trapped in the ballroom at Black Elm. “We save him,” she said. “And if we can’t save him, we stop him.”
“What … what does that mean?” Dawes asked, her fear like a spotlight searching for answers.
It meant that if they couldn’t free Darlington, they couldn’t risk freeing the demon, and that might mean destroying them both. Whatever I am will be unleashed upon the world. But Dawes wasn’t ready to hear that.
“I’ll see you at Sterling,” Alex said, and hung up.
She trudged up the remaining stairs, feeling tired all over again. Maybe she could nap before she met Dawes at the library. She pushed open the door to their common room expecting to see Mercy curled up in the recliner with her laptop and a cup of tea. But Mercy was sitting upright on the couch, back straight, in her hyacinth robe—directly across from Michelle Alameddine. Darlington’s mentor, his Virgil.
Alex hadn’t seen her since Michelle had practically fled their summer research session. She was wearing a plaid dress, a cardigan, and woven flats, her thick hair bound in a braid, a jaunty scarf tied at her neck. She looked quality. She looked like a grown-up.
“Hey,” Alex said, her surprise rendering her incapable of much more. “I … How long have you been waiting?”
“Not long, but I have a train to make. What are you wearing?”
Alex had forgotten she was still in her pajama shorts, a Lethe sweatshirt, and Dawes’s bunchy socks and Tevas. “Let me change.”
Who is she? Mercy mouthed as Alex hurried into their bedroom. But that was not a conversation Alex intended to have in mime.
She shut the door behind her and shoved open the window, letting the crisp morning air clear her head. Just like that, summer had gone. She yanked on black jeans and a black Henley, traded the Tevas for her boots, and rubbed some toothpaste over her teeth.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Michelle asked when Alex emerged from the bedroom.
“I can give you guys privacy,” Mercy offered.
“No,” said Alex. She wasn’t going to kick Mercy out of their room. “Come on.”
She led Michelle downstairs. She’d thought they could talk in the JE library, but there were already people staking out tables.
“Let’s go to the sculpture garden,” Michelle suggested, pushing through the doors. Alex sometimes forgot it was here, an empty sprawl of gravel and the occasional art installation that sat just outside the reading room. It wasn’t much to look at, a pocket of quiet and trees sandwiched between buildings.
“So you fucked that up,” Michelle said. She sat down on a bench and crossed her arms. “I told you not to try it.”
“People tell me that a lot. Anselm called you?”
“He wanted to know if you and Dawes had reached out to me, if you were still trying to get Darlington back.”
“How did he—”
“We were spotted together at the funeral. And I was Darlington’s Virgil.”
“And?” Alex asked.
“I didn’t … rat you out.”
She sounded like she was quoting an episode of Law & Order.
“But you’re not going to help us.”
“Help you with what?” Michelle asked.
Alex hesitated. Anything she said to Michelle might make it straight back to Michael Anselm. But Darlington had considered Michelle one of Lethe’s best. She might still be able to help them, even if she wasn’t willing to get down in the dirt.
“We found the Gauntlet.”
Michelle sat up straighter. “Darlington was right?”
Alex couldn’t help smiling. “Of course he was. The Gauntlet is real and it’s here on campus. We can—”
But Michelle held up a hand. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“But—”
“Alex, I came to Yale on a scholarship. Lethe knew that. It’s part of what made me appealing to them. I needed their money and I was happy to do what they asked. My Virgil was Jason Barclay Cartwright, and he was lazy because he could afford to be. I couldn’t. You can’t either. I want you to think about what this could cost you.”
Alex had. But that didn’t change the math. “I owe him.”
“Well, I don’t.”
Simple enough. “I thought you liked Darlington.”
“I did. He was a good kid.” She was only three years older, but that was how Michelle saw him, the little boy playing knight. “He wanted to believe.”
“In what?”
“In everything. Has Dawes told you what you’re in for? What this kind of ritual entails?”
“She mentioned we’re going to need four murderers.” Well, two more murderers, since she and Dawes had half of that particular equation covered.
“That’s only the beginning. The Gauntlet isn’t some magic portal. You don’t just walk through it. You’re going to have to die to make it to the underworld.”
“I’ve died before,” said Alex. “I made it to the borderlands. I’ll make it back from this too.”
Michelle shook her head. “You don’t care, do you? You’re just going to rush right at it.”
I’m the Wheelwalker, Alex wanted to say. It has to be me. Except not even she knew what that meant. It sounded foolish, childish—I’m special, I have a quest—when the truth was much closer to what Michelle had said. Of course Alex was going to just rush right at it. She was a cannonball. She wasn’t good for much at rest, but give her a hard enough shove, let her build up enough momentum, and she’d punch a hole through anything.
“It’s not that bad,” Alex said. “Dying.”
“I know.” Michelle hesitated, then pulled up her sleeve, and Alex saw her tattoo for the first time. A semicolon. She knew that symbol.
“You tried to kill yourself.”
Michelle nodded. “In high school. Lethe didn’t know. Otherwise they never would have tapped me. Too much of a risk. I’ve been to the other side. I don’t remember it, but I know this isn’t hopping a bus, and I am never going back. Alex … I didn’t come here to play Anselm’s stooge. I came to warn you. Whatever is out there, on the other side of the Veil, it isn’t just Grays.”
Alex remembered the waters of the borderlands, the strange shapes she’d seen on the far shore, the way the current had yanked her off her feet. She thought of the force that had drawn her to Black Elm, that had wanted her in that room, maybe inside of that circle. “They tried to keep me there.”
Michelle nodded. “Because they’re hungry. Have you ever read Kittscher’s Daemonologie?”
Of course she hadn’t. “No, but I hear it’s a real page-turner.”
Michelle cast her eyes heavenward. “What Darlington must have made of you. Lethe has a copy. Before you do anything crazy, read it. Death isn’t just a place you visit. I fought my way back once. I’m not going to risk it again.”
Alex couldn’t argue with that. Even Dawes had hesitations about what they were about to attempt, and Michelle had the right to live and be done with Lethe. It still made Alex angry, little-kid angry, don’t-leave-me-here angry. She and Dawes weren’t enough to take this on.
“I understand,” she said, embarrassed by how sullen she sounded.
“I hope you do.” Michelle sighed deeply, glad to be rid of whatever burden she’d been carrying. She closed her eyes and breathed in, scenting that first hint of fall. “This was one of Darlington’s favorite spots.”
“Is,” Alex corrected.
Michelle’s smile was soft and sad. It terrified Alex. She thinks we’re going to fail. She knows it.
“Have you seen the plaque?” she asked.
Alex shook her head.
Michelle led her over to one of the window casements. “George Douglas Miller was a Bonesman. He had a whole plan for expanding the Skull and Bones tomb, building a dormitory.” She pointed to the towers that loomed over the stairs that led to the sculpture garden. Crenellated, Alex could hear Darlington whisper. Cod-medieval. Alex had never noticed them before. “Those towers were from the old alumni hall. Miller had them moved here when Yale knocked it down in 1911, the first step in his grand vision. But he ran out of money. Or maybe he ran out of will.”
“Alex, slow down. Here.” She held up soft white tube socks and a pair of Tevas. “I brought these for you. They’re too big, but better than going barefoot.”
Alex sat down on the doormat to pull on the socks and shoes. She wasn’t going back inside. Her head was buzzing. Her body felt alien.
“What were you doing up there?” Dawes asked.
Alex could hear the accusation in her voice and she didn’t quite know how to reply. She thought about lying, but there was too much to explain. Like how she’d ended up at Black Elm in her pajamas.
“I woke up here,” she said, trembling in the cold now that her panic had eased. “I dreamed … I dreamed I was here and then I was.”
“You sleepwalked?”
“I guess so. And then it was like I was still sleepwalking. I don’t quite know how I ended up in the ballroom. But … he talked.”
“He talked to you?” Dawes’s voice was too loud.
“Yeah.”
“I see.” Dawes seemed to close in on herself, the concerned friend receding, the mother hen emerging. “Let’s get you warm.”
Alex let herself be helped to her feet and shepherded into the car, where Dawes cranked the heater up, the faint smell of brimstone emerging as it always had since the night of the new moon ritual. Dawes rested her hands on the wheel as if making a decision.
Then she put the car into gear and they were driving back toward campus. The streets were nearly empty, and Alex wondered who had seen her walking, if anyone had stopped to ask if she needed help, a half-naked girl, barefoot and wandering in the dark, just like that night with Hellie.
It was only once they were back at Il Bastone, with Alex’s feet coated in healing balm and propped on a towel-covered cushion, a cup of tea by her side, that Dawes sat down, opened her notebook, and said, “Okay, tell me.”
Alex had expected more emotion, lip chewing, maybe tears. But Dawes was Oculus now, in research mode, ready to document and investigate, and Alex was grateful for it.
“He said he doesn’t have much time,” Alex began, then did her best to explain the rest, that he had nearly breached the circle, that he’d begged them to find the Gauntlet, but that he didn’t know where it was.
Dawes made a small humming noise.
“He’d have no reason not to tell us,” said Alex.
“He might not be able to. It depends … it depends how much demon he’s become. Demons love puzzles, remember? They never move in a straight line.”
“He talked about Sandow too. He saw him on the other side. He said his host had welcomed him.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Dawes. “He could have named his host, whatever god or demon or hellbeast he’s in service to, but he didn’t. What did he say about the host?”
“Nothing. Just that Sandow had killed for gain. He said greed was a sin in any language.”
“So Darlington may be bound to Mammon or Plutus or Gullveig or some other god of greed. That might help us if we can figure out where the Gauntlet is and how to reveal it. What else?”
“Nothing. He wanted books and I brought him books. He said he was bored.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. He said something about loving books more than his mother.”
Dawes’s lips softened in a smile. “It’s an Egyptian proverb. Suits him well.”
Egyptian. Alex sat up straighter, her feet sliding from the pillow.
Dawes yelped. “Please don’t get that on the rug!”
“When the books didn’t burn, he said stories were immutable.”
“So?” Dawes asked, bustling into the kitchen for a towel.
Alex remembered walking beneath the entry to Sterling with Darlington. There were four stone scribes over the entrance. One of them was Egyptian.
“When was Sterling Library built?”
“1931, I think?” Dawes said from the kitchen. “People really hated it at the time. I think the term used was cathedral orgy. They said it looked too much like…” Dawes halted in the doorway, wet towel in her hands. “They said it looked like a church.”
“Hallowed ground.”
She and Dawes had taken what long-dead Bunchy said too literally. They’d been looking in the wrong places.
Dawes drifted slowly back into the parlor, the towel still dripping in her hands. “John Sterling donated the money for the library.” She sat down. “He was in Skull and Bones.”
“That doesn’t mean much,” Alex said cautiously. “There are a lot of rich guys in Skull and Bones.”
Dawes nodded, still slow, as if she were underwater. “The architect died suddenly and someone else had to take over.”
Alex waited.
“James Gamble Rogers took the job. He was in Scroll and Key. Punter is another word for a gambler.”
Johnny and Punter’s friends built a Gauntlet. On hallowed ground.
Dawes was clutching the towel with both hands now, as if it were a microphone she was about to sing into. “Would that I might make thee love books more than thy mother. That quote is above the entry, above the scribe. It’s written in hieroglyphs.”
Stories were immutable. And what was a library but a house full of stories?
“It’s Sterling,” Alex said. “The library is the portal to hell.”
Erected in memory of
JOHN WILLIAM STERLING
BORN 12 MAY 1844
DIED 5 JULY 1918
B.A. 1864: M.A. 1874
LL.D. 1893: LAWYER
LOYAL FRIEND
TRUSTED ADVISER
AGGRESSIVE LEADER
DEVOTED ALUMNUS
James Gamble Rogers Architect
—Memorial inscription, entrance to Sterling Memorial Library
If I must be a prisoner I would desire to have no other prison than that library.
—James I, engraved above the entrance to the exhibition corridor of Sterling Memorial Library
11
Alex had every intention of helping Dawes research, but the next thing she knew she was waking up in the parlor at Il Bastone, morning light drifting through the windows. A copy of the 1931 Yale Gazette article detailing Sterling’s decoration rested open on her chest as though she’d tried to use the book to tuck herself in.
She felt warm and easy, as if she’d imagined everything at Black Elm, and this morning could just be simple, an ordinary Sunday. She touched her hand to the floorboards and they seemed to hum.
“Did you do that?” she asked Il Bastone, staring up at the coffered ceiling and the pendant lamp that hung high above her from a brass chain. The bulb flickered softly behind its frosted glass globe. The house had known she needed rest. It was looking out for her. At least, that was what it felt like and maybe what Alex needed to believe.
Dawes had left a note on the coffee table: Going to Beinecke. Breakfast on the counter. Call me when you’re up. Bad news.
When wasn’t it bad news? When was Dawes going to leave her a note that said, All good. Go work on that paper so you don’t fall further behind. Left you fresh scones and a couple of puppies?
Alex needed to get home, but she was famished and it would be a shame to waste a breakfast, so she shuffled into the kitchen in Dawes’s giant Tevas.
“Shit,” she said, when she saw the plates of pancakes, the vat of scrambled eggs strewn with chives, heaps of bacon, hollandaise warm in its flowered pitcher, and, yes, a pile of strawberry scones. There was enough food to feed an entire a cappella group if they would stop humming for a minute. Dawes cooked to soothe herself and that meant the news was very bad indeed.
Alex piled her plate with two of everything and called Dawes, but she didn’t answer. You’re freaking me out, she texted. And everything is fucking delicious.
When she was done, she filled a go-cup with coffee and tucked three chocolate chip pancakes into a plastic bag for later. She thought about making a detour to the Lethe library to see if the Albemarle Book could find anything on Turner’s Bible quote or poisons that aged their victims, but that would have to wait. She needed a hot shower and some real clothes. On her way out, she patted the door jamb and briefly wondered if she was making friends with a house or losing her mind.
She had crossed campus and was halfway up the stairs to her room at JE when her phone finally buzzed.
Sterling at noon. We need four murderers.
Alex stared at Dawes’s message and replied, I’ll stop at the store. Should I get half a dozen to be safe?
Her phone rang. “This isn’t a joke.”
“Why four, Dawes?”
“To get into hell. I think that’s why Darlington mentioned Sandow. He was giving us directions. It takes four people for the ritual once the Gauntlet is activated, four pilgrims for the four compass points.”
“Do we really have to—”
“You saw what happened when we tried to cut corners at Scroll and Key. I’m not going to blow up the library. And I think…”
Dawes’s voice trailed off.
“And?” Alex prompted, all the optimism of the morning bleeding out of her.
“If we get this wrong, I don’t think we’re coming back.”
Alex leaned against the wall, listening to the echo of voices up and down the stone stairwell, the sounds of the college waking, the ancient pipes gurgling with water, someone singing an old song about Bette Davis’s eyes. She couldn’t pretend to be surprised. Talk of Gauntlets and boys named Bunchy made it all feel like a game and that was the danger. Power could become too easy. There were too many opportunities to try just because you could.
“I get it, Dawes. But we’re in it now.” From the moment they’d met up in the cemetery and Alex had floated her wild theory of the gentleman demon, they’d known they couldn’t turn their backs on the chance that Darlington was still alive. But the stakes were different than they had been last spring. She remembered her dream, Len saying, Some doors don’t stay locked. Well, they’d blown this door wide open when they’d botched that ritual at Scroll and Key, and now something half man, half monster was trapped in the ballroom at Black Elm. “We save him,” she said. “And if we can’t save him, we stop him.”
“What … what does that mean?” Dawes asked, her fear like a spotlight searching for answers.
It meant that if they couldn’t free Darlington, they couldn’t risk freeing the demon, and that might mean destroying them both. Whatever I am will be unleashed upon the world. But Dawes wasn’t ready to hear that.
“I’ll see you at Sterling,” Alex said, and hung up.
She trudged up the remaining stairs, feeling tired all over again. Maybe she could nap before she met Dawes at the library. She pushed open the door to their common room expecting to see Mercy curled up in the recliner with her laptop and a cup of tea. But Mercy was sitting upright on the couch, back straight, in her hyacinth robe—directly across from Michelle Alameddine. Darlington’s mentor, his Virgil.
Alex hadn’t seen her since Michelle had practically fled their summer research session. She was wearing a plaid dress, a cardigan, and woven flats, her thick hair bound in a braid, a jaunty scarf tied at her neck. She looked quality. She looked like a grown-up.
“Hey,” Alex said, her surprise rendering her incapable of much more. “I … How long have you been waiting?”
“Not long, but I have a train to make. What are you wearing?”
Alex had forgotten she was still in her pajama shorts, a Lethe sweatshirt, and Dawes’s bunchy socks and Tevas. “Let me change.”
Who is she? Mercy mouthed as Alex hurried into their bedroom. But that was not a conversation Alex intended to have in mime.
She shut the door behind her and shoved open the window, letting the crisp morning air clear her head. Just like that, summer had gone. She yanked on black jeans and a black Henley, traded the Tevas for her boots, and rubbed some toothpaste over her teeth.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Michelle asked when Alex emerged from the bedroom.
“I can give you guys privacy,” Mercy offered.
“No,” said Alex. She wasn’t going to kick Mercy out of their room. “Come on.”
She led Michelle downstairs. She’d thought they could talk in the JE library, but there were already people staking out tables.
“Let’s go to the sculpture garden,” Michelle suggested, pushing through the doors. Alex sometimes forgot it was here, an empty sprawl of gravel and the occasional art installation that sat just outside the reading room. It wasn’t much to look at, a pocket of quiet and trees sandwiched between buildings.
“So you fucked that up,” Michelle said. She sat down on a bench and crossed her arms. “I told you not to try it.”
“People tell me that a lot. Anselm called you?”
“He wanted to know if you and Dawes had reached out to me, if you were still trying to get Darlington back.”
“How did he—”
“We were spotted together at the funeral. And I was Darlington’s Virgil.”
“And?” Alex asked.
“I didn’t … rat you out.”
She sounded like she was quoting an episode of Law & Order.
“But you’re not going to help us.”
“Help you with what?” Michelle asked.
Alex hesitated. Anything she said to Michelle might make it straight back to Michael Anselm. But Darlington had considered Michelle one of Lethe’s best. She might still be able to help them, even if she wasn’t willing to get down in the dirt.
“We found the Gauntlet.”
Michelle sat up straighter. “Darlington was right?”
Alex couldn’t help smiling. “Of course he was. The Gauntlet is real and it’s here on campus. We can—”
But Michelle held up a hand. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“But—”
“Alex, I came to Yale on a scholarship. Lethe knew that. It’s part of what made me appealing to them. I needed their money and I was happy to do what they asked. My Virgil was Jason Barclay Cartwright, and he was lazy because he could afford to be. I couldn’t. You can’t either. I want you to think about what this could cost you.”
Alex had. But that didn’t change the math. “I owe him.”
“Well, I don’t.”
Simple enough. “I thought you liked Darlington.”
“I did. He was a good kid.” She was only three years older, but that was how Michelle saw him, the little boy playing knight. “He wanted to believe.”
“In what?”
“In everything. Has Dawes told you what you’re in for? What this kind of ritual entails?”
“She mentioned we’re going to need four murderers.” Well, two more murderers, since she and Dawes had half of that particular equation covered.
“That’s only the beginning. The Gauntlet isn’t some magic portal. You don’t just walk through it. You’re going to have to die to make it to the underworld.”
“I’ve died before,” said Alex. “I made it to the borderlands. I’ll make it back from this too.”
Michelle shook her head. “You don’t care, do you? You’re just going to rush right at it.”
I’m the Wheelwalker, Alex wanted to say. It has to be me. Except not even she knew what that meant. It sounded foolish, childish—I’m special, I have a quest—when the truth was much closer to what Michelle had said. Of course Alex was going to just rush right at it. She was a cannonball. She wasn’t good for much at rest, but give her a hard enough shove, let her build up enough momentum, and she’d punch a hole through anything.
“It’s not that bad,” Alex said. “Dying.”
“I know.” Michelle hesitated, then pulled up her sleeve, and Alex saw her tattoo for the first time. A semicolon. She knew that symbol.
“You tried to kill yourself.”
Michelle nodded. “In high school. Lethe didn’t know. Otherwise they never would have tapped me. Too much of a risk. I’ve been to the other side. I don’t remember it, but I know this isn’t hopping a bus, and I am never going back. Alex … I didn’t come here to play Anselm’s stooge. I came to warn you. Whatever is out there, on the other side of the Veil, it isn’t just Grays.”
Alex remembered the waters of the borderlands, the strange shapes she’d seen on the far shore, the way the current had yanked her off her feet. She thought of the force that had drawn her to Black Elm, that had wanted her in that room, maybe inside of that circle. “They tried to keep me there.”
Michelle nodded. “Because they’re hungry. Have you ever read Kittscher’s Daemonologie?”
Of course she hadn’t. “No, but I hear it’s a real page-turner.”
Michelle cast her eyes heavenward. “What Darlington must have made of you. Lethe has a copy. Before you do anything crazy, read it. Death isn’t just a place you visit. I fought my way back once. I’m not going to risk it again.”
Alex couldn’t argue with that. Even Dawes had hesitations about what they were about to attempt, and Michelle had the right to live and be done with Lethe. It still made Alex angry, little-kid angry, don’t-leave-me-here angry. She and Dawes weren’t enough to take this on.
“I understand,” she said, embarrassed by how sullen she sounded.
“I hope you do.” Michelle sighed deeply, glad to be rid of whatever burden she’d been carrying. She closed her eyes and breathed in, scenting that first hint of fall. “This was one of Darlington’s favorite spots.”
“Is,” Alex corrected.
Michelle’s smile was soft and sad. It terrified Alex. She thinks we’re going to fail. She knows it.
“Have you seen the plaque?” she asked.
Alex shook her head.
Michelle led her over to one of the window casements. “George Douglas Miller was a Bonesman. He had a whole plan for expanding the Skull and Bones tomb, building a dormitory.” She pointed to the towers that loomed over the stairs that led to the sculpture garden. Crenellated, Alex could hear Darlington whisper. Cod-medieval. Alex had never noticed them before. “Those towers were from the old alumni hall. Miller had them moved here when Yale knocked it down in 1911, the first step in his grand vision. But he ran out of money. Or maybe he ran out of will.”
