Darlington gathered the moths’ fragile bodies, placing them gently in the box.

“Are they dead?” she whispered.

“Ink drunk.” He shut the lid and placed the box back in the cupboard. This time the lock’s click seemed more resigned. He and the house were going to have to have a discussion. “Address moths were originally used for transporting classified material. Once they drank a document, they could be sent anywhere in a coat pocket or a box of antiques. Then they’d be placed on a fresh sheet of paper and would recreate the document to the word. As long as the recipient knew the right incantation.”

“So we could put my tattoos on you?”

“They might not fit quite right, but we could. Just be careful …” He waved a hand. “In the throes. Human saliva reverses the magic.”

“Only human?”

“Yes. Feel free to let a dog lick your elbows.”

Then she turned her gaze on him. In the shadows of the room, her eyes looked black, wild. “Is there more?”

He didn’t have to ask what she meant. Would the world keep unraveling? Keep spilling its secrets?

“Yes. There’s plenty more.”

She hesitated. “Will you show me?”

“If you let me.”

Alex smiled then, a small thing, a glimpse of the girl lurking inside her, a happy, less haunted girl. That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for. That was what Lethe had done for him. Maybe it could do that for Alex as well.

Months later, he would remember the weight of the moths’ bodies in his palm. He would think of that moment and how foolish he had been to think he knew her at all.

5

Winter

The sky was already fading into gray when Alex finally made it back to Old Campus. She’d stopped at the Hutch to shower with verbena soap beneath a hanging censer filled with cedar and palo santo—the only things that would counter the stink of the Veil.

She had spent so little time in Lethe places by herself. She had always been with Darlington, and she still expected to see him tucked into the window seat with a book, expected to hear him grumble that she’d used all of the hot water. He’d suggested leaving clothes there and at Il Bastone, but Alex already had so little to wear that she couldn’t afford to stash an extra pair of jeans and one of her two bras somewhere other than her ugly school-issue dresser. So when she stepped out of the bathroom into the narrow dressing room, she had to opt for Lethe House sweats—the Lethe spirit hound embroidered at the left breast and right hip, a symbol meaningless to anyone but society members. Darlington’s own clothes still hung there—a Barbour jacket, a striped Davenport College scarf, fresh jeans neatly folded and creased, perfectly broken-in engineer boots, and a pair of Sperry Top-Siders just waiting for Darlington to slip into them. She’d never seen him wear them, but maybe you had to have a pair in case your preppy card got pulled.

Alex left a green desk lamp burning at the Hutch. Dawes wouldn’t like it, but she couldn’t quite bear to leave the rooms in darkness.

She was unlocking the door to the Vanderbilt entryway when a text arrived from Dean Sandow: Have confabbed w Centurion. Rest easy.

She wanted to throw her phone across the courtyard. Rest easy? If Sandow intended to handle the murder directly, why had she wasted her time—and her coin of compulsion—visiting the crime scene? She knew the dean didn’t trust her. Why would he? He’d probably been up with a cup of chamomile tea when he got the news of Tara’s death, his big dog asleep on his feet, waiting by the phone to make sure nothing went horribly wrong at the prognostication and Alex didn’t humiliate herself or Lethe. Of course he wouldn’t want her anywhere near a murder.

Rest easy. Everything else went unsaid: I don’t expect you to handle this. No one expects you to handle this. No one expects you to do anything but keep from drawing unwanted attention until we get Darlington back.

If they could find him. If they could somehow bring him home from whatever dark place he’d gone. In less than a week they’d attempt the new-moon rite. Alex didn’t understand the specifics, only that Dean Sandow believed it would work and that, until it did, her job was to make sure that no one asked too many questions about Lethe’s missing golden boy. At least now she didn’t have a homicide to worry about or a grumpy detective to deal with.

When she entered the common room to find Mercy already awake, Alex was glad she’d stopped to shower and change. She had thought college dorms would be like hotels, long hallways pocked with bedrooms, but Vanderbilt felt more like an old-fashioned apartment building, full of tinny music, people humming and laughing as they went in and out of the shared bathrooms, the slamming of doors echoing up and down the central staircase. The squat she’d shared with Len and Hellie and Betcha and the others had been noisy, but its sighs and moans had been different, defeated, like a dying body.

“You’re awake,” Alex said.

Mercy glanced up from her copy of To the Lighthouse, its pages thick with pastel sticky notes. Her hair was in an elaborate braid, and instead of bundling up in their ratty afghan, she’d thrown a silk robe patterned with blue hyacinths over her jeans. “Did you even come home last night?”

Alex took a chance. “Yeah. You were already snoring. I just got up to get a run in.”

“You went to the gym? Are the showers even open this early?”

“For crew and stuff.” Alex wasn’t actually sure this was true, but she knew Mercy cared less about sports than just about anything. Besides, Alex didn’t own running shoes or a sports bra, and Mercy never asked about that. People didn’t go looking for lies that didn’t have a reason, and why would anyone lie about going for a morning run?

“Psychos.” Mercy tossed a stapled stack of pages at Alex, who caught them but couldn’t quite bring herself to look. Her Milton essay. Mercy had offered to give it a read. Alex could already see the red pen all over it.

“How was it?” she asked, shuffling into their bedroom.

“Not terrible.”

“But not good,” Alex muttered as she entered their tiny cave of a room and stripped out of her sweats. Mercy had covered her side of the wall in posters, family photos, ticket stubs from Broadway shows, a poem written in Chinese characters that Mercy said her parents made her memorize for dinner parties when she was a kid but that she’d fallen in love with, a series of Alexander McQueen sketches, a starburst of red envelopes. Alex knew it was partially an act, a construction of the person Mercy wanted to be at Yale, but every item, every object connected her to something. Alex felt like someone had come along early and snipped all of her threads. Her grandmother had been her closest link to any kind of real past, but Estrea Stern had died when Alex was nine. And Mira Stern had grieved her but she’d had no interest in her mother’s stories or songs, the way she cooked or prayed. She called herself an explorer—homeopathy, allopathy, healing gemstones, Kryon, spirit science, three months when she’d put spirulina in everything—each embraced with the same fierce optimism, dragging Alex along from one silver bullet to the next. As for Alex’s father, Mira was hazy on the details, hazier when pushed. He was a question mark, Alex’s phantom half. All she knew was that he loved the ocean, that he was a Gemini, and that he was brown—Mira couldn’t tell her if he was Dominican or Guatemalan or Puerto Rican, but she did know he was Aquarius rising with his moon in Scorpio. Or something. Alex could never remember.

She’d brought few objects from home. She hadn’t wanted to return to Ground Zero to pick up any of her old stuff, and the belongings in her mother’s apartment were little-girl things—plastic ponies, rosettes made of colored ribbons, bubble-gum-scented erasers. In the end, she’d packed a hunk of smoky quartz that her mother had given her, her grandmother’s nearly illegible recipe cards, an earring tree she’d had since she was eight, and a retro map of California, which she hung next to Mercy’s poster of Coco Chanel. “I know she was a fascist,” Mercy had said. “But I can’t quit her.”

Dean Sandow had suggested Alex purchase a few sketchbooks and charcoal too, and she’d dutifully placed them atop her half-empty dresser as cover.