She had to imagine Dean Sandow and the rest of the Yale administration were having plenty of harried meetings about damage control this morning. Alex hadn’t understood the distinctions between Yale and Princeton and Harvard and the cities they occupied. They were all the same impossible place in the same imaginary town. But it was clear from the way that Lauren and Mercy laughed about New Haven that the city and its university were considered a little less Ivy than the others. A murder that close to campus, even if the victim hadn’t been a student, couldn’t be good PR.

Alex wondered if she was looking at the place where Tara had been murdered or if her body had simply been dumped in front of the gym. She should have asked the coroner while he was compelled. But she had to imagine it was the former. If you wanted to get rid of a body, you didn’t drop it in the middle of a busy intersection.

An image of Hellie’s shoe, that pink jelly sandal slipping from her painted toes, flashed through Alex’s mind. Hellie’s feet had been wide, the toes crammed together, the skin thick and callused—the only unbeautiful part of her.

What am I doing here? Alex didn’t want to get any closer to where the body had been. It was the boyfriend. That’s what the coroner had told her. He was a dealer. They’d gotten into some kind of argument. The wounds had been extreme, but if he’d been high, who knew what might have been going on in his head?

Still, there was something bothering her about the scene. Last night she’d approached from Grove Street, but now she was on the other side of the intersection, directly across from the Baker Hall dorms and the empty, icy ground where Tara had been found. From this angle there was something familiar about the way it all looked—the two streets, the stakes driven into the earth where Tara had died or been abandoned. Was it just seeing it in the daylight without the crowds that made it seem different? A false sense of déjà vu? Or maybe the basso belladonna was playing tricks on her as it left her system? The Lethe journals were full of warnings on just how powerful it was.

Alex thought of Hellie’s shoe hanging for a brief moment from her toe, then dropping to the apartment floor with a thunk. Len turned to Alex, struggling with the weight of Hellie’s limp body, his hands cupped beneath her armpits. Betcha had Hellie’s knees tucked against his hip as if they were swing dancing. “Come on,” Len said. “Open the door, Alex. Let us out.”

Let us out.

She shook the memory away and glanced at the cluster of Grays in front of the gym. There were less of them today and their mood—if they’d ever really had a mood—had returned to normal. The Bridegroom was still there, though. Despite her best attempts to ignore him, the ghost was hard to miss—crisp trousers, shiny shoes, a handsome face like something out of an old movie, big dark eyes and black hair swept back from his brow in a soft wave, the effect spoiled only by the big bloody pockmark of a gunshot wound to his chest.

He was an actual haunter, a Gray who could pass through the layers of the Veil and make his presence felt, rattling windshields and setting off car alarms in the parking garage that stood where his family’s carriage factory had once been—and where he’d killed his fiancée and then himself. It was a favorite stop on ghost tours of New England. Alex didn’t let her gaze linger, but from the corner of her eye she saw him drift away from the group, sauntering toward her.

Time to get gone. She didn’t want the interest of Grays, particularly Grays who could take any kind of real physical form. She turned her back on him and hurried toward the heart of campus.

By the time she got back to Vanderbilt, the crash had hold of her. She felt weak, exhausted, as if she’d just emerged from a week of the worst flu of her life. Her report for Sandow could wait. She didn’t have much to say anyway. She would sleep. Maybe she would dream of summer. She could still smell crushed mint on her fingers.

She closed her eyes and saw Hellie’s face, her pale brows bleached by the sun, vomit clinging to her lip. It was Tara Hutchins’s fault. Blondes always made Alex think of Hellie. But why had the crime scene looked so familiar? What had she seen in that forlorn patch of dead earth bracketed by the flow of traffic?

Nothing. She’d just had too many late nights, too much Darlington whispering in her ear. Tara was nothing like Hellie. She was like a bad knockoff, generic to Hellie’s name brand.

No, said a voice in her head—and it was Hellie, standing on a skateboard, rocking back and forth on those wide feet, her balance impeccable. Her skin was ashen. Her bikini top was spattered with clumps of her last meal. She’s me. She’s you without a second chance.

Alex fought her way back from the tide of sleep. The room was dark, little light filtering in from the single narrow window.

Hellie was long gone and so were the people who had hurt her. But someone had hurt Tara Hutchins too. Someone who hadn’t been punished. Not yet.

Leave it to Detective Turner. That was what the survivor said. Rest easy. Let it go. Focus on your grades. Think of the summer. Alex could see the bridge that Belbalm had built. She just had to cross it.

Alex reached into her dresser for the basso belladonna drops. One more afternoon. She could give Tara Hutchins that much before she buried her for good and moved on. The way she’d buried Hellie.

Aurelian, home to the would-be philosopher kings, the great uniters. Aurelian was founded to embrace ideals of leadership and, supposedly, to bring together the best of the societies. They modeled themselves as a kind of New Lethe, tapping members from every society to form a leadership council. That didn’t last long. Lively debate gave way to raucous argument, new members were recruited, and they soon became as clannish as the other Houses of the Veil. In the end, their magic has a fundamental practicality best suited to the working professional, less a calling than a trade. That has made them the object of ridicule by some with more delicate sensibilities, but when Aurelian found themselves banned from their own “tomb” and without permanent address, they managed to survive where other Houses have foundered—by hiring themselves out to the highest bidder.

—from The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House

They just lack any kind of style. Sure, they occasionally burp out a senator or an author of middling renown, but Aurelian nights always feel a bit like you’ve been handed the transcript to a juicy court case. You start out excited, and by page two you realize it’s all a lot of words and not much drama.

—Lethe Days Diary of Michelle Alameddine (Hopper College)

6

Last Fall

He started her small—with Aurelian. Darlington figured the big magics could wait for later in the semester, and he knew he’d made the right choice when he came downstairs at Il Bastone to find Alex perched on the edge of a velvet cushion, gnawing feverishly on a thumbnail. Dawes seemed oblivious, her attention focused on A Companion to Linear B, her noise-canceling headphones firmly in place.

“Ready?” he asked.

Alex stood and wiped her palms on her jeans. He had her run through the stock of protections in their bags, and Darlington was pleased to see she’d forgotten nothing.

“Good night, Dawes,” he said as they unhooked their coats from the hall rack. “We won’t be home late.”

Dawes slid her headphones down to her neck. “We have smoked salmon and egg and dill sandwiches.”

“Dare I ask?”

“And avgolemono.”

“I’d say you’re an angel, but you’re so much more interesting.” Dawes clucked her tongue. “It’s really not a fall soup.”

“It’s barely fall and there’s nothing more fortifying.” Besides, after a shot of Hiram’s elixir it was tough to get warm.

Dawes smiled as she returned to her text. She liked being praised for her cooking almost as much as she liked being acknowledged for her scholarship.

The air felt bright and cold against his skin as they walked down Orange, back toward the Green and campus. Spring came on slow in New England, but fall was like rounding a sharp turn. One moment you were sweating through summer cotton and the next you shivered beneath a sky gone hard enamel blue.

“Tell me about Aurelian.”

Alex blew out a breath. “Founded in 1910. Rooms consecrated in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall—”

“Save yourself the mouthful. Everyone calls it SSS.”

“SSS. During the 1932 renovations.”

“Around the same time Bones was sealing off their operating theater,” Darlington added.

“Their what?”

“You’ll learn during your first prognostication. But I thought we’d keep the training wheels on for our first journey out.” Best that Alex Stern found her footing among the eager, generous Aurelians rather than in front of the Bonesmen. “The university gave those rooms to Aurelian as a gift for services rendered.”

“Which services?”

“You tell me, Stern.”

“Well, they specialize in logomancy, word magic. So something with a contract?”

“The purchase of Sachem’s Wood in 1910. It was a huge acquisition of land and the university wanted to make sure the purchase could never be challenged. That land became Science Hill. What else?”

“People don’t take them very seriously.”

“People?”

“Lethe,” she amended. “The other societies. Because they don’t have a real tomb.”

“But we’re not like those people, Stern. We aren’t snobs.”