“How?” Her voice held a nervous, truculent edge. “You can’t even see them.”

Darlington reached into his pocket and removed the vial of elixir. He couldn’t put it off any longer. He broke the wax covering, unstopped the cork, and, before thoughts of self-preservation could intrude, downed the contents.

Darlington had never gotten used to it. He doubted he ever would—the urge to gag, the bitter spike that drove through his soft palate and up into the back of his skull.

“Fuck,” he gasped.

Alex blinked. “I think that’s the first time I’ve heard you swear.”

Chills shook him and he tried to control the tremors that quaked through his body. “I c-c-class p-p-profanity with declarations of love. Best used sparingly and only when wholeheartedly m-m-meant.”

“Darlington … are your teeth supposed to chatter?”

He tried to nod, but of course he was already nodding—spasming, really.

The elixir was like dunking your head into the Great Cold, like stepping into a long, dark winter. Or as Michelle had once said, “It’s like getting an icicle shoved up your ass.”

“Less localized,” Darlington had managed to joke at the time. But he’d wanted to pass out from the shuddering awful of it. It wasn’t just the taste or the cold or the tremors. It was the feeling of having brushed up against something horrible. He hadn’t been able to identify the sensation then, but months later he’d been driving on I-95 when a tractor trailer swayed into his lane, missing his car by the barest breath. His body had flooded with adrenaline, and the bitter tang of crushed aspirin had filled his mouth as he remembered the taste of Hiram’s Bullet.

That was what it was like every time—and would be until the dose finally tried to kill him and his liver tipped into toxicity. You couldn’t keep sidling up to death and dipping your toe in. Eventually it grabbed your ankle and tried to pull you under.

Well. If it happened, Lethe would find him a liver donor. He wouldn’t be the first. And not everyone could be born gifted like Galaxy Stern.

Now the shaking passed, and for a brief moment the world went milky, as if he were seeing Beinecke’s golden glow through a thick cataract of cobwebs. These were the layers of the Veil.

When they parted for him, the haze cleared. Beinecke’s familiar columns, the cloaked members of Aurelian, and Alex’s wary face came into ordinary focus once more—except he saw an old man in a houndstooth jacket hovering by the case that housed the Gutenberg Bible, then strolling past to examine the collection of James Baldwin memorabilia.

“I think … I think that’s—” He caught himself before he spoke Frederic Prokosch’s name. Names were intimate and risked forming a connection with the dead. “He wrote a novel that used to be famous, called The Asiatics, from a desk at Sterling Library. I wonder if Zeb’s a fan.” Prokosch had claimed to be unknowable, a mystery even to his closest friends. And yet here he was, moping around a college library in the afterlife. Maybe it was best that the elixir cost so much and tasted so bad. Otherwise Darlington would be downing it every other afternoon just for glimpses like this. But now it was time to work. “Send him on his way, Stern. But do not make eye contact.”

Alex rolled her shoulders like a boxer stepping into the ring and approached Prokosch, keeping her gaze averted. She reached into her bag and pulled out the vial of graveyard dirt.

“What are you waiting for?”

“I can’t get the lid off.”

Prokosch looked up from the glass case and drifted toward Alex.

“Then say the words, Stern.”

Alex took a step backward, still fumbling with the lid.

“He can’t hurt you,” said Darlington, putting himself between Prokosch and the entry to the circle. The ritual hadn’t yet begun, but best to keep it clean. Darlington didn’t love the idea of dispelling the Gray himself. He knew too much about the ghost as it was, and banishing him back behind the Veil risked creating a connection between them. “Go on, Stern.”

Alex squeezed her eyes shut and shouted, “Take courage! No one is immortal!”

Prokosch shuddered in apprehension and lifted a hand as if to shoo Alex away. He bolted through the library’s glass walls. Death words could be anything, really, as long as they spoke of the things Grays feared most—the finality of passing, a life without legacy, the emptiness of the hereafter. Darlington had given Alex some of the simplest to recall, from the Orphic lamellae found in Thessaly.

“See?” said Darlington. “Easy.” He glanced at the Aurelians, a few of whom were giggling at Alex’s ardent declaration. “Though you needn’t shout.”

But Alex didn’t seem to care about the attention she’d drawn. Her eyes were alight, staring at the place where Prokosch had been moments before. “Easy!” she said. She frowned and looked at the vial of dirt in her hand. “So easy.”

“At least crow a little, Stern. Don’t deny me the enjoyment of putting you back in your place.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “Come on, they’re ready to start.”

Zeb Yarrowman stood at the head of the table. He had removed his shirt and was naked to the waist, his skin pale, his chest narrow, his arms tight to his sides like folded wings. Darlington had seen many men and women stand at the head of that table over the last three years. Some had been members of Aurelian. Some had simply paid the steep fee the society’s trust charged. They came to speak their words, make their requests, hoping for something spectacular to happen. They came with different needs, and Aurelian moved locations depending on their requirement: Ironclad prenups could be fashioned beneath the entryway to the law school. Forgeries might be detected beneath the watchful eyes of poor, duped Benjamin West’s Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes in the university art gallery. Land deeds and real estate deals were sealed high atop East Rock, the city glittering far below. Aurelian’s magic may have been weaker than that of the other societies, but it was more portable and more practical.

Tonight’s chants began in Latin, a soothing, gentle recitation that filled Beinecke, floating up, up, past shelf after shelf encased in the glass cube at the library’s center. Darlington let himself listen with one ear as he scanned the perimeter of the circle and kept one eye on Alex. He supposed it was a good sign that she was so tense. It at least meant she cared about doing a good job.

The chants shifted, breaking from Latin and shifting into vernacular Italian, sliding from antiquity to modernity. Zeb’s voice was the loudest, beseeching, echoing off the stone, and Darlington could feel his desperation. He would have to be desperate given what came next.

Zeb held out his arms. The Aurelians to his right and his left drew their knives and, as the chants continued, drew two long lines from Zeb’s wrists up his forearms.

The blood ran slowly at first, welling to the surface in red slits like eyes opening.

Zeb settled his hands on the edge of the paper before him and his blood spread over it, staining the paper. As if the paper had a taste for it, the blood started to flow faster, a tide that crawled down the scroll as Zeb continued to chant in Italian.

As Darlington had known they would, the Grays began to appear, drifting through the walls, drawn by blood and hope.

When at last the blood tide reached the end of the parchment, the Aurelians each lowered their sleeves, letting them brush the soaked paper. Zeb’s blood seemed to climb up the fabric as the sound of the chanting rose—not a single language now but all languages, words drawn from the books surrounding them, above them, tucked away in climate-controlled vaults beneath them. Thousands upon thousands of volumes. Memoirs and children’s stories, postcards and menus, poetry and travelogues, soft, rounded Italian speared by the spiky sounds of English, the chugging of German, whispery threads of Cantonese.

As one, the Aurelians slammed their hands down on the blood-soaked parchment. The sound ruptured the air like thunder and black spread from their palms, a new tide as blood became ink and flowed back up the table, coursing along the paper to where Zeb’s hands rested. He screamed when the ink entered him, zigzagging up his arms in a scrawl, line upon line, word upon word, a palimpsest that blackened his skin, slowly crawling in looping cursive up to his elbows. He wept and shuddered and wailed his anguish—but kept his hands flat to the paper.