The ink climbed higher, to his bent shoulders, up his neck, over his chest, and in the same instant entered his head and his heart.

This was the most dangerous part of the ritual, when all of Aurelian would be most vulnerable and the Grays would be most eager. They came faster through the walls and sealed windows, rounding the circle, looking for the gateways Alex and Darlington had left open, drawn by Yarrowman’s need and the iron-filing pungence of fresh blood. Whatever worry had plagued Alex, she was enjoying herself now, hurling handfuls of graveyard dirt at Grays with unnecessarily elaborate gestures that made her look like a professional wrestler trying to psych up an invisible crowd. Darlington turned his attention to his own compass points, cast clouds of bone dust at approaching Grays, murmuring the old death words when one of them tried to rush past. His favorite Orphic hymn began O spirit of the unripe fruit, but it was almost too long to be worth diving into.

He heard Alex grunt and glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see her engaged in a particularly acrobatic banishing maneuver. Instead, she was on the ground, scrabbling backward, terror in her eyes—and Grays were walking straight through the circle of protection. It took him a bare moment to understand what had happened: The markings of the southern gateway were smudged. Alex had been so busy enjoying herself, she’d stepped on the markings and ruptured the southern side of the circle. What had been a narrow door to allow the flow of magic had become a gaping hole with no barrier to entry. The Grays advanced, their attention focused on the pull of blood and longing, drawing nearer to the unsuspecting Aurelians.

Darlington threw himself into their path, barking the quickest, cruelest death words he knew: “Unwept!” he shouted. “Unhonored, and unsung!” Some checked their steps, some even fled. “Unwept, unhonored, and unsung!” he repeated. But they had momentum now, a mass of Grays that only he and Alex could see, dressed in clothes of every period, some young, some old, some wounded and maimed, others whole.

If they reached the table, the ritual would be disrupted. Yarrowman would certainly die and he might well take half of Aurelian with him. The magic would spring wild.

But if Beinecke was a living house of words, then it was one grand memorial to the end of everything. Thornton Wilder’s death mask. Ezra Pound’s teeth. Elegiac poems by the hundreds. Darlington reached for the words … Hart Crane on Melville, Ben Jonson on the death of his son. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem.” His mind scrambled for purchase. Start somewhere. Start anywhere.

“A wanton bone, I sing my song

and travel where the bone is blown.”

Good Lord. When taxed with staving off the uncanny, how did he somehow resort to Foley’s poem about a skeleton having sex?

A few of the Grays peeled off, but he needed something with some damn gravitas.

Horace.

“Winter will come on

And break the lower sea on the rocks

While we drink summer’s wine.”

Now they slowed, some covered their ears.

“See, in the white of the winter air,” he cried. “The day hangs like a rose. It droops down to the reaching hand. Take it before it goes!”

He lifted his hands before him as if he could somehow push them back. Why couldn’t he remember the first verse of the poem? Because it hadn’t interested him. Why try to know the future, which cannot be known?

“Winter will come on!” he repeated. But even as Darlington pushed the Grays back through the ruptured gate and reached for the chalk, he looked through the glass walls of the library. A horde was assembling—a tide of Grays visible through the glass walls, surrounding the building. He was not going to be able to fix the markings in time.

Alex was still on the ground, shaking so hard he could see her trembling even from a distance. When the magic got free, it might kill them both first.

“Take courage,” she said again and again. “Take courage.”

“That’s not enough!”

The Grays rushed toward the library.

“Mors vincit omnia!” Darlington cried, falling back on the words printed in every Lethe manual. The Emperor and the Aurelians had looked up from the table; only Zeb Yarrowman was still lost to the agonies of the ritual, deaf to the chaos that had entered the circle.

Then a voice pierced the air, high and wobbling, not speaking but singing … “Pariome mi madre en una noche oscura.”

Alex was singing, the melody hitching on her sobs. “Ponime por nombre ni?a y sin fortuna.”

My mother gave birth to me on a dark night and called me the girl with no fortune.

Spanish, but slanted. Some kind of dialect.

“Ya crecen las yerbas y dan amarillo triste mi corazón vive con suspiro.”

He didn’t know the song, but the words seemed to slow the Grays’ steps.

The leaves are growing and turning gold.

My heavy heart beats and sighs.

“More!” said Darlington.

“I don’t know the rest of the song!” Alex yelled. The Grays moved forward.

“Say something, Stern! We need more words.”

“Quien no sabe de mar no sabe de mal!” She didn’t sing these words; she shouted them, again and again.

He who knows nothing of the sea knows nothing of suffering.

The line of Grays outside stumbled, looked over their shoulders: Something was moving behind them.

“Keep going!” he told her.

“Quien no sabe de mar no sabe de mal!”

It was a wave, a massive wave, rising from nowhere over the plaza. But how? She wasn’t even speaking death words. He who knows nothing of the sea knows nothing of suffering. Darlington wasn’t even sure what the words meant.

The wave rose and new words came to Darlington from Virgil—the real Virgil. From the Eclogues. “Let all become mid-ocean!” he declared. The wave climbed higher, blotting out the buildings and the sky beyond. “Farewell, ye woods! Headlong from some towering mountain peak I will throw myself into the waves; take this as my last dying gift!”

The wave crashed and Grays were scattered over the stone tiles of the plaza. Darlington could see them through the glass, bobbing like chunks of ice in the moonlight.

Hastily, Darlington redrew the marks of protection, strengthening them with heaps of graveyard dirt.

“What was that?” he said.

Alex was staring out at the fallen Grays, her cheeks still wet with tears. “I … It was just something my grandmother used to say.”

Ladino. She’d been speaking Spanish and Hebrew and he wasn’t sure what else. It was the language of diaspora. The language of death. She’d gotten lucky. They both had.

He offered her his hand. “You’re all right?” he asked. Her palm was cold, clammy in his, as she rose.

“Yes,” she said, but she was still shaking. “Fine. I’m sorry, I—”

“Do not say another word until we’re back at Il Bastone, and for God’s sake don’t apologize to anyone until we’re out of here.”

Zelinski was striding toward them, the Emperor close behind. The ritual had ended and they looked furious, though also a bit like Klan members who’d gone for a stroll and forgotten their hoods. “What the hell were you doing?” said Amelia. “You almost ruined the ritual with your shouting. What happened here?”

Darlington whirled on them, blocking their view of the smudged marks and summoning every bit of his grandfather’s authority. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Zelinski stopped short; his sleeves—now clean and white again—flapped gently as he dropped his arms. “What?”

“Have you performed this ritual before?”

“You know we have!” snapped Amelia.

“Exactly in this way?”

“Of course not! The ritual always changes a bit depending on the need. Every story is different.”

Darlington knew he was on shaky ground but better to go on the offense than to make Lethe look like a bunch of amateurs. “Well, I don’t know what Zeb has in mind for his new novel, but he almost unleashed a whole host of phantoms on your delegation.”

Zelinski’s eyes widened. “There were Grays here?”

“An army of them.”

“But she was screaming—”

“You put my Dante and me at risk,” said Darlington. “I’m going to have to report this to Dean Sandow. Aurelian shouldn’t be tampering with forces—”

“No, no, please,” Zelinski said, putting his palms up as if to tamp down a fire. “Please. This is our first ritual as a delegation. Things were bound to get a little tricky. We’re campaigning to get our rooms in SSS back.”

“She could have been hurt,” said Darlington, bristling with blue-blood indignation. “Killed.”

“This is a donation year, isn’t it?” said Amelia. “We … we can make sure it’s a generous one.”

“Are you trying to bribe me?”

“No! Not at all! A negotiation, an understanding.”

“Get out of my sight. You’re just lucky no lasting damage was done to the collection.”

“Thanks,” Alex whispered as the Emperor and Zelinski hurried away.