The years slid by. Sometimes Alex would put her head up, think about staying sober, think about a book or school or her mom. She’d fall into a fantasy of clean sheets and someone to tuck her in at night. Then she’d catch a glimpse of a biker, the skin scraped from the side of his face, the pulp beneath studded with gravel, or an old woman with her housecoat half open, standing unnoticed in front of the window of an electronics store, and she’d go back under. If she couldn’t see them, somehow they couldn’t see her.

She’d gone on that way until Hellie—golden Hellie, the girl Len had expected her to hate, maybe hoped she would, the girl she’d loved instead—until that night at Ground Zero when everything had gone so very wrong, until the morning she’d woken up to Dean Sandow in her hospital room.

He’d taken some papers out of his briefcase, an old essay she’d written when she still bothered going to school. She didn’t remember writing it, but the title read, A Day in My Life. A big red F was scrawled over the top, beside the words The assignment was not fiction.

Sandow had perched on a chair by the side of her bed and asked, “The things you describe in this essay, do you still see them?”

The night of the Aurelian ritual, when the Grays had flowed into the protective circle, taken on form, drawn by blood and longing, it had all come flooding back to her. She’d almost lost everything before she’d begun, but somehow she’d held on, and with a little help—like a summer job learning to brew the perfect cup of tea in Professor Belbalm’s office, for starters—she thought she could hold on a little longer. She just had to lay Tara Hutchins to rest.

By the time Alex finished in the Lethe library, the sun had set and her brain felt numb. She’d made the initial mistake of not limiting the retrieved books to English, and even after she’d reset the library, there were a baffling number of hard-to-parse texts on the shelf, academic papers and treatises that were simply too dense for her to pull apart. In a way, it made things easier. There were only so many rituals Alex could understand, and that narrowed her options. Then there were the rites that required a particular alignment of the planets or an equinox or a bright day in October, one that demanded the foreskin of a yonge, hende man of ful corage, and another that called for the less disturbing but equally hard to procure feathers of one hundred golden ospreys.

“The satisfaction of a job well done” was one of those phrases Alex’s mom liked. “Hard work tires the soul. Good works feed the soul!” Alex wasn’t sure that what she intended qualified as “good” work at all, but it was better than doing nothing. She copied the text—since her phone wouldn’t work in the annex, even to take a photo—then sealed up the library and trudged down the stairs to the parlor.

“Hey, Dawes,” Alex said awkwardly. No response. “Pamela.”

She was in her usual spot, huddled on the floor by the grand piano, a highlighter shoved between her teeth. Her laptop was set off to one side, and she was surrounded by stacks of books and rows of index cards with what Alex thought might be chapter titles for her dissertation.

“Hey,” she tried again, “I need you to go with me on an errand.”

Dawes shuffled From Eleusis to Empoli under Mimesis and the Chariot’s Wheel.

“I have work to do,” she mumbled around the highlighter.

“I need you to go with me to the morgue.”

Now Dawes glanced up, brow furrowed, blinking like someone newly exposed to sunlight. She always looked a little put out when you spoke to her, as if she’d been on the brink of the revelation that would finally help her finish the dissertation she’d been writing for six years.

She removed the highlighter from her mouth, wiping it unceremoniously on her nubbly sweatshirt, which might have been gray or navy, depending on the light. Her red hair was twisted into a bun, and Alex could see the pink halo of a zit forming on her chin.

“Why?” asked Dawes.

“Tara Hutchins.”

“Does Dean Sandow want you to go?”

“I need more information,” Alex said. “For my report.” That was a problem dear Dawes should be able to sympathize with.

“Then you should call Centurion.”

“Turner isn’t going to talk to me.”

Dawes ran a finger over the edge of one of her index cards. Heretical Hermeneutics: Josephus and the influence of the trickster on the Fool. Her nails were bitten down to the quick.

“Aren’t they charging her boyfriend?” asked Dawes, pulling at her fuzzy sleeve. “What does this have to do with us?”

“Probably nothing. But it was a Thursday night and I think we should make sure. It’s what we’re here for, right?”

Alex hadn’t actually said, Darlington would do it, but she might as well have.

Dawes shifted uncomfortably. “But if Detective Turner—” “Turner can go fuck himself,” Alex said. She was tired. She’d missed dinner. She’d wasted hours on Tara Hutchins and she was about to waste a few more.

Dawes worried her lip as if she was legitimately trying to visualize the mechanics. “I don’t know.”

“Do you have a car?”

“No. Darlington does. Did. Fuck.” For a moment, he was there in the room with them, gilded and capable. Dawes rose and unzipped her backpack, removed a set of keys. She stood in the fading light, weighing them in her palm. “I don’t know,” she said again.

She might have been referring to a hundred different things. I don’t know if this is a good idea. I don’t know if you can be trusted. I don’t know how to finish my dissertation. I don’t know if you robbed me of our golden, destined for glory, perfect boy.

“How are we going to get in?” Dawes asked.

“I’ll get us in.”

“And then what?”

Alex handed her the sheet of notes she’d transcribed in the library. “We have all this stuff, right?”

Dawes scanned the page. Her surprise was obvious when she said, “This isn’t bad.”

Don’t apologize. Just do the work.

Dawes gnawed on her lower lip. Her mouth was as colorless as the rest of her. Maybe her thesis was draining the life right out of her. “Couldn’t we call a car instead?”

“We may need to leave in a hurry.”

Dawes sighed and reached for her parka. “I’m driving.”

8

Winter

Dawes had parked Darlington’s car a little ways up the block. It was an old wine-colored Mercedes, maybe from the eighties—Alex had never asked. The seats were upholstered in caramel leather, worn in some places, the stitching a bit threadbare. Darlington had always kept the car clean, but now it was immaculate. Dawes’s hand no doubt.

As if asking for permission, Dawes paused before she turned the key in the ignition. Then the car rumbled to life and they were moving away from campus and out onto the highway.

They rode in silence. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was actually in Farmington, almost forty miles outside New Haven. The morgue, thought Alex. I’m going to the morgue. In a Mercedes. Alex thought about turning on the radio—the old kind with a red line that glided through the stations like a finger seeking the right spot on a page. Then she thought of Darlington’s voice floating out of the speakers—Get out of my car, Stern—and decided she was fine with the silence.

It took them the better part of the hour to find their way to the OCME. Alex wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but when they got there she was grateful for the bright lights, the big lot, the office-park feel of it all.

“Now what?” said Dawes.

Alex took the plastic baggie and the tin they’d prepared from her satchel and wedged them into the back pockets of her jeans. She opened her door, shrugged off her coat and scarf, and tossed them onto the passenger seat.

“What are you doing?” asked Dawes.

“I don’t want to look like a student. Give me your sweatshirt.” Alex’s peacoat was thin wool with a polyester lining, but it screamed college. That was exactly why she’d bought it.

Dawes seemed like she wanted to object, but she unzipped her parka, shucked off her sweatshirt, and tossed it over to Alex, shivering in her T-shirt. “I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

“Of course it isn’t. Let’s go.”

Through the glass doors, Alex saw that the waiting room had a few people in it, all trying to get their business done before closing. A woman sat at a desk near the back of the room. She had fluffy brown hair that showed a red rinse beneath the office lights.

Alex sent a quick text to Turner: We need to talk. Then she told Dawes, “Wait five minutes and then come in, sit down, pretend you’re waiting for someone. If that woman leaves her desk, text me right away, okay?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Talk to her.”

Alex wished she hadn’t wasted her coin of compulsion on the coroner. She had only one left and she couldn’t afford to use it to get past the front desk, not if the plan went the way she hoped.

She tucked her hair behind her ears and bustled into the waiting room, rubbing her arms. A poster had been hung behind the desk: SYMPATHY AND RESPECT. A small sign read, My name is Moira Adams and I’m glad to help. Glad, not happy. You weren’t supposed to be happy in a building full of dead people.

Moira looked up and smiled. She had some hard-living lines around her eyes and a cross around her neck.

“Hi,” Alex said. She made a show of taking a deep, shuddering breath. “Um, a detective said I could come here to see my cousin.”