Alex nodded. “He’s very tousled. Very mournful. Very … Morrissey.”

Dawes surprised her by singing, “And I wonder, does anybody feel the same way I do?”

“And is evil,” sang Alex quietly, “just something you are or something you do?” She’d meant it as a joke, a way to solidify the bare threads of camaraderie forming between them, but in the eerie lamplit quiet, the words sounded menacing. “I think he saved my life. He attacked that thing.”

“The gluma?”

“Yeah.” Alex shuddered. It had been so strong and seemingly immune to everything she’d thrown at it—which admittedly hadn’t been much. “I need to know how to stop one of those things.”

“I’ll pull whatever we have on them,” said Dawes. “But you shouldn’t form ties with Grays, especially a violent one.”

“We don’t have a tie.”

“Then why did he help you?”

“Maybe he wasn’t helping me. Maybe he was trying to hurt the gluma. I didn’t exactly have time to ask.”

“I’m just saying—”

“I know what you’re saying,” said Alex, then flinched when a low gong sounded. Someone had entered the stairwell.

“It’s okay,” Dawes said. “It’s only Dean Sandow.”

“You called Sandow?”

“Of course,” Dawes said, straightening. “You were nearly killed.”

“I’m fine.”

“Because a Gray interceded on your behalf.”

“Don’t tell him that,” Alex snarled before she could tame her response.

Dawes drew back. “He needs to know what happened!”

“Don’t tell him anything.” Alex wasn’t sure why she was so afraid of Sandow knowing what had gone down. Maybe it was just old habit. You didn’t talk. You didn’t tell. That was how CPS got called. That was how you got locked up “for observation.”

Dawes planted her hands on her hips. “What would I tell him? I don’t know what happened to you any more than I know what happened to Darlington. I’m just here to clean up your messes.”

“Isn’t that what they pay you for?” Empty the fridge. A little light dusting. Save my worthless life. Damn it. “Dawes—”

But Sandow was already pushing open the door. He startled when he saw Alex by the window. “You’re up. Dawes said you were unconscious.”

Alex wondered what else Dawes had said. “She took good care of me.”

“Excellent,” Sandow said, draping his overcoat on a bronze post shaped like a jackal’s head and striding across the room to where the old-fashioned samovar sat in a corner. Sandow had been a Lethe delegate in the late seventies and a very good one, according to Darlington. Brilliant on theory, but just as good on fieldwork. He fashioned some original rites that are still on the books today. Sandow had returned to campus as an associate professor ten years later, and since then he had served as Lethe’s liaison with the university president. Excluding a few alums who had been taps themselves, the rest of the administration and faculty knew nothing about Lethe or the societies’ true activities.

Alex could imagine Sandow happily working away in the Lethe library or fastidiously marking a chalk circle. He was a small, tidy man with the trim build of a jogger and silvery brows that steepled at the center of his forehead, giving him a permanent look of concern. She’d seen little of him since she’d begun her education at Lethe. He’d sent her his contact information and an “open invitation to office hours” that she’d never taken him up on. Sometime in late September, he’d come to a long, awkward lunch at Il Bastone, during which he and Darlington discussed a new book on women and manufacturing in New Haven and Alex hid her white asparagus beneath a bread roll.

And, of course, he was the one Alex texted the night Darlington disappeared.

Sandow had come to Il Bastone that night with his old yellow Labrador, Honey. He made a fire in the parlor grate and asked Dawes for tea and brandy as Alex tried to explain—not what had happened. She didn’t know what had happened. She only knew what she’d seen. She was shaking by the time she finished, remembering the cold of the basement, the crackling smell of electricity on the air.

Sandow had patted her knee gently and set a steaming mug before her.

“Drink,” he’d said. “It will help. That must have been very frightening.” The words took Alex by surprise. Her life had been a series of terrifying things she’d been expected to take in stride. “It sounds like portal magic. Someone playing with something they shouldn’t.”

“But he said it wasn’t a portal. He said—”

“He was scared, Alex,” Sandow had said gently. “Probably panicked. For Darlington to disappear that way, a portal must have been involved. It may have been a kind of anomaly created by the nexus beneath Rosenfeld Hall.” Dawes had drifted into the room, hovering behind the couch with her arms crossed tight, barely holding herself together while Sandow murmured about retrieval spells and the likelihood that Darlington simply had to be pulled back from wherever he’d gone. “We’ll need a new-moon night,” Sandow had said. “And then we’ll just call our boy home.”

Dawes burst out crying.

“Is he … where is he?” Alex had asked. Is he suffering? Is he scared?

“I don’t know,” said the dean. “That will be part of the challenge for us.” He’d sounded almost eager, as if presented with a delicious problem. “A portal of the size and shape you described, stable enough to be maintained without practitioners present, can’t have gone anywhere interesting. Darlington was probably transported to a pocket realm. It’s like dropping a coin between the cushions of a couch.”

“But he’s trapped there—”

“He probably isn’t even aware he’s gone. Darlington will come back to us thinking he was just in Rosenfeld and furious that he’ll have to repeat the semester.”

There had been emails and text chains since then—Sandow’s updates on who and what would be needed for the rite, the creation of the Spain cover story, a flurry of apologetic and frustrated messages when the January new moon had to be scrapped due to Michelle Alameddine’s schedule, followed by profound silence from Dawes. But that night, the night when Darlington had gone from the world, was the last time they’d all been in a room together. Sandow was the fire alarm they weren’t supposed to pull without good cause. Alex was tempted to think of him as the nuclear option, but really, he was just a parent. A proper adult.

Now the dean stirred sugar into his cup. “I appreciate your quick thinking, Pamela. We can’t afford another …” He trailed off. “We just need to see the year out and …” Again he let his sentence dissolve as if he’d dunked it into his tea.

“And what?” Alex nudged. Because she really did wonder what was supposed to come next. Dawes was standing with her hands clasped as if about to sing a choir solo, waiting, waiting.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Sandow at last. He sank down into a wing-backed chair. “We’re ready for the new moon. I’ll pick up Michelle Alameddine from the train station Wednesday night and bring her directly to Black Elm. I have every hope that the rite will work and that Darlington will be back with us soon. But we also need to be prepared for the alternative.”

“The alternative?” said Dawes. She sat down abruptly. Her face was tight, angry even.

Alex couldn’t pretend to understand the mechanics of what Dean Sandow had planned, but she would have bet Dawes did. It’s my job. She was there to clean up the messes that invariably got made, and this was a big one.

“Michelle is at Columbia, working on her master’s. She’ll be with us for the new-moon rite. Alex, I think she could be persuaded to come up on the weekends and continue your education and training. That will reassure the alumni if we have to”—he brushed his finger over his graying mustache—“bring them up-to-date.”

“What about his parents? His family?”

“The Arlingtons are estranged from their son. As far as anyone knows, Daniel Arlington is studying the nexus beneath San Juan de Gaztelugatxe. If the rite fails—”

“If the rite fails, we try again,” said Dawes.

“Well, of course,” said Sandow, and he seemed genuinely distressed. “Of course. We try every avenue. We exhaust every possibility. Pamela, I’m not trying to be callous.” He held out a hand to her. “Darlington would do everything he could to bring one of us home. We’ll do the same.”

But if the rite failed, if Darlington couldn’t be brought back, then what? Would Sandow tell the alumni the truth? Or would he and the board invent a tale that didn’t sound like We sent two college kids into situations we knew they couldn’t handle and one died.