Don’t look. It was Darlington’s voice, his warning. Don’t look too closely. It was too easy for a Gray to form a bond, to attach itself to you. And it was more dangerous because she already knew these Grays’ histories. They had been around so long that generations of Lethe delegates had documented their pasts. But their names had been redacted from all documents.

“If you don’t know a name,” Darlington had explained, “you can’t think it, and then you won’t be tempted to say it.” A name was a kind of intimacy.

Don’t look. But Darlington wasn’t here.

The female Gray was naked, her small breasts puckered from the cold as they must have been in death. She lifted a hand to the open wound of her belly, touched the flesh there fondly, like a woman coyly indicating that she was expecting. They hadn’t sewn her up. The boy—and he was a boy, skinny and tender-featured—wore a sloppy bottle-green jacket and stained trousers. Grays always appeared as they had in the moment of death. But there was something obscene about them side by side, one naked, the other clothed.

Every muscle in the Grays’ bodies strained, their eyes wide and staring, their lips yawning open. The black holes of their mouths were caverns, and from them that bleak keening rose, not really a moan at all but something flat and inhuman. Alex thought of the wasps’ nest she’d found in the garage beneath her mother’s Studio City apartment one summer, the mindless buzz of insects in a dark place.

The Haruspex kept reciting in Dutch. Another Bonesman held a glass of water to the Scribe’s lips as he continued his transcriptions. The smell of blood and herbs and shit hung dense in the air.

The Grays arced forward inch by inch, trembling, lips distended, their mouths too wide now, as if their jaws had unhinged. The whole room seemed to vibrate.

But only Alex could see them.

That was why Lethe had brought her here, why Dean Sandow had grudgingly made his golden offer to a girl in handcuffs. Still, Alex looked around, hoping for someone else to understand, for anyone to offer their help.

She took a step back, heart rabbiting in her chest. Grays were docile, vague, especially Grays this old. At least Alex thought they were. Was this one of the lessons Darlington hadn’t gotten to yet?

She racked her brain for the few incantations Darlington had taught her last semester, spells of protection. She could use death words in a pinch. Would they work on Grays in this state? She should have put salt in her pockets, caramels to distract them, anything. Basic stuff, Darlington said in her head. Easy to master.

The wood beneath the Grays’ fingers began to bend and creak. Now the redheaded a cappella girl looked up, wondering where the creaking had come from.

The wood was going to splinter. The signs must have been made incorrectly; the circle of protection would not hold. Alex looked right and left at the useless Bonesmen in their ridiculous robes. If Darlington were here, he would stay and fight, make sure the Grays were contained and Reyes was kept safe.

The halogens dimmed, surged.

“Fuck you, Darlington,” Alex muttered beneath her breath, already turning on her heel to run.

Boom.

The room shook. Alex stumbled. The Haruspex and the rest of the Bonesmen looked at her, scowling.

Boom.

The sound of something knocking from the next world. Something big. Something that should not be let through.

“Is our Dante drunk?” muttered the Haruspex.

Boom.

Alex opened her mouth to scream, to tell them to run before whatever was holding that thing back gave way.

The moaning dropped away suddenly, completely, as if stoppered in a bottle. The monitor beeped. The lights hummed.

The Grays were back in their seats, ignoring each other, ignoring her.

Beneath her coat, Alex’s blouse clung wetly to her, soaked through with sweat. She could smell her own sour fear thick on her skin. The halogens still shone hot and white. The theater pulsed heat like an organ suffused with blood. The Bonesemen were staring. Next door, the credits rolled.

Alex could see the spot where the Grays had gripped the railing, white slivers of wood splayed like corn silk.

“Sorry,” Alex said. She bent at the knees and vomited onto the stone floor.

When they finally stitched up Michael Reyes, it was nearly 3 a.m. The Haruspex and most of the other Bonesmen had left hours before to shower off the ritual and prepare for a party that would last well past dawn.

The Haruspex might head directly back to New York in the creamy leather seat of a black town car, or he might stay for the festivities and take his pick of willing undergrad girls or boys or both. She’d been told “attending to” the Haruspex was considered an honor, and Alex supposed if you were high enough and drunk enough, it might feel like that was the case, but it sure sounded like being pimped out to the man who paid the bills.

The redhead—Miranda, it turned out, “like in The Tempest”—had helped Alex clean up the vomit. She’d been genuinely nice about it and Alex had almost felt bad for not remembering her name.

Reyes had been transported out of the building on a gurney, cloaked in obfuscation veils that made him look like a bunch of AV equipment piled beneath protective plastic sheeting. It was the most risky part of the whole night’s endeavor as far as the safety of the society went. Skull and Bones didn’t really excel at anything other than prognostication, and of course the members of Manuscript weren’t interested in sharing their glamours with another society. The magic binding Reyes’s veils wobbled with every bump, the gurney coming into and out of focus, the blips and bleeps from the medical equipment and the ventilator still audible. If anyone stopped to take a close look at what was being wheeled down the hallway, the Bonesmen would have some real trouble—though Alex doubted it would be anything they couldn’t buy their way out of.

She would check in on Reyes once he was back on the ward and then again in a week to make sure he was healing without complications. There had been casualties following prognostications before, though only one since Lethe had been founded in 1898 to monitor the societies. A group of Bonesmen had accidentally killed a vagrant during a hastily planned emergency reading after the stock-market crash of 1929. Prognostications had been banned for the next four years, and Bones had been threatened with the loss of its massive red stone tomb on High Street. “That’s why we exist,” Darlington had said as Alex turned the pages listing the names of each victima and prognostication date in the Lethe records. “We are the shepherds, Stern.”

But he’d cringed when Alex pointed to an inscription in one of the margins of Lethe: A Legacy. “NMDH ?”

“No more dead hobos,” he’d said on a sigh.

So much for the noble mission of Lethe House. Still Alex couldn’t feel too superior tonight, not when she’d been seconds from abandoning Michael Reyes to save her own ass.

Alex endured a long string of jokes about her spewed dinner of grilled chicken and Twizzlers, and stayed at the theater to make sure the remaining Bonesmen followed what she hoped was proper procedure for sanitizing the space.

She promised herself she’d return later to sprinkle the theater with bone dust. Reminders of death were the best way to keep Grays at bay. It was why cemeteries were some of the least haunted places in the world. She thought of the ghosts’ open mouths, that horrible drone of insects. Something had been trying to slam its way into the chalk circle. At least that was how it had seemed. Grays—ghosts—were harmless. Mostly. It took a lot for them to take any kind of form in the mortal world. And to pass through the final Veil? To become physical, capable of touch? Capable of damage? They could. Alex knew they could. But it was close to impossible.

Even so, there had been hundreds of prognostications in this theater and she’d never heard of any Grays crossing over into physical form or interfering. Why had their behavior changed tonight?

If it had.

The greatest gift Lethe had given Alex was not the full ride to Yale, the new start that had scrubbed her past clean like a chemical burn. It was the knowledge, the certainty, that the things she saw were real and always had been. But she’d lived too long wondering if she was crazy to stop now. Darlington would have believed her. He always had. Except Darlington was gone.

Not for good, she told herself. In a week the new moon would rise and they would bring him home.

Alex touched her fingers to the cracked railing, already thinking about how to phrase her description of the prognostication for the Lethe House records. Dean Sandow reviewed all of them, and she wasn’t anxious to draw his attention to anything out of the ordinary. Besides, if you set aside a helpless man having his guts rearranged, nothing bad had actually happened.

When Alex emerged from the passage into the hallway, Tripp Helmuth startled from his slouch. “They almost done in there?”

Alex nodded and took a deep breath of comparatively fresh air, eager to get outside.