But Alex was only half paying attention to the dean’s speech. She was staring at the old map of New Haven that hung above the mantel. It showed the original nine-square plan for the New Haven colony. She remembered what Darlington had said that first day as they crossed the green: The town was meant to be a new Eden, founded between two rivers like the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Alex looked at the shape of the colony—a wedge of land bracketed by West River and the Farmington Canal, two slender channels of water rushing to meet each other at the harbor. She finally understood why the crime scene had looked so familiar. The intersection where Tara Hutchins’s body had been found looked just like the map: That slab of empty land in front of Baker Hall was like the colony in miniature. The streets that framed that plot of land were the rivers, flowing with traffic, joining at Tower Parkway. And Tara Hutchins had been found in the middle of it all, as if her punctured body lay at the heart of a new Eden. Her body hadn’t just been dumped there. It had been placed there deliberately.

“Honestly, Alex,” Sandow was saying, “what possible motive could any of these people have for hurting a girl like that?”

She didn’t really know. She just knew that they had.

Then someone had found out Alex visited the morgue. Whoever it was thought Alex knew Tara’s secrets—at least some of them—and that she had enough magic at her disposal to learn more. They’d decided to do something about it. Maybe they’d been trying to kill her, or maybe discrediting her was enough.

And the Bridegroom? Why had he chosen to help her? Was he part of this somehow?

“Alex, I want you to thrive here,” said Sandow. “I want us to get through this difficult year and I want all of our attention focused on the new-moon rite and bringing Darlington home. Let’s get through this and then take stock.”

Alex wanted that too. She needed Yale. She needed her place here. But the dean was wrong. Tara’s death hadn’t been the easy ugly thing that Sandow wanted it to be. Someone from the societies was involved, and whoever it was wanted to silence her.

I’m in danger, she wanted to say. Someone hurt me and I don’t think they’re finished. Help me. But what good had that ever done? Somehow Alex had thought this place was different, with all of its rules and rituals and Dean Sandow watching over them. We are the shepherds. But they were children at play. Alex looked at Sandow sipping his tea, one leg crossed over the other, light glinting off his shiny loafer as his knee bounced, and she understood that at some level he truly did not care what harm came to her. He might even be hoping for it. If Alex got hurt, if she vanished, she would take with her all the blame for what had happened to Darlington, and her short, disastrous tenure at Yale would be written off as an unfortunate mistake in judgment, an ambitious experiment gone wrong. He’d get his golden boy back at the new moon and make everything right. He wanted to be comfortable. And wasn’t Alex the same? Dreaming of a peaceful summer and mint in her tea while Tara Hutchins lay cold in a drawer?

Rest easy. She’d been ready to do just that. But someone had tried to hurt her.

Alex felt something dark inside her uncoil. “You’re a flat beast,” Hellie had once said to her. “Got a little viper lurking in there, ready to strike. A rattler probably.” She’d said it with a grin, but she’d been right. All this winter weather and polite conversation had put the serpent to sleep, its heartbeat slowing as it grew lazy and still, like any cold-blooded thing.

“I want us to get through this too,” said Alex, and she smiled for him, a cowed smile, an eager smile. His relief gusted through the room like a warm front, the kind that New Englanders welcome and that Angelenos know means wildfires.

“Good, Alex. Then we will.” He rose and put on his coat, his striped scarf. “I’ll submit your report to the alumni, and I’ll see you and Dawes Wednesday night at Black Elm.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Just a few more days and everything will be back to normal.”

Not for Tara Hutchins, you ass. She smiled again. “See you Wednesday.”

“Pamela, I’ll send you an email on refreshments. Nothing fancy. We’re expecting two representatives from Aurelian along with Michelle.” He gave Alex a wink. “You’re going to love Michelle Alameddine. She was Darlington’s Virgil. An absolute genius.”

“Can’t wait,” said Alex, returning the dean’s wave as he saw himself out. When the door shut, she said, “Dawes, how tough is it to talk to the dead?”

“Not difficult at all if you’re in Book and Snake.”

“They’re last on my list. I try not to ask for help from people who might want to kill me.”

“Limits your options,” Dawes muttered to the floor.

“Aw, Dawes, I like you bitchy.” Dawes shifted uncomfortably and tugged at her murky gray sweatshirt. She closed the laptop. “Thanks for backing me with the dean. And for saving my life.” Dawes nodded at the carpet. “So what are my other options if I need to talk to someone on the other side of the Veil?”

“The only one I can think of is Wolf’s Head.”

“The shapeshifters?”

“Do not call them that. Not if you’re looking for favors.”

Alex crossed to the window, pulled open the curtain.

“Is he still there?” Dawes said from behind her.

“He’s there.”

“Alex, what are you doing? Once you let him in … You know the stories about him, what he did to that girl.”

Open the door, Alex.

“I know he saved my life and he wants my attention. Relationships have been built on less.”

The rules of Lethe House were opaque and convoluted. Catholic, Darlington had said. Byzantine. Still, the big stuff wasn’t tough to remember. Leave the dead to the dead. Turn your eyes to the living. But Alex needed allies, and Dawes wasn’t going to be enough.

She knocked on the window.

Below, on the street, the Bridegroom looked up. His dark eyes met hers in the light from the streetlamp. She did not look away.

Wolf’s Head, fourth of the Houses of the Veil, though Berzelius would argue the point. Members practice therianthropy and consider simple shapeshifting to be base magic. They focus instead on the ability to retain human consciousness and characteristics while in animal form. Primarily used for intelligence gathering, corporate espionage, and political sabotage. Wolf’s Head was a major recruitment ground for the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s. It can take days for someone to shake off the traits of an animal after a shifting ritual. Keep discussions of an important or sensitive nature around animals to a minimum.

—from The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House

I’m tired and my heart won’t stop racing. My eyes look pink. Not the whites. The irises. When Rogers said we were going to fuck like rabbits, I didn’t think he meant actual rabbits.

—Lethe Days Diary of Charles “Chase” MacMahon (Saybrook College ’88)

12

Winter

Alex knew she couldn’t go to Wolf’s Head empty-handed. If she wanted their help, she had a stop to make at Scroll and Key first to retrieve a statue of Romulus and Remus. Wolf’s Head had been badgering Lethe to orchestrate its return since it went missing during their Valentine’s Day party the year before, when they’d opened their doors to other society members, as was tradition. Though Alex had since spotted the statue sitting on a shelf in the Locksmiths’ tomb, with a plastic tiara slung over it, Darlington had refused to get involved. “Lethe doesn’t concern itself with petty squabbles,” he’d said. “These kinds of pranks are beneath us.”

But Alex needed a way into the temple room at the heart of the Wolf’s Head tomb, and she knew exactly what their delegation president, Salome Nils, would demand in payment.

Alex drank one of Darlington’s disgusting protein shakes from the fridge. She was hungry, which Dawes claimed was a good sign, but her throat couldn’t tolerate anything solid yet. She wasn’t eager to leave the safety of the wards when she didn’t know exactly what had happened to the gluma, but she couldn’t just sit still. Besides, whoever had sent the gluma thought she was laid up somewhere being consumed by corpse beetles from the inside out. As for her public fit in the middle of Elm Street, at least there hadn’t been too many witnesses, and aside from Jonas Reed, it was unikely any of them knew her. If someone did, she’d probably be getting a call from a concerned therapist at the health center.