She’d seen the terror in his eyes, the plea. Do something. Help me.

She meant to. At least, she thought she meant to. She’d replayed that moment a thousand times, wondering why she’d frozen—if it had been fear or lack of training or distraction. Or if it had been a choice. If the thing in the corner had given her a solution to the problem Darlington presented.

This isn’t something I can keep from Sandow. Darlington’s words like fingers reaching into her mouth, pinching her tongue, keeping her from crying out.

At night, she thought of Darlington’s perfect face, of the feel of his body bracketing hers in the sleep-warmed sheets of his narrow bed.

I let you die. To save myself, I let you die.

That is the danger in keeping company with survivors.

The mechanic leaned over her, smiling. “Nowhere to run, bitch.”

His grip felt so heavy on her neck, like his thumbs might push right through her skin and sink into her windpipe.

Alex hadn’t wanted to think of that night at Ground Zero. She hadn’t wanted to look back. She hadn’t even been sure what had happened, if it had been Hellie or her that had made it possible.

Let me in.

Stay with me.

Maybe she’d been afraid that if she opened the door again something terrible might step inside. But that was exactly what she needed now. Something terrible.

Alex’s right hand closed over the discarded golf club—a putter. She extended her left hand toward North, remembered the sense of herself splitting, willed herself to do it again. Open the door, Alex. She had time to register the look of surprise on his face, and then the dark cold of him rushed toward her.

Hellie had come to her willingly, but North fought. She sensed his confusion, his desperate terror to remain free, and then a tide of her own need swallowed his concerns.

North felt different than Hellie. She had been the powerful curve of a wave. North’s strength was dark and limber, springy as a fencer’s foil. It filled her limbs, made her feel like molten metal ran through her veins.

She twirled the putter once in her hand, tested its weight. Who said I’m running? She swung.

The mechanic managed to get his hand up, protecting his head, but Alex heard the bones of his hand give way with a satisfying crunch. He yowled and stumbled backward into the couch.

Alex went for his knee next. The big ones were easier to handle on the ground. He collapsed with a thud.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Who sent you?”

“Fuck off,” he snarled.

Alex brought the putter down and struck the hard slats of the floor. He was gone—as if he’d melted straight through the floorboards. She stared at the empty place where he had been, the recoil of the strike reverberating through her arms.

Something smacked her from behind. Alex fell forward as pain exploded through her skull.

She hit the floor and rolled, scrabbling backward. The mechanic was half in and half out of the wall, his body split by the mantel.

Alex sprang to her feet, but in the next second he was beside her. His fist shot out, cracking across her jaw. Only North’s strength kept her from crumpling. She swung the putter, but the mechanic was already gone. A fist cracked into her from the other side.

This time she went down.

The mechanic kicked her hard in the side, his boot connecting with her broken ribs. She screamed. He kicked again.

“Get your hands on your head!”

Detective Turner. He was standing at the door, his weapon drawn.

The mechanic looked at Turner. He threw his middle fingers up and vanished, melting into the mantel.

Alex slumped against the wall and felt North flood out of her, saw him leave her in a blurry tide, reassuming his form, his face frightened and resentful. Was she supposed to feel sorry for him?

“I get it,” Alex muttered. “But I didn’t have a choice.” He touched his hand to the wound at his chest as if she’d been the one to shoot him.

“Just find Tara,” she snapped. “You have the retainer.”

“The what?” said Turner. He was patting the mantel and the bricked-up hearth beneath it as if expecting to find a secret passage.

“Portal magic,” Alex grunted out.

North looked back once over his shoulder and vanished through the wall of the apartment. Pain came at her in a sudden swell, a time-lapse photograph of a blooming flower, as if North’s presence had kept the worst of it at bay and now that she was empty the damage could rush in. Alex tried to push herself up. Turner had holstered his weapon.

Turner slammed his fist on the counter. “That isn’t possible.”

“It is,” said Alex.

“You don’t understand,” said Turner. He looked at her the way North had, as if Alex had done him a wrong. “That was Lance Gressang. That was my murder suspect. I left him less than an hour ago. Sitting in a jail cell.”

Is there something unnatural in the very fabric of New Haven? In the stone used to raise its buildings? In the rivers from which its great elms drink? During the War of 1812, the British blockaded New Haven Harbor, and poor Trinity Church—not yet the Gothic palace now gracing the green—had no way of accessing the necessary lumber for its construction. But Commander Hardy of the Royal British Navy heard of the purpose for which the great roof beams were intended. He permitted them to pass and they were floated down the Connecticut River. “If there is any place on earth that needs religion,” he said, “it is this New Haven. Let the rafts go through!”

—from Lethe: A Legacy

Why do you think they built so many churches here? Somehow the men and women of this city knew: Their streets were home to other gods.

—Lethe Days Diary of Elliot Sandow (Branford College ’69)

21

Winter

Turner had his phone out and Alex knew what came next. Part of her wanted to let it happen. She wanted the steady beep of hospital machines, the smell of antiseptic, an IV full of the strongest dope they had to knock her into sleep and away from this pain. Was she dying? She didn’t think so. Now that she’d done it once, she figured she’d know. But it felt like she was dying.

“Don’t.” She forced the word out in a rasp. Her throat still hurt like it was being squeezed by Lance Gressang’s enormous hands. “No hospital.”

“Did you see that in a movie?”

“How are you going to explain this to a doctor?”

“I’ll say I found you this way,” said Turner.

“Okay, how am I going to explain this? And the messed-up crime scene. And how I got in here.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I don’t need a hospital. Take me to Dawes.”

“Dawes?”

Alex was annoyed that Turner had somehow forgotten Dawes’s name. “Oculus.”

“Fuck this,” said Turner. “All of you with your code names and your secrets and your bullshit.” She could see the way he was leaping from rage to fear and back again. His mind was trying to erase everything he’d seen. It was one thing to be told magic existed, quite another to have it literally give you the finger.

Alex wondered how much Lethe had shared with Centurion. Did they hand him the same Life of Lethe booklet? A long file full of horror stories? A commemorative mug that said Monsters Are Real ? Alex had spent her life surrounded by the uncanny and it had still been hard to let in the reality of Lethe. What would it be like for someone who had grown up in what he believed was an ordinary city—his city—who had been an instrument of order on its streets, to suddenly know that the most basic rules did not apply?

“She need a doctor?” A woman stood in the hall, her cell phone in her hand. “I heard a commotion.”

Turner flashed his badge. “Help is on the way, ma’am. Thank you.”

That badge was a kind of magic too. But the woman turned to Alex. “You okay, honey?”

“I’m good,” Alex managed, feeling a pang of warmth for this stranger in a bathrobe, even as she cradled her phone to her chest and shuffled away.

Alex tried to raise her head, the pain spiking through her like a whip crack. “You need to take me somewhere warded. Someplace they can’t get to me, understand?”

“They.”

“Yes, they. Ghosts and ghouls and inmates who can walk through walls. It’s all real, Turner, not just a bunch of college kids dressing up in robes. And I need your help.”

Those were the words that woke him. “There’s a uniform out front, and I can’t carry you past him without answering a whole heap of questions—and you sure can’t walk out on your own.”

“I can.” But, God, she didn’t want to. “Reach into my right pocket. There’s a little bottle in there with a dropper.”

He shook his head but dug into Alex’s pocket. “What is this?”

“Basso belladonna. Just put two drops in my eyes.”

“Drugs?” asked Turner.

“Medication.”