“He pushed to make me stop looking, Dawes. Lethe is here to keep the societies in line. Why did he yank so hard on the reins?”

We are the shepherds. Lethe had been built on that mission. Or had it? Had Lethe ever really been intended to protect anyone? Or were they just supposed to maintain the status quo, to make it look like the Houses of the Veil were being monitored, that some standard was being kept to without ever really checking the societies’ power? This is a funding year. Had Sandow somehow known that if they looked too closely, they’d find connections to the society rosters? Bones, Book and Snake, Scroll and Key, Manuscript—four of the eight societies responsible for funding Lethe. That added up to half the money needed to keep the Ninth House alive—more since Berzelius never paid in. Was Lethe that precious to Sandow?

“What kind of salary does Dean Sandow get from Lethe?” Alex asked.

Dawes blinked. “I don’t actually know. But he has tenure. He makes plenty from the university.”

“Gambling?” suggested Turner. “Drugs? Debt?”

Dawes’s spine seemed to straighten even more, as if she were an antenna being adjusted to receive information. “Divorce,” she said slowly, reluctantly. “His wife left him two years ago. They’ve been in court ever since. Still—”

“It’s probably nothing,” said Alex, though she wasn’t at all sure that was true. “But it couldn’t hurt to know where he was that night.”

Dawes’s teeth dug into her lip again. “Dean Sandow would never do anything to hurt Lethe.”

Turner rose and began to collect his folders. “For the right price, he just might. Why do you think I said yes to being Centurion?”

“It’s an honor,” protested Dawes.

“It’s a job, on top of the very intense job I already have. But the money meant I could pay down my mother’s mortgage.” He slid the folders into a messenger bag. “I’ll see what I can find out about Sandow without tipping him off.”

“I should do it,” Dawes said quietly. “I can talk to his housekeeper. If you start asking questions, Yelena will go to Sandow right away.”

“Do you feel up to that?” Turner said skeptically.

“She can handle it,” said Alex. “We just need a look at his schedule.”

“I like money as a motive,” said Turner. “Nice and clean. None of this hocus-pocus bullshit.” He shrugged into his coat and headed for the back door. Alex and Dawes followed.

Turner paused with the door open. Behind him, Alex could see the sky turning the deep blue of dusk, the streetlamps coming on. “My mother couldn’t just take the check,” he said, a rueful smile on his lips. “She knows cops don’t get bonuses. She wanted to know where the money came from.”

“Did you tell her?” asked Alex.

“About all this? Hell no. I said I hit a lucky streak at Foxwoods. But she still knew I’d gotten myself into something I shouldn’t have.”

“Mothers are like that,” said Dawes.

Were they? Alex thought of the photo her mom had texted her the week before. She’d had one of her friends snap a picture of her in the apartment. Mira had been wearing a Yale sweatshirt, the mantel behind her crowded with crystals.

“Do you know what my mother said?” Turner asked. “She told me there’s no doorway the devil doesn’t know. He’s always waiting to stick his foot in. I never really believed her until tonight.”

Turner pulled up his collar and disappeared into the cold.

23

Winter

Alex trudged upstairs to retrieve her boots from the armory. The crucible had healed her wounds, but she was short on sleep and her body knew it. Still if she’d had a choice, she thought she might take another brawl, even with a bruiser like Lance, rather than face the salon tonight, classes tomorrow, and the day after—and the day after that. When she was fighting for her life, it was strictly pass/fail. All she had to do was survive and she could call it a win. Even sitting in the parlor with Dawes and Turner, she’d felt like she was keeping up, not just playing along. She didn’t want to go back to feeling like a fraud.

But you are still pretending, she reminded herself. Dawes and Turner didn’t really know her. They never would have guessed at what Darlington had learned about her past. And if the new-moon rite worked? If Darlington returned two days from now and told them all the truth, would anyone speak for her then?

Alex found a stack of clothes on her bed in the Dante room.

“I brought them from my apartment,” Dawes said, hovering in the doorway, hands curled into her sleeves. “They’re not stylish, but they’re better than sweats. I know you like black, so …”

“They’re perfect.” They weren’t. The jeans were too long and the shirt had been washed so many times it was closer to gray than black, but Dawes hadn’t needed to share her closet. Alex wanted to soak up every kindness while she still could.

As she set out for Belbalm’s house, Alex felt jumpy. She’d wound her watch tight in case the gluma was stalking her, stuffed a jar of graveyard dirt into her satchel, placed two magnets in her pocket, and studied the signs of warding needed to close a portal temporarily. They felt like small protections. The list of suspects in Tara’s murder had become a list of possible threats, and they were all packing too much magical firepower.

Belbalm lived on St. Ronan, a twenty-minute walk north from Il Bastone, not far from the divinity school. Her house was one of the smaller ones on the street, two stories high, and built of red brick covered in gray vines like an old woman’s hair. Alex entered through a garden gate beneath a white lattice arch, and the same sense of calm she’d felt in Belbalm’s office descended over her. The garden smelled of mint and marjoram.

Alex paused on the path. It was some kind of crushed gravel the color of slate. Through the tall windows, she could see a circle of people gathered in a variety of chairs, a few crowded onto a piano bench, some on the floor. She glimpsed glasses of red wine, plates poised on knees. A boy with a beard and a wild mane of curls was reading from something. She felt like she was looking into another Yale, a Yale beyond Lethe and the societies, one that might open and keep opening if she could just learn its rituals and codes. At Darlington’s house she had felt like a trespasser. Here she had been invited. She might not belong but she was welcome.

She knocked softly at the door and, when there was no answer, pushed gently. It was unlocked, as if there were never unwanted visitors. There were coats hung in heaps and in piles along a row of hooks. The floor was littered with boots.

Belbalm saw her hovering in the door and gestured Alex toward the kitchen.

Then Alex understood. She was staff.

Of course she was staff.

Thank God she was staff and wouldn’t have to try to pretend to be anything else.

Over Belbalm’s shoulder, Alex spotted Dean Sandow talking to two students on a settee. She slipped into the kitchen, hoping he hadn’t seen her, and then wondered why she should worry about it. Did she really think he had hurt Tara? That he was capable of something that gruesome? In the parlor back at Il Bastone, it had seemed possible, but here, in this place of warmth and easy conversation, Alex couldn’t quite get her head around it.

The kitchen was vast, the cupboards white, the countertops black, the floor a clean checkerboard.

“Alex!” crowed Colin when she appeared. Murder suspects on all sides. “I didn’t know you were coming! We need extra hands. What are you wearing? Black is fine, but next time a white button-down.”

Alex didn’t own a white button-down. “Okay,” she said.

“Just come over here and set these on a baking sheet.”

Alex fell into the rhythm of following orders. Isabel Andrews, Belbalm’s other assistant, was there too, arranging fruit and pastries and mysterious stacks of meats on different platters. The food they were serving seemed utterly foreign to her. When Colin said to hand him the cheese, it took her a long moment to realize it was right in front of her: not platters of cubed cheddar but giant hunks of what looked like quartz and iolite, a tiny pot of honey, a spray of almonds. All of it art.

“After the readings and the talk they’ll do dessert,” Colin explained. “She always does meringues and mini tartes aux pommes.”

“Was Dean Sandow here last week?” Alex asked. If he had been, then Alex could cross him off their list, and if Colin didn’t know, then maybe he hadn’t really been at the salon all night.