“There are over a hundred societies at Yale at this point, but we don’t concern ourselves with most of them. They get together for dinners, tell their life stories, do a little community service. It’s the Ancient Eight that matter. The landed societies. The Houses of the Veil. They’re the ones that have held their tombs continuously.”

“Tombs?”

“I’m betting you’ve already seen some of them. Clubhouses, though they look more like mausoleums.”

“Why don’t we care about the other societies?” she asked.

“We care about power, and power is linked to place. Each of the Houses of the Veil grew up around a branch of the arcane and is devoted to studying it, and each built their tomb over a nexus of power. Except for Berzelius, and no one cares about Berzelius.” They’d founded their society in direct response to the growing magical presence in New Haven, claiming the other Houses were charlatans and superstitious dilettantes, dedicating themselves to investments in new technologies and the philosophy that the only true magic was science. They’d managed to survive the stock market crash of 1929 without the help of prognostication, and limped along until the crash of 1987 when they’d been all but wiped out. As it happened, the only true magic was magic.

“A nexus,” Alex repeated. “They’re all over campus? The … nexes—”

“Nexuses. Think of magic like a river. The nexuses are where the power eddies, and it’s what allows the societies’ rituals to function successfully. We’ve mapped twelve in the city. Tombs have been built on eight of them. The others are on sites where structures already exist, like the train station, and where it would be impossible to build. A few societies have lost their tombs over time. They can study all they want. Once that connection is broken, they don’t accomplish much.”

“And you’re telling me this has all been going on for more than a hundred years and no one has figured it out?”

“The Ancient Eight have yielded some of the most powerful men and women in the world. People who literally steer governments, the wealth of nations, who forge the shape of culture. They’ve run everything from the United Nations to Congress to The New York Times to the World Bank. They’ve fixed nearly every World Series, six Super Bowls, the Academy Awards, and at least one presidential election. Hundreds of websites are dedicated to unraveling their connections to the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group—the list goes on.”

“Maybe if they met at Denny’s instead of giant mausoleums, they wouldn’t have to worry about that.”

They had arrived at Il Bastone, Lethe House, three stories of red brick and stained glass, built by John Anderson in 1882 for an outrageous sum and then abandoned barely a year later. He’d claimed he was being chased out by the city’s high tax rates. Lethe’s records told a different story, one that involved his father and the ghost of a dead cigar girl. Il Bastone didn’t sprawl like Black Elm. It was a city house, bracketed closely on both sides by other properties, tall but contained in its grandeur.

“They’re not worried,” said Darlington. “They welcome all of the conspiracy theories and tinfoil-hat-wearing loons.”

“Because they like feeling interesting?”

“Because what they’re really doing is so much worse.” Darlington pushed open the black wrought-iron gate and saw the porch of the old house straighten slightly, as if in anticipation. “After you.”

As soon as the gate shut, darkness enveloped them. From somewhere beneath the house, a howl sounded, high and hungry. Galaxy Stern had asked what she was in for. It was time to show her.

3

Winter

Who dies at the gym? After her call with Dawes, Alex backtracked across the plaza. She had been to Payne Whitney Gymnasium exactly once: when she’d let Mercy drag her to a salsa class, where a white girl snugly packed into taut black pants had told her to pivot, pivot, pivot.

Darlington had encouraged her to use the free weights and to “build up her cardio.”

“For what?” Alex had asked.

“To better yourself.”

Only Darlington could say something like that with a straight face. But, then again, he ran six miles every morning and swept into rooms on a cloud of physical perfection. Every time he showed up at the Vanderbilt suite, it was as if someone had run an electric current through the floor. Lauren, Mercy, even silent, frowning Anna, would sit up a little straighter, looking bright-eyed and slightly frantic as a bunch of well-groomed squirrels. Alex would have liked to be immune to it—the pretty face, his lean frame, the easy way he occupied space as if he owned it. He had a way of distractedly brushing the brown hair back from his forehead that made you want to do it for him. But Darlington’s lure was offset by the healthy fear he instilled in her. At the end of the day, he was a rich boy in a nice coat who could capsize her without even meaning to.

That first day at the mansion on Orange, he’d set jackals on her. Jackals. He’d given a sharp whistle and they’d leapt from the bushes near the house, snarling and cackling. Alex had screamed. Her legs had tangled as she’d turned to run and she’d fallen to the grass, nearly impaling herself on the low iron fence. But early on in her time with Len she’d learned to always watch the person in charge. That changed from room to room, house to house, deal to deal, but it always paid to know who could make the big decisions. That was Darlington. And Darlington didn’t look scared. He looked interested.

The jackals were stalking toward her, slavering, teeth bared and backs bent.

They looked like foxes. They looked like the coyotes that ran the Hollywood Hills. They looked like hounds.

We are the shepherds.

“Darlington,” she said, forcing calm into her voice. “Call off your fucking dogs.”

He’d spoken a series of words she didn’t understand and the creatures had slunk back into the bushes, all of their aggression vanishing, bouncing on their paws and nipping at one another’s heels. He’d had the gall to smile at her as he offered her an elegant hand. The Van Nuys girl inside her longed to slap it away, jab her fingers into his windpipe, and make him sorry. But she forced herself to take his hand, let him help her up. It had been the start of a very long day.

When Alex had finally returned home to the dorms, Lauren waited all of sixty seconds before pouncing with, “So does your cousin have a girlfriend?”

They were sitting around the new coffee table, trying to get its legs not to wobble as they pushed in little plastic screws. Anna had vanished off somewhere and Lauren had ordered pizza. The window was open, letting in the bare beginnings of a breeze as twilight fell, and Alex felt like she was watching herself from the courtyard—a happy girl, a normal girl, surrounded by people with futures who assumed she had a future too. She had wanted to hold on to that feeling, to keep it for herself.

“You know … I have no idea.” She’d been so overwhelmed she hadn’t had a chance to be curious.

“He smells like money,” said Mercy.

Lauren threw an Allen wrench at her. “Tacky.”

“Don’t start dating my cousin,” Alex said, because that was the kind of thing these girls said. “I don’t need that mess.”

On this night, with the wind clawing to get into her winter coat, Alex thought of that girl, illuminated in gold, sitting in that sacred circle. It was the last moment of peace she could remember. Only five months had passed but it felt much longer.

She cut left, shadowed by the white columns that ran along the south side of the vast dining hall that everyone still called Commons, though it was supposed to be the Schwarzman Center now. Schwarzman was a Bonesman, class of 1969, and had managed a notoriously successful private equity fund, the Blackstone Group. The center was the result of a one-hundred-fifty-million-dollar donation to the university, a gift and a kind of apology for stray magic that had escaped an unsanctioned ritual and caused bizarre behavior and seizures in half the members of the Yale Precision Marching Band during a football game with Dartmouth.

Alex thought of the Grays in the operating theater, mouths gaping. It had been a routine prognostication. Nothing should have gone wrong, but something most definitely had, even if she was the only one who knew it. And now she was supposed to contend with a murder? She knew Darlington and Dawes had kept an eye on homicides in the New Haven area, just to make sure there was no stink of the uncanny, no chance one of the societies had gotten overeager and stepped beyond the bounds of their rituals.

Ahead of her, Grays formed a thin gruel that shifted over the roof of the law school, spreading and curling like milk poured into coffee, drawn by the grind of fear and ambition. Book and Snake’s towering white tomb loomed on her right. Of all the society buildings, it was the most like a crypt. “Greek pediment, Ionic columns. Pedestrian stuff,” Darlington had said. He saved his admiration for the Moorish screens and scrollwork of Scroll and Key, the severe mid-century lines of Manuscript. But it was the fence surrounding Book and Snake that always drew Alex’s eye: black iron crawling with snakes. “The symbol of Mercury, god of commerce,” Darlington had said.