“Who’s here?” he asked.
Her dark brows shot up. “You want specifics?”
“I’m not asking you to endanger yourself for the sake of my curiosity. Just… an overview.”
“Two by the sliding glass door, five or six in the yard, one by the entry right behind that girl working the door, a whole herd of them clumped by the punch. Impossible to tell how many.”
She hadn’t missed a beat. She was aware of them because she was afraid of them.
“The lower floors are all warded. You don’t have to worry about that tonight.” He led her to the top of the stairs, where Doug Far was leaning against the banister, making sure no one without an invite proceeded below. “Blood magic is strictly regulated on Halloween. It’s too appealing to the dead. But tonight Manuscript will siphon off all the desire and abandon of the holiday to power their rites for the rest of the year.”
“Partying is that powerful?”
“Anderson Cooper is actually five foot four inches tall, weighs two bills, and talks with a knee-deep Long Island accent.” Alex’s eyes widened. “Just be careful.”
“Darlington!” Doug said. “The gentleman of Lethe!”
“You stuck here all night?”
“Just the next hour and then I’m gonna go get high as fuck.”
“Nice,” said Darlington, and glimpsed Alex rolling her eyes. Other than the night they’d gotten drunk after the disastrous Aurelian ritual, he’d never seen her take even a sip of wine. He wondered if she partied with her roommates or if she’d chosen to stay mostly clean after what had happened to her friends in Los Angeles.
“Who’s this?” Doug said, and Darlington found himself annoyed by Doug’s lazy perusal of Alex’s costume. “Your date or your Dante?”
“Alex Stern. She’s the new me. She’ll be watching over all you dullards when I finally get out of here.” He said it because they expected him to, but Darlington would never leave this city. He’d fought too hard to remain here, to hold on to Black Elm. He would take a few months to travel, visit the remnants of the library cave in Dunhuang, make a pilgrimage to the monastery at Mont Sainte-Odile. He knew Lethe expected him to apply to graduate school, maybe take a research position in the New York office. But that wasn’t what he really wanted. New Haven needed a new map, a map of the unseen, and Darlington wanted to be the one to draw it, and maybe, in the lines of its streets, the quiet of its gardens, the deep shadow of East Rock, there would be an answer to why New Haven had never become a Manhattan or a Cambridge, why, despite every opportunity and every hope for prosperity, it had always foundered. Was it merely chance? Bad luck? Or had the magic that lived here somehow stunted the town even as it continued to flourish?
“So what are you?” Doug asked Alex. “A vampire? Gonna suck my blood?”
“If you’re lucky,” said Alex, and disappeared down the stairs.
“Stay safe tonight, Doug,” Darlington said as he followed her. She was already out of sight, vanishing down the spiral, and she shouldn’t be on her own tonight.
Doug laughed. “That’s your job.”
The blast of a fog machine struck him full in the face, and he nearly stumbled. He waved the mist away, annoyed. Why couldn’t people just have a quality drink and a conversation? Why all of this desperate pretense? And was some part of him jealous of Doug, of everyone who managed to be reckless for a night? Maybe. He’d felt disconnected from everything since he’d moved back to Black Elm. Freshmen and sophomores were required to live in the dorms, and though he’d visited Black Elm religiously, he’d liked the feeling of being pulled into other orbits, yanked forcibly from his shell by his well-meaning roommates, drawn into a world that had nothing to do with Lethe or the uncanny. He’d liked Jordan and E.J. enough to room with them both years, and he was grateful that they’d felt the same. He kept intending to call them, to invite them out. But another day would go by and he’d find it lost to books, to Black Elm, to Lethe, and now to Alex Stern.
“You should stay behind me,” he said when he caught up to her, vexed by the petulant edge to his own voice. She was already on the next level, looking around with eager eyes. This floor resembled the VIP section of a nightclub, the lights dimmer, the bass muted, but there was a dreamy quality to it all, as if every person and every item in the room was limned in golden light.
“It looks like a music video,” Alex said.
“With an infinite budget. It’s a glamour.”
“Why did he call you the gentleman of Lethe?”
“Because people who can’t be bothered with manners pretend to be amused by them. Onward, Stern.”
They continued down the next flight of stairs. “Are we going all the way down?”
“No. The lowest levels are where the rites are performed and maintained. At any given time they have five to ten magics working internationally. Charisma spells and glamours need constant maintenance. But they won’t be performing any rites tonight, just culling power from the party and the city to store in the vault.”
“Do you smell that?” asked Alex. “It smells like—”
Forest. The next landing brought them to a verdant wood. The previous year it had been a high desert mesa. Sunlight filtered through the leaves of a copse of trees and the horizon seemed to stretch on for miles. Partyers dressed in white lolled on picnic blankets that had been laid out over the lush grass, and hummingbirds bobbed and hovered in the warm air. From this level on, only alumni and the current members who attended them were permitted.
“Is that a real horse?” Alex whispered.
“As real as it has to be.” This was magic, wasteful, joyous magic, and Darlington couldn’t deny that some part of him wanted to linger here. But that was exactly why they had to press on. “Next floor.”
The stairs curved again, but this time the walls seemed to bend with them. The building somehow took on a different shape, the ceiling high as a cathedral, painted the bright blue and gold of a Giotto sky; the floor was covered in poppies. It was a church but it was not a church. The music here was otherworldly, something that might have been bells and drums or the heartbeat of a great beast lulling them with every deep thud. On the pews and in the aisles, bodies lay entwined, surrounded by crushed red petals.
“Now this is more like what I expected,” said Alex.
“An orgy in a flower-filled cathedral?”
“Excess.”
“That’s what this night is all about.”
The next level was a mountaintop arbor, which didn’t even bother trying to look real. It was all hazy peach clouds, wisteria hanging in thick clusters from pale pink columns, women in sheer gowns lazing on sun-warmed stone, their hair caught in an impossible breeze, a golden hour that would never end. They’d walked into a Maxfield Parrish painting.
Finally, they arrived in a quiet room, a long banquet table set against one wall and lit by fireflies. The murmur of conversation was low and civilized. A vast circular mirror nearly two stories high took up the north-facing wall. Its surface seemed to swirl. It was like looking into a huge cauldron being stirred by an invisible hand, but it was wiser to understand the mirror as a vault, a repository of magic fed by desire and delusion. This level of Manuscript, the fifth level, marked the central point between the culling rooms above and the ritual rooms below. It was far larger than the others, stretching under the street and beneath the surrounding houses. Darlington knew the ventilation system was fine, but he struggled not to think about being crushed.