Alex tore off a piece of toilet paper and plucked the retainer from the case. “It mattered to her. Trust me.” And hopefully still had some quality effluvia on it.
Alex stoppered the sink and filled it. Would this count as a body of water? She hoped so.
She dropped the retainer into the water. Before it could sink to the bottom, she saw a pale hand emerge beside the drain, as if it had bloomed from the cracked basin. As soon as the fingers closed, both hand and retainer vanished. When she looked up, North held it in his dripping palm, his mouth curled in distaste.
Alex shrugged. “You wanted effluvia.” She pushed the stopper down, dropped the tissue in the basket, and turned to go.
A man was standing in the doorway. He was huge, his head nearly brushing the frame, his shoulders filling the space. He wore a mechanic’s gray coverall, the top unzipped and hanging loose. His white T-shirt revealed muscled arms covered in ink.
“I—” Alex began. But he was already charging.
He barreled into her, slamming her backward against the wall. Her head cracked against the window ledge and he grabbed her by the throat. She clawed at his arms.
North’s eyes had gone black. He threw himself at her attacker but passed right through him.
This was not a gluma. Not a ghost. This wasn’t something from beyond the Veil. He was flesh and blood and trying to kill her. North couldn’t help her now.
Alex slammed her palm into his throat. His breath caught on a gulp and his grip loosened. She brought her knee up between his legs. Not a direct hit, but close enough. He doubled over.
Alex shoved past him, tearing the shower curtain off its rings as she passed, stumbling over the plastic. She hurtled into the hallway, North on her heels, and was reaching for the door when suddenly the mechanic was in front of her. He hadn’t opened the door—he’d simply appeared through it—just like a Gray might. Portal magic? For the briefest moment Alex glimpsed what looked like a barren yard behind him, then he was striding toward her.
She backed up through the cluttered living room, wrapping an arm around her middle, trying to think. She was bleeding and it hurt to breathe. He’d broken her ribs. She wasn’t sure how many. She could feel something warm and wet trickling down the back of her neck from where she’d hit her head. Could she make it to the kitchen? Grab a knife?
“Who are you?” the mechanic growled. His voice was low and raspy, maybe from Alex’s chop to his windpipe. “Who hurt Tara?”
“Her shitbag boyfriend,” Alex spat.
He roared and rushed at her.
Alex lurched left toward the mantel, dodging him narrowly, but he was still between her and the door, bouncing on his heels, as if this were some kind of boxing match.
He smiled. “Nowhere to run, bitch.”
Before she could slip past him, he had his hands around her throat again. Black spots filled her vision. North was shouting, gesturing wildly, powerless to help. No, not powerless. That wasn’t right. Let me in, Alex.
No one knew who she was. Not North. Not this monster in front of her. Not Dawes or Mercy or Sandow or any of them.
Only Darlington had guessed.
18
Last Fall
Darlington knew Alex resented the call. He could hardly blame her. It wasn’t a Thursday, when rituals took place, or a Sunday, when she was expected to prepare for the next week’s work, and he knew she was struggling to keep up with her classes and the demands of Lethe. He’d been concerned about how the incident at Manuscript might impact their work, but she’d shrugged it off more easily than he had, handling the report so that he wouldn’t have to relive the embarrassment and going right back to complaining about Lethe’s demands. The ease with which she let go of that night, the casual forgiveness she’d offered, unnerved him and made him wonder again at the grim march of the life she’d lived before. She’d even made it smoothly through her second rite with Aurelian—a patent application at the Peabody’s ugly, fluorescent-lit satellite campus—and her first prognostication for Skull and Bones. There’d been a rocky moment when she turned distinctly green and looked like she might vomit all over the Haruspex. But she’d managed, and he could hardly fault her for wavering. He’d been through twelve prognostications and they still left him feeling shaken.
“It will be quick, Stern,” he promised her as they set out from Il Bastone on Tuesday night. “Rosenfeld is causing trouble with the grid.”
“Who’s Rosenfeld?”
“It’s a what. Rosenfeld Hall. You should know the rest.”
She adjusted the strap on her satchel. “I don’t remember.”
“St. Elmo,” he prompted her.
“Right. The electrocuted guy.”
He’d give her the point. St. Erasmus had supposedly survived electrocution and drowning. He was the namesake for St. Elmo’s fire and for the society that had once been housed in Rosenfeld Hall’s Elizabethan towers. The red-brick building was used for offices and annex space now and was locked at night, but Darlington had a key.
“Put these on,” he said, handing her rubber gloves and rubber overboots not unlike the kind once made in his family’s factory.
Alex obliged and followed him into the foyer. “Why couldn’t this wait until tomorrow?”
“Because the last time Lethe let trouble at Rosenfeld go, we had a campus-wide blackout.” As if chiming in, the lights in the upper stories flickered. The building hummed softly. “This is all in The Life of Lethe.”
“Remember how you said we don’t concern ourselves with the non-landed societies?” Alex asked.
“I do,” said Darlington, though he knew what was coming.
“I took your teachings to heart.”
Darlington sighed and used his key to open another door, this one to a huge storage room packed with battered dorm furniture and discarded mattresses. “This is the old dining hall of St. Elmo.” He shone his flashlight over the soaring Gothic arches and cunning stone details. “When the society was cash poor in the sixties, the university purchased the building from them and promised to keep leasing the crypt rooms to St. Elmo to use for their rituals. But instead of a proper contract built by Aurelian to secure the terms, the parties opted for a gentleman’s agreement.”
“Did the gentlemen change their minds?”
“They died, and less gentle men took over. Yale refused to renew the society’s lease and St. Elmo’s ended up in that grubby little house on Lynwood.”
“Home is where the heart is, you snob.”
“Precisely, Stern. And the heart of St. Elmo was here, in their original tomb. They’ve been broke and all but magicless since they lost this place. Help me move these.”
They shoved two old bed frames out of the way, revealing another locked door. The society had been known for weather magic, artium tempestate, which they had used for everything from manipulating commodities to swaying the outcome of essential field goals. Since the move to Lynwood they hadn’t managed so much as a swift breeze. All of the societies’ houses were built at nexuses of magical power. No one was sure what created them, but it was why new tombs couldn’t simply be built. There were places in this world that magic avoided, like the bleak lunar planes of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and places it was drawn to, like Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and the French Quarter in New Orleans. New Haven had an extremely high concentration of sites where magic seemed to catch and build, like cotton candy on a spool.
The staircase they were descending wound down through three subterranean floors, the hum growing louder with every downward step. There was little left to actually see in the lower levels: the dusty stuffed bodies of retired New Haven zoo animals—acquired on a lark by J. P. Morgan in his wilder days; old electrical conductors with pointed metal spires, straight out of a classic monster movie; empty vats and cracked glass tanks.