Alex waited until daylight to walk home to the dorms and change her clothes. She borrowed a soft gray cashmere sweater from Lauren, and put on her least-shabby-looking pair of jeans. She wanted to seem responsible, like a good investment, but there was nothing she could do about her scuffed-up boots.
When she’d called Anselm to ask for a meeting, she had expected him to tell her to meet with the new Praetor instead. But he was coming up on the Metro-North that afternoon and agreed to squeeze her in.
“You’ll have to forgive the name of the place,” he’d said. “I have a meeting there before I head back to the city, but I can meet you for a late lunch.”
Shell and Bones. It was an oyster bar right on the water. Alex checked to make sure her salt collar wasn’t visible beneath her borrowed sweater, then nudged her bike out onto the street. She forgot sometimes that New Haven was so close to the sea, that it was truly a port town.
The ride down Howard was surprisingly pretty, past leaves turning colors and homes that got grander as they neared the waterfront. They were nothing like the mansions of Old Greenwich. There was something public about their big porches, their windows facing the road, as if they were meant to be seen and enjoyed instead of being hidden behind a wall.
Dawes hadn’t taken the news of the missing Mercedes well, because of course the car was not just a car.
“What do you mean you lost it?” she’d cried. “I didn’t lose it. I know where it is.”
“Then tell me so I can go get it. I have a spare set of keys. We—” “We can’t.”
“Why not?”
Because I’m afraid. Because it’s too dangerous. But Alex couldn’t explain it all. Linus Reiter. What she’d been doing in Old Greenwich. The dream of Darlington restored to himself in the circle. I have been crying out to you from the start. It was too much.
“You lost him,” Dawes seethed. “And now this.”
“I didn’t lose Darlington,” Alex said, striving for patience. “He isn’t a shiny penny I dropped somewhere. Elliot Sandow sent a hellbeast to eat him, so go to the cemetery and bitch at his tombstone if you want to.”
“You should have—”
“What? I should have what? Known the right spell to speak, the right incantation? I should have grabbed him so we could go to hell together?”
“Yes,” Dawes said on a hiss. “Yes. You’re his Dante.” “Is that what you’d have done?”
Dawes didn’t answer, and Alex knew she should let it lie, but she was too tired and bruised to be kind. “I’ll tell you what you would have done, Dawes. You would have pissed yourself. You would have frozen just like I did, and Darlington would be just as gone.”
Silence on the other end of the phone and then, as if she’d never spoken the words and didn’t quite know how to make the syllables match, Dawes shouted, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Something about that stuttered bit of profanity pierced Alex’s miserable mood. The anger gusted out of her and she felt the sudden urge to laugh— which she knew would be a huge mistake.
She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Dawes. You don’t know how sorry I am. But the car doesn’t matter. I matter. You matter. And I promise we’ll get it back. I just … I just need a little grace right now.”
After a long moment, Dawes said, “Okay.” “Okay?”
“Yes. For the time being. I’m sorry I was rude.”
Then Alex did laugh. “You’re forgiven. And you should swear more, Dawes.”
Alex knew the restaurant was at a yacht club, but it wasn’t what she’d anticipated. She’d thought there would be a valet, men in blue blazers,
women in pearls. Instead it was an ordinary-looking building on the waterfront, with a flag out front and a big parking lot. Alex locked her bike to the railing by the steps. She would have liked to wear her hair up, look a bit more conservative, but the marks on her neck were still red and swollen, as if her body was staving off an infection, and if she just slapped another bandage on her neck, she’d look like she was trying to hide a hickey.
Anselm was waiting at a four-top on a covered deck that faced the ocean, the harbor crowded with boats, their masts tilting one way or the other, some of them christened after women, others with names like The Hull Truth, Knotty Girl, Reel Easy. He’d slung his arm over the chair beside him, and he looked like an ad for an expensive watch. The other tables were crowded with Yalies and their parents, businessmen taking long lunches, a few older women in quilted coats lingering over glasses of rosé.
“Alex!” he said when he caught sight of her, his voice warm and vaguely surprised, as if he hadn’t invited her there. “Have a seat.” He waved over a server who placed a menu in front of her. “I’ve already eaten, but please, get whatever you like.”
Alex wasn’t going to say no to a free meal. She thought she should probably order something like mussels or grilled fish, but years of eating her mother’s all-grain, sprouted carob experiments had left her with a lifelong craving for junk food. She ordered the sliders and a Coke for the caffeine.
“I wish I could eat like you,” Anselm said, patting what looked like a flat stomach. “Youth is wasted on the young. If I’d known what middle age would look like, I would have spent more time eating fried chicken and less time at the gym.”
“You’re middle-aged?”
“Well, I will be … What?”
Alex realized she was staring. “Sorry, you just seem different, more relaxed.”
“Is that surprising? Believe it or not, I don’t relish chastising undergraduates.”
“Dawes is a Ph.D. candidate.”
He cast her a glance. “I think you know what I mean.”
Now that the new Praetor had been appointed, Anselm seemed like a different person, unburdened by the worries and obligations of Lethe.
“I’m surprised you’re back in Connecticut,” she said. “I thought I’d have to come to New York.”
“I’m usually in Connecticut once or twice a month for meetings. It’s why the board asked me to step in and oversee things at Lethe. And given what happened to Dean Beekman, I thought it couldn’t hurt to check in. He was a legend. I think everyone who knew him is pretty shaken.”
“Did you know him?”
He cocked his head to one side. “Is this why you wanted to have lunch?
Does Centurion have you checking alibis?”
“No,” Alex said, which was true. And there was no reason for her to suspect Anselm had anything to do with Marjorie Stephen or Dean Beekman. “I’m sorry. After everything that happened last year.” She shrugged. “Old habits.”
“I get it. The people who were supposed to protect you didn’t really do the job, did they?”
And they never had. But Alex didn’t want to think too much on that, not at this table with this stranger on a sunny afternoon. “I guess not.”
“Lethe asks a lot of us, doesn’t it?”
Alex nodded. She felt nervous and her palms were damp. Between her miserable nightmares, she’d lain awake last night, trying to think of the best approach for this. But Anselm had offered her an opening so she was going to take it. “It does,” she said. “You’ve seen my file.”
“And now you’re rolling in clover.” “Something like that.”
“Tell me about California.”
“It’s like this, but the water is warmer and the people are better-looking.”
Anselm laughed and Alex felt herself unwind a little. She’d been prepared for Anselm in authority mode, but this guy wasn’t all bad. He’d clearly had a couple of glasses of wine with lunch and he was enjoying being out of the office. She could work with this.
“Who were you meeting?” she asked.
“A few friends working out of Stamford. You know where the old AIG offices are?”
“Not really.”
“You’re not missing much. Anyway, they’re kind of black sheep in our business, but I like underdogs and they needed some advice.”
“Hide the outcasts,” she murmured.
Anselm laughed again. “That’s a pull.”
So Anselm knew the Isaiah quote. But if he was somehow involved in the murders, he probably wouldn’t have volunteered that knowledge. “You don’t strike me as the religious type.”
“Not at all, but that’s an essential bit of New Haven lore. God,” he said, shaking his head. Not a single carefully styled hair moved. “I’m even boring myself.”
“Go on,” she said. “I like this kind of stuff.” Especially if it could help her catch a murderer and put her in Turner’s good graces.
Anselm looked skeptical, but said, “It’s from the sermon John Davenport gave in support of the three judges.”
Judges. Interesting. “That clears up everything.”
Again his brows rose, and Alex realized why she liked this version of Anselm. He reminded her just a little of Darlington. Not the Darlington she’d known but who he might have been if he hadn’t grown up in Black Elm and fallen in love with Lethe, a slicker, less hungry Darlington. A Darlington less like her.
“You’ve never been to Judges Cave?” Anselm asked. “Okay, so the year is 1649, and Cromwell orders the execution of Charles I. Fifty-nine judges sign the death warrant. All well and good. Off with his head. But just a decade later, the monarchy is restored, and his son Charles II—”
“Junior.”
“Exactly. Junior isn’t pleased with what happened to his father or the precedent of killing off kings. So, ruthless he must be. He sentences all of the judges to death.”
“That’s a lot of dead judges.” And it lined up with Turner’s initial theory of the crime, that the disgraced Professor Lambton had gone after the people who had sat in judgment on him.
“Some of them were executed, others fled to the colonies. But there are British soldiers everywhere and no one is particularly excited about harboring fugitives and bringing down Junior’s wrath. Except for the good citizens of New Haven.”
“Why?”
Anselm gestured to the boats in the harbor as if they might have an answer. “It’s always been a contrary town. The good Reverend John Davenport steps up to the pulpit and preaches, ‘Hide the outcasts. Bewray not him that wandereth.’ And hide the outcasts they do. When the British come snooping around, the townspeople keep their secrets and the judges hide out near West Rock.”
“At Judges Cave?”
“It’s technically just a cluster of big rocks, but yes. Their names were Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell.”
Alex hadn’t lived in New Haven long, but she knew those names. They were streets that branched off of Broadway. Follow Whalley long enough and you’d end up in West Rock. Three streets. Three judges. Three murders. There will be a third. That was what Darlington had meant. He’d been trying to make the connection for them even as his demon half had been
toying with them, enjoying the riddle the killer had set.
“What happened to the judges?” Alex asked. “Did they get caught?”
“Lived to a ripe old age. Two of them ended up somewhere in Massachusetts, but Dixwell changed his name and lived out his days in New Haven. His ashes are interred beneath the New Haven Green. British troops used to travel here just to piss on his gravestone, one hundred years after he died. That’s how big a deal these guys were. Martyrs to liberty and all that. And now they’re a footnote, a bit of trivia for me to try to impress you with over lunch.”
Alex wasn’t sure whether to be uncomfortable or flattered at the idea of Anselm trying to impress her.
“Have you ever wondered why the death words work?” He leaned forward. “Because we all amount to nothing in the end and there is nothing more terrifying than nothing.”
Alex hadn’t really cared why they worked so long as they did. “You know a lot about this place.”
“I like history. But there isn’t any money in it.” “Not like the law?”
Anselm lifted a shoulder. “Lethe makes a lot of promises, so does Yale, but none of them come true in New Haven. This is a place that will never repay your loyalty.”
Maybe not much like Darlington after all. “And Lethe?”
“Lethe was an extracurricular. It’s silly to think of it as anything else.
Dangerous even.”
“You’re warning me.” Just as Michelle Alameddine had.
“I’m just talking. But I don’t think you came here to listen to me pontificate about Cromwell and the perils of growing old in Connecticut.”
So this was it. “You said you read my file. My mom … my mom isn’t doing great.”
“She’s ill?”
Was chasing after any whiff of a miracle diagnosable? Was there a name for someone doomed to seek invisible patterns in gemstones and horoscopes? Who thought life’s mysteries might be revealed by eliminating dairy from your diet? Or gluten or trans fats? Could Los Angeles be called an illness?
“She’s fine,” Alex said. “She’s just not a realist and she’s not good with money.” That was putting it mildly.
“Does she embarrass you?”
The question startled her, and Alex wasn’t ready for the rush of emotion that came with it. She didn’t want to feel small and naked, a child without protection, a girl alone. The semester had only just begun and she was already exhausted, worn down to nothing, the same girl who had arrived at Yale over a year ago, swinging at anyone and anything that might try to hurt her. She wanted a mother to keep her safe and give her good advice. She wanted a father who was something more than a ghost story her mother refused to tell. She wanted Darlington, who was here but who wasn’t, whom she needed to navigate all this madness. It all crashed in on her at once, and she felt the unwelcome ache of tears at the back of her throat.
Alex took a sip of water, got herself under control. “I need to find a way to help her.”
“I can get you a paid summer intern—”
“No. Now. I need money.” That came out harsher than she’d meant it to, the real Alex jutting her chin out, tired of small talk and diplomacy.
Anselm folded his hands as if bracing himself. “How much?”
“Twenty thousand dollars.” Enough to get Mira out of her lease and settled somewhere new, enough to keep her going until she landed a new job. All of that was assuming Alex could convince her mother to leave Los Angeles. But Alex thought she could. She’d use compulsion if she had to, if it would save her mother’s life and hers.
“That’s quite a loan.”
“A gift,” she corrected. “I can’t pay something like that back.” “Alex, what you’re asking—”
But it was time to be very clear. “You read my file. You know what I can do. I can see the dead. I can even speak to them. You want information? You want access to the Veil? I can get it for you. And I don’t need some stupid ritual at Book and Snake to do it.”
Now Anselm was staring. “You can hear them?” She nodded.
“That’s … that’s incredibly risky.” “Believe me, I know.”
“But the possibilities…” Anselm’s expression was unreadable. His easy laughter and charm had evaporated into the salt sea air. He might want to be done with Lethe and all of its strange magic, but he also knew how much the Ninth House valued that kind of access, how much power it might yield. Sandow had once called Lethe “beggars at the table,” authorities without authority, hands out for any crumb of magic the other societies might be willing to part with. Alex’s gift could change that, and power was a language they all understood.
“Alex,” he said, “I’m going to ask you something and I need you to be honest with me.”
“Okay.”
“You told me you were willing to put aside your attempts to reach Darlington, that you were ready to let that go.” Alex waited. “You don’t seem like the kind of person who lets things go.”
Alex had known he might push and this part was easy. Because she knew exactly what he wanted to hear.
“You’ve seen my file,” she repeated. “You know what Lethe offered me. I’m not here because I want to wear a cloak and play wizard. You all think the world beyond the Veil is something special, but that’s just because you haven’t had to look into that particular abyss your whole life. I didn’t come to Yale for magic, Mr. Anselm.”
“Michael.”
She ignored him. “I didn’t come here for magic or for fun or because I wanted to make friends and learn to talk about poetry at cocktail parties. I came here because this is my one and only chance at a future that doesn’t look like that file. I’m not going to throw it away for a rich kid who was nice enough to talk down to me a few times.”
It was all true. All but the last part.
Anselm studied her, weighing what she’d said. “You said Lethe owed him.”
“I’m not Lethe.”
“And you have nothing planned?”
“Nothing,” Alex said without hesitation.
“I want your word. I want you to swear on your mother’s life, because if you’re fucking with me, there will be no money, no rescue plan. I’m not in the business of charity.”
“You have my word.”
“You’ve been quite the surprise, Alex Stern.” Anselm rose. He tossed a few bills on the table. Then stretched and turned his face to the light. “A good lunch. A little sun and sea, a chat with a beautiful woman. I feel almost human. We’ll see if it lasts all the way to New York.” He stuck out his hand. His palm was warm and dry, his blue eyes clear. “Keep your nose clean and make sure things stay quiet. I’ll get you that money.”
Anselm was nothing like Darlington now. He was a tan in a suit. He was a wealthy grifter looking for an edge and willing to use her to get it. He was
one more thief rummaging through artifacts in a country not his own. He was the Lethe Alex understood, not the Lethe Darlington had loved.
Alex shook his hand. “Sold.”
