Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  “Right?” Tripp said, ready to be pals. “Maybe getting stuck out here all night’s not so bad.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  “What happened to your arm?” Alex could see a bit of bandage peeking out from Tripp’s windbreaker.

  He shoved the sleeve up, revealing a patch of greasy cellophane taped over the inside of his forearm. “A bunch of us got tattoos today.”

  Alex looked closer: a strutting bulldog bursting through a big blue Y. The dudebro equivalent of best friends forevah!

  “Nice,” she lied.

  “You got any ink?” His sleepy eyes roved over her, trying to peel back the winter layers, no different than the losers who had hung around Ground Zero, fingers brushing her clavicle, her biceps, tracing the shapes there. So what does this one mean?

  “Nope. Not my thing.” Alex wrapped her scarf around her neck. “I’ll check in on Reyes on the ward tomorrow.”

  “Huh? Oh, right. Good. Where’s Darlington anyway? He already sticking you with the shit jobs?”

  Tripp tolerated Alex, tried to be friendly with her because he wanted his belly rubbed by everyone he encountered, but he genuinely liked Darlington.

  “Spain,” she said, because that was what she’d been instructed to say.

  “Nice. Tell him buenos días.”

  If Alex could have told Darlington anything, it would have been, Come back. She would have said it in English and Spanish. She would have used the imperative.

  “Adiós,” she said to Tripp. “Enjoy the party.”

  Once she was clear of the building, Alex yanked off her gloves and unwrapped two sticky ginger candies, shoving them into her mouth. She was tired of thinking about Darlington, but the smell of the ginger, the heat it created at the back of her throat, brought him even more brightly alive. She saw his long body sprawled in front of the great stone fireplace at Black Elm. He’d taken his boots off, left his socks to dry on the hearth. He was on his back, eyes closed, head resting in the cradle of his arms, toes wiggling in time to the music floating around the room, something classical Alex didn’t know, dense with French horns that left emphatic crescents of sound in the air.

  Alex had been on the floor beside him, arms clasped around her knees, back pressed against the base of an old sofa, trying to seem relaxed and to stop staring at his feet. They just looked so naked. He’d cuffed his black jeans up, keeping the damp off his skin, and those slender white feet, hair dusting the toes, had made her feel a little obscene, like some sepia-toned pervert driven mad by a glimpse of ankle.

  Fuck you, Darlington. She yanked her gloves back on.

  For a moment she stood paralyzed. She should get back to Lethe House and write up her report for Dean Sandow to review, but what she really wanted was to flop down on the narrow bottom bunk of the room she shared with Mercy and cram in all the sleep she could before class. At this hour, she wouldn’t have to make any excuses to curious roommates. But if she slept at Lethe, Mercy and Lauren would be clamoring to know where and with whom she’d spent the night.

  Darlington had suggested making up a boyfriend to justify her long absences and late nights.

  “If I do that, at some point I’ll have to produce a boy-shaped human to gaze at me adoringly,” Alex had replied in frustration. “How have you gotten away with this for the last three years?”

  Darlington had just shrugged. “My roommates figured I was a player.” If Alex’s eyes had rolled back in her head any farther, she would have been facing the opposite direction.

  “All right, all right. I told them I was in a band with some UConn guys and that we played out a lot.”

  “Do you even play an instrument?”

  “Of course.”

  Cello, upright bass, guitar, piano, and something called an oud.

  Hopefully, Mercy would be fast asleep when Alex got back to the room and she could slip inside to retrieve her basket of shower things and head down the hall without notice. It would be tricky. Anytime you tampered with the Veil between this world and the next, it left a stink that was something like the electrical crackle of ozone after a storm coupled with the rot of a pumpkin left too long on a windowsill. The first time she’d made the mistake of returning to the suite without showering, she’d actually had to lie about slipping in a pile of garbage to explain it. Mercy and Lauren had laughed about it for weeks.

  Alex thought of the grimy shower waiting at her dorm … and then of sinking into the vast old claw-foot tub in Il Bastone’s spotless bathroom, the four-poster bed so high she had to hoist herself onto it. Supposedly Lethe had safe houses and hidey-holes all over the Yale campus, but the two Alex had been introduced to were the Hutch and Il Bastone. The Hutch was closer to Alex’s dorm and most of her classes, but it was just a shabby, comfortable set of rooms above a clothing store, always stocked with bags of chips and Darlington’s protein bars, a place to stop in and take a quick nap on the badly sprung couch. Il Bastone was something special: a three-story mansion nearly a mile from the heart of campus that served as Lethe’s main headquarters. Oculus would be waiting there tonight, the lamps lit, with a tray of tea, brandy, and sandwiches. It was tradition, even if Alex didn’t show up to enjoy them. But the price of all that luxury would be dealing with Oculus, and she just couldn’t handle Dawes’s clenched-jaw silences tonight. Better to return to the dorms with the stink of the night’s work on her.

  Alex crossed the street and cut back through the rotunda. It was hard not to keep looking behind her, thinking of the Grays standing at the edge of the circle with their mouths stretched too wide, black pits humming that low insect sound. What would have happened if that railing had broken, if the chalk circle hadn’t held? What had provoked them? Would she have had the strength or the knowledge to hold them off? Pasa punto, pasa mundo.

  Alex pulled her coat tighter, tucking her face into her scarf, her breath humid against the wool, hurrying back past Beinecke Library.

  “If you get locked in there during a fire, all of the oxygen gets sucked out,” Lauren had claimed. “To protect the books.”

  Alex knew that was bullshit. Darlington had told her so. He’d known the truth of the building, all of its faces, that it had been built to the Platonic ideal (the building was a temple), employing the same ratios used by some typesetters for their pages (the building was a book), that its marble had been quarried in Vermont (the building was a monument). The entrance had been created so that only one person was permitted to enter at a time, passing through the rotating door like a supplicant. She remembered Darlington pulling on the white gloves worn to handle rare manuscripts, his long fingers resting reverently on the page. It was the same way Len handled cash.

  There was a room in Beinecke, hidden on … she couldn’t remember which floor. And even if she could have she wouldn’t have gone. She didn’t have the balls to descend into the patio, touch her fingers to the window in the secret pattern, enter in the dark. This place had been dear to Darlington. There was no place more magical. There was no place on campus she felt more like a fraud.

  Alex reached for her phone to check the time, hoping it wasn’t much past three. If she could get washed up and into bed by four, she’d still be able to get three and a half solid hours before she had to be up and across campus again for Spanish. This was the math she ran every night, every moment. How much time to try to get the work done? How much time to rest? She could never quite make the numbers work. She was just scraping by, stretching the budget, always coming up a little short, and the panic clung to her, dogging her steps.

  Alex looked at the glowing screen and swore. It was flooded with messages. She’d put the phone on silent for the prognostication and forgotten to switch it back on.

  The texts were all from the same person: Oculus, Pamela Dawes, the grad student who maintained the Lethe residences and served as their research assistant. Pammie, though only Darlington called her that.

  Call in.

  Call in.

  Call in.

  The
texts were all timed exactly fifteen minutes apart. Either Dawes was following some kind of protocol or she was even more uptight than Alex had thought.

  Alex considered just ignoring the messages. But it was a Thursday night, the night the societies met, and that meant that some little shit had gotten up to something bad. For all she knew, the shapeshifting idiots at Wolf’s Head had turned themselves into a herd of buffalo and trampled a bunch of students coming out of Branford.

  She stepped behind one of the columns supporting the Beinecke cube to shelter from the wind and dialed.

  Dawes picked up on the first ring. “Oculus speaking.”

  “Dante replies,” Alex said, feeling like a jackass. She was Dante. Darlington was Virgil. That was the way Lethe was supposed to work until Alex made it to her senior year and took on the title of Virgil to mentor an incoming freshman. She’d nodded and matched Darlington’s small smile when he’d told her their code names—he’d referred to them as “offices”—pretending she got the joke. Later, she’d looked them up and discovered that Virgil had been Dante’s guide as he descended into hell. More Lethe House humor wasted on her.

  “There’s a body at Payne Whitney,” said Dawes. “Centurion is on site.”

  “A body,” Alex repeated, wondering if fatigue had damaged her ability to understand basic human speech.

  “Yes.”

  “Like a dead body?”

  “Ye-es.” Dawes was clearly trying to sound calm, but her breath caught, turning the single syllable into a musical hiccup.

  Alex pressed her back against the column, the cold of the stone seeping through her coat, and felt a stab of angry adrenaline spike through her.

  Are you messing with me? That was what she wanted to ask. That was what this felt like. Being fucked with. Being the weird kid who talked to herself, who was so desperate for friends she agreed when Sarah McKinney pleaded, “Can you meet me at Tres Muchachos after school? I want to see if you can talk to my grandma. We used to go there a lot and I miss her so much.” The kid who stood outside the shittiest Mexican restaurant in the shittiest food court in the Valley by herself until she had to call her mom to ask her to pick her up because no one was coming. Of course no one was coming.

  This is real, she reminded herself. And Pamela Dawes was a lot of things but she wasn’t a Sarah McKinney–style asshole.

  Which meant someone was dead.

  And she was supposed to do something about it?

  “Uh, was it an accident?”

  “Possible homicide.” Dawes sounded like she’d been waiting for just this question.

  “Okay,” Alex said, because she had no idea what else to say.

  “Okay,” Dawes replied awkwardly. She’d delivered her big line and now she was ready to get offstage.

  Alex hung up and stood in the bleak, windswept silence of the empty plaza. She’d forgotten at least half of what Darlington had tried to teach her before he’d vanished, but he definitely hadn’t covered murder.

  She didn’t know why. If you were going to hell together, murder seemed like a good place to start.

  2

  Last Fall

  Daniel Arlington prided himself on being prepared for anything, but if he’d had to choose a way to describe Alex Stern, it would have been “an unwelcome surprise.” He could think of a lot of other terms for her, but none of them were polite, and Darlington always endeavored to be polite. If he’d been brought up by his parents—his dilettante father, his glib but brilliant mother—he might have had different priorities, but he’d been raised by his grandfather, Daniel Tabor Arlington III, who believed that most problems could be solved with cask-strength scotch, plenty of ice, and impeccable manners.

  His grandfather had never met Galaxy Stern.

  Darlington sought out Alex’s first-floor Vanderbilt dorm room on a sweating, miserable day in the first week of September. He could have waited for her to report to the house on Orange, but when he was a freshman, his own mentor, the inimitable Michelle Alameddine, who had served as his Virgil, had welcomed him to Yale and the mysteries of Lethe House by coming to meet him at the Old Campus freshman dorms. Darlington was determined to do things right, even if everything about the Stern situation had started out wrong.

  He hadn’t chosen Galaxy Stern as his Dante. In fact, she had, by sheer virtue of her existence, robbed him of something he’d been looking forward to for the entirety of his three-year tenure with Lethe: the moment when he would gift someone new with the job he loved, when he’d crack the ordinary world open for some worthy but barely suspecting soul. Only a few months before, he’d unloaded the boxes full of incoming freshman applications and stacked them in the great room at Black Elm, giddy with excitement, determined to read or at least skim through all eighteen hundred–plus files before he made his recommendations to the Lethe House alumni. He would be fair, open-minded, and thorough, and in the end he would choose twenty candidates for the role of Dante. Then Lethe would vet their backgrounds, check for health risks, signs of mental illness, and financial vulnerabilities, and a final decision would be made.

  Darlington had created a plan for how many applications he’d have to tackle each day that would still free his mornings for work on the estate and his afternoons for his job at the Peabody Museum. He’d been ahead of schedule that day in July—on application number 324: Mackenzie Hoffer, 800 verbal, 720 math; nine APs her junior year; blog on the Bayeux Tapestry maintained in both English and French. She’d seemed promising until he’d gotten to her personal essay, in which she’d compared herself to Emily Dickinson. Darlington had just tossed her folder onto the no pile when Dean Sandow called to tell him their search was over. They’d found their candidate. The alumni were unanimous.

  Darlington had wanted to protest. Hell, he’d wanted to break something. Instead, he’d straightened the stack of folders before him and said, “Who is it? I have all of the files right here.”

  “You don’t have her file. She never applied. She didn’t even finish high school.” Before Darlington could sputter his indignation, Sandow added, “Daniel, she can see Grays.”

  Darlington had paused, his hand still atop Mackenzie Hoffer (two summers with Habitat for Humanity). It wasn’t just the sound of his given name, something Sandow rarely used. She can see Grays. The only way for one of the living to see the dead was by ingesting the Orozcerio, an elixir of infinite complexity that required perfect skill and attention to detail to create. He’d attempted it himself when he was seventeen, before he’d ever heard of Lethe, when he’d only hoped there might be more to this world than he’d been led to believe. His efforts had landed him in the ER and he’d hemorrhaged blood from his ears and eyes for two days.

  “She managed to brew an elixir?” he said, both thrilled and—he could admit it—a little jealous.

  Silence followed, long enough for Darlington to switch off the light on his grandfather’s desk and walk out to the back porch of Black Elm. From here he could see the gentle slope of houses leading down Edgewood to campus and, far beyond, the Long Island Sound. All of the land down to Central Avenue had once been a part of Black Elm but had been sold off in bits and pieces as the Arlington fortune dwindled. The house, its rose gardens, and the ruined mess of the maze at the edge of the wood were all that remained—and only he remained to tend and prune and coddle it back to life. Dusk was falling now, a long, slow summer twilight, thick with mosquitoes and the glint of fireflies. He could see the question mark of Cosmo’s white tail as the cat wended his way through the high grass, stalking some small creature.

  “No elixir,” said Sandow. “She can just see them.”

  “Ah,” said Darlington, watching a thrush peck half-heartedly at the broken base of what had once been the obelisk fountain. There was nothing else to say. Though Lethe had been created to monitor the activities of Yale’s secret societies, its secondary mission was to unravel the mysteries of what lay beyond the Veil. For years they had documented stories of people who could act
ually see phantoms, some confirmed, some little more than rumor. So if the board had found a girl who could do these things and they could make her beholden to them … Well, that was that. He should be glad to meet her.

  He wanted to get drunk.

  “I’m not any happier about this than you are,” said Sandow. “But you know the position we’re in. This is an important year for Lethe. We need everyone happy.” Lethe was responsible for keeping watch over the Houses of the Veil, but it also relied on them for funding. This was a re-up year and the societies had gone so long without an incident, there were rumblings that perhaps they shouldn’t dip into their coffers to continue supporting Lethe at all. “I’ll send you her files. She’s not … She’s not the Dante we might have hoped for, but try to keep an open mind.”

  “Of course,” said Darlington, because that was what a gentleman did. “Of course I will.”

  He’d tried to mean it. Even after he read her file, even after he’d watched the interview between her and Sandow recorded at a hospital in Van Nuys, California, heard the husky, broken woodwind sound of her voice, he’d tried. She’d been found naked and comatose at a crime scene, next to a girl who hadn’t been lucky enough to survive the fentanyl they’d both taken. The details of it were all more sordid and sad than he could have fathomed, and he’d tried to feel sorry for her. His Dante, the girl he would gift with the keys to a secret world, was a criminal, a drug user, a dropout who cared about none of the things he did. But he’d tried.

  And still nothing had prepared him for the shock of her presence in that shabby Vanderbilt common room. The room was small but high-ceilinged, with three tall windows that looked out onto the horseshoe-shaped courtyard and two narrow doors leading to the bedrooms. The space eddied with the easy chaos of a freshman year move-in: boxes on the floor, no proper furniture to be seen but a wobbly lamp and a battered recliner pushed up against the long-since-functional fireplace. A muscular blonde in running shorts—Lauren, he guessed (likely pre-med, solid test scores, field-hockey captain at her Philadelphia prep school)—was setting up a faux-vintage turntable on the ledge of the window seat, a plastic crate of records balanced beside it. The recliner was probably hers too, carted along in a moving truck from Bucks County to New Haven. Anna Breen (Huntsville, Texas; STEM scholarship; choir leader) sat on the floor trying to assemble what looked like a bookshelf. This was a girl who would never quite fit. She’d end up in a singing group or maybe get heavily into her church. She definitely wouldn’t be partying with her other roommates.