Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  “Alex!” he exclaimed, like she was a much anticipated guest at a party.

  Colin’s enthusiasm always seemed genuine, but sometimes its sheer wattage made her want to do something abruptly violent like put a pencil through his palm. Belbalm just draped her elegant coat on the rack and beckoned Alex into her sanctum.

  “Tea, Colin?” Belbalm inquired.

  “Of course,” he said, beaming less like an assistant than an acolyte.

  “Thank you, love.”

  Coat, mouthed Colin. Alex shucked off her jacket. She’d once asked Colin what Belbalm knew about the societies. “Nothing,” he’d said. “She thinks it’s all old-boy elitist bullshit.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Alex had wondered what was so special about the seniors selected by the societies every year. She’d thought there must be something magical about them. But they were just favorites—legacies, high achievers, charisma queens, the editor of the Daily News, the quarterback for the football team, some kid who had staged a particularly edgy production of Equus that no one wanted to see. People who would go on to run hedge funds and start-ups and get executive producer credits.

  Alex followed Belbalm inside, letting the calm of the office settle over her. The books lining the shelves, the carefully curated objects from Belbalm’s travels—a blown-glass decanter that bulged like the body of a jellyfish, some kind of antique mirror, the herbs flowering on the window ledge in white ceramic containers like bits of geometric sculpture. Even the sunlight seemed more gentle here.

  Alex took a deep breath.

  “Too much perfume?” Belbalm asked with a smile.

  “No!” Alex said loudly. “It’s great.”

  Belbalm dropped gracefully into the chair behind her desk and gestured for Alex to seat herself on the green velvet couch across from her.

  “Le Parfum de Thérèse,” Belbalm said. “Edmond Roudnitska. He was one of the great noses of the twentieth century and he designed this fragrance for his wife. Only she was allowed to wear it. Romantic, no?”

  “Then—”

  “How do I come to wear it? Well, they both died and there was money to be made, so Frédéric Malle put it on the market for us peasants to buy.”

  Peasant was a word poor people didn’t use. Just like classy was a word that classy people didn’t use. But Belbalm smiled in a way that included Alex, so Alex smiled back in a way she hoped was just as knowing.

  Colin appeared, balancing a tray laden with a tea set the color of red clay, and placed it on the edge of the desk. “Anything else?” he asked hopefully.

  Belbalm shooed him away. “Go do important things.” She poured out the tea and offered a cup to Alex. “Help yourself to cream and sugar if you like. Or there’s fresh mint.” She rose and broke a small sprig from the herbs on the sill.

  “Mint please,” Alex said, taking the sprig and echoing Belbalm’s movements: crushing the leaves, dropping them into her own cup.

  Belbalm sat back, took a sip. Alex did the same, then hid a flinch when it burned her tongue.

  “I take it you heard the news about that poor girl?”

  “Tara?”

  Belbalm’s slender brows rose. “Yes, Tara Hutchins. Did you know her?”

  “No,” Alex said, annoyed at her own stupidity. “I was just reading about her.”

  “A terrible thing. I will say a more terrible thing and admit that I’m grateful she was not a student. It does not diminish the loss in any way, of course.”

  “Of course.” But Alex was fairly sure Belbalm was saying exactly that.

  “Alex, what do you want from Yale?”

  Money. Alex knew Marguerite Belbalm would find such an answer hopelessly crude. When did you first see them? Darlington had asked. Maybe all rich people asked the wrong questions. For people like Alex, it would never be what do you want. It was always just how much can you get? Enough to survive? Enough to help her take care of her mother when shit fell apart the way it always, always did?

  Alex said nothing and Belbalm tried again. “Why come here and not to an art school?” Lethe had mocked up paintings for her, created a false trail of successes and glowing recommendations to excuse her academic lapses.

  “I’m good, but I’m not good enough to make it.” It was true. Magic could create competent painters, proficient musicians, but not genius. She had added art electives to her class schedule because it was expected, and they’d proven the easiest part of her academic life. Because it wasn’t her hand that moved the brush. When she remembered to pick up the sketchbooks Sandow had suggested she buy, it was like letting a trivet skate over a Ouija board, though the images that emerged came from somewhere inside her—Betcha half naked and drinking from a hole; Hellie in profile, the wings of a monarch butterfly pushing from her back.

  “I will not accuse you of false humility. I trust you to know your own talents.” Belbalm took another sip of her tea. “The world is quite hard on artists who are good but not truly great. So. You wish what? Stability? A steady job?”

  “Yes,” Alex said, and despite her best intentions the word emerged with a petulant edge.

  “You mistake me, Alexandra. There is no crime in wanting these things. Only people who have never lived without comfort deride it as bourgeois.” She winked. “The purest Marxists are always men. Calamity comes too easily to women. Our lives can come apart in a single gesture, a rogue wave. And money? Money is the rock we cling to when the current would seize us.”

  “Yes,” said Alex, leaning forward. This was what Alex’s mother had never managed to grasp. Mira loved art and truth and freedom. She didn’t want to be a part of the machine. But the machine didn’t care. The machine went on grinding and catching her up in its gears.

  Belbalm set her cup in its saucer. “So once you have money, once you can stop clinging to the rock and can climb atop it, what will you build there? When you stand upon the rock, what will you preach?”

  Alex felt all of the interest go out of her. Was she really supposed to have something to say, some wisdom to impart? Stay in school? Don’t do drugs? Don’t fuck the wrong guys? Don’t let the wrong guys fuck with you? Be nice to your parents even if they don’t deserve it, because they can afford to take you to the dentist? Dream smaller? Don’t let the girl you love die?

  The silence stretched. Alex gazed at the mint leaves floating in her tea.

  “Well,” said Professor Belbalm on a sigh. “I ask you these things because I don’t know how else to motivate you, Alex. Do you wonder why I care?”

  Alex hadn’t, actually. She’d just assumed Belbalm took her job as the head of JE seriously, that she looked out for all of the students under her care. But she nodded anyway.

  “We all began somewhere, Alex. So many of these children have had too much handed to them. They’ve forgotten how to reach. You are hungry and I respect hunger.” She tapped her desk with two fingers. “But hungry for what? You’re improving; I see that. You’ve gotten some help, I think, and that’s good. You’re clearly a smart girl. The academic probation is worrisome, but what worries me more is that the classes you’re choosing show no real pattern of interest other than ease. You cannot simply get by here.”

  Can and will, thought Alex. But all she said was, “I’m sorry.” She meant it. Belbalm was looking for some secret potential to unlock and Alex was going to disappoint her.

  Belbalm waved away the apology. “Think about what you want, Alex. It may not be something you can find here. But if it is, I will do what I can to help you stay.”

  This was what Alex wanted, the perfect peace of this office, the gentle light through the windows, the mint and basil and marjoram growing in lacy clusters.

  “Have you given any thought to your summer plans?” asked Belbalm. “Would you consider staying here? Coming to work for me?”

  Alex’s head snapped up. “What could I possibly do for you?”

  Belbalm laughed. “Do you think Isabel and Colin are performing complicated tasks? They maintain my cal
endar, do my filing, organize my life so I don’t have to. I have no doubt you could manage it. There’s a summer composition program that I think might get your writing where it needs to be to continue here. You could begin to think about what you might consider as a career path. I don’t want to see you left behind, Alex.”

  A summer to catch up, to catch my breath. Alex was good at odds. She’d had to be. Before you walked into a deal, you had to know if you would walk out. And she knew the chance that she could bob and weave her way through four years of Yale was unlikely. With Darlington around, it had been different. His help had given her an edge, made this life manageable, possible. But Darlington was gone, who knew for how long, and she was so damn tired of treading water.

  Belbalm was offering her three months to breathe, to recover, make a plan, gather her resources, to become a real Yale student, not just someone playing the part on Lethe’s dime.

  “How would that work?” Alex asked. She wanted to set down her cup, but her hand was shaking badly enough she was afraid it would clatter.

  “Show me you can continue to improve. Finish the year strong. And the next time I ask you what you want, I expect an answer. You know about my salon? I had one last night but I’ll have another next week. You can start by attending.”

  “I can do that,” she said, though she wasn’t at all sure she could. “I can do that. Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me, Alex.” Belbalm looked at her over the red rim of her teacup. “Just do the work.”

  * * *

  Alex felt light as she drifted out of the office and waved to Colin. She found herself in the silence of the courtyard. It was like this sometimes—all of the doors would close, no one passing through on their way to class or a meal, all the windows shut tight against the cold, and you’d be left in a pocket of silence. Alex let it pool around her, imagined that the buildings surrounding her had been abandoned.

  What would the campus be like in the summer? Quiet like this? Humid and unpopulated, a city under glass. Alex had spent her winter break holed up at Il Bastone, watching movies on the laptop Lethe had bought for her, afraid Dawes would appear. She’d skyped with her mom and only ventured out for pizza and noodles. Even the Grays had vanished, as if without the students’ excitement and anxiety, they had nothing to draw them to campus.

  Alex thought of the stillness, the late mornings that summer might bring. She could sit behind that desk where Colin and Isabel sat, brew tea, update the JE website, do whatever had to be done. She could pick her courses, ones that had syllabi that didn’t change much. She could do the reading ahead of time, take the composition course so she wouldn’t have to lean on Mercy so much anymore—assuming Mercy wanted to room with her next year.

  Next year. Magical words. Belbalm had built Alex a bridge to a possible future. She just had to cross it. Alex’s mother would be disappointed when she didn’t go home to California … Or would she? Maybe it was easier this way. When Alex had told her mother she was going to Yale, Mira had looked at her with such sadness that it had taken Alex a long moment to understand her mother thought she was high. Guiltily, Alex snapped a picture of the empty courtyard and texted it to her mom. Cold morning! Meaningless, but evidence that she was okay and here, proof of life.

  She popped into the bathroom before she headed to class, ran her fingers through her hair. She and Hellie had loved wearing makeup, spending their rare bits of spare cash on glitter eyeliner and lip gloss. She missed it sometimes. Here, makeup meant something different; it sent a signal of effort that was unacceptable.

  Alex endured an hour of Spanish II—dull but manageable because all it required of her was memorization. Everyone was chattering about Tara Hutchins, though no one called her by name. She was the dead girl, the murder victim, the townie who got stabbed. People were talking about crisis lines and emergency therapy for anyone triggered by the event. The TA who led her Spanish class reminded them to use the campus walking service after dark. I was right near there. I was there like an hour before it happened. I walk by there every day. Alex heard the same things repeated again and again. There was worry, some embarrassment—another bit of proof that, no matter how many chain stores moved in, New Haven would never be Cambridge. But no one seemed truly afraid. Because Tara wasn’t one of you, Alex thought, as she packed up her bag. You all still feel safe.

  Alex had two hours free after class and she meant to spend them hidden away in her dorm room, eating her pilfered sandwiches and writing her report for Sandow, then sleeping through the basso belladonna crash before she went to her English lecture.

  Instead, she found her feet carrying her back to Payne Whitney. The intersection was no longer blocked off and the crowds were gone, but police tape still surrounded the triangular swath of barren ground across the street from the gym. The students who passed cast furtive glances at the scene and hurried along, as if mortified to be seen gawking at something so lurid in the cold gray sunlight. A police cruiser was parked half on the sidewalk, and a news van sat across the street.

  She had to imagine Dean Sandow and the rest of the Yale administration were having plenty of harried meetings about damage control this morning. Alex hadn’t understood the distinctions between Yale and Princeton and Harvard and the cities they occupied. They were all the same impossible place in the same imaginary town. But it was clear from the way that Lauren and Mercy laughed about New Haven that the city and its university were considered a little less Ivy than the others. A murder that close to campus, even if the victim hadn’t been a student, couldn’t be good PR.

  Alex wondered if she was looking at the place where Tara had been murdered or if her body had simply been dumped in front of the gym. She should have asked the coroner while he was compelled. But she had to imagine it was the former. If you wanted to get rid of a body, you didn’t drop it in the middle of a busy intersection.

  An image of Hellie’s shoe, that pink jelly sandal slipping from her painted toes, flashed through Alex’s mind. Hellie’s feet had been wide, the toes crammed together, the skin thick and callused—the only unbeautiful part of her.

  What am I doing here? Alex didn’t want to get any closer to where the body had been. It was the boyfriend. That’s what the coroner had told her. He was a dealer. They’d gotten into some kind of argument. The wounds had been extreme, but if he’d been high, who knew what might have been going on in his head?

  Still, there was something bothering her about the scene. Last night she’d approached from Grove Street, but now she was on the other side of the intersection, directly across from the Baker Hall dorms and the empty, icy ground where Tara had been found. From this angle there was something familiar about the way it all looked—the two streets, the stakes driven into the earth where Tara had died or been abandoned. Was it just seeing it in the daylight without the crowds that made it seem different? A false sense of déjà vu? Or maybe the basso belladonna was playing tricks on her as it left her system? The Lethe journals were full of warnings on just how powerful it was.

  Alex thought of Hellie’s shoe hanging for a brief moment from her toe, then dropping to the apartment floor with a thunk. Len turned to Alex, struggling with the weight of Hellie’s limp body, his hands cupped beneath her armpits. Betcha had Hellie’s knees tucked against his hip as if they were swing dancing. “Come on,” Len said. “Open the door, Alex. Let us out.”

  Let us out.

  She shook the memory away and glanced at the cluster of Grays in front of the gym. There were less of them today and their mood—if they’d ever really had a mood—had returned to normal. The Bridegroom was still there, though. Despite her best attempts to ignore him, the ghost was hard to miss—crisp trousers, shiny shoes, a handsome face like something out of an old movie, big dark eyes and black hair swept back from his brow in a soft wave, the effect spoiled only by the big bloody pockmark of a gunshot wound to his chest.

  He was an actual haunter, a Gray who could pass through the layers of the Veil and make
his presence felt, rattling windshields and setting off car alarms in the parking garage that stood where his family’s carriage factory had once been—and where he’d killed his fiancée and then himself. It was a favorite stop on ghost tours of New England. Alex didn’t let her gaze linger, but from the corner of her eye she saw him drift away from the group, sauntering toward her.

  Time to get gone. She didn’t want the interest of Grays, particularly Grays who could take any kind of real physical form. She turned her back on him and hurried toward the heart of campus.

  By the time she got back to Vanderbilt, the crash had hold of her. She felt weak, exhausted, as if she’d just emerged from a week of the worst flu of her life. Her report for Sandow could wait. She didn’t have much to say anyway. She would sleep. Maybe she would dream of summer. She could still smell crushed mint on her fingers.

  She closed her eyes and saw Hellie’s face, her pale brows bleached by the sun, vomit clinging to her lip. It was Tara Hutchins’s fault. Blondes always made Alex think of Hellie. But why had the crime scene looked so familiar? What had she seen in that forlorn patch of dead earth bracketed by the flow of traffic?

  Nothing. She’d just had too many late nights, too much Darlington whispering in her ear. Tara was nothing like Hellie. She was like a bad knockoff, generic to Hellie’s name brand.

  No, said a voice in her head—and it was Hellie, standing on a skateboard, rocking back and forth on those wide feet, her balance impeccable. Her skin was ashen. Her bikini top was spattered with clumps of her last meal. She’s me. She’s you without a second chance.

  Alex fought her way back from the tide of sleep. The room was dark, little light filtering in from the single narrow window.

  Hellie was long gone and so were the people who had hurt her. But someone had hurt Tara Hutchins too. Someone who hadn’t been punished. Not yet.

  Leave it to Detective Turner. That was what the survivor said. Rest easy. Let it go. Focus on your grades. Think of the summer. Alex could see the bridge that Belbalm had built. She just had to cross it.