“At least crow a little, Stern. Don’t deny me the enjoyment of putting you back in your place.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “Come on, they’re ready to start.”
Zeb Yarrowman stood at the head of the table. He had removed his shirt and was naked to the waist, his skin pale, his chest narrow, his arms tight to his sides like folded wings. Darlington had seen many men and women stand at the head of that table over the last three years. Some had been members of Aurelian. Some had simply paid the steep fee the society’s trust charged. They came to speak their words, make their requests, hoping for something spectacular to happen. They came with different needs, and Aurelian moved locations depending on their requirement: Ironclad prenups could be fashioned beneath the entryway to the law school. Forgeries might be detected beneath the watchful eyes of poor, duped Benjamin West’s Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes in the university art gallery. Land deeds and real estate deals were sealed high atop East Rock, the city glittering far below. Aurelian’s magic may have been weaker than that of the other societies, but it was more portable and more practical.
Tonight’s chants began in Latin, a soothing, gentle recitation that filled Beinecke, floating up, up, past shelf after shelf encased in the glass cube at the library’s center. Darlington let himself listen with one ear as he scanned the perimeter of the circle and kept one eye on Alex. He supposed it was a good sign that she was so tense. It at least meant she cared about doing a good job.
The chants shifted, breaking from Latin and shifting into vernacular Italian, sliding from antiquity to modernity. Zeb’s voice was the loudest, beseeching, echoing off the stone, and Darlington could feel his desperation. He would have to be desperate given what came next.
Zeb held out his arms. The Aurelians to his right and his left drew their knives and, as the chants continued, drew two long lines from Zeb’s wrists up his forearms.
The blood ran slowly at first, welling to the surface in red slits like eyes opening.
Zeb settled his hands on the edge of the paper before him and his blood spread over it, staining the paper. As if the paper had a taste for it, the blood started to flow faster, a tide that crawled down the scroll as Zeb continued to chant in Italian.
As Darlington had known they would, the Grays began to appear, drifting through the walls, drawn by blood and hope.
When at last the blood tide reached the end of the parchment, the Aurelians each lowered their sleeves, letting them brush the soaked paper. Zeb’s blood seemed to climb up the fabric as the sound of the chanting rose—not a single language now but all languages, words drawn from the books surrounding them, above them, tucked away in climate-controlled vaults beneath them. Thousands upon thousands of volumes. Memoirs and children’s stories, postcards and menus, poetry and travelogues, soft, rounded Italian speared by the spiky sounds of English, the chugging of German, whispery threads of Cantonese.
As one, the Aurelians slammed their hands down on the blood-soaked parchment. The sound ruptured the air like thunder and black spread from their palms, a new tide as blood became ink and flowed back up the table, coursing along the paper to where Zeb’s hands rested. He screamed when the ink entered him, zigzagging up his arms in a scrawl, line upon line, word upon word, a palimpsest that blackened his skin, slowly crawling in looping cursive up to his elbows. He wept and shuddered and wailed his anguish—but kept his hands flat to the paper.
The ink climbed higher, to his bent shoulders, up his neck, over his chest, and in the same instant entered his head and his heart.
This was the most dangerous part of the ritual, when all of Aurelian would be most vulnerable and the Grays would be most eager. They came faster through the walls and sealed windows, rounding the circle, looking for the gateways Alex and Darlington had left open, drawn by Yarrowman’s need and the iron-filing pungence of fresh blood. Whatever worry had plagued Alex, she was enjoying herself now, hurling handfuls of graveyard dirt at Grays with unnecessarily elaborate gestures that made her look like a professional wrestler trying to psych up an invisible crowd. Darlington turned his attention to his own compass points, cast clouds of bone dust at approaching Grays, murmuring the old death words when one of them tried to rush past. His favorite Orphic hymn began O spirit of the unripe fruit, but it was almost too long to be worth diving into.
He heard Alex grunt and glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see her engaged in a particularly acrobatic banishing maneuver. Instead, she was on the ground, scrabbling backward, terror in her eyes—and Grays were walking straight through the circle of protection. It took him a bare moment to understand what had happened: The markings of the southern gateway were smudged. Alex had been so busy enjoying herself, she’d stepped on the markings and ruptured the southern side of the circle. What had been a narrow door to allow the flow of magic had become a gaping hole with no barrier to entry. The Grays advanced, their attention focused on the pull of blood and longing, drawing nearer to the unsuspecting Aurelians.
Darlington threw himself into their path, barking the quickest, cruelest death words he knew: “Unwept!” he shouted. “Unhonored, and unsung!” Some checked their steps, some even fled. “Unwept, unhonored, and unsung!” he repeated. But they had momentum now, a mass of Grays that only he and Alex could see, dressed in clothes of every period, some young, some old, some wounded and maimed, others whole.
If they reached the table, the ritual would be disrupted. Yarrowman would certainly die and he might well take half of Aurelian with him. The magic would spring wild.
But if Beinecke was a living house of words, then it was one grand memorial to the end of everything. Thornton Wilder’s death mask. Ezra Pound’s teeth. Elegiac poems by the hundreds. Darlington reached for the words … Hart Crane on Melville, Ben Jonson on the death of his son. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem.” His mind scrambled for purchase. Start somewhere. Start anywhere.
“A wanton bone, I sing my song
and travel where the bone is blown.”
Good Lord. When taxed with staving off the uncanny, how did he somehow resort to Foley’s poem about a skeleton having sex?
A few of the Grays peeled off, but he needed something with some damn gravitas.
Horace.
“Winter will come on
And break the lower sea on the rocks
While we drink summer’s wine.”
Now they slowed, some covered their ears.
“See, in the white of the winter air,” he cried. “The day hangs like a rose. It droops down to the reaching hand. Take it before it goes!”
He lifted his hands before him as if he could somehow push them back. Why couldn’t he remember the first verse of the poem? Because it hadn’t interested him. Why try to know the future, which cannot be known?
“Winter will come on!” he repeated. But even as Darlington pushed the Grays back through the ruptured gate and reached for the chalk, he looked through the glass walls of the library. A horde was assembling—a tide of Grays visible through the glass walls, surrounding the building. He was not going to be able to fix the markings in time.
Alex was still on the ground, shaking so hard he could see her trembling even from a distance. When the magic got free, it might kill them both first.
“Take courage,” she said again and again. “Take courage.”
“That’s not enough!”
The Grays rushed toward the library.
“Mors vincit omnia!” Darlington cried, falling back on the words printed in every Lethe manual. The Emperor and the Aurelians had looked up from the table; only Zeb Yarrowman was still lost to the agonies of the ritual, deaf to the chaos that had entered the circle.
Then a voice pierced the air, high and wobbling, not speaking but singing … “Pariome mi madre en una noche oscura.”
Alex was singing, the melody hitching on her sobs. “Ponime por nombre niña y sin fortuna.”
My mother gave birth to me on a dark night and called me the girl with no fo
rtune.
Spanish, but slanted. Some kind of dialect.
“Ya crecen las yerbas y dan amarillo triste mi corazón vive con suspiro.”
He didn’t know the song, but the words seemed to slow the Grays’ steps.
The leaves are growing and turning gold.
My heavy heart beats and sighs.
“More!” said Darlington.
“I don’t know the rest of the song!” Alex yelled. The Grays moved forward.
“Say something, Stern! We need more words.”
“Quien no sabe de mar no sabe de mal!” She didn’t sing these words; she shouted them, again and again.
He who knows nothing of the sea knows nothing of suffering.
The line of Grays outside stumbled, looked over their shoulders: Something was moving behind them.
“Keep going!” he told her.
“Quien no sabe de mar no sabe de mal!”
It was a wave, a massive wave, rising from nowhere over the plaza. But how? She wasn’t even speaking death words. He who knows nothing of the sea knows nothing of suffering. Darlington wasn’t even sure what the words meant.
The wave rose and new words came to Darlington from Virgil—the real Virgil. From the Eclogues. “Let all become mid-ocean!” he declared. The wave climbed higher, blotting out the buildings and the sky beyond. “Farewell, ye woods! Headlong from some towering mountain peak I will throw myself into the waves; take this as my last dying gift!”
The wave crashed and Grays were scattered over the stone tiles of the plaza. Darlington could see them through the glass, bobbing like chunks of ice in the moonlight.
Hastily, Darlington redrew the marks of protection, strengthening them with heaps of graveyard dirt.
“What was that?” he said.
Alex was staring out at the fallen Grays, her cheeks still wet with tears. “I … It was just something my grandmother used to say.”
Ladino. She’d been speaking Spanish and Hebrew and he wasn’t sure what else. It was the language of diaspora. The language of death. She’d gotten lucky. They both had.
He offered her his hand. “You’re all right?” he asked. Her palm was cold, clammy in his, as she rose.
“Yes,” she said, but she was still shaking. “Fine. I’m sorry, I—”
“Do not say another word until we’re back at Il Bastone, and for God’s sake don’t apologize to anyone until we’re out of here.”
Zelinski was striding toward them, the Emperor close behind. The ritual had ended and they looked furious, though also a bit like Klan members who’d gone for a stroll and forgotten their hoods. “What the hell were you doing?” said Amelia. “You almost ruined the ritual with your shouting. What happened here?”
Darlington whirled on them, blocking their view of the smudged marks and summoning every bit of his grandfather’s authority. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Zelinski stopped short; his sleeves—now clean and white again—flapped gently as he dropped his arms. “What?”
“Have you performed this ritual before?”
“You know we have!” snapped Amelia.
“Exactly in this way?”
“Of course not! The ritual always changes a bit depending on the need. Every story is different.”
Darlington knew he was on shaky ground but better to go on the offense than to make Lethe look like a bunch of amateurs. “Well, I don’t know what Zeb has in mind for his new novel, but he almost unleashed a whole host of phantoms on your delegation.”
Zelinski’s eyes widened. “There were Grays here?”
“An army of them.”
“But she was screaming—”
“You put my Dante and me at risk,” said Darlington. “I’m going to have to report this to Dean Sandow. Aurelian shouldn’t be tampering with forces—”
“No, no, please,” Zelinski said, putting his palms up as if to tamp down a fire. “Please. This is our first ritual as a delegation. Things were bound to get a little tricky. We’re campaigning to get our rooms in SSS back.”
“She could have been hurt,” said Darlington, bristling with blue-blood indignation. “Killed.”
“This is a donation year, isn’t it?” said Amelia. “We … we can make sure it’s a generous one.”
“Are you trying to bribe me?”
“No! Not at all! A negotiation, an understanding.”
“Get out of my sight. You’re just lucky no lasting damage was done to the collection.”
“Thanks,” Alex whispered as the Emperor and Zelinski hurried away.
Darlington cast her one angry glance and bent to begin the work of clearing the circle. “I did that for Lethe, not you.”
* * *
They cleaned up the leavings of the markings, made sure the Aurelians had left no traces and that Zeb’s arms were bandaged and his vitals were stable. He still had ink stains on his lips and all over his teeth and gums. It trickled from his ears and the inner corners of his eyes. He looked monstrous but he was grinning, gibbering to himself, already scribbling away in a notebook. He would continue that way until the story was out of him.
Darlington and Alex walked back to Il Bastone in strained silence. The night felt colder, not only because of the hour, but because of the lasting effects of Hiram’s elixir. Usually he felt a sense of sadness when its magic was gone, but tonight he was perfectly happy for the Veil to fall back into place.
What had happened during the rite? How could Alex have been so incautious? She’d broken the most basic rules he’d set for her. The circle was inviolable. Guard the marks. Had he been too easygoing about the whole thing? Tried too hard to put her at ease?
When they entered Il Bastone, the entry lights flickered, as if the house could sense their mood. Dawes was exactly where they’d left her in front of the fireplace. She glanced up and seemed to shrink more deeply into her sweatshirt, before returning to her array of index cards, happy to turn her back on human conflict.
Darlington drew off his coat and hung it by the door, then headed down the hall to the kitchen, not waiting to see if Alex would follow. He turned on the burner to heat Dawes’s soup and took the sandwich platter from the refrigerator, setting it down with a loud clatter. A bottle of Syrah had been decanted and he poured himself a glass, then sat and watched Alex, who had slumped into a chair at the kitchen table, her dark eyes trained on the black-and-white tiles of the floor.
He made himself finish his glass of wine, poured another, and at last said, “Well? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured, her voice barely audible.
“Not good enough. You are literally of no use to us if you can’t handle a few Grays.”
“They weren’t coming at you.”
“They were. Two of those gates were mine to guard, remember?”
She rubbed her arms. “I just wasn’t ready. I’ll do better next time.”
“Next time will be different. And the next. And the next. There are six functioning societies and each has different rituals.”
“It wasn’t the ritual.”
“Was it the blood?”
“No. One of them grabbed me. You didn’t say that was going to happen. I—”
Darlington couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re saying one of them touched you?”
“More than one. I—”
“That isn’t possible. I mean…” He set down his wine, ran his hands through his hair. “Rarely. So rarely. Sometimes in the presence of blood or if the spirit is particularly moved. That’s why true hauntings are so rare.”
Her voice was hard, distant. “It’s possible.”
Maybe. Unless she was lying. “You need to be ready next time. You weren’t prepared—”
“And whose fault is that?”
Darlington sat up straighter. “I beg your pardon? I gave you two weeks to get up to speed. I sent you specific passages to read to keep it manageable.”
“And what about all of the years before that?” Ale
x stood and shoved her chair back. She paced into the breakfast room, her black hair reflecting the lamplight, energy sparking off her. The house gave a warning groan. She wasn’t sad or ashamed or worried. She was mad. “Where were you?” she demanded. “All you wise men of Lethe with your spells and your chalk and your books? Where were you when the dead were following me home? When they were barging into my classrooms? My bedroom? My damn bathtub? Sandow said you had been tracking me for years, since I was a kid. One of you couldn’t have told me how to get rid of them? That all it would take was a few magic words to send them away?”
“They’re harmless. It’s only the rituals that—”
Alex grabbed Darlington’s glass and threw it hard against the wall, sending glass and red wine flying. “They are not harmless. You talk as if you know, like you’re some kind of expert.” She struck her hands against the table, leaning toward him. “You have no idea what they can do.”
“Are you done or would you like another glass to break?”
“Why didn’t you help me?” said Alex, her voice nearly a growl.
“I did. You were about to be buried under a sea of Grays, if you recall.”
“Not you.” Alex waved her arm, indicating the house. “Sandow. Lethe. Someone.” She covered her face with her hands. “Take courage. No one is immortal. Do you know what it would have meant to me to know those words when I was a kid? It would have taken so little to change everything. But no one bothered. Not until I could be useful to you.”
Darlington did not like to think he had behaved badly. He did not like to think that Lethe had behaved badly. We are the shepherds. And yet they’d left Alex to face the wolves. She was right. They hadn’t cared. She’d been someone for Lethe to study and observe from afar.
He’d told himself he was giving her a chance, being fair to this girl who had washed up on his shore. But he’d let himself think of her as someone who had made all of the wrong choices and stumbled down the wrong path. It hadn’t occurred to him that she was being chased.
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