Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  It took them the better part of the hour to find their way to the OCME. Alex wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but when they got there she was grateful for the bright lights, the big lot, the office-park feel of it all.

  “Now what?” said Dawes.

  Alex took the plastic baggie and the tin they’d prepared from her satchel and wedged them into the back pockets of her jeans. She opened her door, shrugged off her coat and scarf, and tossed them onto the passenger seat.

  “What are you doing?” asked Dawes.

  “I don’t want to look like a student. Give me your sweatshirt.” Alex’s peacoat was thin wool with a polyester lining, but it screamed college. That was exactly why she’d bought it.

  Dawes seemed like she wanted to object, but she unzipped her parka, shucked off her sweatshirt, and tossed it over to Alex, shivering in her T-shirt. “I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

  “Of course it isn’t. Let’s go.”

  Through the glass doors, Alex saw that the waiting room had a few people in it, all trying to get their business done before closing. A woman sat at a desk near the back of the room. She had fluffy brown hair that showed a red rinse beneath the office lights.

  Alex sent a quick text to Turner: We need to talk. Then she told Dawes, “Wait five minutes and then come in, sit down, pretend you’re waiting for someone. If that woman leaves her desk, text me right away, okay?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Talk to her.”

  Alex wished she hadn’t wasted her coin of compulsion on the coroner. She had only one left and she couldn’t afford to use it to get past the front desk, not if the plan went the way she hoped.

  She tucked her hair behind her ears and bustled into the waiting room, rubbing her arms. A poster had been hung behind the desk: SYMPATHY AND RESPECT. A small sign read, My name is Moira Adams and I’m glad to help. Glad, not happy. You weren’t supposed to be happy in a building full of dead people.

  Moira looked up and smiled. She had some hard-living lines around her eyes and a cross around her neck.

  “Hi,” Alex said. She made a show of taking a deep, shuddering breath. “Um, a detective said I could come here to see my cousin.”

  “Okay, hon. Of course. What’s your cousin’s name?”

  “Tara Anne Hutchins.” The middle name had been easy enough to come by online. The woman’s face grew wary. Tara Hutchins had been in the news. She was a homicide victim, the kind that could draw crazies. “Detective Turner sent me here.”

  Moira’s expression was still cautious. He was the lead detective on the case and his name had most likely been in the media.

  “You can have a seat while I try to reach him,” said Moira.

  Alex held up her phone. “He gave me his information.” She sent another quick text: Pick up NOW, Turner. Then she slid to the call screen and dialed on speaker. “Here,” she said, holding out her cell.

  Moira sputtered, “I can’t…” But the faint sound of the phone ringing and Alex’s expectant expression did the trick. Moira pressed her lips together and took the cell from Alex.

  The call went to Turner’s voicemail, just as Alex had known it would. Detective Abel Turner would pick up when he damn well felt like it, not when some pissy undergrad told him to, especially not when she demanded it.

  Alex hoped Moira would just hang up, but instead she cleared her throat and said, “Detective Turner, this is Moira Adams, public outreach at OCME. If you could give us a call back…” She gave the number. All Alex could hope was that Turner wouldn’t check a voicemail from her number anytime too soon. Maybe he’d be really petty and delete it.

  “Tara was a good girl, y’know?” she said when Moira handed her phone back. “She didn’t deserve any of this.”

  Moira made sympathetic sounds. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” Like she was reading from a script.

  “I just need to pray over her, say my goodbyes.”

  Moira’s fingers touched her cross. “Of course.”

  “She had a lot of problems, but who doesn’t? We got her going to church every weekend. You can bet that boyfriend of hers didn’t like it.” At this Moira gave a little huff of agreement. “You think Detective Turner’ll call back soon?”

  “As soon as he can. He may be tied up.”

  “But you guys close in an hour, right?”

  “To the public, yes. But you can come back on Mon—”

  “I can’t, though.” Alex’s eyes scanned the photos taped below the ledge of Moira’s desk and spotted a woman in Winnie-the-Pooh scrubs. “I’m in nursing school.”

  “At Albertus Magnus?”

  “Yeah!”

  “My niece is there. Alison Adams?”

  “Real pretty girl with red hair?”

  “That’s her,” Moira said with a smile.

  “I can’t miss class. They’re so tough. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.”

  “I know,” Moira said ruefully. “They’re running Allie ragged.”

  “I just … I need to be able to tell my mama I said goodbye to her. Tara’s mom and dad were … They all weren’t close.” Alex was flat out guessing now, but she suspected Moira Adams had her own story about girls like Tara Hutchins. “If I could just see her face, say goodbye.”

  Moira hesitated, then reached forward and gave her hand a squeeze. “I can have someone take you down to see her. Just have your ID ready and … It can be hard, but prayer helps.”

  “It always does,” said Alex fervently.

  Moira pressed a button, and a few minutes later an exhausted-looking coroner in blue scrubs appeared and waved Alex through.

  It was cold on the other side of the double doors, the floors tiled in heathered gray, the walls a melted cream. “Sign in here,” he said, gesturing to the clipboard on the wall. “I’ll need photo ID. Cell phones, cameras, and all recording devices in the bin. You can retrieve them when you return.”

  “Sure,” said Alex. Then she held out her hand, gold glinting beneath the fluorescents. “I think you dropped this.”

  * * *

  The room was larger than she’d expected and ice-cold. It was also unexpectedly noisy—the dripping of a faucet, the hum of the freezers, the rush of the air conditioner—though it was silent in another way. This was the last place Grays would come. To hell with Belbalm. She should intern at the morgue this summer.

  The tables were metal, as were the basins and the hoses coiled above them, and the drawers—flat squares slotted into two of the walls like filing cabinets. Had Hellie been cut up in a place like this? It wasn’t like the cause of death had been a mystery.

  Alex wished she had her coat. Or Dawes’s parka. Or a shot of vodka.

  She needed to work fast. The compulsion would give her about thirty minutes to get her work done and get out. But it didn’t take her long to find Tara, and though the drawer was heavier than she’d expected, it slid out smoothly.

  There was something worse about seeing her like this a second time, as if they knew each other. Looking at Tara now, Alex could see it had only been the blond hair that made her think of Hellie. Hellie had been strong. Her body remembered the soccer and softball she’d played in high school, and she could surf and skateboard like a girl out of Seventeen magazine. This girl was built like Alex, ropy, but weak.

  Tara’s knees looked brownish gray. There was stubble near her bikini area, red razor bumps like a rash. She had a tattoo of a parrot at her hip and below it was written Key West in looping scrawl. Her right arm had an ugly realistic portrait of a young girl on it. A daughter? A niece? Her own face as a child? There was a pirate flag and a ship on cresting waves, a Bettie Page zombie girl in heels and black lingerie. The cameo on Tara’s inner arm looked newer, the ink fresh and dark, though the text was nearly illegible in that tired Gothic font: Rather die than doubt. Song lyrics, but Alex couldn’t remember what they were from.

  She wondered if her own tattoos would reappear if she died or if the art wo
uld live inside the address moths forever.

  Enough stalling. Alex took out her notes. The first part of the ritual was easy, a chant. Sanguis saltido—but you couldn’t just say the words; you had to sing them. It felt utterly obscene to do in that empty, echoing room, but she made herself sing the chant: Sanguis saltido! Salire! Saltare! No tune was specified, only allegro. It was on her second round through that she realized she was singing the words to the tune of the Twizzlers jingle. So chewy. So fruity. So happy and oh so juicy. But if that’s what it took to make the blood dance … She knew it was working when Tara’s lips began to pink.

  Now things were going to get worse. The blood chant was only intended to start Tara’s circulation and loosen rigor so that Alex could get her mouth open. Alex took hold of Tara’s chin, trying to ignore the newly warm, pliant feel of her skin, and wiggled the girl’s jaw open.

  She took the scarab from the plastic bag in her back pocket and placed it gently on Tara’s tongue. Then she took the tin from her other pocket and began to trace waxy patterns over Tara’s body with the balm inside, trying to think about anything but the dead skin beneath her fingertips. Feet, shins, thighs, stomach, breasts, collarbone, down Tara’s arms to her wrists and middle fingers. Finally, starting at the navel, she drew a line bisecting Tara’s torso up to her throat, her chin, and to the crown of her head.

  Alex realized she’d forgotten to bring a lighter. She needed fire. There was a desk next to the door, beneath a messy whiteboard. The big drawers were locked, but the narrow top drawer slid open. A pink plastic lighter lay beside a pack of Marlboros.

  Alex took the lighter and held the flame just above the places she’d applied the balm, retracing her path up Tara’s body. As she did, a faint haze appeared over the skin, like heat rising off blacktop, the air seeming to wave and shimmer. The effect was denser in certain spots, so thick it blurred and vibrated as if seen through the spinning spokes of a wheel.

  Alex put the lighter back in the drawer. She reached out to the blur above Tara’s elbow, ran her hand through the shimmer. In a rush, she was racing down the street on a bicycle. In front of her, a car door flew open in her path. She hit the brakes, failed to stop, struck the door at an angle, clipping her arm. Pain shot through her. Alex hissed and drew back her hand, cradling her arm as if the broken bone had been hers and not Tara’s.

  The haze above Tara was a map of all the harm done to her body—flickers over her tattoos and where her ears had been pierced, dense clumping above her broken arm, a tiny dim spiral over a pockmark left by a BB on her cheek, the murky darkness that hung suspended over the wounds in her chest.

  In Lethe’s books, Alex had found no way to make Tara talk or any way to reach her on the other side of the Veil—at least, nothing that was achievable without the help of one of the societies. Even if Alex could have managed it, many of the rituals she’d found made it clear that speaking to the newly dead usually risked raising them, and that was always a dangerous proposition. No one could be brought back from beyond the Veil permanently, and hauling a reluctant soul back into its body could be wildly unpredictable. Book and Snake specialized in necromancy and had created numerous safeguards for their rituals, but even they sometimes lost control once a Gray found its way to a body. In the late seventies, they’d tried to summon the spirit of Jennie Cramer, the legendary Belle of New Haven, into the body of a teenage girl from Camden, who had frozen to death when she’d passed out drunk in her car during a blizzard. Instead, it was the Camden girl who had returned, shivering with cold and possessed of the ferocious strength of the newly dead.

  She’d broken through the Book and Snake gates and walked to Yorkside Pizza, where she’d eaten two pies and then lain down in one of the ovens in an attempt to get warm. A Lethe delegate had been present and was able to quickly quarantine the area and, through a serious of compulsions, convince the customers the girl was part of a performance-art piece. The owner was Greek and less easily swayed. He had long carried a gouri given to him by his mother—specifically the blue “evil eye” or mati, which stymied any attempts at compulsion. Cash proved far more effective. At the owner’s request, Lethe also stepped in to make sure Yorkside retained its lease when the majority of other businesses were forced out of Yale’s premiere shopping district by rising rents designed to bring in upscale retailers. The local businesses along Elm and Broadway had vanished, making way for prestige brands and chain stores, but Yorkside Pizza remained.

  So since Tara couldn’t talk, her body would have to. Alex had discovered a ritual to reveal harm, something simpler, lighter, used for diagnosis or for when a patient or witness was unable to speak. It had been invented by Girolamo Fracastoro to discover who had poisoned an Italian countess after she’d keeled over, foaming at the mouth, at her own wedding feast.

  Alex didn’t want to put her hand into the haze above the gruesome wounds on Tara’s chest. But that was what she’d come here to do. She took a breath and thrust her fingers forward.

  She was on the ground, a boy’s face above her—Lance. Sometimes she loved him, but lately things had been … The thought left her. She felt herself open her mouth, tasted something acrid on her tongue. Lance was smiling. They were on their way … where? She felt only excitement, anticipation, the world beginning to blur.

  “I’m sorry,” Lance said.

  She was on her back, staring up at the sky. The streetlights seemed far away; everything was moving, and the cathedral beside her melted into a building that blotted out the few stars. It was quiet but she could hear something, like a boot squelching in mud. Thunk squelch, thunk squelch. She saw a body looming above her, saw the knife, understood the sound was her own blood and bone breaking open as the blade sawed away at her. Why didn’t she feel it? What was real and what wasn’t?

  “Close your eyes,” said an unfamiliar voice. She did and was gone.

  Alex stumbled backward, clutching her chest. She could still hear that horrible squelching sound, feel the warm wet spreading over her chest. But no pain? How had there been no pain? Had she been high? High enough not to feel being stabbed? Lance had drugged her first. He’d told her he was sorry. He must have been high too.

  So there was her answer. Tara and Lance had clearly been messing with something other than weed. No doubt by now Turner had been through their apartment, found whatever weird shit they were using and selling. Alex had no way of knowing what Lance had been thinking that night, but if he’d been taking some kind of hallucinogen it could be anything.

  Alex looked down at Tara’s body. She’d been frightened in those last moments, but she hadn’t been hurting. That had to count for something.

  Lance would go to prison. There would be evidence. That amount of blood … Well, you couldn’t hide it. Alex knew.

  The map still glowed above Tara. Little injuries. Big ones. What would Alex’s map show? She’d never broken a bone, had surgery. But the worst damage didn’t leave a mark. When Hellie died, it was as if someone had cut into Alex’s chest, cracked her open like balsa wood. What if it really had been like that and she’d had to walk down the street bleeding, trying to hold her ribs together, her heart and her lungs and every part of her open to the world? Instead, the thing that had broken her had left no mark, no scar for her to point to and say, This is where I ended.

  No doubt that was true for Tara too. There was more pain locked inside her that no glowing map would reveal. But though her wounds were grotesque, there were no organs taken, no blood marks or indications of magical harm. Tara had died because she’d been as stupid as Alex and no one had come to rescue her in time. She hadn’t found Jesus or yoga, and no one had offered her a scholarship to Yale.

  It was time to leave. She had her answers. This should be enough to appease Hellie’s memory and Darlington’s judgment too. But something was still tugging at her, that sense of familiarity she’d felt at the crime scene that had nothing to do with Tara’s blond hair or the sad, parallel tracks of their lives.

&nbs
p; “Should we go?” she asked the coroner standing in the corner in his scrubs, looking vaguely at nothing.

  “Whatever you like,” he said.

  Alex closed the drawer.

  “I think I’d like to sleep for eighteen hours,” Alex said on a sigh. “Walk me out and tell Moira everything went fine.”

  She opened the door and strolled straight into Detective Abel Turner.

  * * *

  He seized her arm and drove her backward into the room, slamming the door behind him. “What the living fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “Hey!” Alex said cheerfully. “You made it.”

  The coroner hovered behind him. “Are we going?” he asked.

  “Stay there a minute,” said Alex. “Turner, you’re gonna want to let go of me.”

  “You don’t tell me what I want. And what the hell is wrong with him?”

  “He’s having a good night,” said Alex, her heart pounding in her chest. Abel Turner did not lose his cool. He was always smiling, always calm. But something in Alex liked him better this way.

  “Did you lay hands on that girl?” he said, fingers digging into her skin. “Her body is evidence and you are tampering with it. That’s a crime.”

  Alex thought about kneeing Turner in the nuts, but that wasn’t what you did with a cop, so she went limp. Completely limp. It was a strategy she’d learned to use with Len.

  “What the hell?” He tried to hold her up as she slumped against him, then released her. “What is wrong with you?” He wiped his hand on his arm as if her weakness were catching.

  “Plenty,” Alex said. She managed to right herself before she actually fell, making sure to stay out of his reach. “What kind of stuff were Tara and Lance getting into?”