Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  Salome gave a frantic nod of her head, the sweaty skin of her throat bobbing against Alex’s arm.

  Alex released her. Salome backed away, hands held out in front of her. Dawes had pressed her fingers to her mouth, and even the Bridegroom looked disturbed. She’d managed to scandalize a murderer.

  “You’re insane,” said Salome, touching her fingertips to her throat. “You can’t just—”

  The snake inside Alex stopped twitching and uncoiled. She curled her hand into the sleeve of her coat and slammed it through the glass case where they kept their little trinkets. Salome and Dawes shrieked. They both took another step back.

  “I know you’re used to dealing with people who can’t just, but I can, so give me the key to the temple room and let’s get square so we can forget all about this.”

  Salome hovered, poised on the tips of her toes, framed by the doorway. She looked so light, so impossibly slender, as if she might simply lose contact with the ground and float up to the ceiling to bob there like a party balloon. Then something shifted in her eyes, all of that Puritan pragmatism seeping back into her bones. She settled on her heels.

  “Whatever,” she muttered, and fished her keys from her pocket, slipping one from the ring and setting it on the table.

  “Thank you.” Alex winked. “Now we can be friends again.”

  “Psycho.”

  “So I hear,” said Alex. But crazy survived. Alex snatched up the key. “After you, Dawes.” Dawes passed through to the hallway, keeping a wide distance between herself and Alex, eyes on the floor. Alex turned back to Salome.

  “I know you’re thinking that as soon as I’m in the temple you’re going to start making calls, try to get me jammed up.” Salome folded her arms. “I think you should do that. Then I’ll come back and use that wolf statue to knock your front teeth in.”

  The Bridegroom shook his head.

  “You can’t just—”

  “Salome,” Alex said, shaking her finger. “Those words again.”

  But Salome clenched her fists. “You can’t just do things like that. You’ll go to jail.”

  “Probably,” said Alex. “But you’ll still look like a brother-fucking hillbilly.”

  * * *

  “What is wrong with you?” Dawes spat as Alex joined her at the nondescript door that led to the temple room, the Bridegroom trailing behind.

  “I’m a bad dancer and I don’t floss. What’s wrong with you?”

  Now that the wave of adrenaline had passed, remorse was setting in. Once a mask was off you couldn’t just slide it back into place. Salome wouldn’t be calling the cavalry, Alex felt pretty sure of that. But she felt equally certain that the girl would talk. Psycho. Crazy bitch. Whether she would be believed was another thing entirely. Salome had said it herself: You can’t just. People here didn’t behave the way that Alex had.

  The more pressing concern was how good Alex felt, like she was breathing easy for the first time in months, free from the suffocating weight of the new Alex she’d tried to construct.

  But Dawes was breathing hard. As if she’d done all the work.

  Alex flipped a light switch and flames flared to life in the gas lanterns along the red and gold walls, illuminating an Egyptian temple built into the heart of the English manor house. An altar was laden with skulls, taxidermied animals, and a leather ledger signed by each of the delegation’s members before the start of a ritual. At the center of the back wall was a sarcophagus topped with glass, a desiccated mummy pilfered from a Nile Valley dig inside. It was all almost too expected. The ceiling was painted to look like a vaulted sky, acanthus leaves and stylized palms at the corners, and a stream cut through the center of the room, fed by a sheet of water that toppled from the edge of the balcony above, the echo overwhelming. The Bridegroom drifted across the stream, as far from the sarcophagus as he could get.

  “I’m leaving,” Salome shouted from down the hall. “I don’t want to be here if something goes wrong.”

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong!” Alex called back. They heard the front door slam. “Dawes, what did she mean if something goes wrong?”

  “Did you read the ritual?” Dawes asked as she walked the perimeter of the room, studying its details.

  “Parts of it.” Enough to know it could put her in touch with the Bridegroom.

  “You have to cross into the borderland between life and death.”

  “Wait … I’m going to have to die?” She really should start doing the reading.

  “Yes.”

  “And come back?”

  “I mean, that’s the idea.”

  “And you’re going to have to kill me?” Timid Dawes who, at the first sign of violence, had curled into a corner like a hedgehog in a sweatshirt? “You okay with that? It’s not going to look good for you if I don’t make it back.”

  Dawes expelled a long breath. “So make it back.”

  The Bridegroom’s face was bleak, but that was sort of his look.

  Alex contemplated the altar. “So the afterlife is Egypt? Of all the religions, the ancient Egyptians got it right?”

  “We don’t really know what the afterlife is like. This is one way into one borderland. There are others. They’re always marked by rivers.”

  “Like Lethe to the Greeks.”

  “Actually, to the Greeks, Styx is the border river. Lethe is the final boundary the dead must cross. The Egyptians believed the sun died on the western banks of the Nile every day, so to journey from its eastern bank to the west is to leave the world of the living behind.”

  And that was the journey Alex would have to make.

  The “river” bisecting the temple was symbolic, hewn of stone mined from the ancient limestone tunnels beneath Tura, hieroglyphs from the Book of Emerging Forth into Night carved into the sides and base of the channel.

  Alex hesitated. Was this the crossroads? Was this the last foolish thing she would do? And who would be there to greet her in the beyond? Hellie. Maybe Darlington. Len and Betcha, their skulls crushed in, that cartoonish look of surprise still stuck on Len’s face. Or maybe they’d be made whole somewhere on that other shore. If she died, would she be able to cross back through the Veil and spend an eternity flitting around campus? Would she end up back home, doomed to haunt some dump in Van Nuys? So make it back. Make it back or leave Dawes holding her dead body and Salome Nils to share the blame. The last thought wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  “All I have to do is drown?”

  “That’s all,” said Dawes without a hint of a smile.

  Alex unbuttoned her coat and drew off her sweater, while Dawes shed her parka, drawing two slender green reeds from her pockets. “Where is he?” she whispered.

  “The Bridegroom? Right behind you.” Dawes flinched. “Kidding. He’s by the altar, doing his brooding thing.” The Bridegroom’s scowl deepened.

  “Have him stand opposite you on the western shore.”

  “He can hear you fine, Dawes.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.” Dawes made an awkward gesture and the Bridegoom drifted to the other side of the stream. It was narrow enough that he crossed it with a single long step. “Now you both kneel.”

  Alex wasn’t sure if the Bridegroom would be so quick to follow instructions, but he did. They knelt. He seemed to want this little talk as much as Alex did.

  She could feel the cold of the floor through her jeans. She realized she was wearing a white T-shirt and it was going to get soaked. You’re about to die, she scolded herself. Maybe now isn’t the time to worry about giving a ghost a look at your boobs.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” said Dawes.

  “Why?”

  Dawes held up the reeds and recited: “Let his wrists be bound with stalks of papyrus.”

  Alex put her hands behind her back. It was like getting arrested. She half-expected Dawes to slide a zip tie around her wrists. Instead, she felt Dawes drop something into her left pocket.

  “It’s a carob pod. When you wa
nt to come back, put it in your mouth and bite down. Ready?”

  “Go slow,” said Alex.

  Alex bent forward. It was awkward with her hands behind her back. Dawes braced her head and neck and helped her fall forward. Alex hovered for a moment above the surface, raised her eyes, met the Bridegroom’s gaze. “Do it,” she said. She took a deep breath and tried not to panic as Dawes shoved her head underwater.

  Silence filled her ears. She opened her eyes but could see nothing but black stone. She waited, breath leaking from her in reluctant bubbles as her chest tightened.

  Her lungs ached. She couldn’t do this, not this way. They’d have to come up with something else.

  She tried to push up, but Dawes’s fingers were claws on the back of Alex’s skull. It was impossible to break her grip in this position. Dawes’s knee pressed into her back. Her fingers felt like spikes digging into Alex’s scalp.

  The pressure in Alex’s chest was unbearable. Panic came at her like a dog slipped free of its leash, and she knew she’d made a very bad mistake. Dawes had been working with Book and Snake. Or Skull and Bones. Or Sandow. Or whoever wanted her gone. Dawes was finishing what the gluma had started. Dawes was punishing her for what had happened to Darlington. She’d known the truth of what had gone down that night at Rosenfeld all along, and this was her revenge on Alex for stealing away her golden boy.

  Alex bucked and thrashed in silence. She had to breathe. Don’t. But her body wouldn’t listen. Her mouth opened on a gasp. Water rushed into her nose, her mouth, filled her lungs. Her mind was screaming in terror, but there was no way out. She thought of her mother, the silver bangles stacked on her forearms like gauntlets. Her grandmother whispered, Somos almicas sin pecado. Her gnarled hands gripped the skin of a pomegranate, spilling the seeds into a bowl. We are little souls without sin.

  Then the pressure on the back of her neck was gone. Alex hurled herself backward, chest heaving. A rush of gritty water spewed from her mouth as her body convulsed. She realized her wrists were free and pushed up to her hands and knees. Deep, rattling coughs shook her body. Her lungs burned as she gulped at the air. Screw Dawes. Screw everyone. She was sobbing, unable to stop. Her arms gave way and she fell to the floor, flopped onto her back, sucking in breath, and wiped a wet sleeve over her face, trailing snot and tears—and blood. She’d bitten her tongue.

  She squinted up at the painted ceiling. There were clouds moving across it, gray against the indigo sky. Stars glinted above her in strange formations. They were not her constellations.

  Alex forced herself to sit up. She touched her hand to her chest, rubbing it gently, still coughing, trying to get her bearings. Dawes was gone. Everything was gone—the walls, the altar, the stone floors. She sat on the banks of a great river that flowed black beneath the stars, the sound of the water a long exhalation. A warm wind moved through the reeds. Death is cold, thought Alex. Shouldn’t it be cold here?

  Far across the water, she could see a man’s shape moving toward her from the opposite shore. The water parted around the Bridegroom’s body. So he had true physical form here. Had she stepped behind the Veil, then? Was she truly dead? Despite the balmy air, Alex felt a chill creep through her as the figure drew closer. He had no reason to harm her; he’d saved her. But he’s a killer, she reminded herself. Maybe he just misses murdering women.

  Alex didn’t want to go back into the water, not when her chest still rattled with the memory of that violent pressure and her throat was raw from coughing. But she had come here with a purpose. She rose, scrubbed the sand from her palms, and waded into the shallows, her boots squelching in the mud. The river rose, warm against her calves, the current pulling gently at her knees, then her thighs, then her waist. She drifted past the spiky bowls of lotus flowers resting gently on the surface, still as a table setting. The water tugged at her hips, the current strong. She could feel the silt shift beneath her feet.

  Something brushed against her in the water and she glimpsed starlight glinting off a shiny, ridged back. She flinched backward as the crocodile passed, a single golden eye rolling toward her as it submerged. To her left, another black tail flicked through the water.

  “They cannot harm you.” The Bridegroom stood only a few yards away. “But you must come to me, Miss Stern.” To the center of the river. Where the dead and the living might meet.

  She didn’t like that he knew her name. His voice was low and pleasant, the accent almost English but broader in the vowels, a little like someone imitating a Kennedy.

  Alex waded in farther, until she stood directly in front of the Bridegroom. He looked just as he had in the living world, silver light clinging to the sharp lines of his elegant face, caught in his dark mussed hair—except here she was close enough to see the creases of the knot in his necktie, the sheen of his coat. The bits of bone and gore that had splattered the white fabric of his shirt were gone. He was clean here, free of blood or wound. A boat slid past, a slim craft topped by a pavilion of billowing silks. Shadows moved behind the fabric, dim shapes that were men one moment and jackals the next. A great cat lay at the edge of the boat, its paw playing with the water. It looked at her with huge diamond eyes, then yawned, revealing a long pink tongue.

  “Where are we?” she asked the Bridegroom.

  “At the center of the river, the place of Ma’at, divine order. In Egypt all gods are the gods of death and life as well. We don’t have much time, Miss Stern. Unless you wish to join us here permanently. The current is strong and inevitably we all succumb.”

  Alex looked over his shoulder to the shore beyond, west to the setting sun, to the dark lands, and the next world.

  Not yet.

  “I need you to look for someone on the other side of the Veil,” she said.

  “The murdered girl.”

  “That’s right. Her name is Tara Hutchins.”

  “No small feat. This is a crowded place.”

  “But I’m betting you’re up to the task. And I’m guessing that you want something in return. That’s why you came to my rescue, isn’t it?”

  The Bridegroom didn’t answer. His face remained very still, as if waiting for an audience to quiet. In the starlight, his eyes looked almost purple. “If I’m to find the girl, I’ll need something personal of hers, a beloved possession. Preferably something that retains her effluvia.”

  “Her what?”

  “Saliva, blood, perspiration.”

  “I’ll get it,” Alex said, though she had no idea how she was going to manage that. No chance was she going to be able to talk her way back into the morgue, and she was all out of coins of compulsion. Besides, Tara might be underground or ashes by now for all she knew.

  “You’ll need to bring it to the borderlands.”

  “I doubt I can come back here. Salome and I aren’t exactly on friendly terms.”

  “I can’t imagine why.” The Bridegroom’s lips pursed slightly, and in that moment, he reminded her so much of Darlington, she felt a tremor pass through her. On the western shore, she could see dark shapes moving, some human, some less so. A murmur rose from them, but she couldn’t tell if there was reason in the noise, if it was language or just sounds.

  “I need to know who murdered Tara,” she said. “A name.”

  “And if she doesn’t know her attacker?”

  “Then find out what she was doing with Tripp Helmuth. He’s in Skull and Bones. And if she knew anyone in Book and Snake. I need to know how she’s connected to the societies.” If she was connected at all, if it wasn’t just coincidence. “Find out why the hell—” A bolt of lightning flashed overhead. Thunder cracked and the river suddenly seemed alive with restless reptilian bodies.

  The Bridegroom raised a brow. “They don’t like that word here.”

  Who? Alex wanted to ask. The dead? The gods? Alex dug her boots into the sand as the current tugged at her knees, urging her west into darkness. She could ponder the mechanics of the afterlife later.

  “Just find out why someone wa
nted Tara dead. She has to know something.”

  “Then let us come to terms,” said the Bridegroom. “You shall have your information, and in return I wish to know who murdered my fiancée.”

  “This is awkward. I was under the impression you did.”

  The Bridegroom’s lips pursed again. He looked so prim, so put out, Alex almost laughed. “I’m aware.”

  “Murder-suicide? Shot her, then yourself?”

  “I did not. Whoever killed her was responsible for my death as well. I don’t know who it was. Just as Tara Hutchins may not know who harmed her.”

  “All right,” Alex said dubiously. “Then why not ask your fiancée what she saw?”

  His eyes slid away. “I can’t find her. I’ve been searching for her on both sides of the Veil for over a hundred and fifty years.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”

  He nodded stiffly. “If a spirit doesn’t wish to be found, there’s an eternity to hide in.”

  “She blames you,” Alex said, fitting the pieces together.

  “Possibly.”

  “And you think she’ll stop blaming you if you find out who really did this?”

  “Hopefully.”

  “Or you could just leave her be.”

  “I was responsible for Daisy’s death, even if I didn’t deal her the blow. I failed to protect her. I owe her justice.”

  “Justice? It’s not like you can seek revenge. Whoever killed you is long since dead.”

  “Then I will find him on this side.”

  “And do what? Kill him real good?”

  The Bridegroom smiled then, the corners of his mouth pulling back to reveal an even, predatory set of teeth. Alex felt a chill settle over her. She remembered the way he’d looked wrestling with the gluma. Like something that wasn’t quite human. Something even the dead should fear.