Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  “You did break in.”

  “He wasn’t there for me. He came back to the apartment for something else.”

  “Yeah, let’s talk about that. I explicitly told you not to go anywhere near—”

  “Do you want answers or do you want to keep being an asshole? Lance Gressang didn’t kill Tara. You have the wrong guy.”

  Turner said nothing and Alex laughed softly. The effect was not worth the effort. “I get it. Either you’re crazy and seeing shit or I’m crazy, and wouldn’t it be nicer if I was the crazy one. I have bad news for you, Turner. Neither of us is nuts. Someone wanted you to believe Lance is guilty.”

  “But you don’t think he is.” There was a long silence. Alex heard the tick tock tick tock of the turn signal in time with her heartbeat. At last, Turner said, “I checked into the whereabouts of the society members you mentioned.”

  So he’d followed up. He was too good a detective to turn down a lead. Even if it came from Lethe. “And?”

  “We already knew it was impossible to confirm Tripp Helmuth’s whereabouts, because no one had eyes on him the whole night. Kate Masters claims she was at Manuscript until just after three in the morning.”

  Alex grunted as the Charger hit a bump. It hurt to talk, but it also helped keep her distracted. “Her whole delegation should have been there,” she managed. “It was a Thursday night. A meeting night.”

  “My impression is they were partying late. It’s a big building. She easily could have come and gone with no one the wiser.”

  And Manuscript was only a few blocks from the crime scene. Could Kate have snuck out, glamoured as Lance, to meet Tara? Had it been some kind of game? A high gone wrong? Had Kate intended to hurt Tara? Or was all of this just in Alex’s head?

  “What do you know about the kid from Scroll and Key, Colin Khatri?” Turner asked.

  “I like him,” Alex was surprised to hear herself say. “He’s nice and he dresses sharp like you but more European.”

  “That’s great intel.”

  Alex searched her memory. The basso belladonna made it easy to remember the elaborate interior of the Scroll and Key tomb, the patterns of the tiles on the floor. The night of the botched attempt to open a portal to Budapest, Colin had given her an excited little wave when he’d seen her, as if they were rushing the same sorority. “Darlington said Colin was one of the best and brightest, doing graduate-level chem work as an undergrad. Headed someplace prestigious next year. Stanford, I think.”

  “He never showed at Scroll and Key last Thursday. He was at a party at a professor’s house. Bell-something. A French name.”

  She wanted to laugh. “Not a party. A salon.” Colin had been at Belbalm’s salon. Alex was supposed to attend the next one … tomorrow? No, tonight. Her magical summer working in the professor’s quiet office and watering her plants had never seemed more far away. But had Colin actually been at the salon? Maybe he’d slipped away. Alex hoped that wasn’t the case. Belbalm’s world of peppery perfume and gentle conversation felt like a refuge, the reward she probably didn’t deserve but would happily accept. She wanted to keep it separate from all of this mess.

  Alex felt her awareness drifting, that first bright burst of the basso belladonna letting go. She heard a beep that sounded too loud, then Turner talking over the radio, explaining the damage at Lance and Tara’s apartment. Someone looking for drugs. He had pursued on foot but lost the perp. He gave a vague description of a suspect who might have been male or female in a parka that might have been black or dark blue.

  Alex was surprised to hear him lying, but she knew he wasn’t covering for her. He didn’t know how to explain Lance or what he’d seen.

  At last, Turner said, “We’re coming up on the green.”

  Alex forced herself to sit up so she could direct him. The world felt red, as if even the air touching her body was out to get her.

  “Alley,” she said, as the dark brick and stained glass of Il Bastone came into view. There were lights on in the parlor window. Be home, Dawes. “Park in back.”

  Alex shut her eyes and released a sigh when the engine stopped. She heard Turner’s door slam and then he was helping her climb out of the car.

  “Keys,” he said.

  “No keys.”

  She had a worried moment when Turner fumbled with the doorknob, wondering if the house would let him in. But either her presence was enough or it recognized Centurion. The door swung open.

  Il Bastone made a worried rattle as she entered, the chandeliers tinkling. To anyone else it probably would have felt like a truck rolling by, but Alex could feel the house’s concern and it put a lump in her throat. Maybe it just disapproved of so much blood and trauma crossing its threshold, but Alex wanted to believe that the house did not like the suffering of one of its own.

  Dawes was lying on the parlor carpet in her lumpy sweatshirt, headphones on.

  “Hey,” said Turner, and repeated, “Hey!” when she didn’t answer.

  Dawes jumped. It was like watching a big beige rabbit come to life. She startled and cringed backward at the sight of Turner and Alex in the parlor.

  “Is she a racist or just twitchy?” asked Turner.

  “I’m not a racist!” said Dawes.

  “We’re all racists, Dawes,” said Alex. “How did you even make it through undergrad?”

  Dawes’s mouth went slack as Turner dragged Alex into the light. “Oh my God. Oh my God. What happened?”

  “Long story,” said Alex. “Can you fix me?”

  “We should go to the hospital,” said Dawes. “I’ve never—”

  “No,” said Alex. “I’m not leaving the wards.”

  “What got you?”

  “A very big dude.”

  “Then—”

  “Who can walk through walls.”

  “Oh.” She pressed her lips together and then said, “Detective Turner, I … could you—”

  “What do you need?”

  “Goat’s milk. I think Elm City Market stocks it.”

  “How much?”

  “As much as they have. The crucible will do the rest. Alex, can you get up the stairs?”

  Alex glanced at the staircase. She wasn’t sure she could.

  Turner hesitated. “I can—”

  “No,” said Alex. “Dawes and I will manage.”

  “Fine,” he said, already heading toward the back door. “You’re lucky this dump of a town is gentrifying. Like to see me walk into the Family Dollar looking for goat’s milk.”

  * * *

  “You should have let him carry you,” Dawes grunted as they made their slow way up the stairs.

  Alex’s body was fighting every step. “Right now he feels guilty for not listening to me. I can’t let him make up for it just yet.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the worse he feels, the more he’ll do for us. Trust me. Turner doesn’t like to be in the wrong.” Another step. Another. Why didn’t this place have an elevator? A magical one full of morphine. “Tell me about Scroll and Key. I thought their magic was waning. The night Darlington and I observed, they couldn’t even open a portal to Eastern Europe.”

  “They’ve had a few bad years, trouble getting the best taps. There’s been some speculation in Lethe that portal magic is so disruptive it’s been eroding the power nexus their tomb is built on.”

  But maybe the Locksmiths had been pretending, running a little con, trying to look weaker than they actually were. Why? So that they could perform rituals in secret without Lethe interference? Or was there something shady about the rituals themselves? But how would that connect Colin Khatri to Tara? All Tripp had said was that Tara had mentioned Colin once in passing. There had to be more to it. That tattoo couldn’t just be coincidence.

  Dawes led Alex to the armory and propped her up against Hiram’s Crucible. It felt like it was vibrating gently, the metal cool against Alex’s skin. She had never used the Golden Bowl, just watched Darlington mix his elixir in it. He had treated
it with reverence and resentment. Like any junkie with a drug.

  “The hospital would be safer,” Dawes said, rummaging through the drawers in the vast cabinet, opening and closing one after another.

  “Come on, Dawes,” Alex said. “You gave me that spider-egg stuff before.”

  “That’s different. It was a specific magical cure for a specific magical ailment.”

  “You didn’t hesitate to drown me. How hard can it be to fix me up?”

  “I did hesitate. And none of the societies specialize in healing magic.”

  “Why?” Alex said. Maybe if she kept talking, her body couldn’t give up. “Seems like there’d be money in it.”

  Dawes’s disapproving frown—that “learning should be for the sake of learning” look—reminded her painfully of Darlington. Actually, everything she did in this moment was painful.

  “Healing magic is messy,” said Dawes. “It’s the most commonly practiced by laypeople, and that means power gets distributed more broadly instead of being drawn to nexuses. There are also strong prohibitions against tampering with immortality. And it isn’t like I know exactly what’s wrong with you. I can’t x-ray you and just cast a spell to mend a broken rib. You could have internal bleeding or I don’t know what.”

  “You’ll think of something.”

  “We’re going to try reversion,” said Dawes. “I can take you back … will an hour do it? Two hours? I hope we have enough milk.”

  “Are you … are you talking about time travel?”

  Dawes paused with a hand on a drawer. “Are you serious?”

  “Nope,” said Alex hurriedly.

  “I’m just helping your body revert to an earlier version of itself. It’s an undoing. Much easier than trying to make new flesh or bone. It’s actually a kind of portal magic, so you can thank Scroll and Key for it.”

  “I’ll send them a note. How far back can you go?”

  “Not far. Not without stronger magic and more people to work it.”

  An undoing. Take me back. Make me into someone who has never been done harm. Go as far as you can. Make me brand-new. No bruises. No scars. She thought of the moths in their boxes. She missed her tattoos, her old clothes. She missed sitting in the sun with Hellie. She missed the gentle, dilapidated curves of her mother’s couch. Alex didn’t really know what she missed, only that she was homesick for something, maybe for someone, she’d never been.

  She ran her hand along the edge of the crucible. Could this thing burn me new? Make it so I’d never have to see another ghost or Gray or whatever they decided to call it? And would she even wish for that now?

  Alex remembered Belbalm asking what she wanted. Safety. A chance at a normal life. That was what had come to mind in that moment—the quiet of Belbalm’s office, the herbs blooming in the window boxes, a matched set of teacups instead of the chipped mugs of jobs lost and promotional giveaways. She wanted sunlight through the window. She wanted peace.

  Liar.

  Peace was like any high. It couldn’t last. It was an illusion, something that could be interrupted in a moment and lost forever. Only two things kept you safe: money and power.

  Alex didn’t have money. But she did have power. She’d been afraid of it, afraid of staring directly at that blood-soaked night. Afraid she’d feel regret or shame, of saying goodbye to Hellie all over again. But when she’d finally looked? Let herself remember? Well, maybe there was something broken and shriveled in her, because she felt only a deep calm in knowing what she was capable of.

  The Grays had plagued her life, changed it horribly, but after all of those years of torment, they’d finally given something back to her. She was owed. And she’d liked using that power, even the alien feeling of North inside her. She had enjoyed the surprise on Lance’s face, on Len’s face, on Betcha’s. You thought you saw me. See me now.

  “You have to take your clothes off,” said Dawes.

  Alex unbuttoned her jeans, trying to hook her fingers into the waist. Her movements were slow, hampered by pain. “I need your help.”

  Reluctantly, Dawes stepped away from the shelves and helped shove the jeans over Alex’s hips. But once they were around her ankles, Dawes realized she needed to take off Alex’s boots, so Alex stood there in her underwear while Dawes untied her boots and yanked them off.

  She stood, eyes jumping from Alex’s bruised face to the tattooed snakes at her hips, which had once matched those at her clavicles. She’d gotten them after Hellie told her there was a rattler inside her. She liked the idea. Len had wanted to try tattooing her in their kitchen. He’d gotten his own gun and inks online, insisted it was all sterile. But Alex hadn’t trusted him or their filthy apartment and she hadn’t wanted him to leave a mark on her, not that way.

  “Can you lift your arms over your head,” Dawes said, cheeks red.

  “Uh-uh,” Alex grunted. Even forming words was getting difficult.

  “I’ll get shears.”

  A moment later, she heard the snip of scissors, felt her shirt pulled away from her skin, the fabric sticking to the drying blood.

  “It’s okay,” said Dawes. “You’ll feel better as soon as you’re in the crucible.”

  Alex realized she was crying. She’d been choked, drowned, beaten, choked again, and nearly killed, but now she was crying—over a shirt. She’d bought it new at Target before she’d come to school. It was soft and fit well. She hadn’t owned many new things.

  Alex’s head felt heavy. If she could just close her eyes for a minute. For a day.

  She heard Dawes say, “I’m sorry. I can’t get you in. Turner will have to help.”

  Was he back from the market? She hadn’t heard him return. She must have blacked out.

  Something soft moved over Alex’s skin and she realized Dawes had wrapped her in a sheet—pale blue, from Dante’s room. My room. Bless Dawes.

  “Is she in some kind of shroud?” Turner’s voice.

  Alex forced herself to open her eyes, saw Turner and Dawes emptying cartons of milk into the crucible. Turner’s head moved back and forth like a searchlight, a slow scan, taking in the strangeness of the upper floors. Alex felt proud of Il Bastone, the armory with its cabinet of curiosities, the bizarre golden bathtub at its center.

  She meant to be brave, to grit her teeth through the pain, but she screamed when Turner lifted her. A moment later, she was sinking beneath the cool surface, the sheet unwrapping, blood staining the goat’s milk in veins of pink. It looked like a strawberry sundae cup, the kind with the wooden spoon.

  “Don’t touch the milk!” Dawes was shouting.

  “I’m trying to keep her from drowning!” Turner barked back. He had his hands cradled around her head.

  “I’m all right,” said Alex. “Let me go.”

  “You’re both nuts,” said Turner, but she felt his grip ease.

  Alex let herself sink beneath the surface. The cool of the milk seemed to seep straight through her skin, coating the pain. She held her breath as long as she could. She wanted to stay below, feel the milk cocoon around her. But eventually she let her toes find the bottom of the crucible and pushed back to the surface.

  When she emerged, Dawes and Turner were both shouting at her. She must have stayed beneath the surface a little too long.

  “I’m not drowning,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  And she was. There was still pain but it had receded, her thoughts felt sharper—and the milk was changing too, becoming clearer and more watery.

  Turner looked like he might be sick, and Alex thought she understood why. Magic created a kind of vertigo. Maybe the sight of a girl on the brink of death descending into a bathtub and then emerging whole and healthy seconds later was just one spin too many on this ride.

  “I need to get to the station,” he said. “I—”

  He turned and strode out the door.

  “I don’t think he likes us, Dawes.”

  “It’s okay,” Dawes said, picking up the heap of Alex’s bloodied clothes
. “We had too many friends already.”

  * * *

  Dawes left to make Alex something to eat, claiming she’d be famished once the reversion was complete. “Do not drown while I’m gone,” she said, and left the door to the armory open behind her.

  Alex lay back in the crucible, feeling her body change, the pain leaching out of her, and something—the milk or whatever it had become in Dawes’s enchantment—filling her up. She heard music coming from the tinny sound system, the sound so staticky it was hard to pick out a tune.

  She dunked her head beneath the surface again. It was quiet here, and when she opened her eyes it was like looking through mist, watching the last traces of milk and magic fade. A pale shape loomed before her, came into focus. A face.

  Alex sucked in a breath, choking down water. She burst through the surface, coughing and sputtering, arms crossed over her breasts. The Bridegroom’s reflection stared up at her from the water.

  “You can’t be here,” she said. “The wards—”

  “I told you,” his reflection said, “wherever water pools or gathers, we can speak now. Water is the element of translation. It is the mediary.”

  “So you’re going to be showering with me?”

  North’s cold face didn’t change. She could see the dark shore behind him in the reflection. It looked different than it had the first time, and she remembered what Dawes had said about the different borderlands. She must not be looking into Egypt this time—or whatever version of Egypt she had traveled to when she’d crossed the Nile. But Alex could see the same dark shapes on the shore, human and inhuman. She was glad they couldn’t reach her here.

  “What did you do to me at Tara’s apartment?” North said. He sounded haughtier than ever, his accent more clipped.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” said Alex, because it felt truer than most things. “There wasn’t really time to ask for permission.”