Fuck you, Darlington. She yanked her gloves back on.
For a moment she stood paralyzed. She should get back to Lethe House and write up
her report for Dean Sandow to review, but what she really wanted was to flop down on the
narrow bottom bunk of the room she shared with Mercy and cram in all the sleep she could before class. At this hour, she wouldn’t have to make any excuses to curious roommates. But if she slept at Lethe, Mercy and Lauren would be clamoring to know where and with whom she’d spent the night.
Darlington had suggested making up a boyfriend to justify her long absences and late
nights.
“If I do that, at some point I’ll have to produce a boy-shaped human to gaze at me adoringly,” Alex had replied in frustration. “How have you gotten away with this for the
last three years?”
Darlington had just shrugged. “My roommates figured I was a player.” If Alex’s eyes
had rolled back in her head any farther, she would have been facing the opposite direction.
“All right, all right. I told them I was in a band with some UConn guys and that we played out a lot.”
“Do you even play an instrument?”
“Of course.”
Cello, upright bass, guitar, piano, and something called an oud.
Hopefully, Mercy would be fast asleep when Alex got back to the room and she could
slip inside to retrieve her basket of shower things and head down the hall without notice. It
would be tricky. Anytime you tampered with the Veil between this world and the next, it left a stink that was something like the electrical crackle of ozone after a storm coupled with the rot of a pumpkin left too long on a windowsill. The first time she’d made the mistake of returning to the suite without showering, she’d actually had to lie about slipping in a pile of garbage to explain it. Mercy and Lauren had laughed about it for weeks.
Alex thought of the grimy shower waiting at her dorm … and then of sinking into the
vast old claw-foot tub in Il Bastone’s spotless bathroom, the four-poster bed so high she
had to hoist herself onto it. Supposedly Lethe had safe houses and hidey-holes all over the
Yale campus, but the two Alex had been introduced to were the Hutch and Il Bastone. The
Hutch was closer to Alex’s dorm and most of her classes, but it was just a shabby, comfortable set of rooms above a clothing store, always stocked with bags of chips and Darlington’s protein bars, a place to stop in and take a quick nap on the badly sprung couch. Il Bastone was something special: a three-story mansion nearly a mile from the heart of campus that served as Lethe’s main headquarters. Oculus would be waiting there
tonight, the lamps lit, with a tray of tea, brandy, and sandwiches. It was tradition, even if Alex didn’t show up to enjoy them. But the price of all that luxury would be dealing with
Oculus, and she just couldn’t handle Dawes’s clenched-jaw silences tonight. Better to return to the dorms with the stink of the night’s work on her.
Alex crossed the street and cut back through the rotunda. It was hard not to keep looking behind her, thinking of the Grays standing at the edge of the circle with their mouths stretched too wide, black pits humming that low insect sound. What would have
happened if that railing had broken, if the chalk circle hadn’t held? What had provoked them? Would she have had the strength or the knowledge to hold them off? Pasa punto,
pasa mundo.
Alex pulled her coat tighter, tucking her face into her scarf, her breath humid against the wool, hurrying back past Beinecke Library.
“If you get locked in there during a fire, all of the oxygen gets sucked out,” Lauren had
claimed. “To protect the books.”
Alex knew that was bullshit. Darlington had told her so. He’d known the truth of the
building, all of its faces, that it had been built to the Platonic ideal (the building was a temple), employing the same ratios used by some typesetters for their pages (the building
was a book), that its marble had been quarried in Vermont (the building was a monument).
The entrance had been created so that only one person was permitted to enter at a time, passing through the rotating door like a supplicant. She remembered Darlington pulling on