the white gloves worn to handle rare manuscripts, his long fingers resting reverently on the page. It was the same way Len handled cash.
There was a room in Beinecke, hidden on … she couldn’t remember which floor. And
even if she could have she wouldn’t have gone. She didn’t have the balls to descend into
the patio, touch her fingers to the window in the secret pattern, enter in the dark. This place had been dear to Darlington. There was no place more magical. There was no place
on campus she felt more like a fraud.
Alex reached for her phone to check the time, hoping it wasn’t much past three. If she could get washed up and into bed by four, she’d still be able to get three and a half solid
hours before she had to be up and across campus again for Spanish. This was the math she
ran every night, every moment. How much time to try to get the work done? How much
time to rest? She could never quite make the numbers work. She was just scraping by, stretching the budget, always coming up a little short, and the panic clung to her, dogging
her steps.
Alex looked at the glowing screen and swore. It was flooded with messages. She’d put
the phone on silent for the prognostication and forgotten to switch it back on.
The texts were all from the same person: Oculus, Pamela Dawes, the grad student who
maintained the Lethe residences and served as their research assistant. Pammie, though only Darlington called her that.
Call in.
Call in.
Call in.
The texts were all timed exactly fifteen minutes apart. Either Dawes was following some kind of protocol or she was even more uptight than Alex had thought.
Alex considered just ignoring the messages. But it was a Thursday night, the night the
societies met, and that meant that some little shit had gotten up to something bad. For all
she knew, the shapeshifting idiots at Wolf’s Head had turned themselves into a herd of buffalo and trampled a bunch of students coming out of Branford.
She stepped behind one of the columns supporting the Beinecke cube to shelter from the wind and dialed.
Dawes picked up on the first ring. “Oculus speaking.”
“Dante replies,” Alex said, feeling like a jackass. She was Dante. Darlington was Virgil. That was the way Lethe was supposed to work until Alex made it to her senior year
and took on the title of Virgil to mentor an incoming freshman. She’d nodded and matched
Darlington’s small smile when he’d told her their code names—he’d referred to them as
“offices”—pretending she got the joke. Later, she’d looked them up and discovered that Virgil had been Dante’s guide as he descended into hell. More Lethe House humor wasted
on her.
“There’s a body at Payne Whitney,” said Dawes. “Centurion is on site.”
“A body,” Alex repeated, wondering if fatigue had damaged her ability to understand basic human speech.
“Yes.”
“Like a dead body?”
“Ye-es.” Dawes was clearly trying to sound calm, but her breath caught, turning the single syllable into a musical hiccup.
Alex pressed her back against the column, the cold of the stone seeping through her coat, and felt a stab of angry adrenaline spike through her.
Are you messing with me? That was what she wanted to ask. That was what this felt like. Being fucked with. Being the weird kid who talked to herself, who was so desperate
for friends she agreed when Sarah McKinney pleaded, “Can you meet me at Tres
Muchachos after school? I want to see if you can talk to my grandma. We used to go there
a lot and I miss her so much.” The kid who stood outside the shittiest Mexican restaurant
in the shittiest food court in the Valley by herself until she had to call her mom to ask her to pick her up because no one was coming. Of course no one was coming.
This is real, she reminded herself. And Pamela Dawes was a lot of things but she wasn’t a Sarah McKinney-style asshole.
Which meant someone was dead.
And she was supposed to do something about it?
“Uh, was it an accident?”
“Possible homicide.” Dawes sounded like she’d been waiting for just this question.