“Okay,” Alex said, because she had no idea what else to say.
“Okay,” Dawes replied awkwardly. She’d delivered her big line and now she was ready
to get offstage.
Alex hung up and stood in the bleak, windswept silence of the empty plaza. She’d forgotten at least half of what Darlington had tried to teach her before he’d vanished, but
he definitely hadn’t covered murder.
She didn’t know why. If you were going to hell together, murder seemed like a good place to start.
2
Last Fall
Daniel Arlington prided himself on being prepared for anything, but if he’d had to choose
a way to describe Alex Stern, it would have been “an unwelcome surprise.” He could think of a lot of other terms for her, but none of them were polite, and Darlington always
endeavored to be polite. If he’d been brought up by his parents—his dilettante father, his
glib but brilliant mother—he might have had different priorities, but he’d been raised by
his grandfather, Daniel Tabor Arlington III, who believed that most problems could be solved with cask-strength scotch, plenty of ice, and impeccable manners.
His grandfather had never met Galaxy Stern.
Darlington sought out Alex’s first-floor Vanderbilt dorm room on a sweating, miserable
day in the first week of September. He could have waited for her to report to the house on
Orange, but when he was a freshman, his own mentor, the inimitable Michelle
Alameddine, who had served as his Virgil, had welcomed him to Yale and the mysteries of
Lethe House by coming to meet him at the Old Campus freshman dorms. Darlington was
determined to do things right, even if everything about the Stern situation had started out
wrong.
He hadn’t chosen Galaxy Stern as his Dante. In fact, she had, by sheer virtue of her existence, robbed him of something he’d been looking forward to for the entirety of his three-year tenure with Lethe: the moment when he would gift someone new with the job
he loved, when he’d crack the ordinary world open for some worthy but barely suspecting
soul. Only a few months before, he’d unloaded the boxes full of incoming freshman applications and stacked them in the great room at Black Elm, giddy with excitement, determined to read or at least skim through all eighteen hundred-plus files before he made
his recommendations to the Lethe House alumni. He would be fair, open-minded, and thorough, and in the end he would choose twenty candidates for the role of Dante. Then
Lethe would vet their backgrounds, check for health risks, signs of mental illness, and financial vulnerabilities, and a final decision would be made.
Darlington had created a plan for how many applications he’d have to tackle each day
that would still free his mornings for work on the estate and his afternoons for his job at
the Peabody Museum. He’d been ahead of schedule that day in July—on application
number 324: Mackenzie Hoffer, 800 verbal, 720 math; nine APs her junior year; blog on
the Bayeux Tapestry maintained in both English and French. She’d seemed promising
until he’d gotten to her personal essay, in which she’d compared herself to Emily Dickinson. Darlington had just tossed her folder onto the no pile when Dean Sandow called to tell him their search was over. They’d found their candidate. The alumni were unanimous.
Darlington had wanted to protest. Hell, he’d wanted to break something. Instead, he’d
straightened the stack of folders before him and said, “Who is it? I have all of the files right here.”
“You don’t have her file. She never applied. She didn’t even finish high school.” Before
Darlington could sputter his indignation, Sandow added, “Daniel, she can see Grays.”
Darlington had paused, his hand still atop Mackenzie Hoffer (two summers with
Habitat for Humanity). It wasn’t just the sound of his given name, something Sandow rarely used. She can see Grays. The only way for one of the living to see the dead was by ingesting the Orozcerio, an elixir of infinite complexity that required perfect skill and attention to detail to create. He’d attempted it himself when he was seventeen, before he’d