patent application at the Peabody’s ugly, fluorescent-lit satellite campus—and her first prognostication for Skull and Bones. There’d been a rocky moment when she turned
distinctly green and looked like she might vomit all over the Haruspex. But she’d managed, and he could hardly fault her for wavering. He’d been through twelve
prognostications and they still left him feeling shaken.
“It will be quick, Stern,” he promised her as they set out from Il Bastone on Tuesday
night. “Rosenfeld is causing trouble with the grid.”
“Who’s Rosenfeld?”
“It’s a what. Rosenfeld Hall. You should know the rest.”
She adjusted the strap on her satchel. “I don’t remember.”
“St. Elmo,” he prompted her.
“Right. The electrocuted guy.”
He’d give her the point. St. Erasmus had supposedly survived electrocution and
drowning. He was the namesake for St. Elmo’s fire and for the society that had once been
housed in Rosenfeld Hall’s Elizabethan towers. The red-brick building was used for offices and annex space now and was locked at night, but Darlington had a key.
“Put these on,” he said, handing her rubber gloves and rubber overboots not unlike the
kind once made in his family’s factory.
Alex obliged and followed him into the foyer. “Why couldn’t this wait until
tomorrow?”
“Because the last time Lethe let trouble at Rosenfeld go, we had a campus-wide blackout.” As if chiming in, the lights in the upper stories flickered. The building hummed
softly. “This is all in The Life of Lethe. ”
“Remember how you said we don’t concern ourselves with the non-landed societies?”
Alex asked.
“I do,” said Darlington, though he knew what was coming.
“I took your teachings to heart.”
Darlington sighed and used his key to open another door, this one to a huge storage room packed with battered dorm furniture and discarded mattresses. “This is the old dining hall of St. Elmo.” He shone his flashlight over the soaring Gothic arches and cunning stone details. “When the society was cash poor in the sixties, the university purchased the building from them and promised to keep leasing the crypt rooms to St.
Elmo to use for their rituals. But instead of a proper contract built by Aurelian to secure
the terms, the parties opted for a gentleman’s agreement.”
“Did the gentlemen change their minds?”
“They died, and less gentle men took over. Yale refused to renew the society’s lease and St. Elmo’s ended up in that grubby little house on Lynwood.”
“Home is where the heart is, you snob.”
“Precisely, Stern. And the heart of St. Elmo was here, in their original tomb. They’ve
been broke and all but magicless since they lost this place. Help me move these.”
They shoved two old bed frames out of the way, revealing another locked door. The society had been known for weather magic, artium tempestate, which they had used for everything from manipulating commodities to swaying the outcome of essential field
goals. Since the move to Lynwood they hadn’t managed so much as a swift breeze. All of
the societies’ houses were built at nexuses of magical power. No one was sure what created them, but it was why new tombs couldn’t simply be built. There were places in this world that magic avoided, like the bleak lunar planes of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and places it was drawn to, like Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and
the French Quarter in New Orleans. New Haven had an extremely high concentration of
sites where magic seemed to catch and build, like cotton candy on a spool.
The staircase they were descending wound down through three subterranean floors, the
hum growing louder with every downward step. There was little left to actually see in the
lower levels: the dusty stuffed bodies of retired New Haven zoo animals—acquired on a
lark by J. P. Morgan in his wilder days; old electrical conductors with pointed metal spires, straight out of a classic monster movie; empty vats and cracked glass tanks.
“Aquariums?” asked Alex.
“Teapots for tempests.” This was where the students of St. Elmo had brewed weather.