ever heard of Lethe, when he’d only hoped there might be more to this world than he’d been led to believe. His efforts had landed him in the ER and he’d hemorrhaged blood from his ears and eyes for two days.
“She managed to brew an elixir?” he said, both thrilled and—he could admit it—a little
jealous.
Silence followed, long enough for Darlington to switch off the light on his
grandfather’s desk and walk out to the back porch of Black Elm. From here he could see
the gentle slope of houses leading down Edgewood to campus and, far beyond, the Long
Island Sound. All of the land down to Central Avenue had once been a part of Black Elm
but had been sold off in bits and pieces as the Arlington fortune dwindled. The house, its
rose gardens, and the ruined mess of the maze at the edge of the wood were all that remained—and only he remained to tend and prune and coddle it back to life. Dusk was
falling now, a long, slow summer twilight, thick with mosquitoes and the glint of fireflies.
He could see the question mark of Cosmo’s white tail as the cat wended his way through
the high grass, stalking some small creature.
“No elixir,” said Sandow. “She can just see them.”
“Ah,” said Darlington, watching a thrush peck half-heartedly at the broken base of what had once been the obelisk fountain. There was nothing else to say. Though Lethe had
been created to monitor the activities of Yale’s secret societies, its secondary mission was
to unravel the mysteries of what lay beyond the Veil. For years they had documented stories of people who could actually see phantoms, some confirmed, some little more than
rumor. So if the board had found a girl who could do these things and they could make her
beholden to them … Well, that was that. He should be glad to meet her.
He wanted to get drunk.
“I’m not any happier about this than you are,” said Sandow. “But you know the
position we’re in. This is an important year for Lethe. We need everyone happy.” Lethe
was responsible for keeping watch over the Houses of the Veil, but it also relied on them for funding. This was a re-up year and the societies had gone so long without an incident,
there were rumblings that perhaps they shouldn’t dip into their coffers to continue supporting Lethe at all. “I’ll send you her files. She’s not … She’s not the Dante we might
have hoped for, but try to keep an open mind.”
“Of course,” said Darlington, because that was what a gentleman did. “Of course I will.”
He’d tried to mean it. Even after he read her file, even after he’d watched the interview
between her and Sandow recorded at a hospital in Van Nuys, California, heard the husky,
broken woodwind sound of her voice, he’d tried. She’d been found naked and comatose at
a crime scene, next to a girl who hadn’t been lucky enough to survive the fentanyl they’d
both taken. The details of it were all more sordid and sad than he could have fathomed, and he’d tried to feel sorry for her. His Dante, the girl he would gift with the keys to a secret world, was a criminal, a drug user, a dropout who cared about none of the things he
did. But he’d tried.
And still nothing had prepared him for the shock of her presence in that shabby Vanderbilt common room. The room was small but high-ceilinged, with three tall
windows that looked out onto the horseshoe-shaped courtyard and two narrow doors
leading to the bedrooms. The space eddied with the easy chaos of a freshman year move-
in: boxes on the floor, no proper furniture to be seen but a wobbly lamp and a battered recliner pushed up against the long-since-functional fireplace. A muscular blonde in running shorts—Lauren, he guessed (likely pre-med, solid test scores, field-hockey
captain at her Philadelphia prep school)—was setting up a faux-vintage turntable on the ledge of the window seat, a plastic crate of records balanced beside it. The recliner was probably hers too, carted along in a moving truck from Bucks County to New Haven.