—lay still beside him, the roses fading from her cheeks, her wicked, lively eyes gone cold.
22
Winter
Alex staggered backward, nearly knocking the tray from the table where Dawes had
placed it. She clutched her chest, expecting to find an open wound there. Her mouth was
full of food and she realized that she’d been standing in front of the tray, shoveling macaroni into her mouth, as she relived North’s death. She could still sense him inside her,
oblivious, lost to the sensations of eating for the first time in more than a hundred years.
With all of her will, she shoved him from her, resealing the breach that had allowed him
inside.
She spat out the macaroni, gasped for air, lurched to the edge of the crucible. The only
face looking back at her from the surface of the water was her own. She slapped her hand
against it, watching the ripples spread.
“You killed her,” she whispered. “I saw you kill her. I felt it.”
But even as she said it, she knew she hadn’t been North in that moment. There had been someone else inside him.
Alex stumbled down the hall to the Dante bedroom and pulled on a pair of Lethe House
sweats. It felt like days had passed but it had only been hours. There was a lingering soreness where her ribs had been broken, the only sign of the beating she’d endured. And
yet she was so tired. Each day had started to feel like a year, and she wasn’t sure if it was the physical trauma or the heavy exposure to the uncanny that was wearing her down.
Afternoon light streamed through the stained-glass windows, leaving bright patterns of
blue and yellow on the polished slats of the floor. Maybe she would sleep here tonight, even if it did mean she had to go to class in sweats. She was literally running out of clothes. These attempts on her life were playing havoc with her wardrobe.
The bathroom off the big bedroom had two standing pedestal sinks and a deep claw-footed tub that she’d never used. Had Darlington? She had trouble imagining him sinking
into a bubble bath to relax.
She cupped her hand beneath the sink to drink, then spat into the basin. Alex flinched
back—the water was pink and speckled with something. She stoppered the drain before it
could vanish.
She was looking at North’s blood. She felt sure of it. Blood he had himself swallowed nearly a hundred years ago when he died.
And parsley.
Little bits of it.
She remembered Michael Reyes lying unconscious on an operating table, the
Bonesmen gathered around him. Dove’s heart for clarity, geranium root, a dish of bitter herbs. The diet of the victima before a prognostication.
There had been someone inside North that day at the factory—someone who had been
used by Bones for a prognostication, long before there was a Lethe House around to keep
watch. They cut me open. They wanted to see my soul. They’d let him die. She felt sure of it. Some nameless vagrant who would never be missed. NMDH. No more dead hobos.
She’d seen the inscription in Lethe: A Legacy. A little joke among the old boys of the Ninth House. Alex hadn’t quite believed it somehow, even after she’d seen Michael Reyes
cut open on a table. She should check on him, make sure he was okay.
Alex let the sink drain. She rinsed her mouth again, wrapped her wet hair in a fresh towel, and sat down at the little antique desk by the window.
Bones had been founded in 1832. They hadn’t built their tomb until twenty-five years
later, but that didn’t mean they weren’t trying their hand at rituals before that. No one had been keeping an eye on the societies back then, and she remembered what Darlington had
said about stray magic breaking loose from the rituals. What if something had gone wrong
with that early prognostication? What if a Gray had disrupted the rite, sent the victima’s spirit flying wild? What if it had found its way into North? He hadn’t even seemed to recognize that he was holding a gun— a shadow in my hand.
The terrified victima inside North, North inside Alex. They were like a nesting doll of the uncanny. Had the spirit somehow chosen North’s body to escape to, or had he and Daisy simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, two innocent people mowed down by power they couldn’t begin to understand? Was that what Darlington had been investigating? That stray magic had caused the North-Whitlock murder?