auspicious date or an auspicious place. The new moon represents the moment before something hidden is revealed.”
“Sandow wanted you to keep it quiet?” asked Turner. Alex nodded, feeling guilty. She
hadn’t exactly wanted to trumpet the news either. “What about Darlington’s family?”
“Darlington is our responsibility,” said Dawes sharply, protective to the last. “We’ll get
him back.”
Maybe.
Turner leaned forward. “So what you’re saying is that Scroll and Key may be involved
in a murder and a kidnapping?”
Alex shrugged. “Sure. Let’s call it that. But we can’t rule out Manuscript. Maybe Kate
Masters found out Tara sold the Merity to Blake Keely and that he was using it on girls, or
maybe something went wrong with their deal. If Lance didn’t kill Tara, someone was glamoured to look like him. Manuscript has plenty of tricks and gimmicks that would let
Kate spend a few hours wearing his face. And none of this explains the gluma that was sent after me.” Alex reached into her pocket and felt the reassuring tick of the watch.
Turner looked like he might do murder himself. “The what now?”
“The thing that chased me down Elm. Don’t fucking look at me like that. It happened.”
“Fine, it happened,” said Turner.
“Glumae are servants of the dead,” said Dawes. “They’re errand boys.”
Alex scowled. “That was a highly homicidal errand boy.”
“You give them a simple task, they accomplish it. Book and Snake uses them as
messengers to and from the other side of the Veil. They’re too violent and unpredictable to
really be good for much else.”
Except for making a girl look crazy and maybe shutting her up permanently.
“So Book and Snake is on the board,” said Turner. “Motive unknown. You realize none
of this is evidence, right? We can draw no credible connections to these societies beyond
what Tripp told you. I don’t even have enough to get a warrant to look inside those forestry greenhouses.”
“I’m guessing Centurion can pull all kinds of strings with his superiors.” A shadow crossed Turner’s face. “Except you don’t want to pull strings.”
“That isn’t the way things should work. And I can’t just go to my captain. He doesn’t
know about Lethe. I’d have to go all the way up the chain to the chief.” And Turner wasn’t
going to make that move unless he was sure that all of their theories added up to more than some lunatic scrawl on a whiteboard. Alex couldn’t blame him. “I’ll pull the LUDs
for the liquor store near Tara’s apartment. It’s possible they were using the store’s phone to do business. Kate Masters wasn’t in Tara’s cell or Lance’s. Neither was Colin Khatri or Blake Keely.”
“If Tara and Lance were using the greenhouses, then they were working with someone
at the forestry school,” said Dawes. “Warrant or not, we should try to find out who.”
“I’m a student,” said Alex. “I can walk right in.”
“I thought you wanted me to start pulling strings,” Turner said.
She had, but now she was thinking better of it. “We can handle this on our own. If you
go up the food chain, someone might tell Sandow.”
Turner raised a brow. “That a problem?”
“I want to know where he was the night of the murder.”
Dawes’s spine straightened. “Alex—”
“He pushed to make me stop looking, Dawes. Lethe is here to keep the societies in line.
Why did he yank so hard on the reins?”
We are the shepherds. Lethe had been built on that mission. Or had it? Had Lethe ever really been intended to protect anyone? Or were they just supposed to maintain the status
quo, to make it look like the Houses of the Veil were being monitored, that some standard
was being kept to without ever really checking the societies’ power? This is a funding year. Had Sandow somehow known that if they looked too closely, they’d find connections to the society rosters? Bones, Book and Snake, Scroll and Key, Manuscript—
four of the eight societies responsible for funding Lethe. That added up to half the money