Alex was looking at a slide of Sonnet 130 when she felt her head split open with a sudden bolt of pain. A deep wash of cold gusted through her. She saw flashes of a street lit
by gas lamps, a smokestack belching dark clouds into the gray sky. She tasted tobacco in
her mouth. North. North was inside her and she hadn’t invited him in. She had time to feel a flash of rage and then the world went black.
In the next second she was looking down at her paper. The professor was still talking but Alex couldn’t quite understand what she was saying. She could see the trail of the pen
where her notes had left off. Three dates had been scrawled across the page in wobbly handwriting.
1854 1869 1883
There was blood spattered across the page.
Alex reached up and nearly smacked herself in the face. It was as if she’d forgotten how long her arm was. Hastily, she wiped her sleeve across her face. Her nose was bleeding.
The girl to her right was staring at her. “You okay?”
“I’m great,” Alex said. She pinched her nostrils with her fingers, trying to get the bleeding to stop, as she hastily shut her notebook. North hovered just in front of her, his
face stubborn. “You son of a bitch.”
The girl beside her cringed, but Alex couldn’t be bothered with putting on a good front.
North had possessed her. He’d been inside her. He might as well have shoved his hand up
her ass and used her as a puppet.
“You fucking bastard,” she snarled beneath her breath.
She shoved her notebook into her satchel, seized her coat, and hurried down the aisle,
out of the lecture hall, and through the back door of L-C. She headed straight for Il Bastone, texting Dawes furiously: SOS.
Alex was limping by the time she reached the green, the pain in her side making it hard
to breathe. She wished she’d brought some Percocet with her. North was still following a
few feet behind. “Now you’re keeping a respectful distance, you disembodied fuck?” she barked over her shoulder.
He looked grim, but he sure as hell didn’t look sorry.
“I don’t know what bad shit you can do to a ghost,” she promised him. “But I’m going
to figure it out.”
All of her bluster was cover for the fear rattling around in her heart. If he’d gotten in
once, could he get in again? What could he make her do? Hurt herself? Hurt someone else? She’d used North in pretty much the same way when Lance had attacked her, but her
life had been in danger. She hadn’t been bullying him into going on a fact-finding mission.
What if other Grays found out and came barging through? It had to be the result of the
bond she’d formed with him. She’d invited him in twice. She knew his name. She’d called
him by it. Maybe once that door was open, it couldn’t be locked again.
“Alex?”
Alex whirled, then caught her side, the pain from her wound splintering through her.
Tripp Helmuth stood on the sidewalk in a navy sailing-team windbreaker and a backward
cap.
“What do you want, Tripp?”
He held up his hands defensively. “Nothing! I just … Are you okay?”
“No, I’m really not. But I will be.”
“I just wanted to thank you for, y’know, keeping that stuff with Tara quiet.”
Alex had done no such thing, but if Tripp wanted to think she had, that was fine. “You
bet, buddy.”
“That’s crazy about Blake Keely, though.”
“Is it?” said Alex.
Tripp lifted his cap, ran a hand through his hair, settled it back on his head. “Maybe not. I never liked him. Some guys are just made mean, y’know?”
Alex looked at Tripp in surprise. Maybe he wasn’t quite as useless as he seemed. “I do
know.”
She cast a warning glance at North, who was pacing back and forth, passing through Tripp again and again.
Tripp shivered. “Shit, I think I’m coming down with a flu.”
“Get some rest,” said Alex. “There’s something bad going around.”
Something that looks like a dead Victorian.
Alex hurried down Elm to Orange, eager to be behind the wards. She pulled herself up