incident. The rooms were warm and smelled of damp wool and baked apples. She slipped
off her coat and hung it on top of two others on a peg. She could hear a piano being played
beneath the murmur of conversation. She snatched a couple of stuffed mushroom caps from a passing server. Hell if she was going to die on an empty stomach.
“Alex?” the server asked, and she realized it was Colin.
He looked a little tired maybe, but not distressed or angry.
“I didn’t know you worked for the president too,” Alex said cautiously.
“I’m on loan from Belbalm. I have to drive her home later if you want a ride. You working today?”
Alex shook her head. “No, just dropping something off. For Dean Sandow.”
“I think I saw him by the piano. Come back to the kitchen when you’re done. Someone
sent Belbalm a bottle of champagne and she brought it by for us.”
“Nice,” Alex said, feigning enthusiasm.
She found the powder room and darted inside. She needed a moment to compose
herself, to make sense of Colin’s easy demeanor. He should be mad. He should hate her
for uncovering his connections to Tara, for revealing that Scroll and Key had shared their
secrets with outsiders, that they had been using illegal drugs. Even if Sandow had kept her
name out of the disciplinary proceedings, she was still a representative of Lethe.
But hadn’t Alex known there would be no real repercussions? A slap on the wrist. A fine. The blood price was for someone else to pay. And yet she’d thought there would be
some kind of reckoning.
Alex leaned her hands on the sink, staring into the mirror. She looked exhausted, dark
shadows carving trenches beneath her eyes. She’d worn an old black cardigan over the cream wool sheath her mother had bought for her. Now she stripped it off. Her skin looked
sallow and her arms had the lean, ropy look of someone who would never be full. She could see pink from her wound seeping through the wool of her dress; her new bandage
must have come loose at the edges. She’d meant to look reputable, like a good girl, a girl
who tried, someone to be trusted. Instead, she looked like the monster at the door.
Alex could hear the sounds of glasses clinking and civilized conversation in the living
room. She had tried so hard to be a part of it all. But if this was the real world, the normal world, did she really want in? Nothing ever changed. The bad guys never suffered. Colin
and Sandow and Kate and all of the men and women who had come before them, who had
filled those tombs and worked their magic—they weren’t any different than the Lens and
Eitans and Ariels of the world. They took what they wanted. The world might forgive them or ignore them or embrace them, but it never punished them. So what was the point?
What was the point of her passing GPA and her bargain cashmere sweaters when the game
was rigged from moment one?
Alex remembered Darlington placing the address moths on her skin in the dim light of
the armory. She remembered watching her tattoos fade, believing for the first time that anything might be possible, that she might find a way to belong to this place.
Be careful in the throes, he’d said. Saliva could reverse the magic.
Alex made her hands into fists. She ran her tongue along the knuckles of her left hand,
did the same to the right. For a moment nothing happened. Alex listened to the faucet drip.
Then ink bloomed dark over the skin of her arms. Snakes and peonies, cobwebs and clusters of stars, two clumsy koi circling each other on her left biceps, a skeleton on one
forearm, the arcane symbols of the Wheel on the other. She still had no idea what those
symbols meant. She’d pulled that card from Hellie’s tarot deck moments before they’d
walked into a tattoo shop on the boardwalk. Alex watched in the mirror as her history spilled over her skin, the scars she had chosen for herself.
We are the shepherds. The time for that was done. Better to be a rattler. Better to be a jackal.
Alex stepped out of the powder room and let herself be absorbed into the crowd, the clouds of perfume, the suits and St. John knitwear. She saw the nervous glances cast her